President Hardin, esteemed members of City Council, and fellow community members. Thank you for granting me an opportunity to speak before you tonight on harm reduction strategies for a healthier West Side through our compassionate client center and trauma responsive approach via 1DivineLine2Health Hilltop Drop-In Center. We are on frontlines serving those affected by human and drug trafficking. We serve their children and caregivers. An issue of immense importance to our city is the need to implement and advance effective harm reduction strategies as a cornerstone of our public health response towards substance use disorders. This is a subject that is often difficult to discuss but it is critical to the health, safety, and dignity of residents.

Even the experts get it wrong once in a while.

Erected in 1929, on a ridge over a Maumee River floodplain south of Toledo, is an impressive statue commemorating the Battle of Fallen Timbers. It was the height of summer 1794, and a Native American confederacy made what would amount to one of several last stands against the invaders. The battle’s name was inspired by a tornado that had previously torn through the mix of prairie and forest. On the battlefield was future President William Henry Harrison, as was Tecumseh.

Near the statue is a notable rock moved here to honor the battle’s Native casualties. The legend goes a chief rallied his warriors from this rock – his last words before being gunned down. There’s decaying tobacco stuffed into chiseled holes, testimony First Nations continue to make offerings.  

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To a Land Unknown is a film shaped by its director’s dual allegiances.

As a man of Palestinian descent (though he now lives in Denmark), Mahdi Fleifel is devoted to telling the stories of his people. But as a cinephile, he seems equally devoted to recreating the magic of the American films he watched growing up in the 1980s.

The result is the story of two Palestinian refugees that combines the unvarnished realism of a documentary with the kind of alternately warm and testy relationship you might find in an American “buddy flick.”

The tale’s setting is Athens, Greece, where Chatila and his cousin Reda (Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah, both excellent) are barely scraping by with the help of petty thefts and, in Reda’s case, paid sexual trysts. Their situation is desperate, but they see it as temporary.

If they can save up enough money, they plan to purchase fake passports and make their way to what they see as the greener pastures of Germany. Once there, they hope to open a café with the help of Chatila’s wife and son, who are now living in a refugee camp in Lebanon. 

The recent legislation passed by the United States Congress, oddly named One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), and signed by the U.S. president, shows that Republican lawmakers in the nation’s capital don’t care about excess and premature mortality in the United States.

If these increased deaths truly mattered to the Republican representatives and senators, the OBBB would not have included such a lack of concern for its dreadful consequences on human life and wellbeing. 

In the coming months, the OBBB can be expected to result in excess and premature deaths in the United States, especially among vulnerable groups, such as low-income individuals and families, children, people with disabilities, and seniors.

The lack of concern from Republican lawmakers about the expected excess and premature mortality resulting from the OBBB is evident in the candid remark made by an Iowa Republican senator during a recent town hall meeting.