Love Letters, hate mail

Walk the Walk

(Re: "Parking Problems," Oct. 4-10, Vol. 22., No. 14)

Dear UTW:

I could see a couple of four or five story parking garages near the immediate area for people to park in and while I'm at it ... why not make "Cherry Street" and the Blue Dome a "no vehicle zone" like they do in the French Quarter? Not all the time but on specific days and during certain hours. Tulsans don't mind walking for a good time. Tell ya the truth, I'd rather take a cab and not worry about it.

--Bob Reavis

Cheap Packaging

Dear UTW:

He first demonstrated zero enthusiasm during his convention speech. It was billed for weeks as a big deal. It anti-climaxed after Clinton's speech and just about put everyone to sleep. Now, junior drops the ball at the first debate. Displaying major arrogance and obviously wanting to be elsewhere. Will the Biden - Ryan debate be the third nail in the democrats' coffin? Biden is expected to need an oral surgeon on hand to repeatedly remove both of his feet. How much non-enthusiasm can these guys tolerate. Since the polls are now dead even, was Obama's lead always that fragile? I thought he had a massive lead with women and independents couldn't poll fast enough to be counted with him. Could it be that it just cheap packaging all along?

Oh where has our Obama gone? Does he just need to throw in the towel?

--David Cheney

What's the Deal?

(Re: "Ease Their Pain," Oct. 4-10, Vol. 22, No. 14)

Dear UTW:

Cannabis was included in the United States Pharmacopoeia from the days of William Brooke O'Shaughnessy up until the days of Anslinger. What "science" led to its removal?

What problems were solved by its prohibition?

To keep Cannabis illegal while tobacco and alcohol are sold widely would be *MURDEROUSLY STUPID*.

To keep cannabis from the ill who would benefit from its innumerable medical benefits is an atrocity that shall NOT stand.

Two Google search strings ought to suffice:

anslinger+jazz+swing

"Storm Crow's List"

--Richard P. Steeb

Committing Psychiatrists

Dear UTW:

The Supreme Court has put psychiatrists and their patients, voluntary or not, into a very special legal category, where in practice and despite all medical evidence to the contrary, the psychiatrists' rights are supreme and the patients' rights are almost zero. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, as well as others, the Supreme Court of the United States handed psychiatrists the dispensation of virtual infallibility. Knowing from research that psychiatric predictions of future dangerousness were wrong two out of three times, it stated, "There is no merit to petitioner's argument that psychiatrists, individually and as a group, are incompetent to predict with an acceptable degree of reliability that a particular criminal will commit other crimes in the future, and so represent a danger to the community."

Why? Because "To accept such an argument would call into question predictions of future behavior that are constantly made in other contexts." Resulting in, "psychiatric testimony predicting dangerousness may be countered not only as erroneous in a particular case but also as generally so unreliable that it should be ignored." The High Court then held that there is no "convincing evidence that such testimony is almost entirely unreliable, and [convincing evidence] that the factfinder and the adversary system will not be competent to uncover, recognize, and take due account of its shortcomings."

... (U)nlike a scientific or engineering discipline, clinical psychiatry does not bother often, if at all, to justify its inflated opinion of itself with experimental proof that its methods work and its "insights" are true. And because this kind of High Court decision engendered the horrific consequences to patients abducted into psychiatric institutions under fraudulent and incompetent mental evaluations, often to scam insurance companies. As the Houston Chronicle reported in a long series of articles in the 1990s.

Even though the High Court held in its 1981 Estelle v. Smith case that a prisoner must be given a Miranda warning that anything he says in a psychiatric evaluation can be used against him in a court of law, it seems not to have granted any right to actually remain silent in such an evaluation. Indeed, in the Court's 1990 Washington v. Harper case, it held a prisoner had no right to counsel at a hearing to determine forced psychiatric medication because, "[I]t is less than crystal clear why lawyers must be available to identify possible errors in medical judgment."

The thing is, it ceased to be medical judgment when the High Court made it heresy to question its accuracy and value. Blind faith is the province of religion, the "evidence of things not seen". In contrast, medicine is demonstrated with double-blind experiments and scientific evaluation.

There's a very good article in the July 2009 issue of The Gauntlet, The Law Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, pp 57-71, by Dr. Shawn Roberson, the former director of Forensic Psychology at the Oklahoma Forensic Center, which I understand studies and evaluates criminal psychology. It's "Interrogations and False Confessions -- What Attorneys Should Know From the Social Sciences", and cites 22 research authorities in legal and psychological issues. It shows how law-abiding, innocent, and even mentally stable, ordinary people are trapped into incriminating themselves or giving false confessions. It happens a lot. Perhaps because honest people will readily confess to minor sins which police, prosecutors, judges and lawyers will inflate and conflate into major wrongdoing.

If this can happen to an ordinary, innocent person, what chance does a harmless person with a mental illness have, when faced with interrogation by a mental inquisitor whose opinion that person may not legally dispute? Especially under the duress of being abducted into a mental institution, without any right to counsel. We have seen this kind of thing before. Just ask any Black historian. Or Dred Scott.

--Don Baker