Chapter 10

We began to feel that the world was going to hell faster than we could keep up with it. This Freedom of Drugs Act was tearing hell out of society. More and more people were being shot so that somebody could buy drugs or shot because somebody had bought drugs. We never thought that we would be ones to promote prohibition of anything, but we were starting to come down harder and harder on drugs. We wished that we could find somebody who was politically inclined and felt about drugs the way we did. We knew that we would support that person with more than just our vote—we’d go with money and whatever else it took!

Then it happened! We finally found the person we were looking for. There was a woman in Holden who was running for the State House of Representatives on a single plank in her platform: she wanted to outlaw drugs! She seemed to be a sensible person who had come to realize the damage freely available drugs was doing to the community. Nancy contacted her to see what we could do to help. Her answer was right up our alley.

She was being threatened by some people because she wanted to ban drugs. She had been receiving threatening letters for the past three months, but the law enforcement people were helpless. Recent interpretations of the Free Speech granted in the 1^st Amendment say that simply writing a threat is not sufficient to warrant action by the police, but there must be overt action taken on the threat before it is illegal. Therefore, the poor woman was scared to death, but could not get any help. She wanted to know if we were in a position to help her.

We talked to our lawyers, and they agreed that we could sign our normal contract with Ms Anderson, but we could defer payment as long as we liked. We could afford to take a “vacation” from our normal work without hurting financially, so we decided to do what we could to protect the candidate. Our first step was to visit her in her office.

We showed up in casual, but presentable, clothes. We wanted to look like any other political volunteers so that we would not attract any special attention. Ms Anderson was gracious to us and invited us into her private office. “Can I get you anything to drink—coffee or soda?” she asked as we sat down.

We both accepted coffee, and we talked about generalities for a few minutes until we had all three finished the coffee. After that, we got down to business. Ms Anderson signed a contract for our services. I asked to see some of the threatening letters, and Ms Anderson pulled a folder from her filing cabinet. The folder had 22 letters in it, all making threats of either death or severe bodily harm. Naturally, none of the letters had a traceable signature nor a letterhead. They really didn’t seem to be of much help unless one had access to a major crime lab, and we were shot down on that.

I handed the folder to Nancy, and she started looking through the stack of letters. Meanwhile, I asked Ms Anderson if she had saved the envelopes. She slapped herself on the side of the head and groaned. “Dammit, I didn’t think of that! I pitched the envelopes without thinking that they could provide some useful information. Okay, now I know better. The next one of those that comes in, I’ll save both the letter and the envelope.”

Nancy commented, “I noticed that three of these letters must have been written by the same person. They don’t say the exact the same thing, of course, but the writing style is virtually identical. I wonder if that means that you don’t have as many enemies as you thought? If that is the case, we might be able to find whoever it is who is writing these threatening letters.”

I said, “Ms Anderson, may we have this folder to study? Nancy might be able to pick out some useful clues if she has a chance to work with these letters for a while. Of course, there are no guarantees, but Nancy is very sharp and might be able to pick up something else useful if she has time to study the letters.”

“Certainly, Mr. Pitzer. Is there anything else you think you might be able to use in your search? I will provide anything I have that will help your investigation.”

“I don’t think of anything else at the moment but I do have one question to ask purely out of curiosity. Since the federal government has preempted regulation of the drug availability, how do you expect to get state law to control drug distribution?”

“There is a loophole in the current law allowing free distribution of drugs. Namely, nowhere in the law is there a prohibition against a state taxing the sale of drugs. What I plan to do is to introduce a bill that would slap a heavy sales tax on all drugs. That way, we will not be prohibiting the sale of drugs, but we will make the drugs so expensive that practically nobody can afford them.

“Right now, a person can go into a store and buy a marijuana cigarette for something in the neighborhood of two or three cents each. That means that virtually anyone can afford to smoke marijuana. How much marijuana do you think would be smoked if there were a tax of $50 on each cigarette?

“Yes, I know that this would put us right back to the era of drug dealers who were selling drugs on practically every street corner. However, nowadays, people have access to guns and they can put a stop to the sale of drugs in their neighborhood by simply pressing the trigger.

“I am convinced that the reason there was such widespread selling of drugs back before they were legal was related to the fact that people had no way that they could stop the sale in front of their houses. I am sure that there would be a lot less drug dealing if a distributor of drugs knew that he could be shot at any moment by an irate householder. In fact, I have been thinking of putting a rider on my bill that would pay a bounty to anyone who shot a person illegally selling untaxed drugs. That would shake some people up, don’t you think?”

I said, “Ms Anderson, I have to admit that I would never have thought of that combination of laws, but I am sure that your proposals would attract a lot of attention. Your ideas are mind boggling, and I think they’re wonderful!”

There wasn’t much else we could do at the moment, so Nancy and I left the office. Nancy had the folder of letters and planned to start going through them that evening. We hoped that she could find something that would steer us toward the troublemakers before they decided to act.

On our way home, Nancy said, “John, did you notice that every one of those letters was written on the same kind of paper? It looked to me like the paper was from two different batches, but both batches had a purple cast to the paper. Furthermore, the writing was done with old fashioned ink, and I’ll bet that the writer used a pen that had to be dipped into the ink every few words.”

“I’ll believe you about the paper and other stuff, but how could you tell that detail about the pen?”

“I’ll have to look carefully under high magnification to be certain, but it looked to me like the width of the ink strokes varied from word to word. It was as if the pen was dipped into the ink for a new supply every few words.”

“Dammit, woman, that is a telling discovery! If it’s true, we will know a lot about the person that wrote the letters from a psychological profile of the handwriting.”

“Yeah, but let’s not jump to too many conclusions until I have more data. It won’t take long to determine if I am correct.”

Nancy dug out her most powerful magnifying glass; her microscope did not have the field width that she needed. She spent about half an hour looking at several of the notes that she selected at random, leaned back in her chair, and announced, “Every one of the letters I examined were written by the same person. I am pretty sure that the writer is a woman over 60 years old. I’ll bet that she lives alone, without even a cat to keep her company.”