Legalizing drugs: The money argument

December 2, 2008

Friday marks 75 years since repeal of the Volstead Act, which made the manufacture, distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. As the anniversary of the end of Prohibition approaches, modern advocates of a similar repeal are calling again for the decriminalization of heroin, cocaine and marijuana - and this time they've come packing a money argument by a Harvard economist.

Recent columns

• The 'Z-Man': a portrait in courage

  November 23, 2008

  All the other players were wet and muddy by the time Zachary "Z-Man" Morris got into the game. It was a playoff between the Stembridge Colts and the Middle River Renegades in the 11-13 age division of the huge Harford/Baltimore County Youth Football League. It had rained heavily, and his teammates and opponents were wearing warrior mud when the Z-man's coach ordered him onto the field at Stemmers Run Middle School.

• ... ask what you can buy for your country

  November 18, 2008

  So let me see if I understand this: We're supposed to go shopping for the good of the country. We don't have a president standing on the rubble of the American economy saying as much this time, but that's the message again. If, this holiday season, we don't buy electronics we don't need, if we don't buy new cars instead of fixing old ones, then this whole thing is going to fall apart, and we'll be in for a much longer, colder recessionary winter than already feared.

• A voice uttered words we still need to hear

  November 16, 2008

  James Emory Bond was the grandson of a slave. He was born in a log cabin in Baltimore County in 1889. He had little education, but strong hands and a strong back and a solid work ethic.

• The sad, senseless end of Henry Gunther

  November 11, 2008

  Henry Gunther of Baltimore died at one minute before the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month - the last soldier killed in the four-year insanity of World War I. This Veterans Day 2008 marks 90 years since the armistice of 1918 and the deaths of Henry Gunther and nearly 3,000 other men - American, British, French, German - whose senseless loss in the final hours form the ultimate metaphor for the bloody lunacy of "the war to end all wars."

• We knew we could be better

  November 9, 2008

  There was a memorable moment in the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan's second term in office, when a person I admired - someone who had worked for John F. Kennedy's election, someone who had taken part in student sit-ins of segregated restaurants, someone who had protested the war in Vietnam and who had worked for Bobby Kennedy's election in 1968 - raised an empty bottle of Robert Mondavi estate-bottled cabernet and bragged that he had paid $200 for it at dinner the night before.

• Handmade signs signal persistent hope

  November 5, 2008

  Thirty-two years of elections in Maryland and I've never seen so many handmade signs. Someone told me weeks ago that you couldn't get your hands on an official, campaign-issued Obama sign anywhere; they ran out of them in Baltimore, which might explain all the hand-painted signs I saw yesterday. They were on the eastside and the westside. I saw one on North Avenue, one on Druid Hill Avenue, one on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

• Mining the memories for a smile of recognition

  November 4, 2008

  They live on the same floor of the same Massachusetts nursing home now - the 94-year-old former Rose Popolo; her 85-year-old sister, Sadie Bell; their 83-year-old brother, Frank Popolo, and his 90-year-old wife, Aunt Genie - so I get to see them all in a single visit. On a recent Saturday evening, I coax all but Aunt Genie, who's asleep in her room, down the hall to a faux-Colonial sitting room. I pull up chairs. We sit. We talk. My mother is quiet, but she's smiling. She's very happy about the pizza I just delivered.

• Self-devouring slots

  November 2, 2008

  It looks as though Marylanders are ready for slots. Sick of the debate, or concerned that state budget woes will mean higher taxes or reductions in everything from school teachers to 911 operators, we're headed out on Tuesday to amend the state Constitution. According to the most recent polls, a majority of us are willing to authorize the installation of 15,000 slot machines - and, given current economic conditions, it makes sense: Good idea and right on time.

• Slots aren't the answer to what ails the tracks

  October 28, 2008

  Here's what the people who run Laurel Park are willing to do to get you and me, betting customers, through the gates between now and the end of the year: half-price beers every time a randomly selected jockey wins a race on a Friday; a "special surprise" if one of us grabs the lucky rubber ducky out of the Laurel Lucky Duck Pond between 11 a.m. and noon Nov. 8; free apple or pumpkin pie to the first 5,500 fans on Thanksgiving Day; "Live Pasta Station" every Thursday in the Terrace Dining Room; free ice scraper to the first 4,000 fans Dec. 13.

• In musician's illness, help comes from the state

  October 26, 2008

  The good story within the sad story - the one about the talented rock guitarist Stanley Whitaker having two kinds of cancer and his old friends, including original members of Crack The Sky, stepping up to donate a concert on his behalf - is that the state of Maryland is helping Whitaker pay for his treatment. This is not what I expected to hear when I spoke with his wife, LeeAnne.

• Well-to-do go to war over the U.S. income gap

  October 21, 2008

  For a moment the other night, as I was checking e-mail from readers reacting to Sunday's column about John McCain's "class warfare" whine, I lost my perspective. It was a temporary condition, brought on by an armchair economist named Mark who said my characterization of people who make more than $250,000 a year as "wealthy" was inaccurate.

• It's a 30-year sneak attack in America's class war

  October 19, 2008

  Maintaining a tradition that has been around since at least the Reagan Revolution, John McCain the other night ridiculed the idea of "spreading the wealth" and accused Barack Obama of playing "class warfare."

• Students weigh in on race in today's world

  October 12, 2008

  The 11th-grade English honors students of Deborah Lambert's class at Eastern Technical High School in Baltimore County tackled a question posed in this column recently: Are we there yet? By "there," I meant the colorblind nation of our dreams - or, at least, a nation less prejudiced, more accepting and ready to make an African-American man its next president. Lambert used the Sept. 16 column as a "teachable moment," which, next to making someone's refrigerator door, is about the highest flattery this column has ever enjoyed.

• Here's one way to call the slots tossup

  October 7, 2008

  The last poll I saw on slots showed about 54 percent of Marylanders still supporting a state constitutional amendment allowing the gambling machines. That support was not as large as it appeared to be eight or nine months ago, which fits a theory I have: The closer we get to Election Day, the more people will think about this, and the more they think about it, the more of a tossup the outcome. It all comes down to which of the following attitudes prevail.

• A blue state gets even bluer

  October 5, 2008

  Just a couple of years ago, when Republican Bob Ehrlich was governor of Maryland and running for re-election, he stood next to Rudy Giuliani at a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser in Baltimore, and the former New York City mayor took questions from reporters. When one brought up Maryland's blue statehood, Ehrlich stepped forward to make a correction.

• We should base our choice upon their choices

  September 30, 2008

  Sunday morning on Face The Nation, CBS' Bob Schieffer asked Barack Obama if he considered Sarah Palin qualified to be president of the United States. Obama danced around the subject and said, essentially - I didn't get the exact quote; I was making spaghetti sauce at the time and listening from the kitchen - that Schieffer's question was for the American people to answer.

• To preserve the farm, you also want to preserve the farmer

  September 28, 2008

  Anyone who travels through Baltimore County's Long Green Valley on a regular basis has to stop now and then so that Bobby Prigel's cows can cross the road. Prigel is a dairy farmer who produces milk the old-fashioned way, moving his herd from pasture to pasture, on both sides of Long Green Road, letting the cows actually walk and chew grass at the same time.

• OK, so where's the Boscov's bailout?

  September 23, 2008

  Can we reopen the Boscov's case now?

• ICC? It's time to see to more urgent needs instead

  September 21, 2008

  Here in the Baltimore metropolitan area, we're a bit disconnected from that whole Intercounty Connector thing going on between Montgomery and Prince George's counties. For a lot of us who keep mainly to the Baltimore Beltway and the roads that intersect it, the ICC might as well be a bridge in Alaska. It's "down there" somewhere, designed to connect Interstate 95 near Laurel with Interstate 270 near Gaithersburg. But Baltimoreans and Marylanders everywhere should pay attention. A lot of our money - and our quality of life - is at stake.

• Racism may be waning, but are we there yet?

  September 16, 2008

  RODRICKS TUESDAY

• Needing help, to stay stable, but the help is just never there

  September 14, 2008

  The event came and went in the daily cycle of news of Sept. 4 - man with rifle holds three people hostage in a house off Belair Road, near the Baltimore City-Baltimore County line, leading to a 14-hour standoff with police.

• As gas prices fall, will we go back to guzzling?

  September 9, 2008

  So at what point, as the gas prices fall and maybe even stabilize, do Americans consider buying SUVs again? I know it sounds crazy - that common-sense adults would go back to the fuel-sucking SUVs, with the price of gas floating between $3 and $4 a gallon, the economy stumbling, unemployment rising, the national debt growing and a cloud of uncertainty overhead. But it could happen. It's happened before.

• No justice to be found in DWI jail time

  September 7, 2008

  Jason Bukovsky was a 32-year-old Columbia resident, owner of a 2000 Jeep Wrangler and, one Saturday afternoon last December, just before Christmas, so incredibly drunk he is lucky to be alive. Still, Bukovsky drove his Wrangler south on Aviation Boulevard in Glen Burnie, drifted off to the right, struck a guardrail, cut back sharply and slammed into a Honda Accord, killing its driver, 53-year-old Soon Youn Livingston. About an hour after the accident, Bukovsky's blood-alcohol level registered 0.39 percent, nearly five times what the state considers drunk.

• City's awash in arena visions

  August 3, 2008

  I need to ask the people who've been writing letters to the editor expressing nostalgic affection for the 1st Mariner Arena - and horror at the prospect of that outdated box being torn down and replaced - the following question: When was the last time you were there? When the Beatles played, or was it Herman's Hermits?

• Let's go green with arena

  July 27, 2008

  Here's how Baltimore gets the world's attention, attracts an NBA or NHL franchise, pulls in a major corporate sponsor, establishes another tourist destination a couple of blocks from Camden Yards, helps foster a new sector of jobs in Maryland and reduces long-term operating costs of its new downtown arena: with pizza made from tomatoes grown on the premises.

• Integrity an early McKay hallmark

  June 8, 2008

  Back at the dawn of Baltimore television, when the Sunpapers owned the first station here, a 25-year-old Evening Sun reporter named Jim McManus agreed to work in front of the camera for $65 a week. It was 1947. The station, WMAR-TV, had to fill hours upon hours with original programming. So its crews did remote telecasts, running from the races at Pimlico to supermarket openings to professional wrestling matches at the old Baltimore Coliseum.

• Sludge and other theories: time to think

  May 1, 2008

  A black man approached me on Guilford Avenue in Baltimore the other day and struck up a friendly, walk-and-talk conversation about Barack Obama. The conversation lasted only five minutes, and, remarkably, the stranger did most of the talking, ending with this parting shot: Don't dismiss the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's suggestion that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to kill black people as the irrational ravings of an overwrought preacher. "I mean," the man said, "look at what Johns Hopkins did with that sludge. ... Think about it."

• In face of violence, looking within

  February 7, 2008

  Parents and teenagers are walking around this week awed by the violence that destroyed the Browning family in Cockeysville - one of those events that are so shocking we all look at each other and wait for someone to make some sense of it. But there is no sense to it, and the explanation might never come.

• Out of tragedy, a team

  May 13, 2007

  His surviving teammates and lacrosse coach created a memorial to Christopher Clarke on the wall of the basement locker room at Patterson High School. They took the gloves, blue helmet, lacrosse stick and blue-and-white No. 24 jersey out of his locker and fastened them to the bulletin board near the door that leads to the steps to the playing field.

• Sadly, mass killings are no longer shocking

  April 19, 2007

  President Bush declared Americans shocked. Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth was shocked. Former Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick expressed shock. According to press reports, world leaders from South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Canada said they were shocked, and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing sent a telegram to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressing shock. Officials of Micron Inc., the semiconductor company that has donated generously to the engineering department at Virginia Tech, said they were shocked, too.

• Cultivating their future

  May 11, 2006

  They renamed the old, scary Maryland Penitentiary a few years ago and changed its purpose. It's now called the Metropolitan Transition Center, a place where inmates go when they are in the last couple of years of prison time. Given its purpose and potential, it's probably one of the most important institutions in Baltimore - a crossroads where men who once caused so much trouble in their home communities either beat the devil or re-up.

• Trying to embrace St. Francis' message

  April 30, 2006

  Even though ex-offender threw away a second chance, don't throw in the towel on all

• Get out by phone call or get out by bullet

  April 24, 2006

  Icompare the names in reports of killings in Baltimore with the names of men who called The Sun during the last 10 months to ask for help in finding jobs that might get them out of dealing drugs or other potentially deadly crimes. So far, I know only of one man who came in from the street for help, returned to his old lifestyle and ended up dead because of it.

• The lesson for Easter: Life can be renewed

  April 16, 2006

  There are young men out there - teenage boys from Baltimore to Columbia, from Aberdeen to Annapolis - who will be making decisions this spring. Some will have to decide where to go to college in the fall, or which lacrosse team to play with this summer, or which girl to ask to a prom. Some will have to decide whether to continue to be a stickup boy or a young thug who sells heroin.

• City officer strives to help break the cycle

  April 10, 2006

  Alittle more attention must be paid: Keith Harrison, The Sun's Police Officer of the Year for excellence in community service, has been deeply engaged in the effort to get drug dealers and drug addicts out of that miserable game. We kind of missed the story the other day when we reported on Harrison's selection from among dozens of nominees across Maryland. He's done more than "set up an office where citizens can talk privately to officers about their lives." Like street-corner missionaries, Harrison and his colleagues from the Baltimore Police Department's Get Out of the Game unit have been encouraging hard-core drug offenders to change their lives. Their work isn't about arrests; it's about breaking the dreariest of cycles in this drug-infested city.

• Dealing, gangs, jail, release -- now what?

  March 26, 2006

  I can't use Chico's full name because he thinks he'll be killed for talking to a newspaper columnist. It's a small big town, Baltimore. Everybody knows everybody, or everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, and particularly in the miserable drug life - guys selling dope, or guys sticking up guys selling dope - it's all this kill-or-be-killed stuff among homie familiaritas in sales territories that have become even more compact under O'Malley-era police pressure.

• After lure of the street, a return to honest life

  March 20, 2006

  On the morning of Sept. 5, 2000, Baltimore police conducted what drug dealers call "a house raid" on 43rd Street in a North Baltimore neighborhood that had been beleaguered by gang activity for several months. Police arrested four people and listed these confiscated items for a Sun reporter: 160 vials of cocaine; 19 ounces of pure heroin; 6 ounces of pure cocaine; $8,000 in cash; and a .22-caliber Intertec machine pistol with a silencer. Police placed the value of the heroin at $285,000, the cocaine at $20,000.

• Jim's story highlights enigmatic lure of drugs

  March 5, 2006

  Sometimes I'll sit there - in a courtroom maybe, or at a desk with a phone to my ear - or I'll stand on a Baltimore sidewalk and do what they pay me to do, which is listen to people give their arguments, tell their stories and explain themselves, and it'll hit me: I couldn't be a psychiatrist.

• Shining a light for a man in dark despair

  March 3, 2006

  This is for Jim, who called here the other day. I won't use the last name you left on The Sun's voice-mail system because I haven't been able to speak with you. It doesn't matter. You know who you are. There's only one person who called 410-332-6166 this week to say he was going to take his own life.

• Out of the 'wickedness' and into the kitchen

  February 26, 2006

  Iam regularly pleased by the number of Sun readers who ask about Harry Calloway Jr. I get it all the time. People ask how he's doing, what he's doing, whether he's staying out of trouble - and this continues several months after Calloway first emerged as a kind of poster child for second chances among drug dealers, drug addicts and all the miserable others who drained the life out of long stretches of Baltimore over long periods of time.

• Obstacles on the road to a man's redemption

  February 12, 2006

  Take LaFawn Weaver, for instance. Here's a young man who admits to making bad choices and getting arrested a couple of times -- back when he was a teenager, primarily -- and blowing a good job because he liked to smoke reefer. OK. So it's time to move on. He says he's made a personal declaration to try again and do it right. But so far, Weaver hasn't been able to find the legitimate job that gets him off the street for good and into America's taxpaying, mainstream work force.

• Feds are in the game, and they're serious

  February 5, 2006

  Guys with guns in the city of Baltimore: I got a Super Bowl Sunday gift for you. Some people pay $100 an hour to get this good stuff. You're getting it for free -- a little advice that could change your life. Here goes:

• Ex-offenders need help finding way back to life

  January 22, 2006

  Take a guy like Eric Brooks, for instance. He's 30 years old and he's been in trouble for - here's a shocker - dealing drugs in Baltimore. Last year, Brooks received a taxpayer-financed trip to a Maryland prison for seven months. He went to the Metropolitan Transition Center, which is the old Maryland Penitentiary, that Frankenstein castle commuters see from the Jones Falls Expressway. Based on what state officials have told me, it cost us about $14,000 to keep Eric Brooks there.

• Lend a hand or an ear to start year on right foot

  January 1, 2006

  Here's a suggestion for 2006: Be a mentor, be a mensch. Make a difference in the life of one man or one woman trying to stay off the drug corners and out of prison -- just by showing some interest. You could sign up for this service at an event Jan. 16 (see below), or you could phone in your support. Milton Bates did, and things have worked out pretty well so far.

• Homicide clock ticks louder as year ends

  December 30, 2005

  Aclock ticks in Baltimore, and I don't mean the one in Oriole Park. It's the homicide clock. It's not something you can look up and see, but something you feel and hear - part of Baltimore's biorhythm - and every year at this time, the ticks get louder, the pulse grows stronger, and anyone who still cares about this stupid waste of life gets a headache.

• Cause for ex-offenders crosses party lines

  December 22, 2005

  Mary Ann Saar, Maryland's public safety secretary, said it again last week at a breakfast honoring both ex-offenders who find their way into the mainstream working world and the companies that have the guts to hire them: "This is not a liberal issue. This is not a conservative issue. This is not a Republican issue. It is not a Democratic issue. This is a common-sense issue that will serve all of us."

• Our city's firms must reach out to 51st state

  December 18, 2005

  America's 51st state - the state of Incarceration - has a citizenship of about 2.1 million now, making it just about as populated as Nevada or Utah. Incarceration USA had just 500,000 residents in 1980; the war on drugs, more than any other factor, contributed to its striking growth - and continues to fuel its remarkable retention rate. In 2000, nearly 605,000 inmates were released back into the other 50 states. In 2003, that number reached 656,320, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Despite this, Incarceration still boasts more people than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

• Despite help, some still slip through the cracks

  December 11, 2005

  Just so you know, before I take you into the thorny stuff: I've heard from dozens of people - city and suburban families of longtime drug addicts - who say things are better now. Their sons, husbands, brothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends, sisters are clean, staying out of trouble and away from their old junkie friends, working and taking care of their children. There are a lot of stories like that.

• Want to save Baltimore? Start with one person

  December 5, 2005

  One man, one woman at a time - let's try it that way. Let's say you own a small business, or let's say you're in middle management of a medium-to-large-to-extra-large company. Maybe you're even the CEO, or the COO or the CFO. Maybe you have an MBA, belong to the GBC, work in HRD, drive a BMW, or something GMC.

• Access to drugs in jail was a death sentence

  December 4, 2005

  There's no question that Michael Rabuck should have been institutionalized. People and their property in the city and Baltimore County were safer with him off the street. But this drug-addicted man ended up in a maximum-security prison, the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, where other inmates were eager to give him heroin - and willing to kill him if he did not get his family to pay for it.

• Gratitude for second chances

  November 24, 2005

  Thanks to those who try to make life better for all of us by making life better for themselves. There are still too many homicides in Baltimore - though, at 242, not as many as the 259 last year at this time - and too many men and women addicted to heroin and cocaine. But there are people among us trying to get to a better place in their lives, away from the addictions that create the drug market that begets so much of the violence, and out of unemployment, crime and prison. We should praise and thank them for their efforts, against tough odds, because therein lies the progress of a city, a state and a nation - one man, one woman at a time.

• Knocked down, but ready to try again

  November 17, 2005

  And so it begins again for Harry Calloway. Once more, he restarts his life. On Monday, Calloway started classes at Sojourner-Douglass College for the second time this year, and on Nov. 30 he'll be back at the Moveable Feast culinary class.

• Savor the warmth of youth, family, summer

  October 13, 2005

  I need to get this out. My cousins, Vinnie and Eddie Voci, will close on the sale of Uncle Gene's cottage on Cape Cod tomorrow, and I'm pretty bummed out about the whole thing -- accepting it, but still bummed -- and I hope you won't mind the use of this space for a kind of elegy. I admit to being a baby boomer tossed into the mosh pit of middle age. Some guys drown in the melancholy. I get to write my way out of it, at least for a day or so.

• Hope and despair for those who wait

  September 26, 2005

  I call them "ladies in waiting," the mothers and grandmothers, sisters, wives and fiancees who, with hope and prayer and superhuman patience, keep the faith that one day their men will straighten up, emerge from the drug life or prison and come safe home. I hear from them frequently.

• Ex-dealer is no longer the man he used to be

  September 25, 2005

  A young, beautiful, dark-skinned woman, her hair in cornrows and her arms wrapped around her pregnancy, sits at the end of a park bench, silent and depressed, and for good reason: She's married to a 25-year-old drug dealer who suffered brain damage in a beating last spring, and he faces prison this fall. You can understand why she might want to avoid the conversation at the other end of the bench - the one between the father of her unborn child and the newspaper guy. The woman turns her back slightly and stares at the dry grass at her feet.

• Calling all those who said they needed help

  September 22, 2005

  You know who you are. Kenneth, Leon, William, Joseph and Walter. You know why I'm calling your names out in print today. And Arthur, Tina, Gordon, Andre, Tory and Shawn - where are you?

• After falling so far, coming back can be a long, hard climb

  September 18, 2005

  HERE'S WHAT happens in the big city: A 42-year-old man, who wasted half his life in jails and prisons because of heroin, announces that he's clean and wants out. No longer will he do dope or deal dope. He wants to leave the ranks of the thousands of men and women who for years helped suck the life out of vast stretches of Baltimore. "I just want to get back to working, and being productive," the man says. He sounds earnest.

• High cost of drug sentences in Maryland

  September 15, 2005

  I ASKED Donta Ellerbe, a 28-year-old Baltimorean who spent too much of his young life selling heroin in his hometown, what he would like to do for a living, now that he's sworn off the hustle, and this is what he said: "I'm a good people person. I think I would be good at customer service."

• Ehrlich can put money behind good intentions, expand drug treatment

  September 11, 2005

  BALTIMORE DRUG dealers and former dealers, drug addicts and recovering addicts didn't vote for Bob Ehrlich in 2002. Check me if I'm wrong, brothers and sisters, but many of you either have felony convictions, which means you weren't allowed to vote, or you were incarcerated at the time of the gubernatorial election. Others were just "distracted," committing crimes to feed your addictions, and therefore not engaged in that grand thing we call democracy. And even if you were, you were not inclined to vote for a Republican.

• An excavation company offers a second chance, and six ex-dealers take an important first step

  September 1, 2005

  LIVING DRUG-FREE, feeling part of the working world and the progress of your city, making $10 an hour for a new company owned by people who believe in second chances, knowing your relatives are glad to see you and that your neighbors might even respect you - all that beats hustling heroin for $50 a day. Any way you measure it, the lives of Thomas Willis, Ricky Smith, Sean Wright, Craig Wright, William Taylor and Melvin Richardson are better at the start of September than they were at the start of August - and so, by a small increment, is the quality of life in Baltimore.

• An FAQ for readers of previous columns

  August 28, 2005

  AT A MEETING of recovering drug addicts in West Baltimore the other night, there were more answers than questions, which is a good thing in group therapy - it means there's honesty in the room. Everyone seemed to feel free to recount their struggles and express their feelings, and no man put his brother on the spot with questions - until they got to me.

• Taking family's pain public takes courage, and a lot of love

  August 25, 2005

  DEAR NICOLE Sesker: Your stepdaddy must love you a lot. He's the police commissioner of Baltimore, and yesterday Baltimore and the world learned what you, the commissioner and some of his officers have known for a long time --- that you're a heroin addict.

• A troubled soul, another tragic ending in the 'other Baltimore'

  August 21, 2005

  RALPH E. "Casey" Kloetzli died in an alley behind an abandoned house on a short side street I had neither heard of nor visited in my 27 years in Baltimore. Until two weeks ago, he had lived a tormented life in the "other Baltimore," the subculture of addiction and distress that so many of us know only from a distance.

• Weary dope dealer aims to go straight into a new line of work

  August 18, 2005

  LISTENING to a man named Troy talk about his life as a drug dealer -- with 20 clients who buy marijuana from him on a regular basis, Troy didn't want his full name printed because of the legal ramifications -- I think to myself: This guy could have been somebody.

• O'Mayor could have a little more passion about city hotel plan

  August 15, 2005

  BEFORE THE Baltimore City Council votes on Mayor Martin O'Malley's proposal for the public financing of a $305 million convention center hotel, it would be nice to hear from Mayor Martin O'Malley. Exsqueeze me? Have you noticed that O'Mayor has been relatively low-key on this high-profile project?

• Updates give hope for life off the street

  August 14, 2005

  TWO MONTHS and two days have passed since the first profiles of men and women caught up in Baltimore's drug life -- and eager to get out of it -- appeared in this space. The contact count is up around 150 now, and today's column is an update on where the many hours of conversations with present and former dealers and addicts (or their mothers and grandmothers) have led.

• Weary mothers, grandmothers also are victims of drug trade

  August 11, 2005

  DRUG DEALERS: Your mothers have been calling; your grandmothers too. I speak with them almost daily. The conversations are always pleasant, but the subject is always sad, and the subject is always you - the sons and grandsons who hustle drugs on the streets of Baltimore.

• City hotel can provide a start for jobs plan

  August 7, 2005

  DEAR BALTIMORE City Council: Several of you are questioning the proposal to have the city finance the construction of a $305 million hotel to give the downtown convention business a boost. You're in rare form. We're not used to the City Council doing this sort of thing - challenging the mayor, demanding a better deal for taxpayers. I'm impressed.

• Prison won't heal Baltimore's blight, but helping out its victims would

  July 31, 2005

  BALTIMORE'S drug cancer has eaten away at people, families and whole neighborhoods for more than three decades. It has affected the entire region in some way and, considering the thousands of citizens involved in this problem, seems intractable, a lost cause.

• Taking a leap off the street, into a job hunt

  July 28, 2005

  DOZENS OF Baltimoreans have contacted The Sun during the past six weeks to express a desire to end their roles in one of the city's most serious problems - the drug trade that supplies thousands of city and suburban residents with heroin and cocaine, ruins families and neighborhoods, and fuels the violence that keeps Baltimore high on the homicide charts.

• Drug dealers offered an exit to get out of game

  July 24, 2005

  LEONARD HAMM, the Baltimore police commissioner, could be standing on a street corner watching his officers make a drug arrest, or he might be attending a community event, walking into a barber shop, or just sitting on the front steps of his house. It could happen any time, and often does. Someone recognizes Hamm, walks up to him and says: "Commissioner, I got to get out of the game."

• If you stay in the drug life, you are choosing your death

  July 21, 2005

  DEAR BALTIMORE drug dealers: It's like this. You either want to live a long, relatively happy life or die young and horribly (or, if you're lucky, maybe middle-aged and horribly). You either want to have a home, family and friends (maybe even DirecTV), or go back to prison.

• Effort's goal is to make solid citizens of criminals

  July 17, 2005

  TOMI HIERS, who serves in the Ehrlich administration with a half-mile title - executive assistant to the deputy secretary for operations, Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services - believes the Republican governor of Maryland means to do what no Democrat in recent memory was able to do: turn criminals into productive citizens, give a guy a second chance. The administration wants to stop wasting taxpayer money - $24,000 per year per inmate - on a revolving door. "We are trying to change the culture of corrections," Hiers says.

• A longtime addict wants out; he needs helping hand

  July 7, 2005

  HERE'S DARRYL Logan. Here's a 45-year-old lifelong Baltimorean, a graduate of one of its venerable independent schools - and a longtime drug addict. He seems like a bright guy. He's certainly a congenial conversationalist. And he's one of our estimated 40,000 heroin users.

• Here's a choice: Burn out or really start cooking

  July 3, 2005

  DEAR BALTIMORE drug dealers: Tired of your loser life? Tired of being used to spread the poison in your hometown? Tired of living with your mother because, despite what people think, you can't afford a place of your own? Tired of the prospect of going to jail again, or ending up with a bullet in your head?

• Passing on hard-learned lessons on Father's Day

  June 19, 2005

  THIS IS Berson Tyner's first Father's Day as a free man in 10 years. For most of the past decade -- and for several of the years before that -- he was a prisoner in the Maryland correctional system. If he saw his three sons on Father's Day, it was probably in a guarded visiting room, in Hagerstown or Jessup.

• Former drug abuser finds a chance to regain happiness lost to addiction

  June 16, 2005

  UPON HEARING her story, a consoling preacher might have been tempted to give Towanda Reaves that old, hopeful proverb about doors -- when one closes, another one opens. We found out yesterday that the door Reaves thought had been closed to her forever is still open a crack. It's hard to see from about five years away, but there's definitely a small opening.

• Program envisions a chain of mentors pulling kids from street life

  June 13, 2005

  STEVEN "Take Back The City" Mitchell is certainly dedicated to the cause, and he's always trying to get other men - black, white, Asian, Republican or Democrat, city or suburban - to join him in taking on one of the most persistent and daunting challenges in our midst. He's all about saving Baltimore kids from drugs, thugs and violence.

• Why they sell poison, and why many can't stop

  June 12, 2005

  FOUR MEN - one in his 40s and tired of going to jail, one who just barely escaped the bullets that killed his best friend, one under pressure from police and family to change careers, another who left the streets six years ago to work toward a middle-class life - all agree: Many who sell drugs in Baltimore will never stop, unless arrested or killed, but many more would prefer another way to make a living. If there were more decent jobs and more employers willing to give a felon a second chance, there might be fewer dealers competing for corners and this city might be a less deadly place.

• Dealers, deal if you must -- but please, stop the killing

  June 9, 2005

  DEAR Baltimore drug dealers: I promise this will be the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard. Here goes: How about taking the summer off to see what it might be like around here without all the shooting and killing? Serious. How about a cease-fire? A little break could save lives, maybe even your own.

• Act of forgiveness sets example for the world

  April 3, 2005

  BY THE TIME he came to Camden Yards in Baltimore on that sun-splashed autumn Sunday in 1995, Pope John Paul II had for more than a decade been encased in glass when he traveled among crowds. The "popemobile" circled the baseball field and turned along the warning track, and for a few memorable seconds, as a reporter free to roam in the grass of left field, I had my audience with the Vicar of Christ. He looked right at me - I swear, right into my eyes - and gave the papal blessing from behind bulletproof glass.

• Exploiting the tragedy of Terri Schiavo

  March 24, 2005

  MAYBE YOU know the feeling - that you're about to see or hear something that's really someone else's private business, and it makes you embarrassed and uncomfortable. You're a sucker for human drama in all forms, but you'd rather not be caught gawking.

• A grieving mother brings this war home

  November 18, 2004

  I TOLD MARTINA Burger, who was very accommodating and who gave me more of her time than I ever expected, that I would not debate the war in Iraq with the grieving mother of a Marine who was killed there.

• Once again, young guns shatter hope

  May 9, 2004

  SOMETIMES, SOME days, you wish you could just reach right in and rewire the brains of fools - like the fat one who apparently drove up to Randallstown High School Friday afternoon and decided to open fire on a crowd of kids after a charity basketball game. What do you suppose was the gunman's story this time? Had he been dissed by someone in the crowd? Did someone owe him money? Or was he just upset about the Krispy Kreme plant closing?

• Ehrlich, O'Malley sparring over schools may be Round 1

  March 11, 2004

  WAS THAT a risky thanks-but-no-thanks Martin O'Mayor sent to Bobby Governor the other night, or the first shot in the 2006 gubernatorial campaign? Is this precious? Do we live in interesting times? Is this shaping up to be a battle of political frat boys, or what?

• Given failed war on drugs, Lewis charges no surprise

  March 4, 2004

  ALITTLE news for the many Jamal Lewis fans -- of whom I am one -- who think the Baltimore Ravens' great running back is a victim of an overzealous federal prosecutor reaching too far to make a case out of the word "Yeah," uttered during a cellular telephone call four years ago: We're still at war.

• Ehrlich realizes we all have a stake in the city's schools

  February 26, 2004

  MORE HIGH-FIVES to Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Arbutus for his leadership in Baltimore's school crisis. Last week, the governor pledged a $42 million loan to help the school system pay its bills, and this week, with the deficit numbers looking even worse, Ehrlich came closer to advocating a complete state takeover of the system, declaring himself its new guardian with these words: "I have 90,000 children in Baltimore City schools."

• Ehrlich's gamble on the city shows glimmer of greatness

  February 19, 2004

  ROBERT L. Ehrlich Jr. of Arbutus is just the man to cure Maryland of its "pre-existing antagonism." No doctor can do it. O'Malley can't do it. Nor Sarbanes. Nor Mikulski. Nor Mfume. Not even Ripken. But the state's first Republican governor since Spiro T. Agnew could lead the way on regional big-think, and the sooner he realizes it the better. He has a choice - to be a statesman who unites modern Maryland across jurisdictional, economic, class and racial lines, or go down in history as "Bobby Slots."

• City should have put brakes on Fast Eddie a long time ago

  December 11, 2003

  THOSE WHO find themselves lost in the sordid details of the indictment of Fast Eddie Norris, and terribly lacking in knowledge of fashion, should please note: Il Bisonte is a line of leather goods from Italy, and Faconnable is a clothing line with a store in Manhattan.

• No one can tell grieving family of city Marine how to feel

  March 24, 2003

  THE BALTIMORE family of Staff Sgt. Kendall D. Waters-Bey, killed Thursday in a helicopter crash in southern Iraq, took some heat over the weekend - from talk radio, what else? - for suggesting that the 29-year-old Marine died in an unjust and pointless war, not in a noble cause to make the Middle East safer or to free an oppressed people.

• Referendum on slots wouldn't be a gamble

  February 28, 2003

  ILIKE the idea of referendum. It's a bright, blunt instrument of democracy -- people voting not on men but on ideas and laws, specific issues of significant public importance. If from time to time we present large questions on the ballot that ultimately affect the quality of life in a place -- say, the state of Maryland -- what's the harm? In fact, a great good might be served; government might better reflect the wishes of the little people.

• Take a break from shoveling and check your quiz score

  February 19, 2003

  IN CASE YOU missed it - and chances of that are pretty good - I promised to produce answers today to the Winter Day Quiz, presented in this space Monday as a public service to snowbound readers of The Sun.

• 30 questions for all stuck at home on a winter's day

  February 17, 2003

  IWOULD LIKE to start off today's column by thanking all the intrepid men and women involved in the production and delivery of today's newspaper. If you can read this -- and I don't mean online through Baltimoresun.com -- hug your carrier. I would further like to thank the three guys who stopped in the middle of my street yesterday at noon to give my snow-stuck motor vehicle a push into a position out of the way of traffic and the city snowplow that will -- in my dreams -- make it down my street some day this month. Good snows make good neighbors.

• Slots number becoming game of high-low

  January 27, 2003

  FIRST WE heard that the racing industry wanted 18,000 slot machines in Maryland. Then the number fell to 13,500, and by the end of last week Bobby Governor reportedly was pulling back even more to find some palatable number. Pete "Cut Me In" Rawlings, the city delegate and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was talking 10,000. By the time you read this, they might be agreeing to ask for 11 slots and a mahjong table at the Royal Farm store in Hampden.

• In sniper shootings, prison, not death, is best outcome

  October 30, 2002

  PERHAPS ALL the federal and local prosecutors who want to take the sniper case should have a televised drawing on Saturday night - something on the order of Mega Millions or Powerball - to see who gets to kill the guys. Until yesterday, when the feds stepped in, there seemed to be a considerable argument brewing over which county in which state should get to do the rest of us the big favor of prosecuting the sniper suspects and giving them a long dirt nap. So, settle it with a drawing.

• Fight to take back streets can't be forgotten

  October 25, 2002

  IDRIFT UP to Preston and Eden again, the firebombed, Formstone Dawson house, and I think it should be turned into a shrine -- a memorial to a martyred family who in the first years of the new century died in the civil crusade for a better Baltimore. We could put up a memorial to Angel Dawson, her husband and kids, and I would go for an engraving about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance, something otherwise reserved for the headstones of soldiers.

• Normal people, living amid abnormal danger

  October 23, 2002

  CHARLES MOOSE, the police chief in Montgomery County, thinks it was unwise for the governor of Maryland to call the sniper a coward, apparently because such public name-calling is counterproductive in the delicate "dialogue" the police are trying to establish with this killer. "The governor's training is not in the law enforcement field," Moose said. "I am convinced the governor will never do that again."

• Tragedy on E. Preston St. can't shake faith in future

  October 18, 2002

  BY YESTERDAY morning, word had spread through the neighborhood about the Bible, and a few people came by to see it where it lay - open and still readable, flat atop the pile of ashes and embers from the rowhouse fire that killed Angel Dawson and her five children.

• A primer on 'real Democrats' in era of blurred party lines

  October 2, 2002

  LET ME TELL you something," Melvin A. "Mickey" Steinberg, the former lieutenant governor, said in Glen Burnie Monday, the day he and about 20 other former Democratic officeholders endorsed a Republican for governor. "Real Democrats care about the state of Maryland."

• One last vision of a Unitas-to-Berry pass

  September 18, 2002

  RAYMOND BERRY was at the lectern, giving his fond eulogy for Johnny Unitas, when I looked up at the nearly 90-foot ceiling of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and had the strange, fleeting and irreverent vision of a football spiraling perfectly through the somber atmosphere, under the contemporary-Gothic buttresses, all the way from the back of the great place and through the main nave to the sanctuary.

• Unitas' reach extended past Md. borders

  September 16, 2002

  PLEASE PARDON this personal memory of Johnny Unitas, even though it does not stem from the few special times I was actually in his company here in Baltimore. While natives can attest to seeing him throw footballs at Memorial Stadium -- or buy shirts at Hamburger's -- my experience was limited to what I saw, until about 1969, on black-and-white television.

• On sad anniversary, a lesson for the kids

  September 11, 2002

  IWOULD LIKE to say something to the kids today, so you grown-ups will have to excuse me. All memories of the year past have me thinking of the future, and the future is where children live. So this is for them.

• Hyannis Port high society won't help Townsend's cause

  August 16, 2002

  KATHLEEN K. Townsend is a Kennedy and there's nothing she can do about that. But she could have skipped that $2,000-a-head Hyannis Port party last month - the $4,000-a-plate one two summers ago, with chocolate mousse boats and white-chocolate sails bearing KKT's initials, was bad enough - and maybe she could chill on the out-of-state fund raising and the cocktail parties at Uncle Teddy's house. If I were advising this woman - and who isn't these days? - I'd tell her to lay off the lobster-and-Chablis fetes because those events come with a pretty high gag factor among the Great Unwashed.

• The anger of the faithful a dire wound for the church

  May 20, 2002

  IGO BY WHAT I hear from my 88-year-old mother, Rose, the most ardent Catholic I know. She's disgusted with the whole thing. I don't get any of the Roman Catholic warrior stuff from her on this one. Rose is more angry than sad, and so, based on this -- the most accurate measure available to me -- I believe the church is in bigger trouble than it realizes.

• Death penalty support looks tough but does no good

  May 13, 2002

  SUPPORTING the death penalty -- saying so in public -- is a way for an otherwise liberal and progressive-thinking man or woman to flash tough-on-crime bona fides. Personally, they might think capital punishment to be barbaric; they might believe in their hearts that no society that puts criminals to death can consider itself civilized. But they flash support for the ultimate penalty anyway. This has been the trend among Democrats as they've played catch-up-to-Republicans since the Reagan Revolution.

• Church is blind to damage caused by vow of celibacy

  April 5, 2002

  AND NOW, having read the sordid details from the police report, we regard the pathetic pastor of St. Clement I Catholic Church, caught in a lie of fear and desperation, his license to practice suspended, his whereabouts for a week known but to his attorney and, one assumes, God. All because he did that which his vows forbid him to do, and allegedly lied to a Baltimore County police officer to cover it up. Another one bites the dust, and while the development was decidedly regrettable, one assumes there were sighs of relief among Father Steven Girard's superiors that a little boy wasn't involved.

• Newfound friendship between local, N.Y. firefighters cut short

  September 26, 2001

  BACK ON Jan. 28, Super Bowl Sunday, the phone rang at a Baltimore County fire station, and LeRoy Edmunds picked up. This is Vinny Princiotta, the caller said. New York City Fire Department, Engine 16/Ladder 7. "We wanna make a bet on the game."

• Americans enter a test of will with new clarity

  September 17, 2001

  "INEVER was much for putting out a flag," I heard a woman say in the weekend sunshine, "until now." She went into the basement of her home and fetched two small ones - starchy cloth flags on sticks - and stuck them in the potted plants in front of her house.

• A plea for peace to the one God of Muslims, Christians and Jews

  September 14, 2001

  JUST BEFORE sunset last night in the old basilica in Baltimore, with the nation still shattered by ungodly acts of terrorism, an imam sat next to a cardinal who sat next to a rabbi, and they prayed for peace and healing in the face of terror and hate. They did the difficult thing that people expect of them - they tried to use words to restore hope in a week that tested a believer's faith in a merciful God.

• Events shake belief in a better future

  September 12, 2001

  We organize the tools in our garage and line up the shoes in our closets. We trim the hedge and water the lawn. We shop in malls. We jog. We walk the dog. We sip dark-roast coffee. We drive reliable cars with full tanks of gas. We go to work. We come home. We watch Monday Night Football. We read a novel. We sleep soundly. We have a pretty good life -- orderly, even routine, comfortable, plentiful. We keep going. We believe in the future.

• Firefighters deserve high-fives and another fete

  July 23, 2001

  NOW THAT was a cool coincidence: "Firefighter Appreciation Day 2001" at Oriole Park fell in the midst of the diehard, underground inferno that put the city's Fire Department to an extraordinary test. Too bad many of the firefighters who deserved the tribute could not attend, though they were near Camden Yards. There will have to be another honor for those who worked so hard to end the danger posed by derailed tankers of hazmats stuck in a downtown tunnel fire that burned as hot as 1,500 degrees and turned railroad steel red.

• Stream of consciousness

  June 17, 2001

  I can hear him now: "All that for that?" I can pretty much see him, too, in his khaki trousers and white T-shirt, over in the small clearing by the honeysuckle thicket on the little river I love. My father is watching me fish in the way I have chosen to fish in the years since his death: With a fly rod and tiny lures fashioned of feathers to look like the bugs that finicky trout eat. I can hear him now, as I stand knee-deep in the river and extend a small, delicate net for a trout that's all green, yellow and white with brown spots, about 10 inches of God's glory. I hold the trout in my hand for a moment so that my father might appreciate it. But he only laughs: "All that for that?" And when I ease the little fish back into the river, he laughs harder and disappears into the woods.

• Destructive and creative sides of man in tug of war

  February 16, 2001

  ADIGITAL photograph of the one they call "Crazy Frank" appeared on my computer screen at home Wednesday afternoon as I clicked through The Sun's Web site -- swollen face, large ears, deep-space eyes, arms pulled behind him for the handcuffs. My son, who is 10, looked over my shoulder.

• Bargain-basement justice not much of a deal for city

  February 14, 2001

  YESTERDAY, IN what used to be the basement of a department store, a prosecutor named Patricia Deros called 106 minor criminal cases - drug possession, trespassing, theft, perverted practices, rolling dice for money - in Early Disposition Court, the one the wise-guy mayor of Baltimore promoted last year, in stick-figure terms, as a remedy to the city's clogged judici