• Hoping for an empty net • Compassionate mafia drug lord? Hoping for an empty net Tuesday night while watching a vog-colored sunset, a boat powered by an outboard motor and containing a half dozen men pulled into the bay
• Hoping for an empty net •
Compassionate mafia drug lord?
Hoping for an empty net
Tuesday night while watching a vog-colored sunset, a boat powered by an outboard motor and containing a half dozen men pulled into the bay in front of Brennecke’s beach.
They proceeded to drop a buoy that was attached to a large purse net. They moved completely across the bay and back, completely covering the entire bay.
As they closed the purse and began retrieving their catch, I had several thoughts. In the dozen or more years we’ve stayed here, an increasing onslaught of fishermen and spearfishing has virtually eliminated the papio, so other than a few goatfish, all they were going to do was kill a bunch of reef fish and perhaps a baby bonus or two.
I realize people with a certain percentage of Hawaiian blood have the right to net fish. However, it would be more fair if they were required to do it the same way their ancestors did. Require them to make their own canoe and net out of natural materials. No motor allowed!
It was too dark to see what they caught, and though I do not wish them ill, I hope the net was empty.
Hal Dixon, Koloa
Compassionate mafia drug lord?
I resent the state acting like a mafia drug lord trying to make money off sick people through the new concept of generating taxes on medical drugs, services, and treatment regimes.
Where are the hypocrite Republicans with their “reduce government size, reach, and intrusion mantras” and their personal freedom agenda? Our Founding Fathers were not afraid of marijuana, they used its value for banking and commercial credit. They made cotton, whiskey, and marijuana legal tender — money — when our country was founded.
Our shameless politicians want their cut of the illegal drug trade by pricing prescription drugs at their street value. Most truly ill people are not generating full income, and have extra expenses. The two marijuana issues — medical and recreational — should remain separate.
Medical marijuana stores should be not-for-profit co-ops with direct NED oversight. Medical marijuana is only “compassionate” if it is inexpensive. Corporate profits and taxes are never compassionate.
Now is the time to control attempts to create a corporate and greed-for-tax-revenue quasi-legal cash cow industry, based on making as much profit as possible off AIDS, cancer, MS, and chronically debilitated patients. NED should remain in control of medical marijuana patient permits. If the wrong people are getting permits, that requires clarity of policy by amending our current laws to reduce issuing wrongful permits.
Medical marijuana should be non-profit and provided through coops monitored by NED, by the most cost-effective method possible for patients who cannot, or chose not to, grow their own. Commercial growers require growth of their “compassionate” profits for a successful business model. Why do we want to create a commercial business industry for marijuana?
It is immoral to call it medicine, and then use it to extract high taxes and profits from patients already ill and disadvantaged. It is also immoral to price it as a subterfuge, to create taxes from essentially recreational permitted sales based on street prices.
Marijuana is a difficult public conversation. Much like religion, the many different views have a lot invested in fixed policy positions, dogma, and the funding of the status quo.
For example, enforcement tells us synthetic THC or Marinol is available, but they don’t disclose that it is extremely expensive and not covered by most insurances. Monthly costs run in excess of $1,000 for one daily minimal strength dose. High dosage costs even more per pill, while the patient receives less than half the beneficial chemistries in natural THC. A month’s supply of 120 narcotic vicodin pills cost $28 at Costco. Next: Will the state produce opium poppies and charge mafia street prices for prescription narcotics?
Regarding increased youth usage, clinical studies show that stress (abuse) at home and school is the number one predicator of juvenile self-medicating drug use. Perhaps our shrinking county resources would be better spent on our own youth, rather than a tax payer funded vacation and county dollars for foreign aid donations by His Honor and the County Council to their local political cronies home town Philippines families.
Our mayor and some police officers use the same arguments and language regarding the difficulty in locating a garbage dump as in locating an adolescent treatment center. The number one “gateway drug” is abuse — mental, verbal, physical, and sexual.
Shame on you who imply our recovering-from-social-failure-diseases youth, under professional supervision in a licensed treatment facility, will be a threat to our community. They are not, and are instead a shining beacon for peace, honesty, humility, and finding a higher-than-drugs purpose for their lives.
De-glamorizing violence and drugs while better-funding schools, youth programs, employment, treatment and recovery, are a lot cheaper and likely more effective actions than ineffectual prohibition, which glorifies crime, usage, and the 40-year-old endless enforcement/military-industrial complex “drug war.”
Lonnie Sykos, Kapa‘a
