Student asks Rep. LaHood to support Insulin Price Controls

Dear Honorable Representative Darin LaHood,

Today I am writing to you about a bill to lower the price of insulin that has recently been introduced in the United States: I am referring to the Insulin Price Reduction Act. (H.R. 4906, introduced this past October by Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado). You serve on the Ways and Means Committee, and back in October this bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Health, where it has not yet been passed.  This is a bill that will help many Americans, myself included. I have been a Type One Diabetic for going on sixteen years. I have been around diabetics and insulin my whole life as my mother is also diabetic. I have seen insulin prices sky rocket in the past sixteen years, and it still to this day does not make sense to me. Why should a life saving drug be so hard to afford? I know I am not the only one that feels this way, but I want to make sure that I make an effort to have my voice heard. 

Do you know how much it costs per day, on average, to take insulin to make up for the fact that we persons with Diabetes Type 1 don’t have a functioning pancreas? In India it costs about 150 Rupees per day, or about $2; or about $60 per month. In America the average cost of $6,000 per year to treat a person with Type 1 Diabetes works out to about $500 per month, or $16 per day. That’s the average, not the lowest, nor the highest. The cheapest brands of insulin, such as Novocain R and Novocain N cost over $90 per vial (about 9¢ per unit), and a person who weighs about 140 pounds must use 30 to 50 units per day ($2.85 to $4.55 per day), if they are using those least expensive vials of insulin. But today most people are using rapid-acting insulins such as insulin lisper (18¢ to 24¢ per unit, or $5.70 to $12 per day, $175 to $350 per month for a person weighing about 140 pounds). The least expensive pens for injecting quick acting insulin (like the Humalog KwikPen) cost about 33¢ per unit, so that’s more like something between $312 and $500 per month for that. These are the very cheapest on the market, but there are other insulins; one that you can inhale called Afrezza costs a little over $1 per unit.  Can you imagine working full-time at a wage of $15 per hour, earning about $2,000 per month, and having to spend $400 to $500 to stay alive with insulin, plus $800 for housing, $200 for food, $400 for maintaining and driving a car with insurance, and so forth? It doesn’t leave much for living expenses. People with diabetes who live in places where housing is more expensive, or who live in places where you can still be paid $8 or $9 per hour for working, are really not able to afford insulin on top of their other expenses. 

Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Tom Carper, Kevin Cramer, and Susan Collins have all proposed a legislation to help keep new insulin prices more affordable. This is an effort to lower the price of insulin back to a price no higher than the 2006 price (adjusted for the inflation in the consumer price index). This bill has also been endorsed by JDRF and the American Diabetes Association. The ADA has stated that pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) have increased rebates (PBMs get a cut of the rebate) as a percentage of the list price. These increasing rebates increase the list price for the insulin, thus resulting in higher out-of-pocket price for individuals needing insulin. Just with Medicare alone, these out-of-pocket prices have more than quadrupled since 2007. 

The goal of the Insulin Price Reduction Act is plain and simple:  lower the price of insulin to become more affordable to those who depend on it. The bill is an attempt to reduce the use of middlemen (PBMs) to reduce the use of rebates for any insulin product to make the price no higher that in 2006. This could result in more than a 75% decrease in price for the drug. Future price increases would only be related to medical inflation. This bill also aims to cut the list prices by restricting rebates that go to the PBMs. The competition within the insulin market has led to higher list prices because higher prices mean higher rebates which mean more of a cut for the PBMs. What this bill is attempting to achieve is to make the price an insurer pays for a drug closer to what an uninsured individual may pay. This more or so means that the patients with high deductible health plans would be able to obtain insulin at a standard copay rather than paying the full price until they meet their deductible. JDRF has stated “This bill would take several significant steps to make insulin affordable. Prescription drug rebates currently make up about 70 percent of the list price of insulin.” Insulin is a large money maker for PBMs because these companies know that people need this drug to stay alive, therefore people will pay what they have to in order to obtain the drug. 

As I was doing research on the Insulin Price Reduction Act, I came across some statistics that should affect any individual, diabetic or not. There have been an immense amount of cases resulting in death related to insulin rationing. In July of 2019, a 21-year-old died as a result of rationing insulin. In June of 2019, a 24-year-old died after a week-long hospital visit to treat DKA because of her skipping insulin doses. In 2017 three individuals died after they could no longer afford insulin and had to begin rationing their insulin. These individuals should not have had to ration their life saving drug because they could not afford to take care of themselves. The rising price of insulin has to stop otherwise who knows how many deaths are going to occur in 2020 because of rationing. 

I believe that a large portion of the United States could benefit from the Insulin Price Reduction Act. This population could benefit from this Act because I am sure that almost everyone knows someone who’s life depends on insulin. There are about 1.25 million Americans with Type One Diabetes, but each of us has several family members and many friends, so Diabetes touches the lives of many tens of millions of Americans. There are so many Type One Diabetics and even some Type Two Diabetics who can not afford to take care of themselves because of the price of insulin. Therefore individuals with diabetes live shorter lives or are slowly killing themselves because they may have to make the decision between paying rent or their medication. Many times I personally have had to ration my insulin so that I could wait until the next paycheck to get my month’s supply of insulin. There are so many other prescriptions and necessities that diabetics need as well. The price of insulin is just another burden that these individuals face. I think that this Act should draw more attention to this problem, as it may help save the lives of many individuals who unfortunately live with this disease. All I am asking is that you encourage that health subcommittee of the your Ways and Means committee to get working on passing this bill, and I hope that you will vote for it the it comes up for a vote in your committee, and then vote for it on the House floor vote. I am beginning to fear for my own health as well as the health of those who suffer from diabetes along with me. If this doesn’t get passed, I’m afraid the suffering and grief for many of us who have Type One Diabetes will be impossible to measure.

Links to Articles Containing Information I used:

https://beyondtype1.org/insulin-price-reduction-act/

https://myglu.org/articles/the-senate-s-insulin-price-reduction-act-what-you-need-to-know

http://gabionline.net/Policies-Legislation/Bill-introduced-in-US-to-cut-insulin-prices

https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/facts-statistics-infographic#1 

http://www.diabeticretinopathy.org.uk/prevention/insulindoseinsulin.htm 

https://www.goodrx.com/blog/how-much-does-insulin-cost-compare-brands/ 

https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-insulin-cost-per-day-for-a-Type-1-diabetic-in-India-on-average 

Web Page about the Safe Passage Initiative

You can follow this link to a website designed by a policy course student with a purpose of informing visitors about the safe passage initiative's approach to helping prevent addiction and abuse of substances.

War on Drugs is a sociopolitical masterstroke

The following paper is in reaction to the class discussion we had about mental health and substance abuse. I have chosen to write a brief reaction paper positing a plausible motive behind Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party’s mental health and drug policies, which led to the defunding and the eventual shut down of numerous mental health institutions and substance abuse treatment centers in the early 1980’s. 

In my opinion, The Reagan Administration and The Republican Party defunded and shut down mental health institutions and substance abuse treatment centers in the 1980’s not only because they wanted the private sector to take over the care and treatment of such individuals but also because they wanted/needed such people to be seen wandering the streets and committing crimes to give Americans the impression that the streets needed to be cleaned up.

Think about it: The Reagan Administration declares a so-called war on drugs, pointing to images of mentally-ill poor people on the streets doing drugs, while he implements policies which lead to the release of hundreds of thousands of such individuals on our nation’s streets. The Reagan Administration then grants amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of them said to be mentally ill cast outs from the island of Cuba. Then, at the very time that this war on drugs was declared, it seemed to many people who I have spoken to about this issue who lived in the inner-city during that time that there was an influx of cocaine in the city during those years, not a drop off as one would expect during a so-called war on drugs.

Having said all that, the war on drugs has obviously not been a failure. The Republican Party accomplished its goal of increasing the private sector’s role/responsibility in caring for mentally ill people and substance abusers, while also conducing to the probability that such people would invade the streets and scare the citizenry into supporting their policies, which ultimately involved transferring many of those mentally ill substance abusers out of one institution into another, with the added benefit of being able to criminalize and lock up the boogeymen who supplied them with the drugs.

The war on drugs is not a failure; it is a sociopolitical masterstroke.

In the 1980s the federal government and most of the states did not adequately fund the community mental health centers that were supposed to become the agents of delivery for mental health policies, including everything from prevention and community wellness to long-term residential care for people in each center’s catchment area. 

Your reaction treats the government and the Republican Party as if these institutions were persons with fairly simple motives and logical processes, but of course this is a necessary generalization or abstraction, since we know that policy-making processes and political parties and governments are all aggregations of hundreds and thousands of individuals, with each individual having a variety of mixed and sometimes contradictory motives and goals.

There are a variety of moral foundations that would inspire most people to be concerned about drug addiction.  For some people, the rule of obedience to legitimate authority makes them concerned about drugs since they believe God or the government forbids drug addiction and abuse. For others, the rule of purity informs their emotional rejection of drug use, since drugs or intoxication are unclean or impure.  Some are motivated by a sort of conservation ethic, seeing a waste of talent and potential when others abuse or become addicted to drugs.  For many people, a care ethic motivates them to oppose drug use, since persons who become addicted to drugs or abuse them are often hurt, or harm others.  With so many moral reasons why people might want to control or forbid how others alter their minds through alcohol and other chemicals, we tend to forget there could be other motives. 

When Marx said religion was the aspirin of the masses (he actually called it opium, but he meant it in the sense of a painkiller, not a drug of abuse) he was pointing out that powerful elites might prefer people to escape from harsh realities by turning to drugs.  This was a point in Huxley’s Brave New World in which all the people were constantly taking mood altering drugs to improve their feelings, or in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where people were turning a dial and pushing buttons on a machine to give them experiences of different moods and outlooks.  People who have a strong liberty ethic might also approve of allowing others to use all sorts of drugs, since the use does not directly cause harm to others.  

You are adding to this list of possible motives for allowing or encouraging drugs by suggesting that some people considered that if drugs were widely available, this would create fear and destruction, and in a climate of fear and destruction, people would turn to political parties that offered law-and-order policies.  This is exactly the strategy of some terrorist groups, who seek to create chaos with terrorism to undermine the authority of governments and make common people so desperate and hopeless about the government’s ability to protect them that they will turn to the terrorists as saviors who can put an end to the chaos. The question is, is it plausible that a significant number of Republicans could have had this sort of mentality, really plotting to use the tragic disaster of homelessness, persons with mental illnesses unable to get treatment or services, and an influx of cocaine into poor communities in order to turn people toward a more traditional value system and a political party that promised law and order?

My rule is to generally assume that when people follow courses of action that lead to terrible consequences, they are most likely to be motivated by ignorance, stupidity, or cognitive biases that prevented them from seeing the harm their actions would cause.  I think callousness and lack of empathy is the next most likely cause of evil policies, following ignorance and stupidity.  Malicious intent or long-range strategies to win personal gain are also possible, but I think they are rarely good explanations when simple ignorance, stupidity, cognitive biases, or indifference and contempt are more readily available as explanations.

Mental health clinics weren’t adequately supported because Republicans (and many Democrats) had other priorities that were more important, including lower taxes, economic growth, decreased government size, military spending, and so forth.  Persons with mental illness, who would benefit from well-funded community mental health services, just aren’t very important to the political parties, at least they are relatively unimportant compared to the needs of that military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about, or the goals of the wealthiest and most powerful people, who generally want lower taxes, a smaller government, and a growing economy, and consider these goals more urgent than public safety nets to provide a decent life for every person suffering from a mental illness or disability. 

Yes, there were some interesting connections between drug dealers and CIA informants back in the 1980s. Most famously, the president of Panama was both an informant for the CIA and a major drug trafficker.  But I think the Hitz report showed that the CIA was mostly guilty of not aggressively investigating the drug connections of some informants and local partners, but was probably not guilty of actually directly using the drug trade to raise money for their support of various thugs and terrorists in Central America. 

Reaction to Winter's Bone

Here is a student reaction to a film we saw in class.

A few weeks ago, in class we watched a movie: Winter’s Bone. This movie was very eye opening and interesting to me, I never took my eyes off the screen. The movie, Winter’s Bone, encompassed many topics that we have discussed in our class; poverty, substance abuse, housing issues, and family violence, etc. I was very impressed with the number of issues in just one movie. Not only did this film relate to our class so well, but it was eye opening and filled with the anticipation of overcoming the struggles and obstacles of the poverty life.

Along with the issues that correlated with the class, there were social welfare policies that the family could have used to better their lives but they did not take advantage of these helping aids. The family could have been a part of TANF, which would have helped them to buy healthy food instead of relying on their neighbors to be generous enough to share. Since the mother was ill and unable to work, the family could have benefitted from SSI, the mother could have gotten a better medication that actually helped her. I believe where the family needed the most help was taking care of the mother. Ree was just 17 years old and she was not in school, but she was taking on the parent role and taking care of her own mother.

In the movie, Ree and her younger brother Sonny see a neighbor skinning an animal outside. Sonny said they should ask the neighbors if they would share. Ree replied with “Never ask for what oughta be offered.” This shows the audience that the family does not ask for help, but expects other to see they are suffering and help them out. It astonishes me that there are families out there like this; that need help but have too much “dignity” to ask for it. If I was in a situation like Ree’s family was I would try to get every social welfare policy that I could to help my family out. But one has to think the type of environment that family lives in; out in the country, shooting squirrels for dinner, not having a car, and having a young adult stay home to do household duties rather than go to school. Some of the families that fit into that category do not want anything to do with the government or government funded aids, it is just the way they were brought up. One cannot judge another’s family until they walk in their shoes and seen what they have gone through.

It is sad to think that there are families just like Ree’s out there that need help. These families are struggling on a day-to-day basis. This is where a social worker’s duty comes in.

 And, as her father was a drug manufacturer, cooking Crystal Meth in labs, this is exactly the sort of family that would be considered undeserving by many observers, although the father was murdered when his extended family and neighbors suspected he was cooperating with police and informing on them to reduce jail time, so perhaps this fact might have reduced prejudices against the family.  

If this family was seen by a social worker, I’m sure the family would be standoffish at first, but then realize that they are there to actually help the family and not take the children away. A good social worker would see that Ree is 17 years old, the children would be better off staying with their sister to care for them rather than be split apart. Overall, this movie was a very touching one in many aspects; family bonding and loyalty just to name a couple. I am glad I got the chance to see this movie; it opened my eyes to situations that I have never personally been in.

Mandatory Minimum Sentences

Here is a student paper on the mandatory minimum sentencing law.

Mandatory Minimum Sentences Law

Second Medium Length Paper

            The United States started “War on Drugs” in 1971 to fight against distribution, consumption and use of harmful drugs. Richard Nixon was the first president to hold fame in the “War on Drugs”. Nixon had shown promise on this war and created the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973 for the narcotic and marijuana outbreak in the United States and elsewhere. Later presidents, such as President Clinton in 1996, used this idea, enforced many anti-drug laws, and committed millions of dollars to this war. (Suddath, 2009). One interesting law used in this war was hastily put together without any contributing outside sources, and this was the Mandatory Minimum Sentencing law.

            in 1986 the Congress passed a law that put a mandatory minimum sentencing for cocaine users. This federal mandatory drug sentence depended on three different things, “the type of drug, weight of the drug mixture, and the number of prior convictions” (DPA, 2010). The judge could not look at the person’s reason for using the drug, what role they had in their possession, and whether the person was likely to use the drug again. This prevented wealthy drug traffickers from bribing the judges to reduce their sentences or dismiss the cases against them.

One drug that became a prominent scare and a target of the mandatory sentencing law was cocaine. Through history cocaine was used for almost everything, but in its refined form it has caused addiction, and its use harmfully affected many addicted users. In the 1960s there was a rise in cocaine which led the Congress to classify it as a drug with a high level of potential abuse (ONDCP, 2009).

By the late 1980s, a new and more refined type of cocaine was becoming popular, and it appeared to public health officials and police that this new form was especially potent, much cheaper, and far more addictive than other forms of cocaine, and this cocaine was called crack. Everyone who had five grams of crack cocaine would serve five years imprisoned. This leaves a 100-1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine. If a person had powder cocaine they would need 500 grams of cocaine to be imprisoned for five years. Was crack really that much worse?  Was the harsher sentence for crack related to its lower cost and its relative abundance in poorer neighborhoods, communities where users and dealers were more likely to have African or Hispanic heritage?

If someone is caught with crack, their only hope for escape from the five plus year mandatory sentencing is to snitch on other users. Only the upper level drug dealers would be able to use this escape to their advantage, since they are the ones who deal the drugs to dependent users, and know who the users are. The users that are on the lower distribution level didn’t have the information to give, and so this loophole in the mandatory minimum sentencing law resulted in the perverse situation of the least harmful users spending more time in jail than the more harmful dealers.

            The Federal Bureau of Prisons’ budget has increased from $22 million in 1986 to over $3 billion in 1997 (Huffman, 2006). This law has resulted in prison overcrowding, racial injustice and increases in imprisoned women. Judges generally hate the law, and even some prosecutors will admit that the sentencing guidelines under the mandatory minimum sentencing regime can be unfair. Even with these issues that make many question the law, it does seem that harsh mandatory penalties may help lower drug use.  The dealers and users know what to expect if they are caught possessing a certain amount of illegal drugs, and this knowledge will deter them. Some experts claim this law has stabilized the crack cocaine epidemic and helped contribute to the historic decline violent crime rates that was experienced between 1996 and 2000. (Hutchinson, 2008)

Bibliography

DPA. (2010). Mandatory Minimum Sentences. Retrieved 2011, from Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org/drugwar/mandatorymin/

Huffman, A. A. (2006). Mandatory Minimum Sentences for Drug Offenses. Retrieved 2011, from California State Conference: http://www.ca-naacp.org/advocacy-drug-offenses-mandatory-minimum.php

Hutchinson, A. (2008). Have mandatory minimum sentences been an effective tool in the war on drugs? Retrieved 2011, from ProCon.org: http://aclu.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000731

ONDCP. (2009). Cocaine Facts & Figures. Retrieved 2011, from Office of National Drug Control Policy: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/cocaine/cocaine_ff.html

Suddath, C. (2009). The War on Drugs. Retrieved 2011, from Time: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1887488,00.html


The paper above was written as a descriptive paper in a journalistic style.  The same student wrote an editorial on this same subject, included next:

The Anti-Drug Act of 1986

            The Anti-Drug Act of 1986 provided a mandatory minimum for drugs. This removed a judge’s discretion, and gave every drug trafficker or user the same sentence. The drug that was mostly targeted at the time was cocaine. A person that possessed five grams of crack cocaine would receive a five year sentence, and a person with 500 grams of power cocaine would get the same sentence. This created a 100-to-1 disparity, and affected a significant group of people. The most targeted were minorities in poverty, and this law affected first time users the same as habitual or repeat users.

            This law has caused more damage than good to many victims. There is a significant increase in prisons, and inequality. Drug arrests have tripled to 1.8 million arrests in 2005. This is a high increase in the prison population of non-violent drug users who are not close to any drug lords, but it the people who wrote these mandatory sentences were writing the laws to help keep drug lords in jail for longer sentences. Six in ten persons in state prison for a drug offense have no history of violence or high-level drug selling activity (Mauer & King, September 2007). Not only are the common users in jail but also was there an inequality within the prison system. Before the mandatory minimums were effective the “average Federal offense for African Americans was 11% higher than Caucasians. After the mandatory drug sentencing laws, the average drug offense sentence for African Americans was 49% higher than Caucasians” (Huffmann, 2006). 

            There hasn’t been an improvement with the mandatory minimums. This law just brought more African American males into imprisonment for unreasonable amount of time. The only improvement was in the amount of money the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget received, which was $3.9 billion in 1997, way up from $220 million in 1986. There has been more money contributed to enforcement and prisons. With 1.8 million imprisoned non- violent drug users it costs about $9 billion each year (Huffmann, 2006).

            There are many people against this outlandish law like the group, Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Numerous studies done on sentencing have demonstrated the ineffectiveness of a standard sentence given to every person like in a one size fits all law such as this one. There is no proof that this law deters drug crimes, but rather, it seems this law only increases the number of arrests being made. Taking a drug user off the streets into prison only gives more room for other potential users, which brings those who suffer from substance abuse or addiction to an unending harsh cycle involving the criminal justice system.

Bibliography

Carrillo, S. (2000). Should Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Laws Be Repealed? Retrieved 2011, from Speakout.com: http://speakout.com/activism/issue_briefs/1127b-1.html

Huffmann, A. A. (2006). Mandatory Minimum Sentences for Drug Offenses. Retrieved 2011, from California State Conference: http://www.ca-naacp.org/advocacy-drug-offenses-mandatory-minimum.php

Mauer, M., & King, R. S. (September 2007). A 25- Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society. The Sentencing Project, 2- 6.

Vagins, D. J. (2006). ACLU Releases Crack Cocaine Report, Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 Deepened Racial Inequity in Sentencing. Retrieved 2011, from American Civil Liberties Union: http://www.aclu.org/drug-law-reform/aclu-releases-crack-cocaine-report-anti-drug-abuse-act-1986-deepened-racial-inequity

labeling theory, an anecdote and reaction

In a couple classes we talked about labeling and how people might conform to expectations or roles.  This is relevant in issues of crime and deviance, and also in the process of illness and mental illness. Here is a student’s reflection on her own family’s experience with labeling, and my comments follow the anecdote in this purple font.

For the second reaction paper, I’m going to write about the labeling theory.  When we talked about this in class, I was very interested and wanted to know more.  I have always thought that my brother was a product of labeling.  He was always labeled as a problem child.  

Growing up, my brother was always overweight.  My father constantly made references to his weight problem.  My parents would chastise him for eating too much at dinner and would compare him to me.  I tended to be very small and I know it bothered him that he wasn’t thinner.  Not only did he have a weight problem, but he also had problems in school.  This led to yet another comparison between him and I because I always excelled in academics.

In school, my brother was always labeled as the slacker who ran with the wrong crowd.  He never received good grades and felt that his teachers labeled him as someone who was never going to amount to anything.  He claimed that his teachers knew about him before he was even their student.  Because he felt this way, my parents took him out of Mt. Zion schools and paid out of area tuition to send him to Macon schools.

While attending Macon, my brother once again felt that his teachers singled him out and didn’t like him.  He never felt that his grades were the ones that he deserved but rather, punishments for his teachers’ dislike.  He was frequently absent and our parents stated that he was just not trying hard enough.  They got into many fights over his lack of achievement which later led to him transferring to yet another school.  He attended this school, but was kicked out for lack of attendance.  Eventually, he received his GED on his first try without classes.

My brother got into drugs heavily and we later found out that it started when he was 13.  My parents struggled to help him overcome his addiction and often wondered where they went wrong with their parenting.  In fact, they bickered so much about him and his well-being that they eventually divorced.

I firmly believe that my brother became his label.  Growing up, my parents made constant references to his weight.  This did not encourage him to lose weight, but actually discouraged him.  To this day, he remains overweight.  He was also labeled a problem child early on.  These labels became a stigma to him.  He never felt like he was smart enough, thin enough, or good enough.

My brother and I are very different people.  I would argue that I am also a product of labeling.  I am several years younger than my brother.  I saw the problems that labeling caused my brother, so I became everything opposite.  I never had a weight problem, always excelled at school, and chose not to do drugs.  I didn’t want my parents to be disappointed in me the way they were with my brother.

As a social worker, I believe that it is our duty to help end this cycle.  We need to teach our youth self-confidence. It should also be taught that it is okay to make mistakes.  We need not dwell on them, but find a way to make sure that we learn from them.  High expectations from parents are a fact of life.  However, there is a point when they are not expectations, but stigmas placed on them.

Your personal story brings to mind a few critical ideas I want to comment upon.

First, if we see something bad going on, it’s important to describe it as a specific situation in a specific context, and help people see how the situation or context was involved with the problem behavior or failure. For example, a parent might say, “You ate a tremendous amount of food today, you must have been feeling really hungry today. I’ll try to serve you less food tomorrow so you won’t overeat, do you think that would help you?” This would be better than saying, “You always overeat, and you’re getting fat. A fat person like you shouldn’t eat so much.”  In the first example, the parent is commenting on the overeating as a specific one-time event, and is also suggesting a solution, and is offering to be part of the solution (by serving less food).  The parent is also asking the child to be engaged in the change in behavior by asking, “do you think that would help you?”  It might be even better to just ask an open-ended question to let the child say something about their eating behavior on that specific day and what might help change behaviors at future meals.

Second, your story reminds me of the importance of holding high expectations of everyone while at the same time having a realistic understanding that people won’t reach your expectations. If teachers have low expectations and assume the worst of their students, the students will be “allowed” by the teacher’s expectations to perform at the level the teacher had signaled them to perform to. If a teacher holds all students to high expectations, students will attempt to achieve those higher expectations. Yet, when holding high expectations, I think it’s important to allow failure, and let students know that high expectations must be coupled with patience, support, and a high tolerance for people not achieving the highest marks. When we have high expectations and show too much disappointment or displeasure when people can’t achieve what we asked of them, then we will tend to encourage frustration and discouragement. The correct way to apply high expectations is to keep up an optimistic and accepting attitude.  “Oh well, you didn’t quite reach the mark this time, but you came pretty far toward it and you tried hard. Let’s see what you can do next time, and what I can do to help you get closer to the mark we’re striving to reach. I’m confident you’ll eventually get it.” 

When we’re disappointed with ourselves, or with our spouse or a child, we can communicate our disappointment, but we need to make the feeling related to a specific instance of behavior, and not raise issues of a person “always” doing something we don’t like, or “being” the wrong type of person. In the present instant of time we can’t do something about a problem that is “always” going on, can we?  We can only modify what we are doing in the present instant.  And, it’s hardly fair to blame us for being wrong. We can only control what we do, not what we are.

Student wants fewer Americans incarcerated.

This is a student-written editorial, and I'm sharing it on the blog without my comments.

I am writing about our prison system and the need for reform.   

Senator Jim Webb from Virginia is on a crusade to do just that.  He cites that the United States, with only 5% of the world's population, is housing 25% of the world's reported criminals.  The numbers of people incarcerated for drug related crimes have soared 1200% since 1980 when Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs.  However, a significant number of people incarcerated for drug offenses have no history of violence or high-level drug activity.  He also goes on to state that there are four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.  Our prisons are overcrowded, but not with the people that should be in our penal system.  

The United States spends about 68 billion dollars a year on corrections. It would be prudent for us to consider whether that money could be better spent on treatment for substance abuse and mental illness.   Certainly the correctional facilities are not equipped to address the needs of those addicted to drugs and/or alcohol or those suffering with mental illness.  We need to move these people out of the prisons and provide them with services that would allow them the opportunity to become productive members of society.  

There was a time when we addressed substance abuse as a health issue. Now we decided these people are criminals and that they should be punished for "breaking the rules".  Then what? They are released after serving their sentence and return to society with the same issues that landed them in the penal system in the first place.    How is it that a person suffering with mental illness can find rehabilitation in the confines of a prison?  While none of us approve of those that break the rules of society, our energy and resources would be better directed at reducing the number of people incarcerated for minor substance abuse violations and non-violent crimes in order to make room for the people that we built prisons for, those that we need protection from.

War on Drugs and Marijuana Legalization

The following comment about the legalization of Marijuana was posted on the discussion board at the change.gov website:

“It is high time that marijuana be either legalized or at the very least decriminalized. This prohibition is only empowering drug dealers to push real drugs like cocaine and heroin on our children. Marijuana has never in recorded history killed anyone. It is less addictive than caffeine, and can be grown for responsible personal use for next to nothing. All the while alcohol, and tobacco (the real gateways drugs) which kill millions a year and ruin families lives are legal? Its also ironic that the "Partnership for a drug free America", which runs all those anti marijuana commercials is actually a conglomerate of multibillion dollar pharmaceutical companies and used to include all the major alcohol/tobacco companies. Obama himself admittedly smoked Marijuana growing up and he's our next president. He probably wouldn't be though had he been caught and had a drug charge along with all his federal financial aid for college revoked. The people of the united states are ready for a change with regards to marijuana prohibition and they showed that by making it the #1 question on your community poll. In Massachusetts on Nov 4th, more people voted for marijuana decriminalization (which passed) than voted for Obama to become president. If given the opportunity i think you will see this is not a fluke.”

I agree with many of the comments made in this statement. The only one that I think may be questionable is when he states “Marijuana has never in recorded history killed anyone.” I am not sure that this statement is legitimate. I think this comment is relevant since Springfield has recently decriminalized marijuana. Although I do not smoke, I do not see anything wrong with marijuana. I have been told that I cannot really have an opinion about it until I have experienced it, but I disagree. To me, it does not seem any worse than drinking alcohol, and seems a lot safer than other drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, which are also mentioned above. I am all for marijuana being legalized, with certain limitations such as: age limit, amounts in possession, and operating machinery, driving, and working under the influence.

I’d really like to know what the tax benefits we could get by legalizing it would be. We could release many people from jail and probation, and police could devote more time to cocaine and crystal methamphetamine dealers. If marijuana were legalized I’d like to tax the heck out of it. Aren’t there any studies that make creditable estimations of the economics involved with marijuana legalization? I remember I had an economics professor at Washington University (Dr. Fred Raines) who was quite active in the marijuana legalization movement, and I bet he had some models and forecasts.

I agree with your logic, that you can judge the merits of a substance without trying it. I haven’t fought in any wars, but I have read war memoirs and studied books about war, and I have reached the conclusion that war is awful, and should be avoided. I haven’t smoked, used drugs, or developed a habit of getting intoxicated with alcohol, yet I can look around me and see that in general, tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs do net harm in society, and are generally bad (alcohol and marijuana have benefits, but if I could wave a wand and make them vanish from the Earth, I’d do so without hesitation).

With drug policy we have a clash between an idea of doing noble policies that are good for public health and the actual implementation of such policies. As it turns out, when we try to execute a law that forbids the use of a popular and only mildly harmful substance (mildly harmful to many people, benign to many others, but extremely harmful to a handful of people who become hard-core addicts), we run into the trouble of enforcing something that is a bother to most people.

If we had a way of instantly issuing electronic tickets of $40 to anyone who ever drove their car more than 5 miles-per-hour over a speed limit we’d have a similar problem of people being angry and outraged at the inconvenience. There would be a decline in traffic fatalities, and that would be worth it, but the costs of inserting little computer sensors that recorded a driver’s speed and sent a radio signal to indicate when a fine was to be charged would be a burden on all the car purchasers, and there would be a thriving black market in ways of evading the system.

I think with the inclusion of marijuana in the war on drugs we’re getting a similar backlash from the users and the friends of the users. My questions is: when will the federal policy change? There has been grassroots activism for changes in marijuana laws, but this activism hasn’t generated the legal reform yet, at least not at a federal level. Is this finally about to change?