Last week I was thrilled to be offered a position with a local company and was instructed to complete a drug screening. I filled up with water so that I would be able to produce a sample only to find that it would be "about an hour" even though there were only 5 or so folks in the tiny waiting room. I was told that I could not leave the building nor use the restroom during this time. I lasted about 15 minutes and begged the attendant to let me use the restroom so that I could start drinking water and be ready in 45 minutes. She repeated her original instructions and I was forced to demand my driver's license back and quickly find the nearest public restroom. [continues 101 words]
I am appalled that the media continues to sensationalize meth lab busts (front page of May 3 Herald Democrat) while burying the result of our misguided drug laws in the back portion of the A section (U.S. Prisons Swell in '04, 4-25-05). If we continue to treat addiction as a crime rather than an illness and prohibition allows people to make $20 off a nickel's worth of ingredients, we can expect less of our tax money to go towards education and more of it towards locking up the uneducated. I hope, with all my might, that I am not the only Grayson County citizen that noticed the swelling prison article revealed the increase in our incarceration rate is largely due to mandatory-minimum drug sentences. It did not mention, though, that the United States of America now has the highest incarceration rate in the world! Sadly, young, minority men are carrying the heaviest load of these failed policies. Turning drug users into unemployable ex-cons is a senseless waste of tax dollars. It's time to declare peace in the failed drug war and begin treating all substance abuse, legal or otherwise, as the public health problem it is. Jodie Harrison Pottsboro [end]
A recent article quoted Sheriff Gary telling our County Commissioners that "methamphetamine related crime is the reason for the large number of people in jail." Daily police blotters show the majority of these "crimes" is possession or sales of the substance. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that reducing the number of methamphetamine addicts will lower the number of inmates. Unfortunately, though, $98,000 of our tax dollars is going to be given to someone to figure out why our jail population is growing faster than our general population. Three times our per capita annual income is going to be spent on something that the gentleman in charge of our jails has already revealed! Again, it does not take a rocket scientist to recognize this money should be used in a more cost-effective manner. [continues 73 words]
