Does Frisco really want a family-oriented community? This cry for a family oriented community has come from many of the town officials and concerned citizens. However, it is hard to fathom why a town with these aspirations would allow a marijuana clinic to be established on Summit Blvd. Kremmling, in a recent SDN article, had the foresight to recognize the danger of such clinics , and drafted an ordinance to ban these dispensaries. Why didn't Frisco do the same? William McDonald, MD [end]
First there was heroin, hooking so many of the black urban poor and breeding a contagion of crime. There was marijuana, enveloping vast numbers of the white middle class. Cocaine soon flourished, a symbol of a glittery, glassy-eyed, hedonistic time. Then came crack cocaine, a drug scourge more socially corrosive than any seen before. But this is hardly news. If pressed, most informed Americans could probably recount the various waves of illegal narcotics that have flooded the United States in the recent past, none of them ever fully receding. Everyone also knows that the United States government has long tried to stop the tide. The phrase "the war on drugs" by now sounds almost tired, even dated, like a slogan from a past presidential campaign. People seem to have other things on their minds. The only drugs getting significant attention this election year are those prescribed by a doctor. Yet the producers of "Frontline," in collaboration with National Public Radio, have chosen to revisit this familiar ground in "Drug Wars," a two-part, four-hour documentary on PBS that begins tonight and concludes tomorrow. Are they out of step? Maybe so. And maybe that's the point, for this is an absorbing, illuminating, often provocative presentation - part of a series called "The PBS Democracy Project" - that would clearly like the nation to rethink its fight against illegal drugs and addiction. The lead producer, Martin Smith, and the series reporter, Lowell Bergman - the former "60 Minutes" producer whose battle with the tobacco industry was dramatized in the Michael Mann film "The Insider" - have taken on an old subject with a sense of renewed urgency. And through a well-paced mix of archival images and fresh interviews (some with former major smugglers speaking publicly for the first time) the filmmakers question the federal government's conduct and policies in what is portrayed here as a kind of fruitless American Thirty Years' War. [continues 631 words]
