While I am happy to argue the logic for legalizing marijuana, medicinally and otherwise, anyone who wants all drugs legalized is just wrong.
Spend enough time in a court room and you can see the damage heroin and bath salts do to users and their families and friends.
Both, unfortunately, are just too available and if you know anyone who has ever given any suggestion of using them, grab them and tell them they can’t. By all accounts heroin and bath salts are both highly addictive and, especially in the case of bath salts, make the user downright dangerous to others. If you know someone already using, get them help. Now.
Heroin won’t make a user think he is on fire or having electricity run through his body like bath salts do but the user can develop a craving so strong that he will do just about anything to get a fix.
Meth can be just as bad, but fortunately we don’t see much of that around these parts.
The four young people who committed a series of robberies in Lebanon County in mid February are working their way through the legal system. Two have been sentenced to long state prison terms (11-and-one-third- and eight-year minimums) and another has a plea deal that calls for a minimum of six years. The oldest was 20 at the time the robberies were committed, one was 19 and two were 18. All used bath salts in the hours preceding the robberies.
In the space of about 24 hours, four businesses were robbed and lives were changed. As Judge Samuel Kline noted issuing his sentences, not just the defendants but also their victims were scarred forever. Those business owners, their employees and customers will carry the psychological trauma of that day with them.
Kline compared bath salts to LSD, a hallucinogenic drug popular in the 1960s and 70s, but bath salts seem to be even worse because its users seem more prone to violence.
If you know someone selling bath salts, notify the police. Do it now.
Now for some lighter fare, a few random thoughts:
That new Fox Sports network isn’t any real improvement over ESPN.
High school football in Lebanon County this season will be better than last year. (It almost has to be. Two of the six teams went 0-10 last year. Elco was the only one to post a winning record at 6-4.)
Allowing outside groups, like the American Heart Association, to rent Lebanon High School’s atrium for a fund raiser, and to allow liquor to be sold during that fund raiser, makes sense.
The Community of Lebanon Association’s annual car show, a victim of rain last Sunday, will be held this Sunday, Aug. 25, on Cumberland Street.
In California, schools operate on a schedule with three month-long breaks. Classes are held September through November, with December off; January through March, with April off; and May through July. The best part of that schedule: students aren’t out of classes for most of three months, and less time has to be spent re-teaching what was forgotten during a nearly three-month summer break.
Summer always goes too darn fast, doesn’t it?
As always, follow along on Twitter @sesnyderleb.