Banner Graphic, Volume 13, Number 45, Greencastle, Putnam County, 28 October 1982 — Page 7
Tylenol horror triggers children's Halloween anger, nightmares
By MATT SEIDEN (c) 1982, The Baltimore Sun BALTIMORE-Reality is more terrifying than any ghost story this Halloween. All over the country this week kids are being warned about the perils of the season. They’re being told not to knock on strangers’ doors, or accept unwrapped treats, or eat anything anyone gives them before their parents can examine it. THEY’RE HEARING true horror stories about poisoned apples and needles ingeniously concealed in chocolate bars and broken glass baked into fudge brownies. And by now, of course, nearly every kid in America knows it is possible to take a simple pain killer and die of cyanide poisoning. They also know about poisons found in nose drops, mouthwash and other common medicines. How do kids feel about all this? I put this question to a distinguished panel of more than a dozen experts the other day. The experts ranged in age from six to eleven. They are all
opinion
LARRY GIBBS Publisher
Editorial Beware the witching hour of last-minute campaign rhetoric About two weeks before an election we begin to receive a deluge of letters to the editor praising or degrading individual candidates. This year is no exception. The closer it gets to Nov. 2, the more outrageous the letters become in their claims about a particular individual’s ability—or inability—to handle the job he or she is seeking. Our all-time favorite is a letter received early in October of 1978. The writer heaped unlimited praise on one particular candidate for county office, blasted his opponent in a series of unsubstantiated charges, then added this postscript: “Please print this letter on the day before the election. ’’ We didn’t, of course. Last-minute accusations are an unfortunate element of some political campaigns. Their intent often is to mislead or distort, leaving an opponent virtually no opportunity to respond before voters trek to the polls. We don’t intend to be a pawn in that type of activity. That’s why we’ve halted political reporting that involves partisan comments by any candidate. Wednesday’s paper carried the last such storycoverage of Democrat congressional candidate Steve Bonney’s speech to the Greencastle Optimist Club on Tuesday. We reported Mr. Bonney’s remarks because we did the same thing last week when his opponent, incumbent Republican John Myers, spoke to the same club. From here on out, our political reporting will deal only with general information about the various races on Tuesday’s ballot and the candidates involved. For example, today’s paper includes a story about the four seats at stake on the Putnam County Council. As far as letters are concerned, we decided not to print any whose sole purpose was to endorse or criticize a particular candidate or political party. Once we printed one, we would have been obligated to print an opposing viewpoint, then another, and another, and so on. Our job has been to report the candidates and what they’ve said publicly about the offices they seek. We’ve tried to do that accurately, equally and fairly, covering the League of Women Voters forum on Oct. 6 and the various news conferences and speeches made by legislative and congressional candidates this month. Endorse a candidate? Not us. As the county’s only daily newspaper, we recognize our responsibility to be as fair as possible to all-Democrats, Republicans, Independents, whomever. It isn’t our place to suggest who should or should not be elected. That choice will be made by the voters of Putnam County next Tuesday. And it will be made in the privacy of the polling place, just as it should be. (Larry Gibbs)
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students at a public elementary school in Baltimore. ALL BUT ONE first grader knew about the Tylenol story, and all had been warned about Halloween. Only four said they planned to go trick or treating this year, and those children said they would go with their parents and only to the homes of relatives and friendly neighbors. They said the warnings and the need for all the precautions made them “mad,” “scared,” “worried,” and, one boy said “sixty per cent nervous.” “It’s not fair,” Amesha Brown said. “When the grown-ups were little we didn’t poison them. So how come we have to be poisoned now?” “THE PROBLEM,” said Marat Kushnir, “is you got all these people who don’t have no job or money or nothing to do, so they just sit around with time on their hands and they start thinking of all these weird things to keep themselves busy...” “Just like my brothers,” said Tasha White. “He’s three. I call him ‘Turkey Head.’”
ERIC BfRNSEE Managing Editor
The Leprechaun.
“I think the people who put poison in things are mad at somebody so they take it out on us,” one kid said. “I won’t take nothing unless somebody else in my family will take it first,” another said. “Like my little brother, or a rat or a bird. That way, I can see what happens first.” “I’ll be okay as long as they don’t poison the junk food,” said Ted Kavalas. SARAH KLOSE SAID, “I dreamed that my whole entire family got sick and took Tylenol and they all died except me and there was nobody left in the world to take care of me because they all took it and died too.” “My dream was my brother took it and then my Mom took one and then my father and then I took one and there was nobody left,” said Greg Kessler. “I’m the one who found my brother dead. It felt sickening. He’s three.” “In my dream,” said Naomi Shay, “there was a big space ship that came down from whatever planet with 10 weird creatures with cyanide and
Pipeline policy Lifting U.S. sanctions against Soviet project hinges on 'alternatives'
A NEWS ANALYSIS By Henry Trewhitt (c) 19821 s Baltimore Sun WASHINGTON - If President Reagan, as expected, soon cancels sanctions against the Siberia-West Europe gas pipeline, he is sure to be accused of caving in under political pressure. Both the president and his accusers may be making the right judgments. Caving in under pressure obviously is sometimes necessary. Governments understandably do not like to acknowledge that, just as they rarely acknowledge a change in basic foreign policy, even from one administration to the next. Dropping the sanctions if this happens would be linked to adoption of a common Western strategy for tighter control of the credits and technology passed to the Soviet Union. Reagan, promising to “enthusiastically consider” such alternatives, said last week he was looking for “alternative measures that would be equally or more effective.” Actually the search, inspired by Secretary of State George P Shultz, has been under way with allies for more than a month. It has focused on terms of credit and greater care in the sale of high technology to the Soviets, even products and knowledge not formally barred by existing rules Most administration officials feel that granting highly concessionary credits to the Soviets for the pipeline project as West European allies have is an especially mindless way of shooting oneself in the foot. Beyond that, there is objective evidence for tighter control of technology. Independent studies both here and in West Germany warn that the West has unwittingly supplied much knowledge converted to Soviet military use. But just saying that new rules are in effect will not make it so. U.S. allies, mainly West Germany, Britain and Italy, are happy to cooperate. France is less so, apparently feeling that Reagan created his own problem and ought to solve it. Uncertainty that the allies are serious, therefore, is one of the reasons the alter-
'Security depends as much on health as weapons'
By LORETTA McLAUGHLIN (c) 1982 Boston Globe BOSTON-Every 17 days, the nations of the world spend S3O billion for arms productions, an amount sufficient to bring a safe water supply to the 2 billion people on Earth who lack even clean water to drink. If all the world’s nations were to divert 12 percent of their military spending this year to preventing starvation, there would be enough money, SBO billion, to provide sufficent supplementary food and health care to all developing countries for the next 20 years. THESE AND OTHER examples of the
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natives have not been announced. The administration does not relish a repetition of what happened at the Versailles economic summit in June. Then painfully wrought official language about better economic behavior was quickly nullified when various goverment officials including some Americans rushed to journalists to proclaim that they didn't really mean it. Yet Reagan and his advisers must make a decision soon if they are to earn domestic political returns for dropping the sanctions. The administration would like to restore American jobs, far more than European jobs, lost to the pipeline sanctions before the elections next week It has made an equivalent gesture to American farmers by offering more grain to the Soviets. European allies have spotlighted w'hat they regard as the hypocrisy of the grain sales as they are denied technology for pipeline contracts But the whole pipeline affair, more in West-West than East-West terms, has been riddled with contradictions from the start.
social good that could be accomplished with money now spent on arms appear in a special report carried in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Written by Dr. Howard Hiatt, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, the report appears in the journal’s “Sounding Board” section, which features opinion pieces. “I believe that a‘ strong military is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure the nation’s security,” he wrote. HIATT CONTENDED that “a strong case can be made for the proposition that our security rests in part on the health of people in other nations, in that a world in
Terror's grip In Northern Ireland, no one is immune
By Mary Hyde (c) 1982 Chicago Sun Times BELFAST, Northern Ireland Anne Donegan is a quiet girl. She lives in Belfast and grew up in the Catholic Lower Falls area. Anne studied hard. Her parents wanted all of their seven children to get an education. An education is the way out of the ghetto. Anne went to college to be a reporter and got a job in the Irish News, Northern Ireland’s Catholic newspaper. She hasn’t the hard bitten confidence of a reporter yet. She’s a timid girl. Last Friday morning, the Irish Republican Army kidnapped a British army sergeant, Thomas Cochrane, in South Armagh. Their press statement said they were holding him for questioning. , Protestant paramilitary, in retaliation, decided to kidnap a Catholic any Catholic and hold him for ransom. Joseph Donegan, 48, and the father of seven, rarely went out. But he went out with friends on Friday night and was captured by a Protestant gang. The Cochranes and the Donegans waited by their phones
they roamed all over the world and when they saw a person they’d shoot an arrow in their back and they’d die. I stayed under my bed, but one of the spacemen came in and shot me and I screamed and woke up and I really was under my bed.” “I DREAMED that a man walked into my room and put me in front of my door and opened my mouth and put cyanide in it and then he kidnapped my baby sister and put her up for ransom for one dollar,” Josh Pomerantz said. “If they catch the person who’s been putting poison everyplace, I think they should torture him to death by making him clean the floors in the jail and collect trash and at the end if he didn’t die from that, then I’d just electrocute him,” Sarah Klose said. Other suggested punishments included: The gas chamber (Dameon Fowler), “making him take some of his own Tylenol” (Dawn Turner), “sending him back to his parents and letting them worry about him,” (Naomi Shay) and “putting him in jail for life without asking him” (Marat Kushnir).
The administration came late to the issue. By the time hostile senior policymakers seized it. both American and European firms had massive contracts to supply pipeline material to the Soviets. Opponents, who enlisted Reagan, argued that the project apart from the generous credits granted by the Europeans would provide the Soviets a steady flow of hard currency and leave Europe subject to political extortion. The president first acted in December, ordering American firms not to fulfill their contracts with the Soviet Union. He announced the decision as a penalty for Soviet support of martial law in Poland. Then, in June, he extended the sanctions by ordering American industry, first, to refuse all goods to European firms supplying the pipeline and then, recanting, to refuse only pipeline-related sales. If Reagan now lifts the sanctions, his decision will occur only weeks after the official suppression of Solidarity, the Polish labor organization the sanctions were meant to defend. The first victim of the second decision
which disease and malnutrition are widespread can never be secure.” The Reagan administration’s “decision to commit to the Department of Defense $1.6 trillion over the next five years has the understandable effect of decreasing funding in many other sectors, including health,” Hiatt said. While this expenditure is intended to improve the nation’s security, he said, “I suggest the time has come for Americans to consider more carefully what really constitutes our national security.” In the United States, he said, cutbacks in the federal immunization program will reduce the number of children who can
October 28,1982, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic
MARAT CAME HERE from the Soviet Union three years ago. “In Russia, they got crazy people, too,” he says, “but there they automatically kill them if they do something bad. Here you go to court and pay some money and get out.” “I certainly don’t think it’s fair to put the person in jail for his whole life without asking him any questions,” 7-year-old Andy McKerrow said. “First, I’d trial him and then I’d put him in a hospital to see if he’s actually mentally-ill-crazy and if he is I wouldn’t execute him in any way at all because if he’s crazy he’s innocent and it’s not his fault. So I’d put him in a place for crazy people and wait until he’s cured. ” “But then you’d have all the other crazy people in the world doing the same thing,” Marat replied. “IT DOESN’T MATTER anyway,” Ted Kavalas pronounced somberly. “Halloween is destroyed.” “It’s not fair,” Amesha Brown said. “The law should say no one can steal a holiday.” “And all we wanted was a little candy,” Sarah Klose said.
was Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., who thought he had convinced Reagan that the political cost of blocking the pipeline would be too high. Reagan’s reversal of his secretary of state figured in Haig’s June 25 offer to resign, and Reagan’s quick acceptance. The uproar in Europe has been steady ever since. And one of the many ironies in later events was Reagan’s choice of a secretary of state who feels essentially as Haig did about the use of trade as a political weapon. Secretary Shultz, a quiet insider in the administration, not, like Haig, an explosive outsider, went to work to soften, bend, and ultimately eliminate the problem. If his strategy works, a believable package of measures to control strategic commerce with the Soviets will enable Reagan who apparently has changed his mind to drop the sanctions. The word believable is important. Most elements of the plan under consideration can only be tested with time. Some may be entirely cosmetic. Refusal to participate in a second strand of the pipeline, for example, may only confirm long-standing doubts about the need for the second strand. For weeks, the administration carefully avoided direct public linkage of the interallied negotiations with the pipeline. That was out of consideration for West Europeans, who are prepared to give nothing directly in exchange for lifting of what they regard as unjustified sanctions. But Reagan made the link last week. And Friday the State Department for the first time announced its goal to “place the issue of sanctions within the broader framework of East-West relations.” There was “general agreement,” it announced, “to develop a consensus approach to eastwest economic ties.” The administration, it concluded, was willing to consider “alternative measures that would maintain pressure on the Soviet Union.” That had the ring of imminence. But when the announcement is made, its political credibility, like its effect on the Soviet Union, can be determined only by time.
receive vaccinations from 6.3 million to 4.2 million this year. Other cutbacks will reduce child nutrition and lead-poisoning prevention programs. “THREE MILLION CHILDREN could be immunized with such vaccines for the price of one modern fighter plane (S2O million),” Hiatt said. If doctors pointed out the potential effect on health worldwide of today’s priority on military spending, he contended, “The American people can judge which programs merit more, and which less, of their resources.”
for news. They appealed for the release of their loved ones. Politicians offered to intervene but no one was asked to. On Monday morning, a lot of policemen pulled up in front of the Donegans’ home. They had found a body, too badly beaten to identify, in the nearby Protestant Shankill Road. Anne Donegan identified her father’s body by a gold watch they had given him last Christmas. For the Donegan family, the waiting was over. Joe Donegan was buried Wednesday . But for the Cochrane family, the waiting goes on. The IRA said they have killed Thomas Cochrane, but they won’t yet say where the body is. Six people have died since Northern Ireland's Assembly election results were known last Thursday. A Catholic man living in the mainly Protestant town of Larne had his hand sawn off with a hack saw at the wrist in an apparent sectarian attack. Also Wednesday, three policemen were killed on the spot by a bobby-trapped bomb. Most people in Britain and Northern Ireland thought another attempt to solve the political crisis in the province, at the very worst, couldn’t do any harm. But for Anne Donegan’s family and the Cochranes, London’s political experiment has failed miserably.
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