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Are safe drug injection spaces beneficial?

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A supervised injection site in Montreal, Canada, called CACTUS Montreal. Sites like these have been argued to encourage drug use by addicts, but the evidence is flimsy. These days it’s easy to find someone who believes in the supposed benefits marijuana provides for pain, municipal income, or even curing diseases. But the buck often stops there. What’s much rarer is to find someone extolling the usage of harder drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, or heroin. The latter’s effects on the user have been etched into the collective mind. But just because these drugs are definitively harmful, how do we help those who are already addicted? One such proposal has come under fire due to its seemingly absurdist logic: helping those addicted by providing safe spaces to consume drugs. The blog piece entitled “‘Let me inject heroin in a safe place, it’s my citizen right’” by Arnelious Dominich illustrates some arguments against such an idea. But is it actually such a bad idea? First, we need
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Should Globalism Be a Dirty Word?

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Alex Jones, a far-right conspiratorial political pundit, is a frequent detractor of globalism. This belief is often repeated across the Republican party, and even with some Democrats. There is a dirty word going around the Republican party and even some parts of the Democratic party: globalism. Republicans in Congress frequently disavow so-called “globalist policies” implemented by Democratic politicians, and those of the far right paint their enemies with the often-anti-Semitic pejorative of “globalist”. But globalism should not be looked at with such disdain. In fact, the U.S. government would do good to implement true globalist policies for the benefit of the U.S. and the world.  First, we should define what we mean by “globalism”. The term refers to a perspective of national policymaking that considers its effect on a global scale. For instance, when a country is having economic issues that could be partly allayed by tariffs on global imports, a country would consider suc
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The Devil's Lettuce, Study Restrictions, and Scientific Alarm

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The issue of marijuana has intrigued me in the past years. For as long as I had even heard of the existence of the drug, I’ve heard arguments mostly on the pro side of the issue. It’s rare that someone will come out on the undeniably pro-weed internet to excoriate the supposed ill effects of marijuana. After all, we’ve come a long way since scare-mongering movies like “Reefer Madness” attempted to showcase these so-called dangerous effects in an unintentionally laughable fashion. And the article “Legalize the Lettuce!” by Matthew Serpas is no exception to the modern-day ideas about weed.  In the article, Sherpas extols the virtues of a well-regulated and legal marketplace for weed. He argues that the popularity of the drug combined with the taxes that the government could levy on its sales would be beneficial to those governments. An aspect of this taxation argument that took me by surprise, however, was the idea that a certain portion of the tax revenue should go towards a progr
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The Government is Fine, You Aren't

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Ask any citizen of the United States, either on the left or right of the political spectrum, to lay out their list of government grievances, and you’ll soon realize that the list is almost unending. Indeed, it is practically a national pastime to blame the U.S. government for our multitude of problems. Healthcare, immigration, climate change, etc. are all issues current and past governments have floundered to address. Yet, while it may be common to use this line of thinking, it masks a deeper and more vexing issue underneath: that if the American public really wanted to solve these problems, they could. Indeed, the frequent adjustment of our founding document gives a clue of the potential for radical change in the United States. Furthermore, the public has never had more power when it comes to directly changing their situation through election of officials. When it comes to discussions of governance, the public often looks to the Constitution for guidance. It is the refere
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Is White Supremacy an Issue Worth Government and Political Attention?

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Hate crimes increased by 17% in 2017, an unprecedented rise worth government attention. On both sides of the political aisle, it’s important to have a boogeyman. For example, an issue that the other side brings up must be dismissed outright as nothing but a made-up boogeyman. There’s no actual problem in your side, be it Democratic or Republican. What’s really happening is that the other side is trying to make an issue out of nothing. This is a tactic used frequently in discussions of US government to divert attention from certain issues to others that are believed to be real problems. Ann Coulter, for instance, knows exactly how to employ it. In her recent article entitled White Supremacists Ate My Homework , she illustrates this strategy on the topic of modern white supremacy, an issue of growing concern in modern politics and government. Her points are twofold. Firstly, she argues that modern white supremacy is a non-issue cooked up by angry Democrats out to harm Republicans.
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Does Age Matter in Politics?

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The members of the recent 116th Congress are the most diverse yet in race, gender, and age. With the recent influx of fresh faces to Congress after the 2018 midterm elections, it was refreshing to see a diverse crowd. Yet, one aspect of this diversity could pose a strategic problem: age. Frank Bruni, a columnist for The New York Times, argues in a recent piece entitled In Defense of the Gerontocracy that age is a factor to be considered in the current US Congress and, more specifically, that older congresspersons are a vital component. Indeed, it is a common theme of critique to denounce one's position of power based simply on that person’s age, and Bruni submits that it happens all too often towards older congressmen. Whether power is rejected on the belief that the person is either too young or too old to hold it skillfully, these beliefs about age can cloud or hamper our political thinking. Bruni points out that older members of Congress have been in politics long enough t
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Trump's National Emergency is Harmful to the Rule of Law... and Good Optics.

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Trump's use of a national emergency to fund the border wall could run into legal issues, not to mention its damaging implications for the rule of law At the time of writing, the news has just broken that President Donald Trump will use the emergency powers of the presidency to attempt to fund a concrete or steel barrier at the southern border. After a tumultuous and economically harmful government shutdown last month over this proposed border, Trump had failed to achieve his demand for border wall funding. It seemed plausible that he would acquiesce to a new bipartisan compromise, that included no wall funding, cooked up by a congressional committee to deal with the issue of border security. However, It appears that, even though he will likely sign the negotiated deal, he will still attempt to use his emergency powers. But if the president decides that he must use the emergency powers vested in him by the Constitution to achieve political ends, what’s so wrong with that?
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