Thanks for militia letter
Thank you, Vivian Mendenhall, on your letter about a well-regulated militia, for gun control.
The difference between a liberal and conservative is, a liberal is a conservative who has not been mugged or shot yet.
— Mickeal Knellinger
Anchorage
Face our drug/gang problem
Thank you to KTUU's Rebecca Palsha for filing a report (Sept. 1) on crime statistics in Anchorage. The last sentence of her report was very disconcerting: "APD says that Anchorage's murder rate is typically below average for a city of its size." That doesn't excuse 27 homicides so far this year. We should be striving to report zero homicides.
Perhaps the police chief and mayor need to face the reality that Anchorage has a serious drug/gang problem. When you admit you have a problem, you have taken the first step in combating it.
— Jacqueline Fries
Anchorage
We could be the best
Eric Treider's commentary (Sept. 1) was right on regarding our current health care system. Our health care costs to patients are completely out of control.
Patients and families should not lose their life savings because of an illness or injury. As he implied, we need a nationalized health care system that would enable dedicated docs, nurses, researchers and other health care providers the opportunity to serve their patients according to their medical needs with no thought to insurance company middlemen, bloated health-related CEO salaries or outrageous drug costs.
I think most health care providers entered their fields to serve the sick and injured and would welcome a system where they could garner reasonable wages but, most important, treat needy patients without any thought to their financial means. Our health care system is not "the best on the Earth" but it could be.
— Tom Mader, MD
Cooper Landing
Letting adults have legal pot keeps teens from getting it
We understand why there are concerns about legalizing marijuana, but the fears are misplaced. There is a lot of misinformation.
People with a political agenda have been lying about cannabis for quite some time. Studies have shown cannabis is safer than alcohol and tobacco. Marijuana use has never been linked to cancer, and it is physically impossible to overdose.
The "gateway drug" myth is persuasive but untrue. Most hard drug users' first drug was alcohol or tobacco. While it is generally true that users of dangerous narcotics such as heroin and meth have used marijuana in the past, few who have tried marijuana go on to use hard drugs.
The only gateway effects are because people who buy marijuana must go to criminals to purchase it and because Drug Abuse Resistance Education has been teaching kids that pot is just as bad as heroin. When teens learn that they have been lied to about one drug, why would they trust us when it comes to the dangers of addictive and deadly drugs like meth or heroin?
Allowing adults, many of them productive and otherwise upstanding members of the community, to legally buy and use cannabis in the privacy of their own homes makes it harder for teens to get it.
Drug dealers don't card, and they often sell and push other drugs on their customers. State-licensed legal vendors of marijuana aren't going to have anything that isn't legal and pure.
We need to stop lying to our kids and punishing adults who aren't harming anyone, and bring more jobs to Alaska. Let's do all three by keeping cannabis legal for responsible adults.
— Mike and Cindy Harris
Croy's Enterprise, LLC
Soldotna
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