• Drug Summit • Technology outages Drug Summit As Mayor Bryan Baptiste and Roy Nishida, the head of the county administration’s anti-drug abuse effort, are in Honolulu attending Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona’s statewide drug summit, the “ice” problem continues to
• Drug Summit
• Technology outages
Drug Summit
As Mayor Bryan Baptiste and Roy Nishida, the head of the county administration’s anti-drug abuse effort, are in Honolulu attending Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona’s statewide drug summit, the “ice” problem continues to plague Kaua‘i.
A report in today’s issue of The Garden Island shows how easy it is to buy drug paraphernalia at convenience stores on Kaua‘i, and word of mouth reports has the use of “ice” continuing apace on the South Shore and other locations on Kaua‘i.
The statewide drug summit being held at Waikiki follows a round of meetings called by Aiona in all of Hawai‘i’s counties. Strong statements are being made by Gov. Linda Lingle and others at the Honolulu drug summit. However, they will just be rhetoric if stronger action isn’t taken on busting dealers, interdicting inter-island transport of “ice” to dealers on Kaua‘i and other islands, and a long, hard look is taken into the root causes of why so many are becoming addicted to this dangerous drug.
The long-term effect of “ice” use is being reflected in what some call an “under class” that’s growing in size in Hawai‘i. This group is mired in hopelessness, and while not all its members are drug users, it is common to find its members down on life and looking for a way to escape reality.
Watch for reports on what our Mayor and “drug czar” plan to do following the summit in their fight against Kaua‘i’s ice problem.
Technology outages
An early dismissal from Kaua‘i High School on Monday highlights how dependent we are on the technologies that energize our 21st century world.
A mishap on the Island’s electrical grid made lights go out, faxes fail and computers flicker.
Various computer viruses are bugging users across Kaua‘i, halting work for some, stopping the daily stream of e-mail and Web page watching. This problem is a relatively new one compared to power outages, but one that is a major problem for our information technology dependent society. The holes in the Windows operating system is to blame here.
These failures do show that technology has a human side, too, and at this point the electronic brains are liable to fail, just as humans fail.
While we on Kaua‘i are veterans in handling power failures, following our experiences in the aftermath of Hurricanes ‘Iwa in 1982 and ‘Iniki in 1992, it’s still disrupting to find the lights out, or our computers down due to a computer virus. An antidote may be to stop and enjoy our beautiful Island when technology runs amuck to get a better perspective on our problems.
