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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 27th, 2018, once again, the legal “authorities” made the same decision that seems to be the norm when it comes to police officers killing black man and boys “in the line of duty.” What decision did the Louisiana officials make regarding the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling? A black man that was seen, not alleged, but seen, laying on his back while two police officers held him down and shot him dead. They made the decision that police officers are not held responsible for killing citizens, especially black citizens, and will not be charged with murder when it is very clear, through visual evidence, that murder was committed.

Police officers getting off with killing black boys, or anyone for that matter, isn’t always the case. The police officer who shot unarmed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards in 2017 was charged with murder in Texas within a week of using his rifle to shoot into the car that Edwards was sitting in, with three other black boys, at a house party. This past March in Minnesota a police officer was indicted with murder charges for shooting 40-year-old Australian woman, Justine Damond, when police responded to her 911 call.

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.

Wed, April 4, 6:45-8:45pm
King Arts Complex, 867 Mt. Vernon Ave.
On the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination we will commemorate through song, narration, and images, the African-American resistance to the violence and oppression that have defined the Black experience in America. Keith Kilty, at kilty.1@osu.edu. kingartscomplex.com.

Armed and dangerous: He’s the plainclothes “jump out boy” who shot up a Linden neighborhood in the summer of 2016 killing a young black resident, Henry Green. He’s the uniformed officer seen on tape stomping on a black man’s head as he lay cuffed on the ground in 2017. He is Zachary Rosen, and he was fired. But the Fraternal Order of Police threw such a fit and their weight around the city of Columbus that Rosen was reinstated last month. At first he was assigned back to his old beat in Linden until posters appeared warning the community that he was back on the streets: “Be on the lookout for this officer,” it read with Rosen’s scowling photo, “and record any suspicious behavior.” Later the Dispatch noted the CPD may assign him to a different area of the city. Pity them.

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”] 

Things are going really well for the Democrats. And none of it is thanks to them. They are headed for significant victories at the end of the year and all without crafting progressive legislation or discussing the biggest issues on the campaign trail. The Republicans are imploding and continuously feeding the Democrats ammunition to use against them. Then there is the new wave of activists whose baby steps and half measures are straight out of the Democratic playbook. All the gutless liberals must be positively tumescent at how the past two weeks have turned out.

The good news: By 2045, Columbus has bucked its opioid addiction. The bad news: It’s replaced it with something far worse.

Our hometown is depicted as the headquarters of a virtual playground called the Oasis in Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi blockbuster. So seductive is this escape from reality that most of the world’s population spends its days donning interactive gear, creating avatars and sending them off on mind-blowing adventures.

The phenomenon has turned Columbus into the planet’s fastest-growing burg, but the growth spurt has been a painful one. Many residents—including our teenage hero, Wade (Tye Sheridan)—live in the “Stacks,” a slum consisting of mobile homes piled on top of each other. Impoverished by the Oasis’s demands on their time and money, they have little hope of ever bettering themselves.

We enter this dystopian future at a time when the mogul behind the Oasis, a man named Halliday (Mark Rylance), has died after launching a contest to choose his heir. Wade, with the help of his avatar, Parzival, is confident he’s up to the challenge.

At this time of every school year, most seniors across the country are itching to bust out of high school and into their own independent lives. This feeling is commonly known as “Senioritis” and lucky for me, I haven’t spent the last nine weeks cooped up in a calculus class fantasizing about what comes after graduation. I’m on a semester long service learning project called Walkabout. It’s a project that develops the skills, attitudes and values of responsible adulthood. The test of Walkabout, and of life, is not what a student can do under a teacher’s direction, but what he or she can do as an individual. So instead of dealing with daily tests and assignments, I’ve been working for a local community radio station called WGRN.

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.