opinion
tuesday, september 27, 2011
kansas state collegian
page 4
Police efforts better focused on violent crime than on drugs Jillian Aramowicz
As of 2010, more than 11 percent of Americans smoked marijuana in the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Survey on Drug Use and Health. According to the same survey, 6.3 percent of Americans have misused a prescription drug in the last year, and 1.6 percent of Americans over the age of 12 have used heroin in their lifetime. You might think I am about to make a speech about the rates of drug abuse in this country and how they need to be closely monitored. Wrong. I am not here to say that drugs and substance abuse are not a problem. Indeed, they are a huge problem. Addiction and the growing mainstream popularity of drugs certainly cannot be ignored. That said, I notice an amazing amount of news about police forces tackling America’s “drug problem,” and sometimes I wonder if all their money and tactics are not wasting everyone’s time. Each year in the United
States, 6,000 people get away with murder, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of FBI records, published May 25, 2010, on scrippsnews.com. The rate of solved homicides in the United States has stayed at about 63 percent since 1980, which means that only a little over half of all murders are resolved in our country. Additionally, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 84,767 forcible rapes were reported in 2010. The fact that our law enforcement is trying to deal with the complex social issue of drug abuse is great, but if you review the statistics in the introduction of this column, notice that even the highest percentage of drugs mentioned is relatively small in relation to the entire population. And the terrible cases we hear of strung-out addicts tying off in dirty alleys is even smaller. It is easy to focus on extreme cases of shocking exploits in the news, but in all honesty, the likelihood of moving in next to a smack junkie is far rarer than the chances of you moving in next to a sex offender, of which there are 728,435 in the U.S., according to Carolyn Atwell-Davis, director of legislative affairs for The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. My problem is not the
disparity between drug statistics and alternate crimes, but rather the amount of time spent on trying to stop relatively small problems or small populations of users. For instance, the website getsmar taboutdr ugs.com outlines the legal consequences of trafficking marijuana. If you happened to be growing or selling pot, and you had 50–99 plants, being caught once could result in a $1 million fine and up to 20 years in prison. On the website lawyershop.ca, author Boris Bytensky states in cases of seconddegree murder, a convicted person may apply for parole as soon as 15 years after sentencing. I would much rather the police keep a convicted murderer inside prison walls than worry about catching and sentencing some guy with 50 pot plants growing in his basement. If you don’t agree with my thinking on this, look at it this way. How many of you have taken an Adderall pill you weren’t prescribed? In 2010, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that 11.7 percent of people 18-25 years old used the ADHD prescription Adderall illegally. If you have, it probably didn’t seem like a big deal. But did you know if you bought five from a friend and got caught, you could be charged with a third-
degree crime and be fined up to $200,000? Again, is this type of activity illegal? Yes. Should it be punished? Yes. Should a kid with a couple pills during finals be tracked d o w n and fined $200,000 while nearly 90,000 rapes are occurring in a year? No. I do not advocate the abuse, distribution or proliferation of drugs or paraphernalia, but sometimes when I look at who we are catching, who we are convicting and how small the numbers actually are for extreme abusers, I wonder if the worst of our social problems are truly being tackled. Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have a local stoner sitting on his couch listening to Bob Marley as long as one more of those 6,000 uncaught murderers takes his place in prison. illustration by Jillian Aramowicz Jillian Aramowicz is a senior in advertising. Please send all comments to opinion@spub. ksu.edu.
Technology complicates classes, frustrates students Mary Renee Shirk I miss dead trees. In the old days, a professor would hand you a syllabus printed on a piece of paper on the first day of class. A syllabus is a contract between the professor and the student. The syllabus outlines class expectations, regulations, required texts and supplies, contact information for the professor and due dates for tests and assignments. You knew what to expect from the class and the professor from the beginning. You planned your time and resources for the semester. It was laid out before you, like the Ten Commandments from God to Moses. And, much like the Commandments, it took an act of God to change the syllabus. And then came technology. Now professors post a syllabus and change it, sometimes daily, sometimes more than once a day. They expect you to check it every single day and adapt your understanding of the world around you and your work schedule, and your finances, and fit this new set of commandments into your life. In the old days, a syllabus listed the name of the text required for the class. You would buy, borrow or steal the book for the class and be good to go. Now, professors are requiring a thumb drive or
hard drive or DVDs or CDs or camera or flash card or batteries or six reams of paper, not to mention access to a high-volume color printer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I would rather have bought a book this semester than deal with what has turned into a complex process of finding, downloading and printing PDF files every week that have been scanned differently, saved differently and look different on every single computer I go to and try to print from. Have I mentioned the expectation of having constant, immediate access to a printer and an unlimited supply of paper? Some professors now require you to get a Google account or YouTube account or WordPress account or new Facebook account or join some other random website used specifically for and only for that class. All these accounts, of course, require different usernames and passwords that you’ll most likely forget. Now added to the regular class load and all of the above is watching the latest YouTube video or following the class on Twitter and networking with your classmates on LinkedIn. Just to make things even more interesting, every professor has a different requirement for the number of times you’re supposed to check your email, the syllabus, K-State Online, the WordPress blog and any/all of the other online resources for that class. In the old days, professors would come to class and lecture; it was like watching a live performance. Students
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would interact with each other through conversation guided by the professor. Thanks to the wonders of technology, students now sit in a darkened room and watch PowerPoint presentations. Posting to an online forum to respond to posted comments your classmates have made is in no way the same as having a actual conversation in the classroom. Very few of these new technologies are adding to the educational or academic value of these classes, but instead result in students spending more time on busywork and less time on learning. As a graduate teaching assistant, I receive nearly 100 emails a day. It’s hard to sort the students from the spam from the penis enlargement ads from
professors from job contacts and from random forwards my mother sends me. Go ahead and ask me if I got your email. Face-to-face is now my preferred method of communication with students and employees. Of course, I did write most of this column using
Password Pointers
To the point is an editorial selected and debated by the editorial board and written after a majority opinion is formed. This is the Collegian’s official opinon.
I know we all hate getting those emails telling us that we need to change our passwords. Many of us wonder — why do we have to change our passwords so often? Last year, 445 students fell victim to a spam email and gave their passwords to online scam artists. These scams can prove quite the inconvenience, resulting in loss of access to your email account or even identity theft. This situation can be avoided by the minor inconvenience of changing your password by the required date and by not submitting personal information to an unknown email sender. Being one of the students who forgot to change their password, I can speak from experience that it can be a hassle to get your password changed. Many people forget to change their passwords, and it causes a log-jam in getting your new one. As a student who uses email multiple time a day, this caused a problem for me as I was unable to access my K-State account for an extended period of time. Even though it seems pointless and a hassle to change your password, the minute or two it takes to change it is not as bad as what can happen. Please be careful and read your emails thoroughly before you send any kind of personal information out to someone you do not know. Once again, it only takes a minute to change. Not only do you hurt yourself by not changing your password, but you also make the IT Help Desk’s job a lot more hectic. By changing your password on time, you save the IT Help Desk valuable time as well as your own, and avoid a potential hardship down the line.
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Mary Renee Shirk is a graduate student in journalism and mass communications. Please send all comments to opinion@spub. ksu.edu.
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