Suffolk Dems eyeing Rebecca Sanin to run for county legislature

Daily Point

Schaffer turns to Health and Welfare council head to pick up a seat

Suffolk Democrats may have found a silver lining in the decision last week that knocked off the ballot their candidate for the newly drawn and very competitive 16th Legislative District.

Although Suffolk County real estate director Sidney Joyner initially said he would appeal the ruling which found that the Democrat did not live in the district for one year prior to an election as required by the county charter, The Point has learned that Rebecca Sanin, head of the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island and former 2021 Democratic candidate for Huntington Town supervisor, is destined to be the party’s new standard-bearer.

The executive committee of the Suffolk Democrats is scheduled to vote Thursday evening to approve her candidacy. A former deputy county executive, Sanin will face incumbent Republican Manuel Esteban of East Northport, a first-term legislator who could be vulnerable in the redrawn district. Suffolk Democratic leader Rich Schaffer declined to discuss the nomination.

“It was not something on my radar, I was not looking for or thinking about running for office,” Sanin told The Point about the unexpected call from Schaffer Friday night.

“I was writing remarks for the council’s upcoming gala Wednesday night. I was thinking about how we need partners in government to make good policy,” she said. She asked a persistent Schaffer whether she could take the weekend to think about it before making a commitment.

Sanin, who lives in Huntington Station, said she would focus her campaign on the Republicans' failure to have a vote on a clean water referendum, affordability, and the need for a greater county role in supporting mental health and addiction treatment problems.

A court ruling invalidating a candidacy is one of the few ways a party can replace a candidate in New York, which has some of the toughest hurdles of any state to substitute a candidate. That can happen only if a candidate dies, moves out of state, or runs for a judgeship. In another ballot change, Schaffer needed a new candidate for Brookhaven Town supervisor after Margot Garant, the former mayor of Port Jefferson, withdrew after a stroke. In order to substitute Lillian Clayman as the Democratic candidate, Schaffer negotiated with his upstate counterparts to nominate Garant, an attorney, for a state Supreme Court judgeship in the 7th Judicial District, based in Rochester, where she has almost no chance of winning.

— Rita Ciolli rita.ciolli@newsday.com

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Reference Point

Robert and the Reefers

There is a moment in the celebrated 1947 film noir classic “Out of the Past” when a cab driver says to Robert Mitchum’s character, “Buddy, you look like a guy who’s in trouble … because you don’t act like it.”

One year later, Mitchum was in real-life trouble, and Newsday’s editorial board had something to say about it.

The title of that Sept. 14, 1948 editorial was “Robert and the Reefers,” which was not the name of a Mitchum-fronted band, despite the actor’s much-underrated singing chops. It was instead a reference to pot. Mitchum had been arrested two weeks earlier in Laurel Canyon, in the hills outside of Los Angeles, for possession of marijuana.

“Narcotics have wrecked bigger and better movie stars than Robert Mitchum,” the board wrote. The board’s focus was not on Mitchum, however, but on the way the nation dealt with marijuana.

“Whether Mitchum goes to jail again or not is unimportant, except to movie moguls with millions tied up in his unreleased films,” the board wrote, the prison mention being a reference to a period of juvenile delinquency during which an arrest for vagrancy landed Mitchum a stint on a Georgia chain gang.

“But it dramatizes the need for review and revision of narcotics laws in particular and our penal system in general,” the board said. “People who take marijuana do not need prison punishment. They need mental hygiene. Yet the law regards them as criminals in the same class as those who go for more insidious dopes — morphine, heroin, opium. This is not a just or smart law.”

That argument still rages 75 years later. Laws finally are changing, records for marijuana possession convictions finally are being expunged, and recreational marijuana use is being legalized — but not everywhere. What’s most remarkable about the Newsday board's take is that in 1948 the nation was closer to “Reefer Madness” anti-pot hysteria than it was to the counterculture acceptance of the 1960s.

But the board was not in that latter camp, either.

“Reefer-smokers are not drug addicts — yet. Medical research has not proved marijuana to be habit-forming, although that raises the question of how much repetition makes a habit,” the board wrote. “The weed itself is a problem because it can be grown almost anywhere, is cheap, appeals to two-bit delinquents.”

Mitchum did end up doing time. He spent a week in the Los Angeles County jail — Mitchum reportedly said it was “like Palm Springs but without the riffraff” — and 43 days on a prison farm in Castaic, California. Photographers from Life magazine were allowed to shoot him mopping up in his prison uniform. “Marijuana traffic will not be stopped by making horrible examples of Hollywood characters,” Newsday’s board wrote.

But on the topic of shaming, Mitchum had the last laugh.

Three years later, his conviction was overturned after his arrest was exposed as part of a police sting designed to catch Hollywood celebrities.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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