A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): 18 heads. But who’s the recipient?

When I first saw the headlines connecting “O’Hare airport” and “18 human heads,” my first reaction was to think that somebody accidentally dug up an old burial ground in the areas right around the airport.

Which would be sad, but not exactly tragic. Re-interment is always possible.

BUT THE REALITY is something even more bizarre.

For it seems the human heads are meant for some sort of medical research, but no one is sure who the recipient of the skulls is meant to be.

Both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday that the packages arrived at O’Hare International Airport from Rome just before Christmas. There are goods that get shipped through the airport, as well as people.

But it doesn’t seem that the heads are meant for anyone in Chicago. It seems they were meant to be put onto a different flight for somewhere else.

WHETHER IT IS bad penmanship, or someone’s carelessness, or who knows why, it seems that the label on the package (actually, the package is three coolers meant to preserve the heads in as close to prime condition as is possible) wasn’t clear.

So now, we have the Cook County medical examiner’s office storing the heads until that question is resolved – with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Customs all trying to figure out who the heads belong to. Although later in the day Tuesday, it came out that the heads may wind up being cremated -- with the medical examiner having to make the arrangements.

The odd part is that no one has come forward to claim them yet. If they are truly for research purposes, you’d think that someone would anxiously be awaiting their arrival – and would have said something to someone about the fact that a package due nearly a month ago hasn’t arrived yet.

What else these days is noteworthy along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan?

A GUILT-FREE CONGRESS?:  I happened to catch President Barack Obama’s nationally-televised address this week while eating lunch in between news reporting assignments, and couldn’t help but nearly lose it.

It was Obama’s admission that while he wants stricter measures concerning firearms purchases, he knows he’s not going to get them. Which is realistic. But Obama said that members of Congress will “have to examine their own conscience” to determine what to do.

As though the president thinks he can shame the politicos of Capitol Hill into doing the proper thing – instead of knuckling under to the National Rifle Association and other firearms advocates.

I think a segment of our Congress (and our society as a whole) has shown its “conscience” on this issue is off in its own world – one where they are just a little too eager to have the “right” to shoot another human being whom they perceive as intruding on their “space.”

OPRAH ON LANCE – DO WE REALLY CARE?:  I don’t plan to watch Oprah Winfrey’s broadcast of an interview she had with Lance Armstrong – the man whose seven titles for bicycling have been stripped because of his use of drugs meant to artificially boost his performance.

It’s not that I’m one of those people who refuses to watch Oprah on some grand principle – it’s just that I could care less these days about anything related to Armstrong.

As far as the athletic world is concerned, he has been punished. As far as criminal justice is concerned, the statute of limitations has long passed. What would come out of anything that Armstrong said to Winfrey?

You might as well try to interview one-time baseball slugger Reggie Jackson to ask him whether he really stuck his hip into the path of a thrown baseball during the 1978 World Series to prevent a double play from being completed.

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Are they just being practical?

I recall a moment from just over two decades ago when I was in Grant Park. It was a summer night with Michigan Avenue in the background, and I was a part of the crowd at the Blues Festival that summer.

SOLIS: More city revenue?



I couldn’t help but notice a guy about 30 feet away from me wearing a big overcoat, which struck me as being very unseasonal for summertime. He pulled out of his pockets a substance that appeared to be an illegal one.

APPARENTLY, HE DIDN’T notice the two uniformed police officers who were about five feet behind him, and who suddenly took their own interest in him.

I saw those two officers grab the guy and haul him away. All of this took a matter of seconds to occur. And it might not have been memorable to me, if not for what I saw about 10 minutes later.

It was the same guy with the overcoat. His hair was mussed up a bit, and his mood was angry. For what it turns out that the Chicago police officers did was confiscated his stash (which was a plastic baggie filled with what I believe to be marijuana) and threw it in the sewer.

Then, they let him go.

NO CHARGES. NO legal process. And for those of you who want to believe that these substances are a scourge on our society that needs to be eradicated, it had the effect of lessening the amount of drugs in circulation.

Unless someone is sorry enough to dig down into the sewer to try to get their fix. In which case, they have more serious problems in their lives than the need to get high.

EMANUEL: Not sure yet

It was this moment from the mid-1980s that came to my mind again Wednesday when I learned that the City Council is contemplating changes in its ordinances related to possession of the so-called illegal drugs.

Under the proposal now pending, possession of marijuana would no longer be a criminal offense. Nobody’s talking about legalization of such drugs (although that might be a logical alternative).

IT WOULD BECOME a ticket-able offense. Cops would literally have to whip out the ticket books and issue the citation for people caught with amounts of drugs that clearly do not make them any kind of dealers.

Those people would have to show up in court and pay a fine for their drug-induced actions.

Which might not have the same emotional satisfaction as knowing that some drug abuser had his stash dumped down the sewer. But it might be the most practical.

I remember my gut reaction from those decades ago (I was college-age back then) was part shock to see that a police officer would be willing to let someone caught with a drug go free. But it just also struck me as being sensible.

BECAUSE THIS PARTICULAR guy (I have no idea who he was, and I have never seen him since) was doing something that truly would have been a waste of the criminal justice system’s time if they had to prosecute him.

So we either allow the police to start writing out tickets and treat the “offense” for the minor act that it is. Or we start allowing our police to shake people down so they can dump the drugs in the trash. I doubt anyone would prefer the latter alternative.

I find it interesting that Mayor Rahm Emanuel himself is wavering on this issue. He says he hasn’t made up his mind about the proposal put forth by 25^th Ward Alderman Danny Solis – one that calls for possession of small amounts of drugs to be punishable by fines of $200.

Solis argues that reducing the seriousness of marijuana possession would allow the existing number of police officers to focus attention on more serious crime.

YET THERE ARE those who cannot look at this issue rationally, and my guess is that Emanuel is trying to figure out how intense their outcry will be if he goes along and supports the proposed ordinance change.

For too many people want to look at this issue ideologically, rather than rationally. They want to believe that marijuana is a drug used only by certain types of people (I’m sure the phrase “hippie freaks” pops into their heads) whom they have no qualms about harassing.

Although the reality is that marijuana is a drug that cuts across social and economic classes. In fact, there are times when the social conservatives go on their diatribes that I can’t help but wonder if they’re saying such stupid things because they’re stoned!

Who’s to say?

ALL I KNOW is that the City Council’s proposal is a step in the right direction, and it’s not even an original idea. Several suburban communities already treat minor drug possession as a ticket-able offense.

So it really comes down to whether the city wants to join the ranks of other practical communities, or remain rigidly locked into the past just to please some ideologues.

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Preckwinkle’s opposition to jail clogged by petty drug arrests is nothing new

PRECKWINKLE: No more cheap arrests

Anybody who is shocked and outraged that Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle thinks many of the people who currently clog the county jail because of petty drug arrests hasn’t been paying attention.

Her relevation earlier this week that she has asked police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to have the Police Department reduce the amount of arrests it does for marijuana possession is so in line with her general rhetoric when it comes to crime and incarceration. It’s not surprising.

THOSE WHO WANT to claim outrage should consider that such a sentiment says more about you than it does about Preckwinkle.

Perhaps it is because I have handled reporter-type assignments where I have heard Preckwinkle talk about the conditions at Cook County Jail, which she thinks are miserable because the place is so overcrowded with people who really have no need to be kept locked away from the bulk of society.

The crowded conditions create an environment where those inmates who really do need to be locked up while their criminal cases are pending become harder to keep an eye on.

The end result is hazardous conditions for all.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I heard Preckwinkle speak to school children in suburban South Holland. It may have been a Catholic school, but the gathering was almost entirely of African-American youths with an occasional Latino kid in the mix.

She told those kids of the statistics indicating the heavy racial minority composition of the jail population and how the current system means that those minority kids will have to behave extra careful in order to ensure that they don’t someday wind up in jail.

“That’s why it is particularly important for you to behave,” Preckwinkle said back in April. “Jail is not a place where you want yourself, or any of your friends, to be.”

But the reason it becomes so miserable, she has always said, is because of the large number of people who ought to be receiving something resembling treatment for their drug problems – rather than being locked away for drug possession.

THOSE ARRESTS FOR small amounts could even wind up becoming more serious drug problems while in jail, just because some people can only cope with the sordid conditions at 26^th Street and California Avenue by using substances that numb their senses.

In light of the fact that she has expressed these views (which weren’t even terribly new when I heard them this spring) before, the idea that she’s now using her new government post (she hasn’t even been county board president for a full year yet) to try to influence people in positions of law enforcement authority merely seems like a logical act.

Which is why there are now reports all over Chicago and the Associated Press newswire is spreading the word across the nation about the Cook County politico who doesn’t want people arrested for drug possession.

“It’s pretty well-known within the criminal justice system that the judges will dismiss those charges for very modest amounts of illicit drugs,” Preckwinkle said earlier this week to reporter-types. “I suggested to (McCarthy) that the police might stop arresting people for this, since it clogs up our jail and their cases will be dismissed out anyway.”

AS ONE WHO has sat through many court proceedings throughout the years, I have seen the truth of this statement. The people who got picked up because a police officer discovered enough marijuana for a cigarette or two will get their cases dismissed – provided there aren’t some other factors (such as trying to get physically abusive with the cop) that come into play.

In fact, some suburbs already have decriminalized such small amounts of the drug to the point where someone who gets caught merely makes an appearance in municipal court to pay a fine for violating a local ordinance.

And one gets the strong impression that those municipalities are more interested in collecting the fines to bolster their local revenues than they are in putting up any image of protecting the morals of their communities.

Now I know some people find this kind of attitude offensive.

THEY WANT TO believe that pursuing even the smallest amounts of drug usage is making a bold stand for morals and decency, and that easing up in any sense is taking the “radical” step toward legalization of such drugs.

Which is over-bloated rhetorical nonsense.

Personally, I have no problem regarding someone who abuses drugs to the point where it takes over their lives in the same way I view an alcoholic. They need help. Perhaps the day will come when we see our various attempts at staging a “War on Drugs” as a failure just as much as the alcohol Prohibition of the 1920s.

If we are to move in that direction, we’re going to need more political people like Preckwinkle who are willing to view the issue in ways other than those meant to pander to the ideologues of our society – who themselves could probably care less about those using drugs, except to the degree that it gives them someone to rant and rage against.

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