Cannabis News Media Awareness Project
  Drugs to Blame? Not on Your Life
Posted by CN Staff on May 15, 2002 at 12:16:35 PT
By Ellis Henican  
Source: Newsday 

justice This was almost exactly a year ago, back when a triple-murder was considered a jarring crime. "Carnegie Massacre" was still in the headlines. This was the pre-terror New York.

Jennifer Stahl and two of her friends had been shot to death in her locked apartment above the world's most famous delicatessen. The crime was an especially senseless one. There was no reason these people had to die. The victims' hands and feet were bound with duct tape. They were finished off with bullets to the head.

The police were trying desperately to find the killers. They were not having much luck.

Bernard Kerik, who was then the police commissioner and is not remembered as an especially impressive one, saw all this as a marvelous opportunity to pander on the always-ripe issue of drugs. Dead people? Pot in the apartment? How perfect! Jennifer Stahl, whose acting and music careers weren't exactly thriving, had started selling small bags of marijuana to some of her musician friends. The business had grown.

So Kerik cleared his throat, swallowed hard and did what police officials have been trying to do for decades.

He blamed the pot for everything.

"People who view marijuana peddling as victimless have not seen the carnage left in the apartment above the Carnegie Deli," the headline-grabbing PC harrumphed.

As if Jennifer Stahl had died from an overdose of Chronic.

As if her friends had choked on bong water gone bad.

As if the two murderous thugs who spent a total of six minutes inside the apartment that night weren't motivated by the same twisted, manic drives that have turned robberies into murders since the beginning of time: panic, greed, fear of identification and the utter absence of conscience.

It was as true of Jesse James as it was of Al Capone. The victims had something the robbers wanted - bank notes, diamonds, drugs, whatever. The killing was almost an afterthought.

Pot didn't kill Jennifer Stahl and her friends. Two crazed and greedy killers did.

The government's war on marijuana kills a whole lot more people than marijuana ever did. If you blame the pot for the bodies above the deli, you might as well blame the hamburgers for the Wendy's massacre.

Change the laws against marijuana. Sell the stuff to adults in pharmacies or in bars. The pot business will be just as boring as a flat keg of beer.

All of this became ever more plain yesterday at 100 Centre St., where Sean Salley and Andre Smith are on trial for three counts of second-degree murder and various lesser charges.

The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Steven Nuzzi, played a riveting 911 tape from the night of the murders.

On the tape, a frantic Anthony Veader, one of two others in the apartment who were shot but survived, says he's been shot in the head. He begs the dispatcher to send help.

"A bunch of us have been shot," he says.

His panic hung in the cavernous courtroom yesterday afternoon. It drove all the nonsense out of the air. In a moment like that, with life an open question, even the simplest facts get easily confused.

At first, Veader couldn't get the address straight.

Was the apartment on Broadway?

Was it Seventh Avenue?

The dispatcher kept asking him, "East Side or West Side?"

He said "Apartment 9," the dispatcher understood "ninth floor."

Finally, the police arrived. Thankfully, Veader survived. Now he will be one of the prosecution's key witnesses in the case.

Amid all the confusion on the tape, some clarity was momentarily achieved yesterday for those who knew Jennifer Stahl best.

"She was a kind, enthusiastic, extremely generous person, who was always meticulous about her business, except for letting Sean Salley inside that night," said Michelle Cramer, an office manager at a record company who was one of Jennifer's closest friends.

She was at court yesterday. She spoke outside the building. She wasn't falling for the blame-the-drugs talk.

"These weren't two people who wanted to get high," she said of the two men on trial. "These were two psychopaths who were out on the street, who did something totally unnecessary. Jennifer and the others were practically hog-tied. But they still had to shoot them. What sense did that make?"

Michelle had met Sean Salley one night at Jennifer's apartment, she said. "I didn't like his vibe. I said, 'Nice to meet you.' He said, 'Ugghhh.'"

Jennifer had been welcoming to him. She, like him, had worked around the music business. "He was supposedly a roadie for George Clinton," Michelle said. "So to Jen, he was part of the industry. She trusted him. He was like family."

And then he turned on her, she said.

"If Mr. Salley had needed something from Jen, he could have asked and she probably would have given it to him."

No one could explain how that figured into the war on drugs.

Newshawk: Nicholas Thimmesch II - http://www.norml.org/
Source: Newsday (NY)
Author: Ellis Henican
Published: May 15, 2002
Copyright: 2002 Newsday Inc.
Contact: letters@newsday.com
Website: http://www.newsday.com/

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http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9793.shtml


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Comment #2 posted by E_Johnson on May 15, 2002 at 13:40:55 PT
Thank you Jesus I mean Newsday
It's about time that the victims of this horrific crime were recognized as victims of a horrific crime.



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Comment #1 posted by Ethan Russo MD on May 15, 2002 at 12:59:03 PT:

Truth Triumphs over Propaganda
This story illustrates an important point. Crime occurs for reasons that would not be cured if cannabis had never existed.

The problem is that the administration apologists have had control of the discussion for 75 years. All we have to counter the propaganda is a dissemination of the truth about cannabis.

It took the liberation of the death camps to counter the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. What is required to counter the Ashcrofts, Hutchinsons, and Walters of our current regime? We must expose the fraud, deceipt, corruption and senselessness of the War on Drugs at every opportunity in order to send them to early retirement on government pensions.

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