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Trump found his mark

Just 49 days before election day, Donald Trump finally found someone willing to be his Nevada state chair. U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei took the job.

Trump said Amodei—who took a job as head of a mining industry lobby group while still a state senator—“has resisted the pull of special interests in Washington to fight for change and for the people of Nevada.”

poT Tale of The week

“One argument is that marijuana is just like alcohol, and that’s not the case,” prohibitionist Jason Guinasso told the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza. “The effects of marijuana are far more profound and addictive.”

Guinasso is certainly correct that marijuana is not just like alcohol, but not for the reasons he gives. Marijuana is far less addictive (“Pot tale of the week,” RN&R, Aug. 25) and dangerous. The crime costs associated with alcohol, financial and otherwise, are stupefying. In some counts, most crime is associated with drinking. The costs associated with marijuana are mostly caused by enforcing prohibition.

Alcohol is a common factor in homicide, suicide, domestic battery. None of these things are true of marijuana—none. Rather, according to President Nixon’s Marijuana Commission, “In fact, only a small proportion of the marihuana users among any group of criminals or delinquents known to the authorities and appearing in study samples had ever been arrested or convicted for such violent crimes as murder, forcible rape, aggravated assault or armed robbery. When these marihuana-using offenders were compared with offenders who did not use marihuana, the former were generally found to ‘have committed less aggressive behavior than the latter.”

As for addiction, marijuana was a godsend to many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as they dealt with the anxieties and conflicts of their roles there. As the officer corps became aware of use of the plant, a July 1970 crackdown was launched against marijuana, which succeeded in reducing supply. Because marijuana serves as an obstacle to harder drugs (“Pot tale of the week,” RN&R, July 21), the shortage caused soldiers to turn to harder drugs like alcohol and heroin. Clark University scientist Norman Zinberg later reported, “The Army itself is universally credited with causing the swing to heroin through its own blunder: the campaign against marijuana.” Not until 1971 did desperate officials drop the crackdown. Who knows what damage was done during those months? Soon many soldiers had shifted back to marijuana. Army Spec. 4 Peter Lemon, who was stoned during the action for which he received the Medal of Honor, said marijuana was useful in forward combat in keeping soldiers alert. But the point is, when soldiers returned to the U.S., it was common for them to simply drop smoking pot, in spite of dogmatic claims of marijuana addiction.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, there were indications that marijuana might overtake the alcohol habit in the United States. But there was no Ad Council or other public service campaign to support that shift to a less malignant drug. There were anti-marijuana campaigns, and eventually the trend declined. Consumer Reports noted, “A knowledgeable society, noting a few years ago that some of its members were switching to a less harmful intoxicant, marijuana, might have encouraged that trend. At the very least, society could have stressed the advantages of cutting down alcohol consumption if you smoke marijuana. But no such effort was made. It may yet not be too late to present that simple public-health message.”

—Dennis Myers

At Cathexes design firm in Reno, Gloria Steinem schmoozed with Nevada leaders.

PHOTO/DENNIS MYERS

In touch

Gloria Steinem speaks to Nevada groups

in the world of public figures, one kind stands apart from the run-of-themill celebrities or politicians. There was labor leader Cesar Chavez, for instance. There is consumer advocate Ralph Nader. They made history in a way others have not.

Last week women’s rights leader Gloria Steinem visited Reno to aid the Holland Project, an arts organization. She donated her time, which allowed Holland to keep the price of tickets to her speech at the University of Nevada, Reno, down to $15. Tickets were gone in 48 hours. A scheduled book signing had to be cancelled.

Other appearances were added to her schedule in Reno, including a stop for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the design firm Cathexes, a Truckee Meadows Community College appearance, and a Latina mixer.

Steinem first came to prominent attention in 1963 when she became a Playboy Club “bunny” and wrote a magazine article about the working conditions, attitudes and expectations of sex the young women—they were all young—faced on the job. In 1972, she was a founder of Ms. Magazine, which became a principal forum of the rapidly rising women’s movement.

She has been involved in numerous political campaigns as well as issue campaigns, such as opposition to genital mutilation of young girls. She received an Emmy for her work on a television special and numerous other journalism awards.

In recent years she has pursued a theme that all problems and movements are interconnected. “It is not possible to be anti-racist without also being a feminist,” she said at the Clinton event.

She said treatment of women virtually determines what a society is like, seeming to say that kind of violence makes possible tolerating other terrible crimes. “Half the human race cannot control the other half without a certain amount of violence,” she said. Control was often mentioned in men’s treatment of women.

Calling the Second Amendment “the fruit of the poison tree,” she said it was added to the U.S. Constitution to accommodate slave owners and the slave states, where militias were used to control African Americans.

At her appearances, she said, as a New Yorker, she felt obligated to apologize for Donald Trump, saying, “I don’t think Trump is a Republican, traditionally speaking. He’s Trump.” She claimed he was never a successful businessperson, and now his business life is more or less over: “He’s mistrusted by all the banks. He’s not building buildings anymore. He’s selling his name.”

With former lieutenant governor Sue Wagner—once a leading Nevada Republican—at her side, she said of the exodus of women from the GOP, “The Republican Party left women. Women did not leave the Republican Party.”

But she cautioned against a harsh reaction to such women, a point also made in her new book, My Life on the Road: “They felt abandoned by the Republican War Against Women, yet were turned off by accusatory Democratic women saying, ‘How can you be a Republican?’”

At the Holland event in a full concert hall—she called the Holland Project today’s campfire—Steinem went back repeatedly to her talk of interconnectedness.

“I think we need to see the connection is all. But what we have not done is make the connection to the rest of the economy. … Femaleheaded households are the most likely to be poor of all the households in this nation.”

“Families with children under age 18 that are headed by women are 20.3 percent of all families with children in Nevada,” according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

“When [an abused] woman has escaped control, or is about to escape control, that is the point at which she is most likely to be killed,” Steinem said, a situation Nevada has experienced repeatedly. The very day she visited Reno, the Violence Prevention Center reported that Nevada ranked

third in the nation in the rate of women murdered by men, with a rate of 1.98 per 100,000. Nevada has ranked in the first 10 states of this list for 10 of the past 11 years. (See interview, page 31.)

“A black woman took my job,” Steinem quoted the stereotypical male worker, adding, “Why is it his job? It’s a question of privilege.”

An audience member commented on the nomination of a woman as the Democratic presidential nominee. Steinem replied, “No, I feel it’s incredible, too, but if it were Sarah Palin, I would not be working so hard. … It’s content before form. It is both the form and the content.”

At another point when a question referred to some people as “millennials,” she said, “I don’t really believe in grouping people that way.”

Steinem recently hit the news with talk of the link between climate change and the birth rate, another instance of connecting societal problems. She said, “I am glad the pope is talking about global warming, but”—and here the audience started to chuckle, anticipating talk of birth control—“he is not making that linkage.” While a good deal of her commentary and answers to questions touched on controversy, her remarks also dealt with hope and even love, and sometimes offered quirky, original observations. “I just had to wait for some of my friends to be born.” “So progress lies in

“We’re not the direction we haven’t been.” about to turn “Here in the state where you still have back.” native nations, think about vertical.”

Gloria Steinem “[We need to] get along with and even love people we don’t agree with.” “We can’t only look at the person on top. We have to do it ourselves.” “We have to be careful. We have to take care of each other.” “We’re not about to turn back.” Ω

2016

Change

A customer stands before the box office reading start times for the movie theaters in downtown Sparks. The theaters are scheduled to close Sept. 29. Built by Syufy Enterprises in 1997-98 as a centerpiece of downtown revitalization, the theatre complex had more recently been operated by Cinemark, which is bowing out. The owner is seeking a new operator. Meanwhile, the street in front of the facility, C Street, is also closed, more or less permanently, with the construction of an apartment development. It is one of only three streets that allow traffic through the downtown area on east-west routes.