OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2016
COMING FRIDAY
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
It’s time to become
a Reefer Republic
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
OUR VIEW
Liberty’s new
leader has noble
course ahead
L
ike all community projects and institutions, the Liberty
Theater must constantly reappraise how it can best
serve the public and evolve to suit changing needs. As a
performing art space in an increasingly interesting and diverse
place, the Liberty is in the enviable
but perilous situation of needing to
‘Music
recreate itself in ways that are exciting
needs
and relevant to new generations.
For those who have lived in and
champions
near Astoria long enough, there con-
both on
tinues to be an almost palpable feel-
ing of relief that the Liberty was saved the stage
from the architectural scrapheap. It
doesn’t take much looking around the and behind
nation to fi nd many examples of clas- it, and the
sic theaters that have been carved up Liberty is
into second-hand malls or worse. In a
city with less -dedicated, generous and the perfect
hardworking citizens, the Liberty’s
place to
site might now be a parking lot. Such
make a
a loss would have had incalculable
impacts on the future well-being of
measurable
Astoria’s historic downtown.
difference.’
A series of volunteer board mem-
bers and longtime Executive Director Jennifer Crockett
Rosemary Baker-Monaghan success- Liberty Theater’s new director
fully steered the Liberty during the
early years of its second lease on life. Now, the board has named
Jennifer Crockett, a 39-year-old professional musician, to be the
venue’s new director.
“Music needs champions both on the stage and behind it,
and the Liberty is the perfect place to make a measurable differ-
ence,” Crockett said.
It is, of course, too soon to begin assessing how well the new
director will succeed. But the basic theory underlying her hire is
valid. The Liberty needs solid managerial and fi nancial manage-
ment, coupled with an energetic vision of what the theater’s next
chapters should be. With so much talent in our immediate region
and remarkable creative assets nearby in the Pacifi c Northwest,
it’s possible to conceive the Liberty serving as an incubator and
focal point for many forms of performing arts.
It’s good to think of the possibilities, and gratifying to be
moving toward them after this interim period of uncertainty.
Astoria council
should have fi lled
Ward 2 vacancy
W
e aren’t sure we understand the lack of urgency the
Astoria City Council displayed this past week when
it chose not to fi ll an empty seat at its table.
When City Councilor Cindy Price proposed appointing Tom
Brownson to fi ll the Ward 2 vacancy created when Councilor
Drew Herzig stepped down to move to Massachusetts, her
motion died for lack of a second. Later, councilors voted 3-1
to fi ll the void after the election, with Price saying “no.” The
decision means the council
won’t be at full strength until at
The council
least January.
Brownson is running unop- decided to
posed for Herzig’s empty seat leave a section
and will be sworn into offi ce in
January after the general elec- of the city
tion next month. He has been
unrepresented
a fi xture at council meetings,
already preparing to fi ll the position. He will be joined as a
new member on the council in January by either Bruce Jones, a
former U.S. Coast Guard commander, or Cory Pederson, a con-
ductor and music teacher, who are vying to replace Councilor
Russ Warr, who is not seeking re-election.
While seniority plays a role in Congress, it certainly doesn’t
on city and county councils and commissions, and there is a
reason why most city charters call for an odd number of mem-
bers, so that tie votes can be avoided. There was no real down-
side in putting Brownson in the position ahead of time.
But by not appointing Brownson, the council decided to
leave a section of the city unrepresented and chose to do busi-
ness as it always has rather than sending a signal of a new day
dawning.
It was a missed opportunity.
THE DAILY ASTORIAN ENDORSEMENTS IN
LOCAL, STATE AND FEDERAL ELECTIONS.
P
ORTLAND — The budtenders
of the Rose City are relent-
lessly helpful with tips pairing
a marijuana strain that is “equal parts
fruity and musky” with a stimulating
Sichuan dish. As
Oregon, the place
where empires
once clashed over
the global trade of
beaver furs, glides
into a second year
of legalized recreational pot, the state
is determined to show the world that
a certain kind of drug prohibition
belongs in history’s dumpster.
Soon, with the likely passage of
legal pot in California next month, all
of the West Coast — from the tundra
of Alaska to the sun-washed suburbs
of San Diego — will be a confeder-
acy of state-regulated marijuana use.
Across the Pacifi c, a completely
a different view of drug use is
playing out in the horror of the
Philippines. That country is ruled by
Rodrigo Duterte, a crude and brutal
strongman known as the Donald
Trump of the Philippines. Under his
watch, more than 3,500 suspected
drug users and dealers have been
killed. Many of those murders
are “extrajudicial,” as the State
Department calls them.
Comparing his vigilante cam-
paign to Hitler’s Holocaust, the
Philippine president recently said
“I’d be happy to slaughter” 3 million
drug users. By killing that many
of his own people, Duterte said he
would “fi nish the problem of my
country and save the next generation
from perdition.” This is a Category
5 human rights disaster in the
making, and should be universally
condemned.
Bipolar reactions
The world has always been
bipolar when it comes to our fellow
humans prone to addiction and
chemical diversion. One impulse
is hysterical — the sweeping, lock-
’em-up tragedy of the United States
after the crack epidemic, the numer-
ous executions in places like Iran and
the Philippines. The other is histor-
ical, at least by modern standards:
the attempt by states in the American
West (and a ballot measure in Maine
this year) to call out the drug war for
the farce that it is.
Throughout these swings, little
has changed among a vulnerable
cohort of humanity. And until a way
is found to permanently balance
dopamine levels, we will always
have small but signifi cant portion of
the population prone to addiction.
Benjamin Franklin abused laudanum,
an opium and alcohol mixture, for
his bodily pains. And Sigmund
Freud was more than a casual user of
cocaine.
The current opioid epidemic in
places not usually associated with
drug dens and dirty needles shows
that addiction is not confi ned to
ZIP codes of economic despair. On
Staten Island, home to many a New
York cop, there have been 71 deaths
attributed to heroin overdose this
year.
Heroin is the drug of choice in
small towns in New England and
wide-open rural areas across the
country. Blacks and Latinos use and
sell drugs at roughly the same rate as
whites, but 57 percent of the people
locked up for a drug offense in 2014
were nonwhite.
Perhaps because so many addicts
are white and suburban, or white and
rural, there is now a rare bipartisan
consensus emerging for wholesale
reform of the drug laws.
Nationwide
We can start, nationwide, with
marijuana. Though legalization is
not without its problems — a spike
in emergency room visits attributed
to edible pot, persistent black market
dealers — it’s mostly been no big
deal. Across the legalized West,
consumers frequent their corner
pot shop to talk varietals and buzz
strength. Homegrown gardeners pass
on suggestions to avoid bud rot as
harvest nears. Tax revenue from sales
— though not a panacea — fl ows
to schools and roads and treatment
programs.
It all works, for the most part.
And when California, now the
world’s sixth largest economy, passes
its legal pot measure in November as
expected, it will truly be game over
for this absurd form of prohibition.
So why are nearly 600,000 people
arrested in the United States for
simple possession of marijuana every
year? And why is pot still illegal on
the federal level? People in the loop
of this policing circle know it is an
absurd and Sisyphean use of law
enforcement.
The opioid crisis is a tougher
problem. Some years ago, at the
height of the crack scare, I was
given an assignment to go to the
worst drug dens in urban America.
I ran into my share of scary and
sketchy dudes, yes. But where I
expected to see “super-predators”
and lifetime addled “crack babies,”
I instead found a fascinating variety
of people struggling with an ancient
affl iction. Many of them could not
get into treatment.
A clear majority of Americans
now favor pot legalization. The
problem is the federal government,
which still classifi es marijuana as a
Schedule 1 drug, alongside heroin
and LSD. If pot was legalized nation-
wide, with a tax on every sale desig-
nated for treatment, it would free up
the police to get at serious crimes,
while ensuring that no addict would
be denied treatment for lack of funds.
As with most social reforms, it only
seems impossible until it’s obvious.
Predators in arms in the GOP
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
A
s many people are pointing
out, Republicans now trying
to distance themselves from
Donald Trump need to explain why
The Tape was a breaking point, when
so many previous incidents weren’t.
On Saturday,
explaining why he
was withdrawing
his endorsement,
Sen. John McCain
of Arizona cited
“comments on
prisoners of war, the Khan Gold Star
family, Judge Curiel and earlier inap-
propriate comments about women”
— and that leaves out Mexicans as
rapists, calls for a Muslim ban, and
much more. So, McCain, what took
you so long?
One excuse we’re now hearing
is that the new revelations are qual-
itatively different — that disrespect
for women is one thing, but boasting
about sexual assault brings it to
another level. It’s a weak defense,
since Trump has in effect been prom-
ising violence against minorities all
along. His insistence last week that
the Central Park Five, who were
exonerated by DNA evidence, were
guilty and should have been executed
was even worse than The Tape, but
drew hardly any denunciations from
his party.
And even if you consider sexual
predation somehow uniquely unac-
ceptable, you have to ask where all
these pearl-clutching Republicans
were back in August, when Roger
Ailes — freshly fi red from Fox News
over horrifying evidence that he used
his position to force women into sex-
ual relationships — joined the Trump
campaign as a senior adviser. Were
there any protests at all from senior
GOP fi gures?
GOP upset
Of course, we know the
answer: The latest scandal upset
Republicans, when previous
scandals didn’t, because the
candidate’s campaign was already
in free fall. You can even see it in
the numbers: The probability of a
House Republican jumping off the
Trump train is strongly related to
the Obama share of a district’s vote
in 2012. That is, Republicans in
competitive districts are outraged
by Trump’s behavior; those in safe
seats seem oddly indifferent.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Ailes axis
of abuse raises another question: Is
sexual predation by senior political
fi gures — which Ailes certainly
was, even if he pretended to be in
the journalism business — a partisan
phenomenon?
Just to be clear, I’m not talking
about bad behavior in general,
which occurs among politicians (and
people) of all political leanings. Yes,
Bill Clinton had affairs; but there’s a
world of difference between consen-
sual sex, however inappropriate, and
abuse of power to force those less
powerful to accept your urges. That’s
infi nitely worse — and it happens
more than we’d like to think.
Take, for example, what we now
know about what was happening
politically in 2006, a year that Nate
Cohn, The Times’s polling expert,
suggests offers some lessons for this
year. As Cohn points out, as late as
September of that year it looked as
if Republicans might retain control
of Congress despite public revulsion
at the Bush administration. But then
came the Foley scandal: A member
of Congress, former U.S. Rep. Mark
Foley, R-Fla., had been sending
sexually explicit messages to pages,
and his party had failed to take any
action despite warnings. As Cohn
points out, the scandal seems to
have broken the dam, and led to a
Democratic wave.
But think about how much bigger
that wave might have been if voters
had known what we know now: that
former U.S. Rep. Dennis Hastert,
R-Ill., who had been speaker of the
House since 1999, himself had a long
history of molesting teenage boys.
Monolith
Why do all these stories involve
Republicans? One answer may
be structural. The GOP is, or was
until this election, a monolithic,
hierarchical institution, in which
powerful men could cover up their
sins much better than they could in
the far looser Democratic coalition.
There is also, I’d suggest, an
underlying cynicism that pervades
the Republican elite. We’re
talking about a party that has long
exploited white backlash to mobi-
lize working-class voters, while
enacting policies that actually
hurt those voters but benefi t the
wealthy. Anyone participating in
that scam — which is what it is —
has to have the sense that politics
is a sphere in which you can get
away with a lot if you have the
right connections. So in a way it’s
not surprising if a disproportionate
number of major players feel
empowered to abuse their position.
Which brings us back to the
man almost all senior Republicans
were supporting for president until
a day or two ago.
Assuming that Trump loses,
many Republicans will try to pre-
tend that he was a complete outlier,
unrepresentative of the party. But
he isn’t. He won the nomination
fair and square, chosen by voters
who had a pretty good idea of who
he was. He had solid establishment
support until very late in the game.
And his vices are, dare we say,
very much in line with his party’s
recent tradition.
Trump, in other words, isn’t so
much an anomaly as he is a pure
distillation of his party’s modern
essence.