State Capitol Building (Credit – Matt Meduri)
This was the soberingly realistic question asked by Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine (R-Center Moriches) at last week’s presser, as officials gathered with victims and families of victims of distracted or impaired driving.
The assembly is always a noble one, although we wish a different set of circumstances lent themselves to such bipartisanship. Officials read out their wish list of legislative changes that they implore the State Legislature to include in their final one-house budgets, as well as Governor Kathy Hochul (D) in her Executive Budget. Victims and victims’ families gave heart-rending speeches of the unspeakable horrors that turned their lives into nightmares in the blink of an eye.
Last week’s panel included Daycnee Vanderveer, a single mother who lost both her legs while changing a flat tire on the side of a highway when a driver three times above the legal alcohol limit rear-ended her vehicle, with her in the middle.
Two years after Timothy Carpenter’s, 21, death, his parents, Tim and Andrea, remain steadfast in advocating for laws that could have prevented their only child’s death in Centereach, when a known fentanyl addict passed out behind the wheel. It left the young college boy dead and his uncle permanently disabled. The driver, as is often the case unfortunately, made it out of the accident relatively unscathed, but later overdosed when NARCAN could not be administered.
Alisa McMorris spoke of her son Andrew, 12, who was killed when a drunk driver careened through his Boy Scout troop.
But what makes last week’s press conference – featured on the cover of this week’s edition of The Messenger – all the more infuriating is that we’ve seen this same event for the last several consecutive years, yet Albany refuses to listen.
What Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney (R), Executive Romaine, Suffolk’s local and State-level elected officials, and the victims and the families are requesting are reasonable laws that many other states have on their books.
Chief among them is updating the laws around substances and impaired driving. New York continues to operate off an outdated list that only includes naturally-occuring drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and not the endless cavalcade of synthetic designer drugs that are being introduced faster to the streets than officials can act and legislate in response.
It’s interesting how New York State could have been so complicit in arguably the most lax-in-the-nation bail laws – in which several people charged last week with operating a nationwide drug ring out of Suffolk could not be held on bail – as well as the eye-opening border crises that unarguably contribute to more hard drugs on the streets.
If New York wanted to have its humanitarian cake and eat it too, the least they could have done was afford our public safety officials more tools to take impaired drivers off the roads, even if the intoxicating substance in question cannot be identified against an archaic list. This lack of balance makes us think some in the Legislature are pathological in their beliefs or simply do not act in good faith.
It’s also frustrating to witness the top prosecutor for the largest suburban county in the nation make the same requests year after year, hat-in-hand, only for those requests to go seemingly unheard. D.A. Tierney is clearly a capable, credible professional. Why Albany won’t at least take his word for what it’s worth is astounding to us.
Moreover, what unnecessarily adds to the fray are the activists who vehemently fight Tierney and company along the way. He mentioned the cannabis lobby and those concerned with how the laws would play out regarding prescription drugs.
We can understand the prescription drug question, and Tierney was quick to flatten the “myth” that he and others lobbying for change would include these to the “list” of drugs. In fact, the list already contains prescription drugs.
But our problem is with the cannabis industry, namely those who think that the actions of those who desire change would infringe upon the right to buy and use marijuana. The efficacy of using marijuana can be debated, but Tierney has made it clear that he’s not coming for the stash of the guy at home on a weekend. He’s more interested in ensuring police can arrest obviously impaired drivers, despite New York’s probable cause laws and the nascent stages of roadside toxicology testing for cannabis. Reliable roadside marijuana toxicology tests do not exist as those for measuring alcohol intoxication do.
Herein lies a classic “knee-jerk” of New York. A group wants stricter laws to make worthy arrests of those driving high on marijuana. The first and immediate reaction is to insinuate it’s a move against marijuana at large.
The New York public needs to abandon this “us vs. them” ideology. Besides, if your ability to purchase and use marijuana, barring any significant medical needs, is your primary concern in a county with the highest number of road fatalities in the fourth-largest state in the country, then we’re not sure we’d put the greatest degree of faith in your prioritization or decision-making skills.
The reality is, these are clear and present dangers in which the only people who are on the hook are the families who are left reeling for a lifetime, or the direct victims who don’t even realize they’re about to become a poster child.
If Albany wants humanitarian reform – we believe Bail Reform, Discovery Reform, Sanctuary City/State status warrant this assertion – then their first step should be to pick up these common sense bills.
Otherwise, New York will have to continue to wait in the woods until a logical, sensible path forward presents itself.
