God save us from Hilary Clinton!!
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The editors at Kerrville Daily Times decided to run - over the Christmas holidays - a week long front page series on the methamphetamine problem in Kerr County. The Dec. 30 installment sent some mixed signals, titled “New meth making method explodes: one wrong move could spell disaster in new ‘shake and bake’ method can explode on contact. Under a picture of some ingredients for home cooked meth is a quote from Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer: “We’ve always had meth. I can show you pictures of meth labs we took down 20 years ago.” So I’m not sure why KDT thinks this is a new problem. There was a black comedy of a movie called Spun that came out in 2002, starring Mickey Rouke as a meth cook, with a hilarious scene where he goes into a convenience store to stock up on cold meds.
The Dec. 31 was titled “The downward spirial: woman turns her travails into service to others.”
On New Year’s Day it was “Incarcerated rehab: Jail adds nurse to meet health care demand,” and addressed how much jailing meth and other drug addicts costs the taxpayers.
Today’s installment is “Drug cases are a big chunk of court docket: a quarter of 2013 felony cases were drug-related.”
I think this is all very interesting, and I commend the paper for reporting something besides the usual rah-rah Chamber of Commerce pabulum. However, I agree with a reader of this blog who questioned the timing - while Fredericksburg was celebrating Christmas and New Year’s Eve and thousands of tourists came into town, anyone who visited Kerrville might think that we are the meth capital of Texas.
If I had been writing the series, I would have tried to answer: why is the problem so bad? Part of it is that Kerrville has had the reputation of a drug haven for years, at least since the 60’s when the 13th Floor Elevators were hanging out here. I think a root problem is that we have so many rehab centers and halfway houses, and addicts come from all over the state, decide they like it, and stay. Many relapse, and there have always been dealers here to supply them.
Speaking of Fredericksburg, my wife and I took my 93 year old mother in law to Hill Top Cafe for the early show. The food was great, and the entertainment was wonderful. Johhny Nicholas is a superb musician and showman, and his band rocked! Cindy Cashdollar played steel guitar. She has played with Bob Dylan, Leon Helm and Rick Danko (formerly of The Band), Van Morrison, toured with Asleep at the Wheel for eight years. We’ll go back next year.
I’m reading a book by Colin Flaherty titled White Girl Bleed a Lot: the Return of Racial Violence and How the Media Ignore It. You can read more about it at http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/. Thomas Sewell endorses it with this: “Reading Colin Flaherty’s book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities.”
Read it and you’ll be glad you live in Kerrville, and see that our meth problem is pretty manageable contrasted to what is happening in some of our larger cities.
Drugs are, arguably, the biggest industry in Kerrville and the underpinning of our local economy. Not in the traditional sense of the South Texas way of trafficking, money laundering…etc, but drugs nonetheless are a tremendous contributor to our local economy. There are two drug treatment centers in the area which are important sources for employment. May of the patients stay in Kerrville after being discharged, due to fear of returning to the place of origin. It is well known fact that 85% of these patients will relapse within 6 months, and they become a resource for the KPD, KCSD, Kerr County jail, probation system, as well as supplying a steady stream of minimum wage labor in the service sector, and also serve as feed stock for much of our bloated supply of lawyers.
ReplyDeleteTake away drugs, and each of the systems listed above will be economically decimated.