Tom Searles Writes:
I am certainly no expert on the illegal drug market, but I find Dennis' accusation about the "mostly suburbanite buyers of illegal narcotics" a bit of a stretch. That would seem to imply that few residents of Minneapolis buy illegal drugs and all of the problems are a result of the people who live in the suburbs. It really doesn't matter who is buying the drugs because the customer's geographic location is no excuse for breaking the law by selling drugs and shooting people. A blanket condemnation of people who live in the suburbs does nothing to solve the problem.
Dennis Plante Responds:
Well Tom, you can take it as a bit of a stretch if you choose to. However, not too long ago, neighbors collected and gave to a local news station a fairly large sampling of license plate numbers for cars that were buying narcotices at 26th & Knox and 26th & James. If my memory serves me correctly 88% of the buyers did not drive cars registered to owners in Minneapolis.
I live here and over the years, have become very much in-tune to what occurs on my streets. Trust me when I tell you that for the most part, the people buying illegal narcotics in my neighborhood do not live here. I know what people living in my neighborhood look like. The buyers (for the most part) do not look like them. The best analogy I could give you would be to take one of my local drug-dealing 16 year-old youths and put them on your street corner. They'd probably stick-out, wouldn't they? Well, the mostly Scandanavian, blond-haired, blue-eyed people that drive by my house In their parents Toyota Camry don't fit in here. As a matter of fact, they stick-out.
Is this a blanket condemnation of people that live in the suburbs? Not at all. I'm only stating the fact that we're all inextricably tied together. And it's high-time we stopped treating it as "a minneapolis' problem". It isn't. And the sooner we accept that and come-up with some better ways of dealing with the issues, the sooner we'll be able to focus on improving the quality of life for those less fortunate than you and I. They're the ones that we are continuing to abuse throughout all this.
dennis plante jordan
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