VIEWPOINT BY RICH TOSCHES : Legalize Street Drugs? Pack Up That Idea and Ship It to the Moon

The special election in the San Fernando Valley this week for a state Senate seat consumed a river of money and put a lot of people to big trouble and sleepless nights just to eliminate Drew Angel and forward the political career of Gary Kast.

Many of you may have lost track of Angel and Kast in all the vicious cut-and-thrust of the front-runners, but they too were in the race for the seat vacated by Alan Robbins--who had the darned unfortunate habit of embezzling and conducting a racketeering business while in office.

Angel wanted to solve California’s economic woes by colonizing the moon. He received 578 votes, meaning 1.2% of the electorate thought he was on to something. Honest.

He was eliminated as the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer in the coming June runoff, but of these two fringe candidates, Angel had the least preposterous platform.

All he wanted was to send millions of people to the moon and then claim it as America’s 51st state. A state to be named, perhaps, Moon . Asked if he wanted to be among the first to make the trip, he said he certainly would like to work on the moon but did not want to live there, raising the specter of the longest damn commute you could imagine.

Then again, people live in Palmdale and Lancaster, don’t they?

Anyway, while Angel’s proposal was a bit odd, the one put forth by Kast made it look positively Republican.

Background: Gary P. Kast. Age 39. Panorama City. An attorney, no less. Certainly one of the most respected and admired professions in the world. (Oops. Sorry. I was thinking about firefighters.)

Anyway, Kast waged a cost-containment campaign, containing his costs, he said, to about $10 in an effort to get his message out. This compares to almost $300,000 raised by front-runner David Roberti to get across his message of . . . of . . . well, whatever his message was.

Kast advocated a light rail or monorail system for the Valley, opposed Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed welfare cuts and wanted to save the forests.

Oh, one more thing.

Kast wanted to legalize heroin and cocaine in California. And pot and Quaaludes and barbiturates of all forms and types. Crack? Of course. PCP, angel dust? You betcha. Sell all of it at pharmacies, over the counter. I’ll have one of those pocket combs, please, and this birthday card, and oh yeah, two syringes of heroin, please.

With this platform, Kast accumulated 586 votes, mostly--OK, I’m just guessing here--from people who had been wide awake for days, possibly weeks, before voting. Even at that, it was eight votes more than the lunar suburb caucus drew, and enough to carry Kast into the runoff June 2 as the top-ranking Peace and Freedom candidate, in a field of one.

Kast was serious. A graduate of UCLA and the Southwestern University School of Law, he has a 5-year-old daughter, wears suits and ties and has a thriving law practice. Nothing hugely out of the ordinary here. Never shelled by his own troops in Vietnam or anything like that. A bright and articulate man.

He just wanted to legalize all drugs, that’s all.

Here is his argument: The biggest problem in California today is crime, much of it drug-related. If we make the sale, purchase and use of all drugs not a crime--stay with me here--then the crime rate will go down.

For example: You get popped with two kilos of pot today. This is a crime. But under Kast’s proposal, police would see you walking the streets with two kilos of pot sticking out from under your hat, a smoldering joint dangling from your lips, a syringe poking out of each arm as you pull your daughter’s little red wagon loaded with Quaaludes. The police tell you to have a nice day and drive on by.

“Some people will think it’s crazy, but it really isn’t,” Kast said.

Kast said crime is rampant because drugs are so expensive. They are so expensive because they are illegal. And because they are so expensive, people who use drugs must on occasion acquire funds from atypical sources. Like they steal your car. Or they shoot you in front of a bank’s automated teller machine and--since you’re already dead and won’t be needing it--take the cash strewn about the ground.

Legalizing drugs would solve this problem, according to the would-be Sen. Kast.

“Look,” Kast said, “what’s the outcry? Over what? The effects of heroin are to make you fall asleep in your chair. That’s it. It’s a powerful depressant. So who is that hurting?

“If it were legal, for $2 I can buy enough heroin to keep you and I, together, high for the entire weekend. Under the present system, that same amount of heroin costs $200. So those who use it have to steal and rob and snatch purses to get enough money. My proposal would eliminate all that.”

For starters, let me say that I entertain no notions of joining Kast in a weekend heroin binge. For one thing, I mow the lawn on Saturdays. I’m not sure, but that could be a disaster on heroin. At the very least, the mower lines won’t be very straight. At the worst, I could doze off with my face under the whirring blades, and I hate that kind of thing.

Kast placed some restrictions on his proposal. You’d have to be 21 to buy drugs, for example. I don’t think there are any other restrictions.

“Heroin is no worse than alcohol,” Kast said. “And alcohol is legal.”

So it is. But personally, if I have to choose between taking a ride home from a guy who has just knocked down three beers or a guy who’s asking me to hold his car keys until he can pop the syringe out from between his toes, I’m sliding into the Buick with Mr. Beer Breath.