Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to the letter written by Dr. Maureen D.
Miner. She may be a licensed physician for pain management but has
she studied marijuana?
Marijuana dispensary much needed and revenue-generating for the city
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to the letter written by Dr. Maureen D. Miner. She may be a licensed physician for pain management but has she studied marijuana?
I do not feel that she has done enough research in this matter. I wonder if her patients are being completely honest with her.
In the past 20 years, there has been so much development and understanding of the wonderful benefits that it provides. I know many patients who rely on the pain relief it provides.
There is proven evidence that it works! I and so many others would not use it if it didn’t.
It seems that she is more concerned about losing her practice than patient comfort.
I have never heard of some one losing their business because a dispensary opened up. A doctor that feels it’s ok to prescribe narcotics such as morphine, vicodin, and percoset, etc. which store in the liver and could cause liver failure and many other issues, but that’s ok in her book?
Prescription drugs are abused everyday.
I am a patient and have been using medical marijuana for years now and I it gives me relief from my chronic pain. It’s time for people to grow up on this issue – it feels like we’re still in the ’60s.
As a patient I want to be able to get my medicine legally. If it was not for the dispensary I would have to get it off the streets which is not hard to do. Do people realize you can get almost any drug you want off the streets in Gilroy, yes Gilroy! A dispensary would help cut down on the illegal sales on marijuana and would bring revenue to the city.
Greg Wendlandt, Gilroy
Bullet train will gobble up tax dollars at an unprecedented pace
Dear Editor,
The proposal to build the Bullet Train in California is proof that socialists have taken over our government. Based on past cost overruns, the price tag on this extreme boondoggle is about $75-$80 billion. Paid back interest on these bonds will also burden our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will billions more. Annual operating losses will exceed those of all lite rails combined. Fares won’t cover 1 percent of operating expenses, estimated at $1 billion per year. Bond debt will bury us.
Technology exists to build it, but how do we pay the construction costs, and operating costs?
It’s technologically incompatible with existing railroads, so it will need BART-like right-of-way.
Eminent domain power, included in the legislation creating it, ensures that it will plow through Gilroy and Morgan Hill and any other place, regardless of opposition. But it cannot cross the UPRR’s tracks because the Class I railroads’ eminent domain trumps bullet train’s eminent domain power, according to UP’s top commerce counsel on the West Coast. Tourists will ride it, but enjoy a 99 percent taxpayer subsidy for rides that will cost more than those on the Concorde Supersonic Jets. Local small business owners will pick-up the tab, maybe getting 10 percent back from tourist dollars if we’re lucky.
In 1970 Congressmen stood up in Congress and proclaimed that Amtrak would be “self-sufficient in three years.” Yeah. By Sept. 11 2001, taxpayers had thrown about $30 billion in subsidies down that black hole, but did we have adequate airport security?
In 1863 General Granville Dodge, who was later UPRR’s top civil engineer, and who discovered the Sherman Pass over the Continental Divide, was summoned to the White House. He later said that he told the president that the government should own and operate the transcontinental railroad.
Lincoln, who as a young member of the Illinois Legislature had seen government owned railroads in Eastern and Midwestern States go bust and shutdown operations in the 1830’s and 1840’s, said no. He said that private enterprise must do it, although the government would assist with development incentives (my words, not his). They did it. And what did taxpayers receive in the deal? They got about $460 million (measured in 1940 dollars) more than the value of the land granted to the railroad corporations because of Section 22 in the original Interstate Commerce Act (lower freight rates for government shipments).
A hundred years ago the Progressive Movement, led by William Jennings Bryan, sought nationalization of the railroads and other industries, but their passion was rejected by voters.
When the railroads were nationalized in 1917 during the Administration of Woodrow Wilson, government genius so botched-up shipping that rail traffic came to a standstill. That experiment failed, just as Lincoln predicted it would. In the Transportation Act of 1920 the railroads were de-nationalized, and came to be the envy of the world’s nations today; the backbone of our nation’s commerce.
Like Amtrak’s promoters, their pie-in-the-sky predictions show that they did not listen, nor learn from history. So, hold on for the ride, and warn your children and grandchildren, our leaders will strap taxpayers to the rocket to hell. And if they fund it with gas taxes, be prepared to pay $10 gallon.
Joe Thompson, Gilroy
