MAYBE THE PSYCHIATRIST'S IDEA ISN'T CRAZY

Dr. Stephen Frye, a psychiatrist who served 30 years ago as Sonoma
County's mental health director, is giving over his retirement to
working to legalize all the drugs that people rob and kill for.

"The war on drugs kills far more people than the drugs themselves,"
Frye said from his home in Reno. "We have to stop getting tough and
start getting smart."

He's talking to anybody who will listen about his book, "We Really
Lost This War! 25 Reasons to Legalize Drugs."

It's a jarring notion, but Frye makes a strong argument that drug
laws, like prohibition, have succeeded mostly in making the narcotics
trade obscenely profitable and bloody, and providing job security to
prison guards.

"We have a million teenagers selling drugs now," he said. He argues
that effects of the war on drugs have imposed more misery on the
African-American community than slavery did.

Here in marijuana country, it does seem that there'd be far less
cause for people to create booby-trapped gardens in public forests or
to stick guns in their pockets and steal other people's pot if the
weed were legal.

Frye is part of the chorus of drug-law critics who insist we'd be far
better off to admit the war on drugs is a bust and to focus instead
on education and treatment. Isn't it an idea worth talking about?

THE BURBANK BENCHES: Since volunteers at Luther Burbank Home &
Gardens introduced commemorative benches, no visit is complete
without sitting and taking in Burbank's patch of paradise from one of
the handsome benches that someone placed in a loved one's honor.

The program has been so popular that the Burbank board has made
available for purchase six more benches that will be placed around a
tree in the Carriage House Courtyard.

Linda Hall of city parks (lhall@srcity.org) said the benches will
cost $1,750 and will include a bronze plaque that visitors will read
for a very long time.

IS THERE A TEACHER from your past who's still in your life after all
these years?

Betty Weyle of Petaluma picks up the phone now and again, usually on
a Sunday afternoon, and dials her first-grade teacher, Mildred
Thomas, in Indianapolis. Mildred told me she always looks forward to
the calls from California.

She was a brand-new teacher the year Betty was in her class at
Fountain City School in eastern Indiana.

"She was a darling little girl, with blond, curly hair," Mildred
recalled. "It's been a good many years."

Yes it has. Mildred will celebrate her 96th birthday in November, and
Betty recently turned 82.

There's plenty of catching up to do for a teacher and student who
spent a school year together in 1932-33.

FRICK and FRACK: I don't know about you, but I saw that picture in
Sunday's paper of Tony Turke, his head thrown back in a whole-bodied
laugh at Taste of Sonoma at MacMurray Ranch, and I had to know what
was so funny.

I phoned Tony, an AT&T cable splicer, at home, and he said he and
buddy Dennis Anderson were at the Frick Winery tent and fell into a
conversation with a couple from Italy about the Fricks' frickin' good
wine. Somebody wondered aloud where the Fricks were, and the answer
came that maybe they were out with the Fockers.

The Italians wandered off. An instant before Kent Porter snapped the
shot, they came up behind Tony and his pal and said, "Hey, it's the Fockers."

Well, sure, it'd be better to have been there.