Thinking Outside the Box

Neely Young

This month I would like to follow the lead of some of our readers and think outside the box, as we face some of society’s most troublesome issues: prisons, high school dropouts and drugs.

One reader asked if Georgia’s legislature could make kids wait until their 18th birthdays to have the option of dropping out of school.






Senate Bill 413 addresses the dropout issue, but it doesn’t go far enough. It mandates that 16- and 17-year-olds get parental permission before deciding to leave school. Georgia’s dismal 50 percent-plus dropout rate comes from our own culture. Most dropouts’ parents and grandparents do not have high school diplomas.

When 16-year-olds drop out, most buy a car, which gives them the freedom to get into all kinds of trouble. That leads us to the second suggestion that comes from my wife, Kathy. She suggests the legislature raise the age for driver’s licenses to 18, or high school graduation.

This, too, would help students to stay in school until they are more mature. It would greatly reduce the death rate of teens on our highways; driving today’s heavily traveled roads requires more maturity than driving the roads of the 1950s, when the law setting the age requirement for licenses was passed.

If we made kids stay in school until they turned 18, many might graduate. It’s possible that instead of being a drain on Georgia’s society, they could become productive citizens; instead of using tax dollars, they would pay taxes.

Don Hayes, an influential carpet exec from Dalton, sent us an interesting letter to the editor published in The Economist. The writer, Alasdair Findlay from Gloucestershire, England, says that if NATO purchased Afghanistan’s opium crop that “the Al Qaeda-Taliban network would lose its primary source of funding.” There would be “no money, no bombs, or compensation for the families of suicide-bombers.” It would also give the poor of that country a cash crop, Mr. Findlay argues, and the opium could be destroyed or used for morphine.

Don wants to know why a version of this idea wouldn’t work in the U.S. He believes that if we could apply this approach on the federal level to the cocaine crops in Columbia and other parts of South America, it would save millions of dollars that we spend on law enforcement and to keep inmates in prison. It would give the country’s farmers a decent cash crop.

Obviously, as we have seen with the recent flat tax and sales tax proposals, there are no easy answers to these complex issues. But our responses so far are not working. These “outside the box” solutions could dry up the drug trade and keep kids off the street and out of the prison system.



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