Education and Health Issues

Its 5am in a quiet South Anchorage neighborhood and Gary Zimmerman waits a short distance from a suspected meth house for Anchorage Police Officers to arrive. For the third time in less than a week, he is recovering a company vehicle that was stolen and sold for meth. Items recovered inside the vehicles included loaded weapons, drugs and even a family photo album.

Were not in Kansas anymore Toto.

The history of methamphetamine is long and winding. During World War II, it was used to keep soldiers alert. In the 1950’s it was taken by a variety of users from truck drivers to college students who thrived off the boost they received from the drug. By the 1960’s as the federal government began placing tighter restrictions on the availability of the drug, the production and distribution went underground.

The year was 1974, nine years before the first dividend fund checks found their way into Alaskan mailboxes.

I can still remember watching from my classroom window, the Anchorage School Districts old green pickup with the crudely manufactured hot mop circling the ice rink at Lake Otis Elementary School. And at 3:30, most school day afternoons, you could find me sitting on the school bench with several buddies, lacing up our skates to play hockey.

Closer to Nikita Khrushchev’s brutal honesty than to Rudy Giuliani’s brilliant pragmatism rests Gov. Murkowski’s latest broken campaign promise. Kruschev believed politicians were the same all over, “they’ll promise you a bridge even where there is no river”. Giuliani believed that ideology was incapable of solving public policy challenges.