House of Corrections

September 2005

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In fact, Grusendorf was key to making more money available than I anticipated. And by your standard, I suppose, we should all support insurance legislation supported by the insurance industry and energy legislation driven by Big Oil. Here I thought legislators were supposed to represent the people. In other public policy arenas, you champion the needs of the consumers. In education, it seems, you are more interested in the needs of the suppliers.

Grusendorf’s push for efficiency, transparency, and accountability is exactly what public education needs. And his insistence on empowering voters is exactly what all good democrats should want. You apparently just don’t understand that transforming power of end-of-course examinations for high school students, November elections for school boards, state provision of online best practices for school districts, extensive use of educational technology for curriculum delivery and student assessment, and many of the other reform measures Grusendorf carried.

I have watched Grusendorf’s leadership in the Texas House since my first election to the Houston ISD Board of Education, in 1989, and have seen him, with an unwavering commitment to excellence in public education and growing mastery of the complexity of the system, become the most knowledgeable education policymaker in the state. What has already been achieved in Texas owes as much to Grusendorf as almost anyone else. In my view, the Seventy-ninth Legislature was for him a personal triumph: the coming together of his passion for excellence, his knowledge of public education, and his power as chairman of the House Public Education Committee just when Texas needed real reform leadership from the Legislature.

Notwithstanding the failure of the House and Senate to agree, he was most certainly the right man at the right time, and I don’t believe his time is over. The Legislature may yet create a state policy framework that will make Texas public schools the best in the nation. If it does, it will be to a significant degree because of Kent Grusendorf.
Donald R. McAdams
Bellaire

I have been a subscriber to texas monthly for more than twenty years. It was once a magazine that I read from cover to cover because it contained articles of interest about our great state and information about events throughout the state.

Within the past two years, however, your editorial style of writing, under the “flag” of interest articles, has been reflecting a liberal political philosophy, constantly attacking Republican officeholders. This trend has continued to become more pronounced throughout your magazine. To those of us who hold a more conservative political philosophy, this is not appreciated and has become insulting.

It was reported in the Waco Tribune-Herald that Texas Monthly has dubbed our freshman Republican House member Charles “Doc” Anderson as “furniture,” indicating that he is ineffective at his job. You need to understand that Representative Anderson was quite effective and represented his constituents well. As an “unknown freshman representative,” he introduced eleven pieces of legislation, of which six passed. Not bad for an unknown freshman. He quietly worked to develop contacts and make alliances with members of both parties to assure his effectiveness in the future. Both the governor and the Speaker were very complimentary of his role in Austin. The Texas Monthly designation of “furniture” simply tells me that he does not meet your left-wing, liberal criteria.
John Hatchel
Woodway

Pot Roast

Gary Cartwright sounds like a snake-oil salesman when he touts pot as medicine [“Weed All About It,” July 2005]. The marijuana lobby, who funded these initiatives in Texas, stated that it would use “medical marijuana” as a “red herring” to get marijuana legalized for recreational use. Marijuana in its smoked or crude form is not a safe or effective treatment for any condition. Public policy related to drugs should be based on science, not on misinformation provided by marijuana lobbyists. Texas lawmakers were wise to reject this pro-pot propaganda.
Stephanie Haynes
Save Our Society From Drugs
Alpine

The Drug Enforcement Administration sees the tragic reality of drug use every day, and it is a reality that leaves no doubt that drugs are illegal—and must remain so— because they are dangerous, leaving only addiction and ruined lives in their wake. This year’s drug control budget is $12 billion, and we are balancing prevention, treatment, and targeted enforcement against traffickers, and the return on our investment is significant. We’ve seen an 18 percent drop in teens’ use of marijuana, because, unlike Mr. Cartwright, teens are learning the consequences of this drug. Marijuana has been shown to cause cognitive impairment, including distorted perception and memory loss. What’s more, the potency of marijuana has increased since the seventies. It is a far more powerful drug now than the one that seems to be stoking Mr. Cartwright’s nostalgia, and it is claiming more victims, with more teens in treatment each year for marijuana dependence than for alcohol and all other illegal drugs combined. In addition to its harm, marijuana has no proven medicinal benefits—a conclusion reached not by Washington “politicians” but by the major voices in the medical community. The American Medical Association, the American Glaucoma Society, the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and the American Cancer Society have all rejected marijuana as medicine.

The fight against drugs and the ignorance that fuels drug abuse continues. America is winning, because we have too much sense, and too much at stake, to lose.
James Craig, Special Agent-in-Charge,
Houston Field Division
Gary Olenkiewicz, Special Agent-in-Charge,
Dallas Field Division
Alfredo Ortega, Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge,
El Paso Field Division
Drug Enforcement Administration

Buyer Remorse

The recent story “Home Buyer Beware” [August 2005] might have left a mistaken impression that Dick Weekley, and possibly Texans for Lawsuit Reform, was involved in the creation of the Residential Construction Commission. In fact, Mr. Weekley and TLR were working exclusively at the time toward the enactment of extremely complex and comprehensive civil justice reform legislation under House Bill 4.

Further, since Dick Weekley and his family are in the homebuilding business, Mr. Weekley deliberately decided that he should not engage in legislative advocacy for the residential construction legislation because doing so might be misconstrued by some and misrepresented by others, to the potential harm of the civil justice reform movement. Therefore, any suggestion that Dick Weekley was engaged in the legislative efforts to address lawsuit abuses in the homebuilding industry is simply off the mark.
Ken Hoagland
Communications director
Texans for Lawsuit Reform
Houston

Editor’s Note: Mr. Hoagland is correct in saying that Dick Weekley limited his advocacy role to comprehensive civil justice reform and was not engaged in the effort to create the Texas Residential Construction Commission. The reference to Mr. Weekley in the article was intended solely to convey that his, and TLR’s, support for tort reform helped create “an anti-lawsuit fervor,” one of the collateral consequences of which was to make the climate more suitable for the TRCC legislation to achieve passage.

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