New playground for Rancho Mission Park needs input

At the January meeting of the Allied Gardens Recreation Council (AGRC), Amy Hoffman with KTU&A, the city’s consultant for developing the design the new playground at Rancho Mission Park, gave a presentation on two concepts for the playground. You can view the two concepts on the Navajo Community Planners (NCPI) website at navajoplanners.org.

City staff and the consultant are interested in our feedback so they can return to the March 1 meeting of the AGRC with a final proposal to be voted on by the council. Following the presentation, and working with city staff and Hoffman, we have an updated survey for the playground on the NCPI website.

If you have children and/or use the park, please take the time to complete the short survey so the final design represents what the people who use the park and the playground really want. Please complete the survey by Feb. 28. Your survey counts.

–Jay Wilson, Del Cerro

A letter from George Washington

Your article entitled “Dispensaries in Limbo” [Volume 21, Issue 12 or bit.ly/1OhDxZd] regarding “medical marijuana” has me bothered as an owner of 40 acres of hemp plants. The opposition of numerous persons of growing a plant which Mr. Jefferson has described as “adding a useful plant (hemp) to our culture” has many uses including fiber, paper, medicine and recreational uses. Many of the authors of our recently adopted Constitution smoked its bud, called “marijuana” by the Spanish who smoked it for pleasure. As did many of our delegates while creating the Constitution in Philadelphia.

I recently met a seer who had done some predictions on laws relating to drugs. He had read a professor’s paper entitled “A History of the Criminalization of Cannabis” which described lies by a bureaucrat with a title of ‘Narcotics Commissioner’ about this useful plant, claiming it was “smoked by Hispanics, Filipinos, Negroes and entertainers (such as Billie Holiday); was the most violence-causing in the history of mankind; and when white women smoke it, they want to have sexual relations with Negroes.” All nonsense. House Ways and Means passed the Marijuana Bill over the opposition of the American Medical Association, forbidding a useful medicine without a huge tax. This is the plant that my Virginia colony required all farmers to grow in the early 1700s!

If Congress, during my tenure in office as president, sends me such a bill, I will veto it, announcing, “Make use of the hemp plant, grow it everywhere!” Such a stupid law should not be passed!

–George Washington, Constitutional Convention

[Editor’s note: Actual author: Robert W. Holdenvenzon, retired history professor, Cuyamaca College 1978–1998; Gross mont College 1961–1978]

–Robert Holdenvenzon, San Diego

US dietary guide ignores meat studies

The “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” released [Jan. 6] by U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services mark the ninth time in a row that the meat industry has successfully suppressed scientific findings recommending reduced meat consumption. The reduction was recommended by the government-appointed Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in a 571-page report based on review of thousands of studies. Reduced meat consumption was first recommended in 1977 by the U.S.
Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in “Dietary Goals for the United States”, a precursor to the Dietary Guidelines. The meat industry forced the Committee to destroy all copies of the report and to
remove the offending recommendation from a new edition.  That wanton government sell-out to the meat industry has replayed itself with every new edition of the Dietary Guidelines since then. “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” shape school lunches and other government food support programs and underlie public health campaigns to lower rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Fortunately, American consumers are not easily duped. Sales of plant-based meats, cheeses, milks, and ice creams have skyrocketed, and every grocery store provides seemingly countless choices of fruits and vegetables.

–Mark Smith, San Diego