Pubdate: Tue, 02 Sep 2008
Source: Press Democrat, The (Santa Rosa, CA)
Copyright: 2008 The Press Democrat
Contact:  http://www.pressdemo.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/348
Author: Chris Smith, Press Democrat Columnist
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

MAYBE THE PSYCHIATRIST'S IDEA ISN'T CRAZY

Dr. Stephen Frye, a psychiatrist who served 30 years ago as Sonoma 
County's mental health director, is giving over his retirement to 
working to legalize all the drugs that people rob and kill for.

"The war on drugs kills far more people than the drugs themselves," 
Frye said from his home in Reno. "We have to stop getting tough and 
start getting smart."

He's talking to anybody who will listen about his book, "We Really 
Lost This War! 25 Reasons to Legalize Drugs."

It's a jarring notion, but Frye makes a strong argument that drug 
laws, like prohibition, have succeeded mostly in making the narcotics 
trade obscenely profitable and bloody, and providing job security to 
prison guards.

"We have a million teenagers selling drugs now," he said. He argues 
that effects of the war on drugs have imposed more misery on the 
African-American community than slavery did.

Here in marijuana country, it does seem that there'd be far less 
cause for people to create booby-trapped gardens in public forests or 
to stick guns in their pockets and steal other people's pot if the 
weed were legal.

Frye is part of the chorus of drug-law critics who insist we'd be far 
better off to admit the war on drugs is a bust and to focus instead 
on education and treatment. Isn't it an idea worth talking about?

THE BURBANK BENCHES: Since volunteers at Luther Burbank Home & 
Gardens introduced commemorative benches, no visit is complete 
without sitting and taking in Burbank's patch of paradise from one of 
the handsome benches that someone placed in a loved one's honor.

The program has been so popular that the Burbank board has made 
available for purchase six more benches that will be placed around a 
tree in the Carriage House Courtyard.

Linda Hall of city parks  said the benches will 
cost $1,750 and will include a bronze plaque that visitors will read 
for a very long time.

IS THERE A TEACHER from your past who's still in your life after all 
these years?

Betty Weyle of Petaluma picks up the phone now and again, usually on 
a Sunday afternoon, and dials her first-grade teacher, Mildred 
Thomas, in Indianapolis. Mildred told me she always looks forward to 
the calls from California.

She was a brand-new teacher the year Betty was in her class at 
Fountain City School in eastern Indiana.

"She was a darling little girl, with blond, curly hair," Mildred 
recalled. "It's been a good many years."

Yes it has. Mildred will celebrate her 96th birthday in November, and 
Betty recently turned 82.

There's plenty of catching up to do for a teacher and student who 
spent a school year together in 1932-33.

FRICK and FRACK: I don't know about you, but I saw that picture in 
Sunday's paper of Tony Turke, his head thrown back in a whole-bodied 
laugh at Taste of Sonoma at MacMurray Ranch, and I had to know what 
was so funny.

I phoned Tony, an AT&T cable splicer, at home, and he said he and 
buddy Dennis Anderson were at the Frick Winery tent and fell into a 
conversation with a couple from Italy about the Fricks' frickin' good 
wine. Somebody wondered aloud where the Fricks were, and the answer 
came that maybe they were out with the Fockers.

The Italians wandered off. An instant before Kent Porter snapped the 
shot, they came up behind Tony and his pal and said, "Hey, it's the Fockers."

Well, sure, it'd be better to have been there.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom