Don’t Wait for K2 to Be Officially Outlawed
Editor,
I’d like to comment on last week’s article about K-2, the legal, marijuana-like substance being sold here in the City of Falls Church.
Some of you older readers may remember back in the 70s when our Little City was also home to the only “head” shop in Northern Virginia. A head shop sold bongs, pipes and “a stunning array of hookahs,” for smoking [wink, wink] “tobacco.” Being young and hip, my friends and I would drive into the City to buy smoking paraphernalia at the shop, then get high in the parking lot. Our older friends would buy everybody beer and wine. Prior to leaving the City, one of us would inevitably vomit or urinate behind somebody’s place of business before weaving and laughing our way out of town. Ah, good times. Unfortunately, some of my old friends ended up dead, killing somebody on the road or living in a halfway house for the chronically mentally ill. A few of us survived though, but not after “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed.”
Fast forward to the present: The head shop is back! It’s called Arabica Tobacco. It’s next to the ABC liquor store (double-wow!) and just a stone’s throw from the public school system. Talk about your trifecta for trouble. Why don’t we bring in a stripper’s bar while we’re at it!? (Oh yeah, I forgot, we just got one of those too).
I spent many years sitting in church basements learning the 12-steps of recovery when I could have lived a better, more productive life.
K-2, or whatever “legal” high that’s being sold nowadays, is just an old idea that destroys new minds, nurtures criminal behavior and harms the community. Look at the weekly Crime Report in the News-Press. The majority of our crime here is drug and alcohol related – and much of it surrounds establishments that attract users. I should know. Don’t wait for K-2 to be outlawed. Take a stand now by setting the standard by which we want to live in our Little City.
Jason L.
Falls Church
‘Men Using Religion to Curb Freedom of Women’
Editor,
The letter to the editor in last week’s News-Press (Anti-Abortion Protesters Didn’t Condemn Victims) is a classic example of propaganda and it goes like this:
Firstly apply irrational, illogical arguments – there is no casual, logical or historical relationship between slavery and abortion, nor between the holocaust and abortion – but put it out there and by association the smear sticks. Nature did not directly cause either, but it does cause thousands of terminations – miscarriages – every week of fetal cells (not babies). Clearly Mother Nature does not agree with the letter writer.
Another example of propaganda: change commonly used terms, make them emotional to distort the argument, as in calling a primitive collection of cells a baby.
All these techniques are reinforced by indoctrinating young people to wave placards in support of a cause they don’t understand – talk about parallels with Socialist Germany. Finally, hide behind religion, assume that everyone must think like you and quote scripture. All this to take choice away from women (including forcing women to carry to term a fetus that is a product of a rape). Perhaps the writer would like to apply his considerable skills to the issue of the thousands of real babies that die each day in the Third World of curable diseases, and leave individual women to make their own judgement over an issue that directly affects their personal lives. Totalitarianism is a pernicious tool, the letter represents a step towards a society where conformity to my way and my beliefs is the only way, because I interpret a passage in a Holy book whether you like it or not (see: Iran). Your previous contibutor’s letter was not about abortion but about men using religion to restrict the freedom of women, trying to deny them the opportunity to think and act for themselves. At all costs maintain the separation between church and state.
James Oglethorpe
Falls Church
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