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Any marijuana user knows failing a drug test will most likely cost you your job. Or, that getting popped for marijuana possession could ruin your career.

But what happens to a Fortune 500 company that’s been accused repeatedly over the previous decade by both federal and state law enforcement of breaking federal law by distributing massive amounts of opioids? A Fortune 500 company the Ohio Attorney General’s Office and others allege has helped fuel the heroin epidemic that’s killed tens of thousands?

If you are Dublin-based Cardinal Health, you pay a small fine and keep distributing huge amounts of opioids as your revenues go over $130 billion annually, that’s what.

You also pump Congress full of money so it hamstrings the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) from investigating opioid distributors, as told recently to 60 Minutes by a DEA whistle blower. And as for the founders of Cardinal Health, the Walter family, you become, over this same decade one of the richest if not the richest family in Central Ohio.

On March 22, people around the world celebrated World Water Day, an international holiday established by The United Nations in 1993 to advocate for sustainable management of freshwater resources. This year’s theme was Nature for Water. According to worldwaterday.org:

Environmental damage, together with climate change, is driving the water-related crises we see around the world. Floods, drought and water pollution are all made worse by degraded vegetation, soil, rivers and lakes. When we neglect our ecosystems, we make it harder to provide everyone with the water we need to survive and thrive. Nature-based solutions have the potential to solve many of our water challenges. We need to do so much more with ‘green’ infrastructure and harmonize it with ‘grey’ infrastructure wherever possible. Planting new forests, reconnecting rivers to floodplains, and restoring wetlands will rebalance the water cycle and improve human health and livelihoods.

You know you’ve got a heart (or at least I think you do). You know you have lungs. You know you possess a spine (well, at least some people do …). Kidding aside, these organs permit your body – and you – to function. Respectively, they are part of your circulatory system, your respiratory system and your nervous system. I’m going to tell you about another bodily system that is also integral to you.

It is called the “endocannabinoid” system (ECS), pronounced [en‧duh‧kuh‧nab‧uh‧noid].

I’ll bet you’ve heard of marijuana. No? Do you have a brain? Our favorite herb is often referred to by its scientific name: cannabis. It’s an ancient plant species that has followed mankind from prehistoric times through the present and will continue onward through millennia so long as there are humans. Its ties bind plants, mammals and mankind together.

Marijuana is a compound of over 450 chemicals. The 80 that are unique to the plant are each termed a cannabinoid. [pronunciation: “can-na-bin-oid”] 

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, says that if everything is changing, everyone must be part of the change. Fair enough, but what can one person do?

Actually, you can do a lot right here in central Ohio. Simply Living members have been challenging the status quo since our founding in 1992. It’s not just about recycling, switching to LEDs, and starting a vegetable garden.  We can and should do those things because they are the habits of a new, mindful, ecologically-aware culture that will supplant the current consumer culture.

After a disturbing pattern of apparent retaliation, neglect and discrimination at the highest level of power within the Columbus Police Department (CPD), State Rep. Bernadine Kennedy Kent (D-Columbus) is calling on Mayor Andrew Ginther and City Council members to hold Police Chief Kim Jacobs accountable for her blatant insubordination and dereliction of duty.

"When people pick up the phone for help, they need the police to do everything in their power to keep our community safe and bring criminals to justice," said Kennedy Kent. "Police Chief Jacobs has not only failed to ensure the rights of victims are protected, but public records support her biases opened the door to undeserved intimidation, discrimination, and retaliation of whistleblowers as well as victims. It's politics at its worst. Taxpayers deserve accountability from the city's top cop."

Ohio’s decision to buy new voting machines will make the difference between hackable -- or less-hackable elections.

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: All computer voting machines can be hacked!

We remember when Ohioans witnessed their votes jumping from John Kerry to George Bush on voting machines in Youngstown during the 2004 election. Voters saw their Kerry selection disappear during the infamous “Franklin County fade” on electronic voting machines in that election as well. Ohio’s former voting machine company, Diebold admitted its system accidentally knocked 10,000 registered voters off the rolls.

Ohio’s previous Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner conducted the seminal Everest Study of Ohio’s voting machines in 2007 and found that all of them had security problems. The study concluded that: “Unfortunately, the findings in this study indicate that the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.”

Trump’s leadership is equivalent to environmental destruction. I’ve been posting #ImpeachTrumpNow after every environmental Trump decision. His immediate order to green light the Dakota Access Pipeline through the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, endangering their water supply and that of millions downstream; his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord; his permitting 0il and gas drilling in our National Forests and Parks; and appointing Scott Pruitt, oil and gas lackey as EPA Director, former Oklahoma Attorny General, where earthquake frequency and magnitude is escalating daily from their toxic frack waste injection wells disposal. 

Judge Cynthia Ebner, endorsed by the Stonewall Democrats, handed out sentences in the #BlackPride4 on Tuesday, March 13.  Last week word was sent from the City Attorney's Office that there would be no jail time requested from the judge. The city attorney proescuting this case made this clear for all three of the #BlackPride4.

Intense pressure put on the city of Columbus, including a National Day of Action to Free the #BlackPride4 organized by GetEqual and Black Queer Intersectional Columbus BQIC) on Monday, had an impact. Supporters of the #BlackPride4 had simple message: #Columbusisguilty -- not the #BlackPride4 who were arrested when they held a silent vigil during the 2017 Stonewall Pride march. The vigil was to call attention to the murders of black trans people and killings of black people in Columbus by the police. Immediately, when the #BlackPride4 began a vigil in the street, Columbus Police jumped on them and brutalized them.

A thriving community where wisdom prevails is the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s vision and mantra. But this doesn’t apply anymore to the Main Library’s next door neighbor the Grant Oak apartment complex, a quasi affordable dorm for college students attending CCAD, Franklin University and Capital University. And much like many lower-income peoples who were living downtown (ie, Bollinger Tower), they too are set to be thrown out into the cold.

Grant Oak, seven red-brick buildings built in the 1940s, was sold in January by the library’s Board of Trustees to the city’s pet developer the Pizzuti Companies for $1.26 million even though the Franklin County Auditor’s Office valued the property at $3 million. Thus the library, which could always use the money, shorted themselves roughly $1.75 million in taxpayer’s dollars.

True, Pizzuti Companies had the inside track because they were recently under contract to oversee ten other library construction projects, but $1.75 amounts to a lot of books and other services that could be utilized by the numerous collegians and high schoolers who use the libraries to further themselves.

The two most recently scheduled Ohio executions were not carried out, and it’s starting to look like a fair bet the next one won’t happen either. In November, a failed execution attempt ended with Alva Campbell returned to his cell. In January, a juror raised questions about information withheld during the sentencing of Raymond Tibbetts, prompting the governor to order a new clemency hearing. In April, Ohio plans the execution of a man who may actually be innocent.

William T. Montgomery has been on Ohio’s death row for over 31 years for the 1986 murders of Cynthia Tincher and Debra Ogle in Lucas County (Toledo). He has always maintained his innocence from the time of his arrest. This case features the classic hallmarks of wrongful convictions: jailhouse informant, prosecutorial misconduct, hidden exculpatory evidence and leniency to a co-defendant in exchange for testimony.