| Opinion - Friday, June 18, 2010
Where's the compassion in city's proposed pot laws?
The city's proposed medical marijuana regulations described by the Voice last week are very disturbing in their implication that marijuana has been accepted as a legal vice like alcohol and tobacco and needs to be regulated to assert the superiority of the majority culture and avoid corruption of the youth.
Providers must have a criminal background check? The herb must be grown at a dispensary? Which must be 500 feet from homes, parks, schools and trails? Please. We are not talking about recreational drug use, we are trying to alleviate pain in cancer patients. This attitude is arrogant and inhumane.
Public opinion is pretty four-square against cancer and pain. Not a day goes by without some new fund-raising scheme to raise money for cancer research.
It doesn't make sense to deny patients a natural remedy that is within their means precisely because it has already been tested in the general population over a long period of time. Insisting that innocent people continue to suffer needlessly is against all sense of common decency.
Remember, even the Grand Old Party lost moral credence because of revulsion against the use of torture in our foreign wars. Don't our own people deserve the same compassion?
Stephanie Munoz
Clark Street
A park or a goose farm?
Maybe the city could simply declare Shoreline Park for what it is — a goose farm — and leave it to the geese?
The sheer number of geese and the amount of fecal material make the grass areas and the walkways unusable by human visitors. I love birds, but this is an unsustainable situation that threatens public health and safety.
Barbara Callaghan
Montalto Drive
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