THE REASON FOR THE DRUG BUSTS

To the Editor of THE EAGLE:- With sparks flying over the Taconic parking
lot drug cases, perhaps it would do some good to take a look back at the
events of last summer.

As an employee in the downtown area, I recall seeing dangerously
intoxicated youth involved in fistfights and drug sales.

A schoolteacher was assaulted in the back parking lot, in front of his
daughter, over a minor traffic incident. There certainly were not 2,000
people calling for leniency -- not when the shopping district was being
disturbed during the busiest months of the year! So a cry went up for law
enforcement to get involved, and they did their jobs. Now people are
"saddened" and "appalled" that the law is going to be carried out. They do
have a point -- mandatory minimum sentences are not a productive solution
when dealing with non-violent drug offenders, especially when the accused
are young and impressionable, and the community has the resources to
address their behavior constructively. But nobody wanted to have a
constructive public dialogue in the middle of a crime spree -- they just
wanted the problem to disappear. Arrests of this type have been taking
place in other parts of the county for years. Only now, when local youth
have been rounded up at the request of our own community, are these budding
legal activists concerned with the injustice of our drug laws. Where was
the CCAJ when the young people of Pittsfield were being locked up for the
same crimes?

Had any of these citizens spoken up against the injustice faced by those
people -- most of them poor, and many of them minorities -- with the same
zeal that they now defend their own children, perhaps the current
predicament could have been avoided.

Better yet, had the town of Great Barrington called on the parents and the
community, rather than the police, to control its unruly youth, perhaps
they could have controlled the fate of their own children as well.

David Collins

Great Barrington