I write regarding your most disappointing decision to endorse a No vote on Ballot Measure 33 ["Dude, Where's My Ballot?," Oct 13, 2004].

Although you pay lip service to the scientific truth that marijuana is medicine, you continue to act as though it were somehow appropriate to deny access to this medicine to patients who live in sparsely populated counties. You go on to conjure up problems which will either not come into being, or, if they do, will be handled by the way rural counties handle other similar obligations--by cooperating with other sparsely populated counties to provide the state-mandated service.

Not only is marijuana medicine, but patients need and deserve safe access to the medicine, regardless of where they live. Measure 33 leaves no patient behind, and compassionate Oregonians ought to disregard your recommendation and vote Yes on 33.

Leland R. Berger
Yes on Measure 33
Northeast 15th Avenue

SCHACKLED TO SHEKELS

Nick Budnick writes that Tom Potter's $100 cap on campaign contributions "impli[es] that big business and its big donations are bad" ["The Potter Files," WW, Sept. 22, 2004]. Nonsense.

The cap applies to all interests. It is Budnick who implies that business specifically would have some reason to pout if denied the chance to buy undue access and influence. Potter-the-listener presumably would give business a fair hearing, just not an exclusive one.

What Potter's cap does imply is that our campaign-finance system is broken. It suppresses reasoned consideration of the public interest, undermining public trust in government and leading to sclerosis of creativity. Debate becomes a narrow tyranny of the center-right, the real locus of "political correctness."

Our officials are corrupted, in fully legal fashion. They listen mainly to donor-tied lobbyists and cast their votes with an eye towards past and future contributions. Meanwhile serious and reasonable ideas are refused serious public debate, on the self-fulfilling excuse is that they aren't "politically realistic."

The press colludes in this constriction. Ideas that could gain public support, were they really aired, debated and understood, are dismissed with distortions, false labels, lazy derision or simple silence.

If Jim Francesconi has made himself a poster boy for everything wrong with our current funding system, he has only himself to blame. Francesconi's extreme courting of donations creates a conflict of interest between his obligations to donors and his obligations to the public interest. Absence of such conflict is no reason to fault Potter, and Willamette Week looks silly in implying otherwise.

Chris Lowe
Southeast Bybee Boulevard