CUL-DE-SAC

Californians are trendy and so are their politics. And the political obsession of 2010 is a spindly weed that makes you high when you smoke it. Potheads have managed to get a proposition on the ballot that would legalize all uses of marijuana. So far, marijuana has been legal for medicinal uses only. But the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 would allow sale and use for any reason you desire.

Supporters of legalizing marijuana say their proposition would solve a host of social and economic problems.

Supposedly, it would remedy our state budget disaster by generating a huge amount of sales tax revenue. It would free up cops and DA’s to arrest and jail dangerous criminals because they wouldn’t waste their time prosecuting people who sell pot. So… legalizing marijuana would make us richer and safer, not to mention happy and blissful.

The march toward legalizing marijuana in California began 14 years ago with the passage of prop 215, which allowed for medical use. Unfortunately prop 215 has been nothing but trouble. It put state law in direct conflict with federal law, which does not allow any sale or use of marijuana. The proposition was also badly written. It’s short and vague, and it’s required years of legislative work to try to clarify it for practical use.

Look… if cannabis has medicinal value, and some studies show that it has, we already have an established and tested institution for selling prescription medicine. It’s called a pharmacy.  In the ideal world we’d throw out prop 215, make sure marijuana clears all of the legal hurdles to get approved for public use, let doctors prescribe it to worthy patients and let patients pick it up at their local drug store.

If, on the other hand, California voters decide to legalize marijuana for medical and recreational use by passing the “cannabis act” in November, it’s a whole new ballgame and a whole new fight between the state and the feds.

Last year, Obama’s justice department basically said they’d look the other way if marijuana use was allowed under state laws, and they would not enforce federal prohibitions. But that policy was made with the understanding that any legal marijuana use was medicinal. I doubt the feds will be willing to ignore their drug laws if people start selling and smoking pot just to get stoned.

Besides, if California unilaterally decides to legalize marijuana use, but cultivation and sale remain illegal under federal law and the laws of every other state, won’t that simply make California a huge new market for the existing drug cartels?

It’s possible that smoking pot will be no different from taking a shot of whiskey a hundred years from now. There may be no good reason to use drugs, but humans always have and they always will because drugs are fun. Some people say getting drunk or high is fundamentally no different from kids, on a playground, spinning around until they get dizzy. Changing consciousness is a fundamental human desire, and drugs are a risky but convenient way to do that.

Let’s just think twice and three times before we make a new drug an accepted part of our culture. It’s possible we’ve got enough already.

I thought the Toyota Prius was a safe, nerdy car driven by responsible citizens who want to end global warming. But a 24-mile freeway ride by a San Diegan named James Sikes has turned the Prius into a steel death trap ruled by mechanical phantoms.

In case you hadn’t heard, Sikes claims his 2008 Prius took off on its own one day, accelerating out of control as Sikes desperately jammed on the brakes. He says brakes didn’t work and he finally stopped after a state cop pulled alongside him, while traveling over 90 mph, and told Sikes to depress the brake and parking brake simultaneously. Sikes later said he was afraid to put the car into neutral or turn off the engine, despite being told repeatedly to do it by the cop and a 911 dispatcher.

Soon after the event, Toyota staged a theatrical press conference in a football stadium parking lot where they said Sikes’s story appeared to be hogwash. They tested the car and the brakes were fine. Shifting into neutral worked fine. Depressing the brake and accelerator together engaged an override system that shut off the engine, and there was nothing wrong with the car’s electronics or computer software.

You’d expect Toyota to say all that. But the National Highway Safety Administration has basically said the same thing. I know a little bit about this story after covering it for public radio. Besides, I drive a Prius too.

Sikes’s story became international in scope because of the Toyota floor-mat scandal and millions of recalls of Toyota vehicles. But the inability of Toyota or the feds to reproduce his harrowing expedition has led to many theories about what really happened. Some people think Sikes, a bankrupt realtor, was faking it in order to sue Toyota. Some people think he was just stupid. Some believe Toyota is denying the facts as they play defense in the face of multiple lawsuits.

What people think happened that day, on Interstate 8, says a lot more about them than it says about James Sikes and what did or did not happen to him.

It’s very hard to listen to the 911 tape of Sikes (I have heard it) and not believe he was really scared. If he faked it, he’s an outstanding actor. Yet the fear of Toyota in the general public seems entirely out of touch with reality. The fatal crash last August of a Lexus in San Diego, due to an accelerator stuck on a floor mat, put Toyota under a microscope.

That kind of examination reveals lots of problems, even ones that don’t exist. Suddenly, nearly every report of unexplained acceleration in a car involved a Toyota. That’s wasn’t the case before the Lexus crash.

I don’t know what was going on with James Sikes’s car and we may never know. Lately, I have practiced putting my Prius into neutral. The shifter acts kind of funny and yes, it does take a little bit of practice. There is a great irony that a Prius was the car accused of dangerous acceleration because it is such a nanny car. When you fail to buckle your seat belt the dashboard beeps at you then starts beeping double-time if you ignore it.

Maybe it’s a good thing that we have too many lawyers, ready to sue if a car maker messes up. But if James Sikes sues, it will definitely be time to wonder whether he’s a better actor than I imagined.

PS   Listen to an interview of me on this subject that aired on KPBS, March 17th.

Real estate costs are the sum of location-location. And when the location has uncommonly mild weather, and is wedged snugly between coastal mountains and the Pacific Ocean, those costs are terrifically high.

But the San Diego real estate market means more than that to the people who live here. It has a powerful, magical aura. The ups and downs of home prices are like a force of nature that can win wars or doom civilizations. Five years ago, real estate prices were at their zenith, buoyed by a giddy faith that they could only go up. It seemed like half the people I knew sold real estate at least part-time.

When that bubble popped, we all became agnostics. And cold-hearted realism makes me think it’s a good time to buy. I’m looking for a bigger house.

This desire runs contrary to my puritanical nature, which says 11 hundred square feet is more than enough in which to raise and house a family of four. But temptation drives me to take my hard-earned home equity (driven upwards during a long ride on the inflation train) and plow it into something with one more bedroom and one more bath.

I have to say that upsizing is something I’ve resisted for at least a dozen years. I bought a Normal Heights bungalow in 1998. Barely two years passed before my real estate agent began to wonder whether my family was “bursting out” of our its little shack. I’m not sure we even had any kids yet, which meant we’d only be bursting out because we’d bought too much crap and needed a bigger house to store it all in.

Once you decide you need a bigger house, the people who want to help you buy it and finance it are happy to reassure you that you’ve made the right decision. One mortgage finance guy told us that spending more money on a house was a great idea because our interest deduction would increase by leaps and bounds… by five thousand dollars a year in one home-buying scenario.

His logic underlay a thing I call the super-sizing home-buying mentality. Buy the bigger meal at McDonald’s and you get more food for the money. Never mind that you didn’t want the extra food in the first place and you really are paying more than you need to. The same thinking applies to buying a bigger house: If you don’t buy more house than you need you’re just giving Barack Obama five thousand bucks a year he doesn’t deserve.

House hunting is a voyeuristic adventure that lets you see your home city from the inside out. This is true even though realtors do all they can to make the house you’re looking at as impersonal as possible. Photos of family members, little kids’ artwork… anything that tells you that this is someone else’s place is banished from a house, as it’s being shown, so that possible buyers can better imagine themselves living in it.

The realtor’s charade includes staging the house by setting the dinner table and even renting fancy furnishings that were never were used by the current owners. Some homes are sold by investors who’ve refurbished them and want to turn a quick profit, and once you’ve seen a few of them they all look about the same. The tell-tale sign is granite: Granite counter-tops in the kitchen, granite-lined showers in the bathroom,  granite, granite, granite.

I grew up in a house that was built before WWII and that’s what I’m looking for today. I say this even after seeing many other families, of the educated classes, migrate to San Diego’s new northern suburbs in search of more space and better public schools. But I like the look of old neighborhoods. I like plaster walls and wood floors. I’ve got no quarrel with people who prefer the suburban aesthetic. Old homes are just more my thing.

Today, the San Diego home market is sluggish after going through nearly four years of devaluation. Lots of home owners owe more than their houses are worth. Foreclosures and short sales are everywhere. Lenders have started asking hard questions and actually saying “no” when they don’t think you can make payments on your dream house.

If I end up staying where I am, I’ll still feel lucky to live in the nice weather by the sea. I’ll also be able to maintain a smug attitude, knowing that I’m living in a house that has plenty of room for people who value the right things. Let those new-rich slobs keep their McMansions! I’m doing just fine. Unless something better comes along.

I could see the TV-news vans and their satellite dishes as I drove toward the parking lot, in north San Diego, where the press conference was scheduled. A tight row of cameras were aimed at a podium that held at least twenty microphones. Soon, the county sheriff stood at the podium and told us that a body had been found in a shallow grave, and investigators believed it was the body of Chelsea King.

Chelsea King was a pretty 17-year-old who disappeared four days before. A 30-year-old registered sex offender was arrested. Police say semen found on King clothing matched the offender’s DNA. Nobody’s been convicted in this case. But the story reminds us that a family’s worst nightmares can happen. Innocent girls are raped and murdered by monstrous human beings.

Stories like this touch us so deeply and make us so angry that it’s hard to remember that they are uncommon. Media hype of violent crimes, committed by strangers, is what causes us to shelter our children like we never have before. (I wrote about this in a previous blog post, Remembering the days when kids ran wild)

The media indulge our fears and hatreds with excessive coverage of rare and horrible crimes. As a journalist, I think these stories distort our view of the world. But as a parent, I understand why they get so much attention. I’ve sometimes thought about what I’d want done to a man who committed such a crime on a member of my family. I think you can imagine. 

I oppose the death penalty, but not for morale reasons. I don’t think it’s wrong for the state to kill people who commit our most horrible crimes. Call it justice or call it vengeance. It’s the job of our courts to deliver both, and early death is an appropriate end for people who’s only motivation for terrible, calculated violence is selfish desire.

Unfortunately, our justice system is not perfect and killing people convicted of murder inevitably results in innocent people dying. California’s way of administering the death penalty also seems to involve letting people sit on death row for decades while they exercise their rights to appeal. That must be hellish for families of murder victims who endlessly wait for the state to deliver the justice they were promised. It seems we’d be better off just letting our worst offenders rot in prison and know that they’ll never leave.

I can’t imagine anything worse than the violent death of a child. If I were the parent I’m sure I’d believe in an afterlife. The belief that somewhere and somehow I’d see and hold my child again would be the only way I could continue. So I suggest we believe in that, and hope for that, for Chelsea King and her family.