January 07, 2014
Tuesday PM

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but it seems there is a continuous spell of hard drug dealers getting caught in Ketchikan. Nearly every time I open the police reports on Sitnews there are multiple reports of people being caught with mass amounts of heroin, meth, or some other type of hard drug. The positive to this is that the police are doing a great job in taking down these dealers, but the bad is obviously that they are here. It seems like whenever one gets taken down someone else starts shipping drugs onto our island.        

Almost every time there is a bust it seems the people involved don’t even live here. This is extremely irritating to me because I believe this is one of the best places to live in the world and I plan to someday raise my family here just like my parents and grandparents did. These out of state dealers are like leaches to our community; they suck out our money and literally ruin OUR children’s lives, all so they can make money. They don’t give a rat’s behind about ruining our people’s lives as long as they don’t get caught.

The only way we can help stop this problem is if we as a community come together and refuse to allow it to continue. If the people in our town decide we’re not going to allow it these people will not be able to sell in Ketchikan anymore. The police have been doing a tremendous job catching these people and I would like to publicly thank Sargent Bernstein who is in charge of the drug enforcement for the work he does, he has put a huge dent in the drug activity in Ketchikan over the past few years. But the police cannot stop this problem on their own, the entire community is going to have to come together and refuse to put up with it. Come on people we live on an island, everything comes in on boat or plane we can put a stop to it and send a message to these scum bags.

I’ve seen so many young people get sucked in by drugs in this town, it’s sickening. We need to teach our children the dangers of hard core drugs and worn them of the dealers at a young age. This should be taught at home and in the classroom. If kids in this town are educated of this problem and taught at a young age that these people are not cool and not to tolerate them we can turn this problem around for future generations. It takes the community and my personal opinion is that this is the best community around, we can come together and stop this.

We do not have to allow people to come into our home and sell drugs, its poison to us and most importantly our youth. I have pride in this community and I will stand up for it. If these big dealers find out that they cannot safely sell here anymore they will leave. If everyone gets caught and we don’t allow them here they will have to go elsewhere. I have never thought “tattling” or “narking” was acceptable but this is whole different beast. Anything to take it down is absolutely necessary. Once again I would like to publicly thank Sargent Andy Bernstein for the great work he does.

Come on Ketchikan, we can change our future.

Riley Gass
Ketchikan, Alaska

Received January 07, 2014 - Published January 07, 2014

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