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How High?
By
Joshua Citrak
When I complained last month that MUNI needed to become more financially competitive and that cutting services and raising rider fares were only first stops along the fiscally mired route that MUNI must travel, this wasn’t what I had in mind…
In late March, a driver for the 43-Masonic line was arrested on suspicion of trafficking cocaine - on a city bus. Apparently the driver, in an out-of-service bus, would travel far off its normal operating route to meet buyers in both SOMA and Daly City. The SFPD had the deals staked out over a few weeks, learned the driver’s route and gathered evidence. On Sunday, March, 20th, they moved in for the bust. However, they found little to charge the driver with - meager grams of cocaine and only two grand in cash.
It has now come to light that the driver was tipped off to the impending bust by San Francisco Supervisors Chris Daly and Angela Alioto-Pier. Even more shocking is that he wasn’t even a real bus driver; he was a MUNI
mechanic who shuttled cocaine between the two Supervisors districts. It seems that an under the table deal was struck between the two supervisors, one of whom was the inspiration for TV’s “Silver Spoons” and the other who would rather not see “the 100% pure grade ‘A’ Columbian turned into Sixth Street Crack… (because/and) I’m tired of people blaming me because my district looks like shit, do I look like an urban blight to you?”
Alioto-Pier was quick to defend their plot, “He (Supervisor Daly) told me that he was laundering the money through MUNI’s pension fund…” by getting MUNI spokeswoman, Maggie Lynch, to see to it the books were cooked.
“We were trying to save MUNI from having to make any drastic cuts,” Alioto-Pier continued. “We were doing it for the children.”
Daly, when confronted with the facts, proclaimed that he was planning to donate the money from all alleged narcotics sales to victims of the South Asian Tsunami.
But the real truth is that no one seems to know exactly where the money or the drugs have ended up and MUNI is still deep in a $57 million hole. In the past month MUNI had to
pink slip 200 drivers, disenfranchised workers claim it was because they refused to take part in a city sponsored drug smuggling operation.
“MUNI is here to provide a service to the community,” MUNI department head Michael Burns is cryptically quoted as saying.
But the trail of corruption and intimidation seems to be winding its way back to Supervisor Daly’s SOMA digs and has fellow Supervisors speculating that Daly does not heed to the credo of ‘don’t get high off your own supply’. They fear that the Supervisor, prone to notoriously childish outbursts during city meetings and brazen acts of stupidity, might actually be suffering from what is known in drug circles as being ‘strung out’.
“I’ve always known that white boy was crazy,” former mayor and longtime political nemesis Willie Brown told me. “But seriously, I’m running for Governor in ’06. Now throw your ones in the air and wave ‘em like you just don’t care,” he shouted, beginning a surreal hip-hop inspired call and response-
Him: Hold Up!
Me: Wait a minute…
Him: Who’s house?
Me: Willie’s house!
Him: That’s right, that’s right… now all the ladies in the house say yeah…
But informed readers will note that this sad debacle could all have been prevented had the current mayor and the Board of Supervisors clamped down on all the medicinal herb clubs sprouting
up
within city limits.
“There’s a reason why they call marijuana a gateway drug,” SFPD Chief Heather Fong stated.
And the gate is apparently wide open. Currently, 43 pot clubs are open for business within city limits, or roughly 35% of the entire number of clubs in the state. The per capita ratios of this are staggering, considering San Francisco only carries 2% of the states population.
Just how many people in San Francisco are in need of medicinal marijuana is unclear, because the city keeps no such records. And how many of the people purchasing from the clubs whom are actually in need of weed is also impossible to tell. A medical marijuana access card can be easily copped from whom some advocates call ‘doctors’, with the patient’s only tangible symptoms being a $100.
Many of the clubs have come across the Bay from Oakland, where the city recently capped their ever budding hemp shops to four. But it also isn’t difficult to open a club in San Francisco, where no permits, licenses or price restrictions are necessary and
regulation is just a pipe dream at this stage of the game.
Proponents call the large number of clubs safe access, because of the dire need for many people to get their medicine, and that abuse of the system is unlikely. For example- the club on Vallejo Street easily reached from the middle school around the corner, or another club operating in the ground floor of a Mission hotel serving chemically dependant and recovering welfare tenants. So this is what they meant by Care not Cash.
Fearing competition to MUNI’s dope train, the Board of Supervisors in accordance with Mayor Newsom, introduced legislation that initiated a 45-day moratorium on any new pot clubs in the city.
“We have frankly,” Newsome said. “Been lax on this.”
“I think there needs to be some common sense and grounding as it relates to the proliferation of these clubs in San Francisco. Wanna hit this?”
Of course, the true problem at City Hall has been and will continue to be the fact that our civic leaders don’t know how to just say no. From thwarting special interests, cutting spending and balancing MUNI’s budget, to being truly resolved to making tough choices about our homeless problem, to wasting millions of tax dollars passing meaningless resolutions regarding the size of a dog’s water bowl to the amount of minutes a traffic helicopter can hover in one spot- our lawmakers seem to be bent on creating laws that satisfy self-righteous political whims rather than benefiting the lives of all San Franciscans. Meanwhile, our problems become bigger, the solutions more drastic and us, wondering just what the hell we were
smoking
when we voted for them.
Copyright © 2005 Joshua Citrak
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