After a teenager in Covington, Wash,. turned his father in for growing marijuana, local TV news reporters and daily newspapers fell all over themselves calling him a hero. Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger, asks,"Was I the only pot-smoking parent who was horrified?" Savage savages the "sanctimonious piety" of TV news anchors who praised the stalwart young man. Savage gets both sides of the story. The busted dad has health problems, claims he was growing a small amount of cannabis for medicinal use, and the state legalized medical use of marijuana in 1998. Savage is the only journalist in the area who even bothered to ask. He blames the DARE program for scaring kids. "The DARE kids who turn their parents into the police--some have been as young as 10--expect their parents to get a lecture from a friendly DARE officer about the dangers of marijuana, just like they did at school." Problem is, what the parents get is arrested, which sometimes tears a family apart.
Mara Shalhoup in Creative Loafing Atlanta looks at how one of the country's most lauded housing agencies rebuilt the homes of the poor to better serve the middle class. She talks to former tenants of public housing who are now shut out of the "mixed" development. "It was all right for me to raise my kids over there in Carver Homes when it was a hellhole," one former resident says. "Now that they've remodeled and did everything, we ain't good enough to come back." That's OK to the Atlanta Housing Authority. "Anybody who finds it difficult to get in," AHA spokesman Rick White tells Shalhoup., "we probably don't want to have as a tenant anyway."
