Lawyerly Advice
I find it somewhat amusing that, according to The Sun article by Art Kramer (Feb. 8), Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. has issued an advisory that court clerks "stop dispensing advice [to citizens] that might be interpreted as unauthorized lawyering."
To whom does the attorney general think lawyers turn to for advice as to court procedures, practices and policies?
William T.S. Bricker
Towson
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Native Daughter
I strongly object to David Rosenthal's use of "Native American" when referring to American Indians and their culture (article, Jan. 15).
I am a native American, but not an American Indian. I was born in the United States of native-born parents whose ancestors came from Ireland and Germany.
America is my native land; I am a native of the United States; I do not consider myself Anglo-American; I am a native American and resent that identity being applied to only American Indians.
Wouldn't it be better to regard all citizens born in the United States as native Americans? That would eliminate those segregating classifications of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Anglo-Americans, etc., etc., which now separate all of us into finger-pointing fault-finding groups.
Elizabeth Farrell
Towson
Handicapped?
Having lived in Milwaukee, Chicago and Pittsburgh and moved to Pikesville 14 months ago, I have been very surprised at the number of vehicles with handicapped license plates or handicapped notices hanging from their rearview mirrors.
I have yet to see a single person emerge from or get into one of these vehicles who has any visible handicap.
I am curious as to the criteria required to obtain this special consideration.
In Pittsburgh, my husband was in an ankle cast for six months during the winter months, and we were unable to obtain a temporary handicapped parking pass. We were told they were almost impossible to obtain.
If these seemingly fit individuals are using this privilege, aren't they taking these spaces away from the truly handicapped?
Pamela G. McDonald
Pikesville
Unreal Limits
All this baloney about increasing the speed limit to 65 mph is unreal. The 55 mph limit on interstate highways does not exist -- nor does a 60 mph limit nor a 65 mph limit.
Most drivers on the interstate already are driving between 68 mph and 75 mph -- and often even faster.
Either enforce the speed limit, or eliminate it completely. Right now, with the 55 mph limit on Interstate 95 you would be left in the dust by 90 percent of drivers.
For liberal politicians who want to change the present limit, I suggest they get out of their protective environment and experience for themselves the reality of the situation right now.
Mick Buonaugurio
Aberdeen
Recycling
The recommendation that trash collection in Baltimore City be decreased from two days a week to one is merely an attempt to help, not hurt us.
Continuing twice-a-week garbage pick-up would necessitate an unfavorable tax hike. So, instead of complaining about the inevitable loss, try recycling as a solution. The implementation of curbside recycling benefits the citizens as well as the local government.
For residents, recycling is a way to substantially reduce the trash. There would still be two collections weekly: one for garbage and one for recycling. Rodents and stray animals would not be attracted to the recycleables if guidelines are followed -- namely, thoroughly rinsing food residue from the containers.
For the city, recycling helps battle the rising costs of waste disposal and meeting the Maryland state mandate for reducing solid waste.
Recycling therefore has obvious advantages. Who knows, people may even learn more about the importance of the environment.
John Sloan
Baltimore
Disability Insurance Benefits
After reading both the special report and the editorial, "Welfare Run Amok," Jan. 22, I feel that before coming to $H conclusions the editors must provide the readers with complete and accurate information.
The first installment fails to differentiate, for the reader unfamiliar with the subject, between Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). This sets the stage for bias, even if unintentional.
By not outlining the system one must navigate to receive either benefit, the reader might come to erroneous conclusions about eligibility and deserving beneficiaries labeled as manipulators.
In both SSDI and SSI, state departments of disability determination utilize the "Disability Evaluation Under Social Security" handbook.
This contains a system-by-system listing of all medical conditions, and the severity required, for adults and children to be labeled "disabled" and entitled to benefits.
In many cases, despite clear eligibility under these guidelines, many are denied benefits until reaching the administrative law judge with the assistance of an attorney.
SSDI is for those who have paid into Social Security, as one would pay a private disability policy.
Claimants are examined extensively by the Social Security Administration, and usually after several denials, living from hand to mouth, having no means of support or access to health care, are awarded their rightful benefits.
These benefits, calculated not on a lifetime of paying into Social Security, but only on the years until felled by disability, are but a fraction of the benefits had health allowed them to work until retirement.
Once benefits are received, the amounts often require one to live near the poverty level. Although certified as medically disabled and requiring constant medical care, they must wait 24 months for Medicare.
SSDI, not a lifetime entitlement, requires medical documentation periodically to certify continuing disability.
Each state has a department of rehabilitation to which those who can be retrained are supposed to be referred. I can tell you that this is one place where the system fails.
Supplemental Security Income (SSI), as the article mentioned, is for those who have not necessarily paid into the system.
It is for the disabled -- either at birth or by accident, by chronic disabling illness and its sequels intractable to treatment, the aged and the blind. This, as we see so clearly in the case of the Louisiana family, includes children who are judged to be disabled, whether physically or mentally.
There are many who rightfully deserve these payments -- those with cerebral palsy, the blind, brain-damaged, etc.
What is lacking is a proactive program for the mentally and
physically disabled who have the potential to be trained for jobs they could hold.
Take a look at the Baltimore Association for Retarded Citizens, its training programs and the many productive retarded citizens holding jobs and paying taxes.
In the case of this Louisiana family, has the department of rehabilitation intervened? Is this family receiving education, treatment and rehabilitation?
How am I familiar with this nightmare for the truly disabled? First, I am a Social Security Disability beneficiary, as is my adult son . . .
Needless to say, my fondest wish would be for a life of health, free from pain and disability, as a productive, involved member of the work force.
There is no pleasure or self-actualization in this society, when one's worth is measured by one's job and earned income. To the once-productive, it is a curse. . . .
Yes, there should be reform. Individuals properly adjudged disabled, having both the physical and mental ability to enter the work force after appropriate rehabilitation, should as a condition of benefits, participate in treatment for their condition.
Governmental disincentives to work must be abolished. Education leading to an attitudinal change toward the disabled on the part of the employer must occur.
Continued support -- problem-solving skills, budgeting, child care issues, etc. -- must form the bedrock if success is to be assured. The disabled cannot simply be given a skill and thrown into the work force. They would surely fail.
Unless we are willing to put our money where our mouth is, we are condemning those with the potential to be productive citizens to a life devoid of all that comes from human productivity.
We must put in place a system of humane reforms that can only be positive for health of the individual and this country.
Pearl L. Lewis
Baltimore
Honest Talk Needed on Sparks School
Thirteen hours after attending the public hearing on the Sparks Elementary School situation, I am still experiencing a level of frustration that is approaching the intolerable. And it has increased with each successive meeting on the subject.
I am beginning to feel controlled and manipulated by Sparks PTA President Bernadette Worthing, the Sparks School Study Committee, the school board, the county and the state.
At the Jan. 25 PTA meeting, we were told that the school board was to undertake a study on the feasibility of rebuilding the school on the old site before any decisions would be made about building on a new site.
At the Feb. 9 meeting, the representative from the school board told us that the county had said some time ago that it would not issue building permits for expansion or rebuilding on the site.
From the moment it was clear that the school was totally destroyed in the fire, there was really never any question that it would be rebuilt. For 4 1/2 weeks, the community has been led to believe that the board would consider the possibility and has continued to hope for the restoration of our school. Does this give me much reason to trust what the board says about anything?
More important, does it give me any reason to trust Mrs. Worthing or Laura Eurice, the PTA's president-elect?
As founding members of the Sparks School Study Committee and officers of the Sparks PTA, Ms. Worthing and Ms. Eurice have a responsibility to be honest with the Sparks parents. If we cannot count on them to do that, if we feel this is just another organization giving us filtered information, then we are without representation.
At the Jan. 25 PTA meeting, the Highlands site was discussed. We were given information by a member of the community about the materials known to have contaminated the property and about the unknown long-term effects of that contamination.
Many of us questioned why this site would even be considered for an elementary school, much less a school and 180 single-family homes.
At the Feb. 9 meeting, question after question was put to the representative of the Maryland Department of the Environment. He could only answer questions pertaining to the Bausch & Lomb site.
No state official, apparently, can answer specific questions about the Highlands site, and yet no one in authority seems to think, or has expressed the opinion, that it isn't worth taking a chance with the lives of present and future students or residents.
Perhaps Ms. Worthing does not have the impression I do, that this school site situation is a runaway train which appears to be headed for the Highlands.
The PTA must make it clear to the school board and to county officials that there is opposition to this site. We are already getting enough "political" answers from the state, county and school board. We expect our PTA to cut through that stuff and make it clear that the community deserves more than lip service.
. . . It is clear from the Feb. 9 meeting that the school board intends to build a new school of a size that they deem appropriate.
It doesn't seem to matter that we don't want a school for 500 to 800 students that will give every developer in the area the justification to get the approval needed to build. We were told that we cannot have a 288-student capacity school. Why not?
The Sparks site may present challenges due to topographic limitations, but I think with some creativity the school could rise from the ashes. Why is the government's answer always "we can't"?
No one has asked the community if we would be interested in a joint venture to bring the school back. And they don't seem very interested in the fact that many of us do not want our children going to school in an environment that resembles a factory, right next to contaminated ground.
Decisions will be made, and at the moment I have no confidence that the community's views will make any difference.
What is scary is that for the last 10 years the school board has been investigating sites for a school in the north county and has been unable to find an acceptable site. Now, when a new school must be built, the Highlands site, which would not cost a cent, is looking like the easy answer.
We don't want the easy answer -- we want what is best for our children and for our rural community.
Maybe the Sparks community needs to find its own building and start its own school. That may be the only way to get back what is being taken away from us.
Anne Schoonmaker
Sparks
Giving Out Drugs: Insane or Sensible?
The Feb. 9 front-page article in The Baltimore Sun, "Grand jury suggests giving addicts drugs," was disgusting.
To suggest that the problem could be controlled through a physician's prescription is ludicrous.
Doctor and dealer both begin with a "d," which stands for dollar, the fee for supplying the desired service. The root of the problem is obtaining the money to pay for the service. Theft and crime of many forms stem from the support of the habit, through either doctors or dealers.
There exists no pot of gold at the end of the drug-enhanced rainbow, only a can of worms.
Richard J. Newell
Arbutus
I applaud the grand jury's suggestion that marijuana be decriminalized and that other drugs presently classed as illegal be dispensed by physicians.
Mayor Schmoke took a courageous but sane stand when he came into office by advocating a national debate on alternative means to fight the use of drugs. He was right in suggesting that our society move from a criminal justice war to the arena of a public health war.
I was amused by Dr. Herbert Kleber's comments about no one taking seriously the suggestions of a local grand jury. He will be, in the last analysis, surprised by how seriously this local grand jury will be taken.
Decriminalizing drugs is not treatment. Nor is incarceration treatment.
Dr. Kleber seems to want us to think that legal availability is tantamount to feeding insatiable habits. Habits are already being fed through illegal means. Decriminalization is a simple move toward health care treatment.
The executive director of the Drug Policy Foundation, David Condliffe, praised Baltimore as a city on the cutting edge of a sane drug policy. There is a touch of irony in the use of the metaphor, "cutting edge."
So, to the grand jury and to Mayor Schmoke, I raise my glass of bourbon, my drug of choice.
Thomas L. Culbertson
Baltimore
B6 The writer is rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church.
I have to agree with the physicians quoted in the article. Giving drugs to an addict is like giving a gun to a crazed killer.
OK, doctors would treat less strychnine, quinine, quinidine and talc poisoning if doctors and pharmacists could sell the purest stuff in the neighborhood. But if I let addictive drugs in my door, it would be broken down the first night.
The lay people in the grand jury have never seen how harmful all of these drugs are.
People have told me they simply like watching their pot grow and smoking it -- every day. I am a parent; I don't have time for neurotoxins. I am sad for the children of parents who are watching the present go up in intoxicating smoke.
People have told me they used to snort water to relieve the pain of snorting coke. They tell of the chest pain (which can kill) and of the craving. I have seen the frothing insanity it brings, the seizures and the deaths.
It angered me to hear of a man teaching his grandchildren to "skin pop" -- shoot heroin under his skin. I got to know him on his 20th six-week admission for heart-valve infection.
Another who ran out of veins started shooting into arteries . . . These people don't care that they are flirting with death and that we are picking up the cost.
Rather than dispense addictive drugs, physicians and also teachers and parents need to foster communication and personal growth in those around them as well as in themselves so that each one can know they are responsible for their actions and have the strength to avoid falling victims to these substances.
Theodore C. Houk, M.D.
Towson
Why would a judge waste taxpayer money and time, asking a grand jury to "study drug legalization"? Don't our courts have enough criminal and civil cases to deal with?
Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke is quoted as saying that the jury consists of "23 average citizens from all walks of life."
The reality is just the opposite. To serve on a grand jury you must be able to take four months off from your job or from child raising. This factor inherently prohibits the average citizen from participating.
I called the grand jury clerk in Baltimore City to get more details concerning grand jury selection. After reading him the headline of this article, he said to me, "Pretty good idea, isn't it?"
The clerk also tried to convince me that the grand jury is a "very good cross section." How can this be true?
Kathy Szeliga
Baltimore
Well, it's about time someone besides the mayor has had the smarts to evaluate all the fruitless years combating the drug problem through raids, detention, punishment and express despair about the minimally effective, costly rehabilitation programs.
Any doctor and average layman knows that the sure cure for a disease is to root out the source or cause. If neither is known or impossible to eradicate, then a regimen or substance is sought to be the "enemy" of the disease, giving it nothing to feed on or propagate with.
Ideally, we should rip up and burn every opium poppy, the known source, but this is an unrealistic aim. So we must choose the next alternative: attack the nourisher of the virus.
Money feeds the drug cancer. It is absolutely necessary to have money, and lots of it, to sustain a need beyond human control.
Offer free drugs to addicts and:
* The user is identified and surely some, perhaps many, will want to get the monkey off their back.
* The user will not have to resort to violence -- with a gun? -- to obtain money to buy drugs. Let's not underestimate the implications of that side effect.
* The pusher has lost his repeat customer. No money -- there's that word again -- in that.
When it was a crime to make, buy, sell or use hard liquor, a very lucrative market developed. After Prohibition was repealed, a major source of revenue for criminals dried up.
No one stopped drinking and we still have alcoholics, but their affliction is now defined as a medical problem, not a criminal one.
We will always have abusers. Such is life and the frailty of the human condition. And we'll always have the dollar sign, too, sometimes also connected to the imperfect human condition.
Neither the most altruistic of laws nor the most beneficent of treatments can ever always eliminate completely "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that flesh is heir to."
Nevertheless, fortunately, also embedded in our human nature is our desire to try. And you can bet everyone involved in the drug market is hoping like mad we don't try too hard to enact legislation that will give out their product for free.
Barbara Brassard
Baltimore