TELL ABOUT SUBURBAN DRUG TRADE TOO

The first part of your series on the illegal drug trade in Paterson,
"Drug crossroads" (Page A-1, July 17), appears not only to illustrate
the "blame-the-victim" syndrome but to endorse it as well.

Remember when sexy women were supposedly responsible for getting
raped, and prostitutes for prostitution? Those were the olden days ...
|or were they?

The kid in Smoke Rise with the privileged life - does he really think
the kids of Paterson, for whom, believe me, "struggle sucks," too -
are to blame for his drug problem? Not his own high-living lifestyle?
Not his easy access to the kind of money that can buy expensive hits
day after day?

Not his parents, who apparently couldn't care less about his driving
around blitzed in the middle of the night? Whose own rampant
consumerism and bored indifference to where their own money comes from
are at the heart of their kid's malaise, and at the bottom of the
urban-suburban divide?

Not the cops in his Happy Valley little suburban town, whose crime
workload, by their own admission, is too overwhelming to rescue some
of America's future leading citizens from overdosing on "Diesel"?

Or are they too busy protecting these criminal - yes, criminal - users
from drug records, and leaving it to Paterson's overstretched police
and overtaxed residents to pick up the tab on the social destruction
they wreak in our communities?

Why don't you get real, and show how the corrupt values of today's
suburbs are destroying our inner cities?

FLAVIA ALAYA

Paterson