VENTURA : 7th-Graders Vote on Drug Legalization

The vote in Glenn Ward’s seventh-grade reading class at Anacapa Middle School on Monday was 11 to 5 not to legalize drugs.

As part of the BE COOL program, Ventura Police Officer Juan Reynoso had assigned students to debate the issue after researching arguments for each side. At the end of the presentations, the class took a vote.

BE COOL, which stands for Become Educated to Control Our Own Lives, is now in its second year in Ventura’s four middle schools and is the city’s follow-up to the DARE program. Reynoso said the 10-week program, which teaches kids how to avoid joining gangs and taking drugs, was devised at school officials’ request.

Student Curtis Cropper argued for legalizing drugs. He said, if drugs were refined and substances such as baby laxatives were not added to cocaine, the drugs would not be as bad for people and therefore would make fewer people “crazy.”

“It would kill fewer brain cells,” he said.

Student Bill Knox contended that allowing people to grow marijuana would create more jobs and help the economy. He also maintained that, because jails are overcrowded, legalizing drugs would make more room for murderers and thieves.

Student Brooke Baarstad, a member of the counterpoint team, maintained that drugs should remain illegal.

Saying some professional athletes have taken cocaine to be more “competitive,” Brooke contended that legalizing drugs would result in more professional basketball and football players using the drug.

Student Misha Roland said cocaine can affect a person’s sleeping and eating habits, unnaturally increase the heart rate and destroy the nasal membranes.

Misha said she lost a relative in a drug-related car accident. “It not only destroys you but people you love in your family,” she said.

Later in the 10-week course, Reynoso said, he will discuss the death of former Anacapa student Ricardo Hernandez, 14, who died last week after a gang-related stabbing.

Reynoso’s primary message about gangs was: Youths who join gangs may not be bad, but the lawbreaking activities their peers pressure them to do are bad.

Reynoso said he created the BE COOL program because the DARE program for seventh-graders did not fit Ventura’s needs. While DARE talks about what students should do when violence occurs in the classroom, BE COOL prepares them for violence when it occurs in the community, he said.