SPRING UPDATE
By Kathy Crawford
Communications Chair
Desert Ridge Community Association
The War Against Drugs
Operation Hope continues to work toward educating the general public and parents with information and current news in the war against drugs. In our last meeting, we were presented with the latest issues of what the new bath salts are made of and how quickly these drugs get “recompounded” so that they are not subject to the current laws. What this means to us is that our police cannot arrest someone for using a drug that is not listed as against the law. In other words, our police department has been held hostage to some of the laws we have – not because of their intention but because of wording. But now we are fortunate enough to have Representative Heather Carter to help. Representative Heather Carter is serving in the Centennial Legislature as your representative from North Phoenix, Cave Creek, Carefree and Scottsdale. Currently, Representative Carter is the Vice-Chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, and a member of the Education and Environment Committees. She focuses on legislative issues related to economic recovery for Arizona, including taxpayer protection issues, health care concerns and educational reform. She attended our last meeting and has volunteered to look into the potential of changing the wording on some of these laws to say “mimics the affect of” and not just leaving the wording to that single drug. This would go a long way toward getting some of these drugs into the category of illegal and therefore into the hands of our police.
We also were presented with the Anthem approach to handling some of the issues our parents face. We will moniter the Anthem approach and will provide updates in future issues or Board Meetings.
Working Towards A Bright Future
In addition, the Deer Valley and Paradise Valley Unified School districts are also on board with their support and concern. They recognize that getting the word to the parents of their students is the most important part of this project. With parental recognition and backing, our students will be helped on all sides to have a bright future without drugs.
We want to again thank our police department for sponsoring this Operation and for walking through this problem with our community. In particular, our thanks goes to Commander Klima, Lt. De Benedetto and Sgt. Jamie Rothchild for their time and care.
