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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > February > 10
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Editorial: Programs for addicts especially needed in hard times
Madison Anne Barr was a beautiful, involved, popular 19-year-old from a small town. She died after being abandoned by her friends in an unfamiliar apartment far from home after a heroin overdose.
Ms. Barr was just one of many local stories about the swift and destructive effects of heroin addiction chronicled this week by Dayton Daily News reporter Joanne Huist Smith. After nearly disappearing as a problem in the drug culture in the 1980s, heroin is back because it’s cheap, available and deeply addicting to those who make the mistake of experimenting with it. The drug’s damage extends into all neighborhoods, all income brackets and all racial and ethnic groups.
So what can be done about it? On an individual level, people need to know that there’s a problem. Schools, families and circles of friends can discourage those who might consider trying the drug from ever taking that first hit.
But for those who already have fallen victim to heroin’s allure, intervention is their only hope. Getting that help is another story.
In Montgomery County, Project Cure’s clinic in Dayton is crammed into a tiny, inadequate space where it serves hundreds of recovering addicts each day. Visitors to the clinic jumped by 140 a day between 2007 and 2008.
In Greene County, Xenia’s TCN Behavioral Health Services Inc. offers addicts services ranging from counseling to inpatient detox. But its efforts also are threatened. A mental health levy that supports the program failed last year and could expire at the end of this year if it is not renewed. The accompanying $1.6 million budget cut for TCN if the levy is defeated again could cause all the services it provides to disappear.
A mental health levy can sound expendable to a cash-strapped voter. But do the math. When addicts don’t get treatment, they get increasingly more desperate, often going into an unstoppable downward spiral. Bad decisions that aren’t good for anyone are likely to follow.
Heroin is, perhaps, an unexpected threat once again to the community. That requires changing strategies and reallocating resources. So far, those moves haven’t gone far enough.
Voters and policy makers can’t let that happen. Hard as it may be when every state, county and city budget is being squeezed, support for these programs is money well spent.
For Ms. Barr of Urbana, and 23-year-old Zachary Fitzmaurice of Bevercreek, it’s too late for intervention. But for others across the Dayton region, there’s still time. They can be helped. It’s a challenge, but with cooperation and renewed focus, it can happen.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Social Services
TweetMartin Gottlieb: How much does Limbaugh scare Boehner and McConnell?
Rush Limbaugh does not think much of the leadership being provided the Republican Party by the Ohio Valley.
Limbaugh says President Barack Obama is “obviously more frightened of me than he is (of) Mitch McConnell. He’s more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party.”
Kentuckian McConnell is the party leader in the Senate. Boehner — from the suburbs between Cincinnati and Dayton, with a district stretching into Dayton — leads the party in the House.
What Limbaugh thinks is worth pausing over these days, given that, after all, the president brought him up. Obama had told congressional Republicans, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”
Obama took some flak for lowering himself to take on an over-the-top talk show host, and, thereby, promoting him. But the president was confronting, in a remarkably honest way, what might be his biggest problem in trying to foster the bipartisanship he talks about:
There’s a divisiveness industry in this country. Talented people polarize for profit, and get rich. That Rush Limbaugh will demonize any Democratic president is a given, a matter of business.
Some Democrats have suggested that Obama is naive in his hopes for bipartisanship. Maybe. But he’s not so naive as to believe that there’s any point in reaching out to the Limbaughs of the world, the political warmongers. All he could do was suggest to the Republicans that they not be guided by them.
Good luck even on that. One very conservative legislator, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., made the mistake of coming to the defense of McConnell and Boehner against Limbaugh. He said, “It’s easy, if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich, to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows, and … you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base.”
The result of those comments was a deluge of phone calls from Limbaugh listeners. The result of that was a Gingrey apology. “I regret those stupid comments,” he said. He made sure that everybody understood that he listens to Limbaugh all the time, cherishes him and agrees with him.
And yet, the “stupid comments” were the simple, obvious truth. Now Gingrey’s constituents know they should never expect him to go there again.
Some people try to tell you that Limbaugh is just an entertainer, just fun, that listeners don’t take him seriously. Those people ought to see the mail of anybody who crosses Limbaugh, in the media or otherwise. The truth is a lot of politicians are afraid of him. That’s power.
The notion that he is somehow the most important Republican now — as he portrays himself — is a Democratic dream. It might mean the death of bipartisanship, but, given the limits of his appeal, there might be so few Republicans it wouldn’t matter.
Anybody who reads these pages knows that Obama is taking a lot of flak from people on the left who see the whole bipartisanship schtick as a bad idea, people like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. They point to lockstep Republican opposition to a stimulus bill that the Republicans considered too big but was probably too small all along.
The truth, though, is that this was the wrong issue on which to expect bipartisanship. Obama decided at some point between the election and the inauguration that he needed to be bold. His talks with economists (left and right, he says) convinced him that the package had to be about $800 billion to make a real difference.
That was the end of prospects for much Republican support. The bill wraps together everything that Republicans complain about in public spending. Sure, they have risen above their anti-spending rhetoric in the past, but typically in supporting Republican presidents, not Democrats.
A vote for this bill threatened great troubles for Republicans with their famously conservative, famously partisan base.
It’s a shame this issue had to come first on Obama’s watch. It brought the likes of Limbaugh to the fore. It put people on guard. It seemed to confirm the caricature of Obama that the conservatives promoted during the campaign.
But there’ll be plenty of other issues on which the differences between the parties are at least a little blurrier.
If McConnell and Boehner have not proceeded as if their job is to “scare” Obama, that’s a good thing. The question now is how scared are they.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Obama bipartisan pitch still has life post-stimulus
Rush Limbaugh does not think much of the leadership being provided the Republican Party by the Ohio Valley.
Limbaugh says President Barack Obama is “obviously more frightened of me than he is (of) Mitch McConnell. He’s more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party.”
Kentuckian McConnell is the party leader in the Senate. Boehner — from the suburbs between Cincinnati and Dayton, with a district stretching into Dayton — leads the party in the House.
What Limbaugh thinks is worth pausing over these days, given that, after all, the president brought him up. Obama had told congressional Republicans, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”
Obama took some flak for lowering himself to take on an over-the-top talk show host, and, thereby, promoting him. But the president was confronting, in a remarkably honest way, what might be his biggest problem in trying to foster the bipartisanship he talks about:
There’s a divisiveness industry in this country. Talented people polarize for profit, and get rich. That Rush Limbaugh will demonize any Democratic president is a given, a matter of business.
Some Democrats have suggested that Obama is naive in his hopes for bipartisanship. Maybe. But he’s not so naive as to believe that there’s any point in reaching out to the Limbaughs of the world, the political warmongers. All he could do was suggest to the Republicans that they not be guided by them.
Good luck even on that. One very conservative legislator, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., made the mistake of coming to the defense of McConnell and Boehner against Limbaugh.
He said, “It’s easy, if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich, to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows, and … you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base.”
The result of those comments was a deluge of phone calls from Limbaugh listeners. The result of that was a Gingrey apology. “I regret those stupid comments,” he said. He made sure that everybody understood that he listens to Limbaugh all the time, cherishes him and agrees with him.
And yet, the “stupid comments” were the simple, obvious truth. Now Gingrey’s constituents know they should never expect him to go there again.
Some people try to tell you that Limbaugh is just an entertainer, just fun, that listeners don’t take him seriously. Those people ought to see the mail of anybody who crosses Limbaugh, in the media or otherwise. The truth is a lot of politicians are afraid of him. That’s power.
The notion that he is somehow the most important Republican now — as he portrays himself — is a Democratic dream. It might mean the death of bipartisanship, but, given the limits of his appeal, there might be so few Republicans it wouldn’t matter.
Anybody who reads these pages knows that Obama is taking a lot of flak from people on the left who see the whole bipartisanship schtick as a bad idea, people like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. They point to lockstep Republican opposition to a stimulus bill that the Republicans considered too big but was probably too small all along.
The truth, though, is that this was the wrong issue on which to expect bipartisanship. Obama decided at some point between the election and the inauguration that he needed to be bold. His talks with economists (left and right, he says) convinced him that the package had to be about $800 billion to make a real difference.
That was the end of prospects for much Republican support. The bill wraps together everything that Republicans complain about in public spending. Sure, they have risen above their anti-spending rhetoric in the past, but typically in supporting Republican presidents, not Democrats.
A vote for this bill threatened great troubles for Republicans with their famously conservative, famously partisan base.
It’s a shame this issue had to come first on Obama’s watch. It brought the likes of Limbaugh to the fore. It put people on guard. It seemed to confirm the caricature of Obama that the conservatives promoted during the campaign.
But there’ll be plenty of other issues on which the differences between the parties are at least a little blurrier.
If McConnell and Boehner have not proceeded as if their job is to “scare” Obama, that’s a good thing. The question now is how scared are they.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
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