Atomictumor

An interesting take on Vietnamn, Iraq, C.C.R. and… Knoxville.

Iraq and Vietnam, a crowded VA hospital in Miami, an empty street in Knoxville, my mother’s diary, my uncle’s fixin’-to-die rag. It all makes me think of “Bad Moon Rising,” neither a sad song nor an angry one, not even a great song; just a true one. My mother thought it was a revival song and therefore foreboding, and my uncle, dying in Miami, probably thought it was a harsh song—his tastes ran toward softer stuff, Joan Baez and a band called the Stone Poneys. I think it’s a song for lost causes—true because it never makes them pretty.

I suppose Knoxville is among the lost causes of this article.

Found an article in Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette detailing tactics used by some police deparments in reducing the amount of street corner drug dealing, and sounds like it’d work pretty darn well on the crack problem that nobody wants to admit is in Scarboro.  True, Oak Ridge has meth, and way too much, but unless you know somebody who lives in or frequents the valley, you have no idea how big the crack problem is in Oak Ridge.

One of the problems in stopping the ‘drug trade’ is that the people who get nailed are most often the hustlers, who are small time, and might point one or two notches up the latter, but fingering somebody and getting evidence against them are two completely different things.  The people further up the chain are cagey, and know how to keep from getting busted.

The techniques described here, which has seen some early success already, involves identifying the tail end of the chain, the street pushers and sellers and getting in contact with their ‘influentials’.  Relatives, mentors, etc, are contacted, and relationships are formed between them and the police.  Once enough evidence against the hustlers are amassed, they’re brought in en masse to police headquarters, where they’re faced with first these ‘influentials’, and afterwards with DAs and cops talking about how much trouble they’ll be in if this keeps up.  Then they’re let go.

The experience seems to indicate, based on this article, that people have actually stopped dealing, or at least brought it far underground.

The police department is getting some word for making headway, and hopefully a new DA will help keep these people off the street, but more people will pop up to take their place unless deterrents are  made to keep that from happening.  Lets face it, after 30 odd years of Nixon’s War On Drugs, it’s still a dead heat.  Problem is, as we’ve see, the drugs are a lot more dangerous and addictive now than they were back in Tricky Dick’s time.

Y’know, I’d go so far as to say we wouldn’t have a crack or meth problem if Whitey would have just let up on pot back in the 70s, but, thats just me.