Pubdate: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 Source: Record, The (Hackensack, NJ) Copyright: 2005 North Jersey Media Group Inc. Contact: http://www.bergen.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/44 Author: Flavia Alaya Note: Headline created by newshawk TELL ABOUT SUBURBAN DRUG TRADE TOO The first part of your series on the illegal drug trade in Paterson, "Drug crossroads" (Page A-1, July 17), appears not only to illustrate the "blame-the-victim" syndrome but to endorse it as well. Remember when sexy women were supposedly responsible for getting raped, and prostitutes for prostitution? Those were the olden days ... |or were they? The kid in Smoke Rise with the privileged life - does he really think the kids of Paterson, for whom, believe me, "struggle sucks," too - are to blame for his drug problem? Not his own high-living lifestyle? Not his easy access to the kind of money that can buy expensive hits day after day? Not his parents, who apparently couldn't care less about his driving around blitzed in the middle of the night? Whose own rampant consumerism and bored indifference to where their own money comes from are at the heart of their kid's malaise, and at the bottom of the urban-suburban divide? Not the cops in his Happy Valley little suburban town, whose crime workload, by their own admission, is too overwhelming to rescue some of America's future leading citizens from overdosing on "Diesel"? Or are they too busy protecting these criminal - yes, criminal - users from drug records, and leaving it to Paterson's overstretched police and overtaxed residents to pick up the tab on the social destruction they wreak in our communities? Why don't you get real, and show how the corrupt values of today's suburbs are destroying our inner cities? FLAVIA ALAYA Paterson - --- MAP posted-by: SHeath(DPFFlorida)