SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: Shameful that Snohomish County Prosecutor can’t prosecute drugs

Sep 27, 2019, 5:57 AM

drug possession...

(Pexels)

(Pexels)

I liked the former Snohomish County prosecutor, Mark Rowe. He was always a good friend of the show. However, I vehemently disagreed with him when he announced that like King County, Snohomish County would not prosecute possession of 2 grams of drugs or less.

Then a few months ago, I talked to the new Snohomish County prosecutor, a guy named Adam Cornell. He said that he was going to reverse his predecessor’s policy and once again enforce drug laws, no matter the amount. He said that the 2-gram policy was not working.

Now, however, he is finding that reversal hard to enact. He said that the county does not have the funds to lock people up for drug offenses. Unless they get more money, they will not be able to enforce these drug laws.

This is crazy to me. If your first dollars that you spend as a county are not spent on law enforcement — keeping the streets safe — and infrastructure, that is shameful.

Dori: LEAD program expansion essentially means drugs are legal in King County

To Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers and the Snohomish County Council, if your prosecutor comes to you and says he needs more money to take drugs off the street, you should spend money on that before the other nonsense that government tends to spends money on.

That is a failure at the very top. It is a failure of the county council. It is a failure of the county executive. Your first dollars spent should be on cleaning up the streets, and making sure that we have infrastructure, law enforcement, parks, and the like. Everything else is optional.

This is yet again another absolute failure of local government.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Dori: Shameful that Snohomish County Prosecutor can’t prosecute drugs