Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates is right to question the low number of citations or arrests for the drug problems in Baltimore, particularly Penn Station, despite the mass overdoses in Baltimore’s Penn North neighborhood. As a recent Baltimore Sun report notes, “Newly released citation data shows only a handful of tickets were written for drug-related offenses in the area, which is subject to a well-known open-air drug market market, raising questions about how the city is using its enforcement tools” (“Drug citations barely budge after 3 mass overdoses in Baltimore neighborhood,” Oct. 21).
The situation with the overdoses is serious, yet the mayor and the police don’t seem to be stepping up and confronting it. Of course, the mayor is trying to hold off National Guard troops being sent to Baltimore, so he would prefer not to acknowledge the drug crimes going on. There may be a question of whether personal use of serious drugs is an offense, but the selling of the drugs definitely is, and as Bates also stated with regard to the users, “I think daily you can see drugs being used and sold every single day in our city. Any time [police] see someone, they can write a citation because we need to direct that person to drug treatment. That’s super important.”
No one seems to be interested in getting people off of drugs, only giving citations for use while the sellers operate freely in open-air markets. When are we going to address the real problem? `
— Stas Chrzanowski, Baltimore
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