INSPECTIONS, MARIJUANA MIGHT HELP CURB HALLOWEEN VIOLENCE

Dear Editor: Regarding your editorial about Halloween: There are a
number of other things that the city could do to stop this annual riot.

For starters, if the members of the Dane County Tavern League will not
cooperate with closing bars early on Halloween because they are upset
about the smoking ban, then the city inspectors would be wise to
schedule a lot of inspections for all the bars that stay open despite
the request. If the bar owners understood they faced consequences for
not being civic-minded and helping get this annual riot under control,
then perhaps they would be willing to cooperate.

Also, it is illegal to serve alcohol to someone who is already
intoxicated. What we need is a police officer in every bar to arrest
every bartender who serves alcohol to someone who is drunk. A couple
of bartender arrests would get this legal drug abuse under control.

Better yet, if the partiers just smoked joints instead of drinking
alcohol, and the police officers ignored the marijuana, then the
entire party would stay mellow and nonviolent.

It has been widely exhibited that marijuana leads to peacefulness and
alcohol leads to violence. This approach has already been done with
international soccer games, and has proved very effective and
definitely lowered the incidents of violence. For specific reference,
the Euro 2004 soccer tournament, which took place in Portugal, had
extremely lower levels of violence than at most soccer tournaments
because the police allowed people to smoke marijuana.

Lowering of violence on the level that the soccer games achieved would
definitely be a goodness for Madison.

Linda Ellen

Baraboo