Licia Kuenning
Points recieved:
- Disagree (123)
- Agree (157)
Personal Information
- First Name
- Licia
- Last Name
- Kuenning
- The city or town you live in
- Farmington
- Gender
- Female
- Profile
Farmington resident. Author of FARMINGTON! FARMINGTON! and TALES OF STYRNMOUTH. Editor of THE OCCASIONAL PUSSYCAT.
History
- Member for
- 2 years 27 weeks
- Blog
- View recent blog entries
Licia Kuenning's Comments
Priorities
It isn't any safer to be homeless than to live in a house with old wiring, and obviously the tenants would rather have a home. I have seen this kind of scenario played out in Farmington and Livermore Falls--and maybe we need new legislation to give local officials a sane sense of priorities--but as things stand officials seem to be preoccupied with enforcing a code, with no realistic concern for the human beings involved. The human beings could freeze to death in the street for all the officials cared. Or maybe someone has it in for Ms. Pratt. I wonder how many houses in Norway fail to come up to the code, whose owners are not targeted by officials because nobody has it in for them. I don't know any of the Norway officials personally and don't have any ill will toward them, but I recognize a destructive pattern here. We probably do need legislation to change that pattern statewide--so that nobody is deprived of their home. Meanwhile I urge the Norway officials to give priority to making sure that the occupants of that house have a place to live that is at least as good, before turning them out of doors.
Favor real-name policy
I definitely favor the real-name policy and again applaud SJ for adopting it. SJ is the only paper where I feel comfortable commenting.
But please note that under the survey questions there is some sort of video (I guess that's what it is) which is just a a black box on my screen. I have no idea what I might see in it if I had high-speed internet connection, so I don't know whether you are losing any part of my response. We've run into this problem before. High-speed connection is expensive. Please make your web pages accessible to all of us.
They've had plenty of time
FMH has certainly had enough time to check out the facts relating to Dana Morse's complaints: that they still have nothing to say effectively tells us that Ms. Morse is right. It's pathetic that our local hospital here in Franklin County can't do better than this.
Check out LEAP
It's now a new day since this article came out, and one more person is repeating the received wisdom at me as if I just hadn't seen the articles that everyone else has seen. Apparently it is not well known that there is another informed point of view, but this particular exchange cannot go on and on, on this page. If anyone is interested, check out http://www.leap.cc ("Law Enforcement Against Prohibition") for the perspective of a number of law enforcement people on why prohibition does more harm than good.
Illegality makes them more dangerous
Yes, all drugs are dangerous, and some are addictive. But when a people cannot obtain them legally (whether because they lack a prescription or for some other reason) they are much more dangerous. Robberies of pharmacies are one of the results. Robberies of other people to get money to buy contraband drugs are another. Overdoses, contaminated drugs, association with criminals, also add to the dangers. If all drugs were legal, would people abuse them? Yes; people will abuse almost anything. But it would still cause less harm. The idea expressed by one person here that "absolute anarchy would reign" if all drugs were sold over the counter is just a popular myth. At one time we didn't have all these prohibitions; people make their own decisions about what drugs to use and obtained them without having to resort to crime, and absolute anarchy did not reign. Now we have an entrenched anti-drug industry which does not succeed in preventing drug abuse but uses a whale of a lot of our tax money, while our jails and prisons are made to support people who have no other reason to be in prison.