Experience shows pot can harm a community

Published 12:30 pm Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Coming of age in the late 1960s means I’ve seen the whole drug “revolution” come and go and leave behind in its wake some open thinking (based around pain control), but a lot more devastation.

Dr. Timothy Leary once encouraged students to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” I’ve lived long enough to hear him say that he wished he had never said it. One of his contemporaries spent the rest of his life lecturing and saying, “Can you believe we actually thought you could use drugs recreationally without harming anyone?” During the 1990s, the FBI crime statistics noted that between 80 and 90 percent of all crime sprang from drugs.

In 1987 I was hired as the secretary for the first multi-agency drug task force in the state of Washington. Funded by the DEA with matching funds from five local law enforcement agencies, the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Drug Task Force was aimed at stemming the alarming proliferation of drugs coming into an economically depressed region.

Even then, the goal was never aimed at small, personal users of marijuana, but rather the large grow operations, often defended by guns, vicious dogs and criminals with lengthy histories. Often I received calls to our tip line from concerned citizens about drug trafficking in their neighborhoods and the resulting increase in burglaries, assaults and child neglect that came on the heels of those enterprises. I would advise them to keep logs of license plates, dates, times and descriptions of what they saw for police. Obviously, 30 to 35 cars a night with one- to two-minute stops was suspect.

During this time, a large controversy surrounded the anti-drug curriculum, which had been donated to the Longview School District by a service organization, because parents felt it taught children they had rights to choose, rather than set standards of family behavior abstaining from drugs. Parents then were concerned the indolence, impairment and criminal behavior of the drug scene would prevent their children from making progress in finishing their education, working hard (and smart) at a living and serving their families and communities.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a group of concerned media personnel, made public service announcements in the late 1980s stating, “Marijuana can make ‘nothing’ happen to you, too.” They were all right.

Marijuana is harmful in and of itself because it lowers inhibitions, which causes users to do things they ordinarily wouldn’t — including using other drugs. Further, cannabinoids act on specific neurotransmitters in the brain, affecting cognitive thinking and the memory regions of the brain. Like cigarette smoking, marijuana smoking can lead to lung cancer. Teens whose brains are still developing and who become dependent on pot show a noticeable drop in IQ by age 38, according to MedPage Today.

Those five detectives and one lone secretary years ago were extremely busy. I referred complaints to Child Protective Services because of calls about small children left hungry, dirty and dangerously unsupervised because the parents were involved in drugs. One doctor complained because of the large increase, he was seeing of young teenage girls getting hooked on drugs by their boyfriends and then ending up abandoned, drug addicted and pregnant. Drug trafficking, use, grow operations, efforts to secure a lucrative stash and the resulting power struggles even ended in murders.

In the old “Dragnet” TV series, Detective Joe Friday was challenged by a high school teacher who contended pot was no worse than alcohol. Det. Friday then quoted statistics on the cost of alcohol treatment, divorces citing alcoholism, assaults and drunk driving deaths and said, “With all the trouble we have with alcohol, do we really NEED pot?”

Today in Washington state, we have 10,000 children in the foster care system and more than 1,400 legally free and waiting for families. The largest percentages of these children have been taken from their parents due to neglect from substance abuse and mental illness. I have sympathy for those parents and regularly participate in feeding some of these folks. But I feel we lost our moral compass when we legalized pot. That law should be repealed and quickly.

I’ve had 62 years to watch people who abuse drugs neglect their children, lose their jobs, commit crimes, overdose, commit suicide and become a cost to society rather than an active, positive influence. It sends the wrong message to the youth. I’ve heard from too many who started on that path and didn’t find their way out until they had ruined most of their lives. We can’t afford one more substance that interferes with our ability to choose right from wrong.

— Susan Wolf is a longtime islander, public employee and community volunteer.