A Town Council quiz and fact check from Royal Examiner’s ‘tabloid’ staff satirist

DATELINE ALERT – Front Royal, Virginia: 1/ Space aliens have captured the Town Council and forced the male members to grow hokey beards; 2/ “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles“; 3/ “Plants cause Erosion”; 4/ “What is not due diligence is allowing the creek to grow out of control as it had for over 17 years with no work being done to mitigate flooding and erosion”; 5/ “Over the years, it (the creek bank) hasn’t been maintained and that’s what’s causing the erosion”; 6/ “Marijuana is a gateway drug”.

Question: Which of these statements is NOT true?

Answer: All of them, except the Space Alien one.

TV shot graphic from NBC-affiliate Peacock TV’s stellar series ‘Operation Blue Book’. To paraphrase from another past TV show about the paranormal – ‘The truth is out THERE somewhere, just not here’ with a nod to ‘The X-Files’, Mulder and Scully. Royal Examiner Photos by Roger Bianchini

The first one, that trees cause pollution is a gloriously stupid concept foisted upon the public in 1981 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The full quote of his statement was, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

“Plants cause erosion” is an incredibly dumb statement by someone who should know better – Steven Hicks, the new Town Manager. He did an incredible job in his previous position as Town Manager of Durham, NC, under what it seems were trying conditions. Here, in his defense, he was handed a very bad situation and is trying, we are told, to make things better.

Unfortunately, he may be under the hypnotic thrall of THE Tederick. Yes, THE Tederick, a name that causes bureaucrats to grow hokey beards.

New Front Royal Town Manager Steven Hicks, right, at council meeting staff table with Matt Tederick, who has continued on the Town payroll to ‘help’ with the transition from his town administrative leadership.

THE Tederick, rising out of a primordial LLC swamp to suck at the fabric of governments, much like a three-piece suit Nosferatu. So, Mr. Hicks may have stumbled a bit to please his liege. But incredibly, after landing in a town fresh off of wiping out a healthy stand of trees (again, he didn’t do it), he has applied for Tree City USA status! Ironically, one of the signs proclaiming that Front Royal is a Tree City is in front of the Tederick Trench, formerly known as a portion of the Shenandoah Greenway!

Okay, moving along, the statement that nothing has “been done… for over 17 years to mitigate erosion” – The article by Sonja pretty much disproves that.

Above, beautiful and functional in someone’s eyes(?) – the start of the plan to totally replace existing natural, tree-lined Happy Creek riparian flood buffer with riprap rocks between Prospect and South Streets along a portion of the now ironically named ‘Shenandoah Greenway’. Below, even children understand trees lives matter to a creek and a Tree City USA – wonder why the Town’s elected and appointed officials are grappling with that?

Finally, “marijuana is a gateway drug”. Wrong, wrong, wrong!!!

Fact or tabloid journalism? – “During the opioid discussion, Gillespie put forth the proposition that the Town officially oppose an anticipated State General Assembly initiative to legalize marijuana because, despite decades of past sociological and medical studies indicating otherwise, he said that there was ‘no question marijuana is one of those gateway things’ leading to harder drug use. He pointed to reports that the illegal drug market was now seeing the lacing of marijuana with the super-synthetic opioid Fentanyl as an indicator of his belief on the matter.”

Thus far we are unaware of any request from Mr. Gillespie or the Town’s lengthening battery of taxpayer-funded attorneys to have the above passage corrected in any way.

Marijuana is not a gateway drug. People who have tried marijuana may eventually go on to try harder drugs in search of a stronger high, and experimentation may lead them down a dangerous path toward addiction. However, the science shows overwhelmingly that for most people, marijuana is not a gateway drug.

Many people mistakenly believe that marijuana use precedes, rather than follows the initiation of other illicit drug use. In fact, most drug use begins with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana, making nicotine and alcohol the two most common “gateway” drugs of abuse. Evidence indicates marijuana is usually not the first substance abused before more dangerous illicit drug experimentation.

Gary Gillespie was not questioned by colleagues despite forwarding long-disproven notions about the role of marijuana as a gateway to hard drug abuse. But Front Royal is a ‘sanctuary’ community in some regards, apparently including from known environmental, sociological and public safety factual realities – tho so far only one of those by official resolution. The rest are just a growing political legacy from an end-run on the Town Charter’s mandate against partisan town elections.

A study published in the peer-reviewed “Journal of School Health” has concluded that the theory of a gateway drug is not associated with marijuana, but rather one of the most damaging and socially accepted drugs in the world: alcohol. The findings from this investigation support that alcohol should receive primary attention in abuse prevention programming since the use of other substances could be impacted by delaying or preventing alcohol use. Remember, under-age purchase or use of nicotine or alcohol is a crime.

An alternative “gateway” may just be the trials and tribulations some kids face while growing up. According to Dr. Karen Van Gundy, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, regarding juvenile drug use, “Whether marijuana smokers go on to use other illicit drugs depends more on social factors like being exposed to stress and being unemployed, not so much whether they smoked a joint in the eighth grade. Because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most, and is rarely the first, illicit drug used.”

As for Fentanyl, sadly, it is now found everywhere. In Chicago, Fentanyl was found in a vaping device!

As for space aliens – you explain this mess.

“Three-piece suit Nosferatu” (I crack myself up sometimes.)

‘Project Blue Book’ chart of various UFO’s described around nation – Which one came here to help exert mind-control over our male elected officials grooming tendencies? The ‘Seed Pod’ top row, second from left, seems to be a contender.