Congratulations to Ed Felien for bringing the drug discussion into the Minneapolis Issues forum. Ed, I suggest you strengthen your platform by abandoning the �marijuana is good for you� tack and go to the heart of the issue. It�s about MONEY. Minneapolis is going to have to raise taxes and cut services because of projected shortfalls. Pension funds are going broke, but our spending commitments remain the same. We can resign ourselves to cutbacks in social services, schools, libraries and parks, or we can stop wasteful spending and find new sources of revenue. One big-ticket, wasteful spending item is the police, court and jail/prison funding dedicated to the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders (and to the necessary prosecution of avoidable drug-related crime), plus the spending required to mop up the destruction of families caused by both. One big untapped revenue source is taxation of the multi-billion dollar illegal drug industry. It is totally appropriate for a county commissioner to push for a 10-year drug regulation program, under which currently illegal drugs would be sold in government stores, vetted by the FDA to ensure uniform strength/purity. No advertising of these drugs would be permitted, and the drugs would be sold in ugly gray paper packages with the phone number of the nearest (fully funded!) treatment facility prominently displayed. (These ideas are from Judge James P. Gray�s book, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs. The author is an Orange County, CA, Republican.) If after 10 years we don�t see the results we want � it�s ALWAYS possible to outlaw the drugs again. I hope Ed can get such a program going in as wide an area as possible, even though people may think Minneapolis and other urban areas would stand to gain the most. Police would, after all, be freed up to deal with property crimes and quality-of-life crimes in our neighborhoods. If it can be shown that the suburbs also would benefit from the elimination of state deficits, then that�s the basis of a statewide coalition. Heather Martens Kingfield _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
