Op-ed: How smart are we?
Ron Cuff
– Thirty years after Kristin Smart vanished from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, investigators are still searching for her remains. Her killer, Paul Flores, is serving 25 years to life. Kristin’s brother Matthew stood in a courtroom and told a judge that Flores “chose to take a life, my sister Kristin’s life, a beautiful life.” Her family still cannot bury their daughter.
The coverage has rightly focused on justice delayed, and a predator finally held accountable. But there is a thread in this story that no one wants to pull.
Kristin Smart was 19 years old when she was last seen leaving an off-campus alcohol fueled party with Flores in the early hours of May 25, 1996. We talk at length about predators. We talk about campus safety. We rarely talk honestly about a culture that placed a teenage girl alone on a dark path with a dangerous young man after midnight. And that environment didn’t begin at the party. It began in a society that has thoroughly normalized underage intoxication, where alcohol flows at every celebration, every sporting event, every social gathering, and where the idea of questioning underage substance use is treated as an eccentricity, rather than the serious threat to youth that it presents. Curiously, we rarely prosecute, convict or punish individuals who provide alcohol or other intoxicating substances to minors.
We don’t know at what age Kristen had her first drink, but we do know that by the time she was 19 she had been exposed to alcohol advertising thousands of times. For example, most new alcohol products are fruit flavored and packaged with cartoon-like images. As responsible parents, why do we tolerate drug or alcohol advertising of any kind in front of our children? When adults want an alcoholic beverage, they know where to get one, so it’s pretty clear that most alcohol advertising targets youth.
Almost every feature film normalizes smoking, drinking, drug use, or all three. It’s called product placement advertising. Why do we put up with it?
College party culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is downstream from us. We hand young people a world soaked in alcohol and drugs. We allow addiction industries to spend billions making their products legal, glamorous and taxed at a low rate. We then express shock when 19-year-olds find themselves dangerously impaired in dangerous situations.
This is not about assigning any portion of blame to Kristin Smart. It’s exactly the opposite. The responsibility for her murder rests entirely with Paul Flores. But if we are serious about preventing the next underage substance use tragedy, we have to be willing to look upstream, past the campus, past the party, and into the mirror.
Ron Cuff
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How smart are we? Well we elected an insane moron for president and we ignore gun violence every hour of every day the Republican way.I would say 33% of Americans have no critical thinking skills at all and live out of touch with reality in la la land. There will be a reckoning for this right wing stupidity. We no longer live in a democracy and the American Nazis are in control as Kurt Vonnegut warned us years ago.We have taken our freedoms for granted and are about to lose them all.Don’t use Kristen Smart as your excuse to condemn alcohol abuse; she was an innocent! Don’t pun a child’s name!
Stephen, you sound like you have TDS and want to make this article about you.
It is not a democracy, it is a Democratic Republic. Pick up a good history book and learn about why we are allowed to defend ourselves.
Mr. Cuff, this was a poorly written article, placing blame on the alcohol industry.
Parents should teach their daughters AND sons to listen to their “sixth sense”. We are often taught to be nice and not hurt anyone’s feelings by judging them… and we SHOULD judge them, because some day, those judgements might save our lives. Parents should always have many conversations with their children about NEVER leaving someone alone, and practice, practice, practice before they head off to school. We should all learn survival skills from an early age. You can make it fun and not scary.
I met Paul Flores years ago, and at the time, didn’t know anything about him. He made my skin crawl and when he asked me personal questions, I gave him completely opposite answers from what he was asking. I couldn’t wait to get out of the same space and I knew there was something about him that was evil. Later that day I spoke to a friend about it and he said, “You know who that was don’t you?”.
Sherry you sound MAGA and it’s not about your skin crawling around Flores. Who cares? Does your skin crawl around Trump?
How smart are we? Well we elected an insane moron for president and we ignore gun violence every hour of every day the Republican way.I would say 33% of Americans have no critical thinking skills at all and live out of touch with reality in la la land. There will be a reckoning for this right wing stupidity. We no longer live in a democracy and the American Nazis are in control as Kurt Vonnegut warned us years ago.We have taken our freedoms for granted and are about to lose them all.Don’t use Kristen Smart as your excuse to condemn alcohol abuse; she was an innocent! Don’t pun a child’s name!
Stephen, you sound like you have TDS and want to make this article about you.
It is not a democracy, it is a Democratic Republic. Pick up a good history book and learn about why we are allowed to defend ourselves.
Mr. Cuff, this was a poorly written article, placing blame on the alcohol industry.
Parents should teach their daughters AND sons to listen to their “sixth sense”. We are often taught to be nice and not hurt anyone’s feelings by judging them… and we SHOULD judge them, because some day, those judgements might save our lives. Parents should always have many conversations with their children about NEVER leaving someone alone, and practice, practice, practice before they head off to school. We should all learn survival skills from an early age. You can make it fun and not scary.
I met Paul Flores years ago, and at the time, didn’t know anything about him. He made my skin crawl and when he asked me personal questions, I gave him completely opposite answers from what he was asking. I couldn’t wait to get out of the same space and I knew there was something about him that was evil. Later that day I spoke to a friend about it and he said, “You know who that was don’t you?”.
Sherry you sound MAGA and it’s not about your skin crawling around Flores. Who cares? Does your skin crawl around Trump?