Halting Drugs? It’s Elementary

President-elect Bush has been receiving a lot of advice lately, including a few words of wisdom from schoolchildren. “Please do something about the bad people who sell drugs to little children. Put them in jail,” a third-grader from Rosedale, N.Y., said in one of more than 60,000 letters written to Bush at the invitation of Scholastic News, a classroom news weekly. Three-quarters of the letters from the children mentioned drugs as a major problem, said Jeanne Krier, public relations director for Scholastic News. Four years ago, the magazine’s readers told President Reagan that nuclear war was their top worry. But some kindergartners in Chicago who also wrote Bush had more immediate concerns. “If bad kids beat up good kids, the President should take them to their moms,” a girl named Sarah wrote.

President Reagan will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former U.S. Ambassador Mike Mansfield and to Secretary of State George P. Shultz today, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said. Mansfield, recently retired as ambassador to Japan, and Shultz “are being honored for their many significant contributions in the fields of national interests, public services and world peace to the United States,” Fitzwater said. The medal is the highest civilian award of the U.S. government. Reagan also will award the Presidential Citizens Medal to three Republican lawmakers, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois and Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, for their “exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens,” Fitzwater said.

Homecoming was especially sweet for Mithileshwar Singh, a former hostage in Lebanon. “When I was in captivity, I thought all the time of coming home,” Singh, 61, said after his arrival in Grand Junction, Colo. Neighbors have spent hours cleaning and fixing up Singh’s house, with the help of donations from local realtors. Singh, a citizen of India who has been a resident alien in the United States for more than a decade, taught at a business college in Grand Junction before taking a job at the American University of Beirut. He was kidnaped Jan. 24, 1987, and released by the Islamic Jihad on Oct. 3. His return home was delayed because Singh required treatment in New York for diabetes and other health problems, said John Curtis, with whom Singh and his wife, Lala Mani, are staying until their house is ready.