I am writing to inform the citizens of Minneapolis that I have filed to run for the Minneapolis City Council from the 7th Ward. I will be running as a Green Party member. I decided to run for City Council against Lisa Goodman after I had been active during the summer of 2004 in petitioning to put the Medical Marijuana Charter Amendment on the ballot and Lisa Goodman had voted with the majority of the City Council in refusing to put the Charter Amendment on the ballot after we had submitted the required number of signatures. I first became involved with this issue through my work in ACT-UP when I was asked to do the research and write a statement for ACT-UP on medicinal marijuana. Far from what people unfamiliar with this issue might think, it is not just a matter of "a bunch of potheads wanting to get high," although it should not be any of the law's business regardless of what substances the "potheads" want to get high on since they are not hurting anyone else. Marijuana is the most effective agent known for preventing the nausea and vomiting experienced by people undergoing cancer chemotherapy as well as stimulating their appetite. It has the same effectiveness in combatting the nausea and vomiting and loss of appetite undergone by people with AIDS. Drs. Steven Sallan and Norman Zinberg published their results demonstrating that marijuana was a superior anti-vomiting agent for people undergoing cancer chemotherapy in the October 15, 1975 NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. Dr. Alfred Chang confirmed these results in the December, 1979 ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia conduced studies on the medical efficacy of marijuana before the federal government forced the states to halt their research. The largest was the Tennessee study which included over 100,000 people and found that 90.4% of the people could control their nausea and vomiting by smoking marijuana but that only 66.7% of the people were successful when they took Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, one of the active ingredients in marijuana, in a pill. The May 29, 2003 STAR TRIBUNE(p. D1) stated that 1.3 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer every year, that one million end up on chemotherapy and that about 70 to 80 percent of these patients experience nausea and vomiting during their chemotherapy. In other words, 700 to eight hundred thousand people end up vomiting their guts out every year because of the government's refusal to legalize medicinal marijuana and, every three years, the number of people vomiting their guts out mounts up to millions without even considering the additional people vomiting their guts out because of AIDS. Since next to cardio vascular disease, cancer is the second leading cause of death, this means that, even though we don't like to think about it, all of us have a significant chance of spending the last few weeks or months of our lives vomiting our guts out because of the government's refusal to legalize medicinal marijuana. We could at least expect to spend these last few weeks or months in relative comfort if it were not for the government. The drug war thus takes on the characteristics not of a war but of a religious jihad since it is fanatically pursued no matter how many people it hurts. Since I was a child in the 1940's and a teenager in the 1950's, I was brought up to believe that our government didn't do these sorts of things, things such a wantonly refusing to legalize a drug that had been proven effective for treating numerous disease conditions no matter how many citizens had to suffer and die as a consequence of this arbitrary refusal. A SECOND ISSUE is police brutality. Although the consensus among various civil rights organizations seems to be that Chief McManus has taken care of half of the problem of police brutality, the remaining half of the problem was once again highlighted by an article in the March 12, 2005 STAR TRIBUNE which reported that Rayma Wiggins and her daughter, Gayna Williams had received $335,775.00 from the City Council to settle their police brutality lawsuit. On October 18, 2002, a police officer with the aptly appropriate name of of Phillip HOGquist, after he had arrested Gayna Williams for making an U turn in front of her house ran towards Gayna's 75 year old mother, Rayma Williams, as she was retrieving the cash from the car that Gayna had withdrawn from the bank and pushed her so violently that she went flying through the air and hit the sidewalk. Rayma Williams required hip replacement surgery and has been largely bedridden ever since. Although HOGquist resigned from the Police Department soon afterward, which is some improvement for nothing at all being done to police quilty of brutality, Minnesota Statutes 609.225 on aggravated assault says that whoever assaults another and inflicts great bodily harm may be sentenced to twenty years in prison. We all know that if we as ordinary citizens assaulted a 75 year old woman and permanently crippled her, we would be in prison serving the maximum time. Why isn't that pig serving that time instead of merely being pressured to retire? Why does wearing a police uniform protect the officer from serving the time that the rest of us would be serving if we did the same? A THIRD IMPORTANT ISSUE is the City's using tax increment financing to subsidize luxury housing for the rich and private businesses. High income people are well able to pay for their own housing and to subsidize them when there is such a shortage of affordable housing is Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the poor to give to the rich. It is also welfare for the rich and socialism for the rich in which the government shovels vast amounts of public monies on to the rich while drastically cutting back on necessities for the needy. There is a place for tax increment financing to subsidize housing for the affluent in order to pay back the bonds with the profit if the City REALLY DOES DO what it claims to be doing by using that profit from the affluent housing to make a mixed use development of both luxury and affordable housing profitable to the extent of being able to pay back the bonds. And by affordable, I mean AFFORDABLE. There are people in the lower reaches of the mi ddle income levels, let alone the people who subsist on money from Minnesota welfare, food stamps and social security who need housing assistance. Those people live on between $700 and $800 a month and the City needs to subsidize housing that THEY can afford also. Using public money to subsidize Targets and Sports Stadiums is more Robin Hood in reverse and WELFARE AND socialism for the rich. If the City wanted to give any one of us several hundred million in subsidies, I'm sure we could hire the managerial talent and run a successful business. It is always assumed that people with the wealth of a Carl Pohlad "deserve" the subsidy but we ordinary citizens deserve it more because we NEED it more. Why must administrations like Pawlenty"s pinch pennies and cut the needy back more and more while shoveling money at the rich. Why can't it be the other way around. MASS TRANSIT IS A FOURTH ISSUE that fits in to this picture of the federal and state governments cutting monies for the needy to make way for taxing the rich less and less and spending on adventures in foreign wars. One proposal is for the Legislature to establish a dedicated revenue source for public transit, a particularly important proposal in light of the draconian fare increases and transit cuts facing the people of Minneapolis. But a more important proposal for dealing with the urban transit crisis is Personalized Rapid Transit, or PRT, first proposed thirty years ago by Edward Anderson at the University of Minnesota. Under PRT, a rider could summon a PRT vehicle which would come to where the rider was waiting by an off rail station off from the main, elevated PRT guideway. That way, the PRT vehicle could maintain maximum speed between the starting point and destination, without having to slow down for each station on the route. One obstacle standing in the way of PRT is that no city has been willing to be the first to sink a large amount of money into a city wide system if they are the first to try it. Dean Zimmermann's proposal to start small by establishing a PRT system in part of south Minneapolis will hopefully be a way of getting around this reluctance to sink a large amount of money in an untried system. When it is successful in a part of south Minneapolis, the rest of the City and even the Metro Area will be clamoring for it to be extended. Robert Halfhill Loring Park
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