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Mayor Al's CDRS Veto/Drugs, Cops & PR

Mayor Al's CDRS Veto/Drugs, Cops & PR image Mayor Al's CDRS Veto/Drugs, Cops & PR image
Parent Issue
Day
1
Month
October
Year
1975
OCR Text

A round of applause is due Ann Arbor's Mayor Albert Wheeler for his selective veto of the newly-formed Republican/Human Rights Party coalition's Community Development Revenue Sharing (CDRS) proposal.

The city gets CDRS funds from the federal government to use in programs aimed at easing the plight of low and moderate income people. Wheeler has been proposing that instead of scattering the money to a multitude of projects, the funds be utilized in a coordinated fashion under the umbrella of a proposed Human Services Department within City Hall. If the city has a department for road planning, why not one for seeing to human needs like low-cost day care, legal aid, health care, consumer information, and so forth?

The city Republicans, who have been making vicious and thinly-veiled racist attacks against Wheeler every chance they get, wanted to spend all the CDRS money at once and not wait to develop a coordinated agency or approach. They would use much of the money for road repair, new fire trucks and other items outside the purpose of CDRS.

The GOP teamed up with Kathy Kozachenko, the "radical" HRP's lone and probably last City Councilperson, to pass their original proposal over Wheeler's and the Democrats' objections. Kozachenko's alliance with the GOP is a perfect ending for the once attractive HRP, now largely destroyed by abstract rhetoric and probably some government infiltration.

Wheeler's proposal, and now his selective veto, allow for emergency, temporary funding of community organizations until the more coordinated agency approach can be worked out. We fail to see why the HRP could not support such a move.

Drugs, Cops & PR

The carefully orchestrated political warfare undertaken last week by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in close cooperation with Ann Arbor police chief Walter Krasny, was, to say the least, enraging. 

The law enforcement officials' attack on Ann Arbor's pioneering $5 marijuana ordinance as "tolerant of narcotics traffic" lays bare their utter ignorance of the law. In 1971 the Michigan Supreme Court declared that marijuana and hashish were most definitely not narcotics. There is nothing in the $5 pot law which prevents police on the local, state, or federal level from going after hard narcotics pushers.

If lenient marijuana laws cause a proliferation of "narcotics" 

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Drugs, Cops & PR

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traffic, then Mr. [Theodore] Vernier of the DEA should prepare his agency to arrest the state legislatures and supreme courts of Alaska, Oregon, California, Maine, Colorado and Ohio, all of whom have recently followed Ann Arbor's lead in reducing reefer penalties to non-criminal offenses.

Now of course the Ann Arbor Republican party, in close cooperation with their Ann Arbor News, is setting out to repeal the $5 ordinance. Where is their respect for the "will of the voters," who passed the $5 pot law in a referendum, on this issue?

The whole affair, from Mr. Vernier's insistence that marijuana leads to heroin, to Bill Treml's dinosaurian reporting in the News that undercover agents had to refrain from taking showers in order to infiltrate the "drug ring," reeks of 1950's "Reefer Madness" consciousness. Some people never change with the times.

Calling the people arrested "one of the largest drug operations in the nation" is also an utter lie put forth for political propaganda purposes. With only a couple of exceptions, everyone arrested was accused of selling tiny amounts of drugs. Even the "big guys" were small-time operators in the world of drugs.

Exaggerating by 10 times the street value of the drugs; blowing out of proportion the size of the drug ring; making political statements which police are supposed to shunthere is more here than meets the eye. Is Mr. Vernier setting out to fill the vacancy recently created at the top of the DEA in Washington? Is the DEA trying to muster some credibility, now that Congress is looking into restraining their massive funding due to lack of results?

Just as the FBI and CIA, it appears the DEA is running amuck, manipulating the press, making false statements, brutalizing people during arrest procedures, and cramming them overnight in a jail cell so small no one could lie down. We've also had reports that agents were sold somewhat larger quantities than they alleged in court. Skim-off, anyone?

As for Krasny, we believe his actions only add to the long list of violations of the public trust during his tenure as Ann Arbor Police Chief. Krasny should be fired for maligning the city which pays his salary and for failing to consult with the elected officials in charge of his department before making political statements of an inflammatory nature.