Month: November 2018

Canada (Conversation) – Canada currently finds itself at the intersection of two historic social phenomena with massive implications for public health. First, after decades of restricting public access to marijuana, on Oct. 17, Canada became the first major industrial nation to fully legalize cannabis for both medicinal and recreational usage. Second, we find ourselves in the throes of a worsening opioid addiction crisis that has already caused the deaths of thousands of Canadians, young and old. The interactions between opioids and cannabis have been explored at the clinical and pharmacological…

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United States (Conversation) – Thanksgiving may be uniquely American, but its core spirit was exported from harvest festivals stretching back for millennia. Its essence is being grateful for what one has, while noting a duty to share one’s good fortune. In my new book, “The Food Sharing Revolution: How Start-Ups, Pop-Ups, and Co-Ops are Changing the Way We Eat,” I look at sharing from a variety of angles – good, bad and downright ugly. One example is the custom of seed sharing, which can be traced from indigenous societies and the…

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World Wide (Conversation) – Approximately five times more women than men are victims of sexual assault and young adults are at especially high risk. The impact on young people’s psychological and physical health can be devastating, especially given that this developmental period is when young people should be developing and refining intimacy skills in close relationships. What is striking about sexual assault is that, despite decades of research and public health interventions, there has been little change in rates since we first began studying it in earnest during the 1980s…

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Canada (Conversation) – Recently, posters were discovered on several walls at the University of Manitoba with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.” Other similar incidents were reported in Halifax, Regina and elsewhere around the world. Most who saw the paper print-outs denounced them as hate propaganda from white nationalists. Following the incident, some media outlets, including the Winnipeg Free Press, received an email from the alleged poster, who claimed he was a University of Manitoba student who papered the walls. The student said the posters were a “protest of…

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United States (Conversation) – A record number of women are headed to statehouses and Capitol Hill in 2019. One hundred women were elected to the U.S. House, which means that at least 121 women will serve in the 116th Congress – up from the current 107. Twelve women were elected to the U.S. Senate. This new record shatters the 1992 “year of the woman” in which five women were elected to serve in the Senate. Media outlets have been quick to attribute women’s candidacies and successes to the Democratic “blue…

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Mexico (Conversation) – The Hondurans who banded together last month to travel northward to the United States, fleeing gangs, corruption and poverty, were joined by other Central Americans hoping to find safety in numbers on this perilous journey. But group travel couldn’t save everyone. Earlier this month, two trucks from the caravan disappeared in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. One person who escaped told officials that about “65 children and seven women were sold” by the driver to a group of armed men. Mexican authorities are searching for the migrants,…

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United States (ProPublica) – Andy Leisher didn’t like what he was seeing on the security cameras from his post at the front desk of the Ramada Inn in Janesville, Wisconsin. On the closed-circuit television in front of him, Leisher watched as a man in his 30s kissed what appeared to be a teenager in the motel hot tub. It put him on alert. “It just felt awkward,” Leisher said of the scene. “She just seemed really young, and he seemed really old. Or too old to be with her.” When…

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United States (Conversation) – You’ve heard of Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. How about Big Marijuana? The drug’s growing legalization is raising concerns among small-scale marijuana farmers and retailers that the corporatization of weed may be right around the corner. For example, earlier this year NASDAQ became the first major U.S. stock exchange to list shares of a marijuana production company. And in August, Corona-maker Constellation Brands shocked Wall Street by making a US$3.8 billion investment in a Canadian marijuana producer, sparking a bull market in marijuana stocks industry-wide. Even…

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Texas, United States (TexasTribune) – Approaching the podium, Dallas middle school teacher Ron Francis faced the circle of 15 large, wooden desks at the Texas State Board of Education’s September meeting. The board was discussing changes to the social studies curriculum standards, the result of a 10-month-long process to cut back on what teachers have to cover in the classroom. But Francis, a 6-foot-tall Army veteran who teaches in Highland Park ISD, was more concerned about what the board wasn’t cutting. The standards currently list slavery alongside three other causes for…

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(Conversation) – For Marie Colvin, it was Lebanon’s War of the Camps that brought home the power of journalism. In April 1987 Burj al Barajneh, a Palestinian refugee camp, was besieged by Amal, a Shia militia backed by the Syrian regime. Colvin and her photographer Tom Stoddart paid an Amal commander to briefly hold fire while they ran into the camp across no-man’s land. The assault on the camp was relentless and women were forced to run a gauntlet of sniper fire to get food and water for their families. One…

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