The Rambling Musings of Self Aware Stardust

In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs and he later created the Drug Enforcement Administration to co-ordinate the efforts of all other agencies.   Since then, billions of dollars have been spent and millions of drug users have been imprisoned. Although there was some early success decreasing the number of drug users, the overarching goal to end the international drug trade and use of illegal drugs in financing criminal enterprises has utterly failed.   In fact this has resulted in a dramatic increase in violence in many areas, often times contributing to the migrant crisis we have seen. In addition, we’ve seen dramatic racial and social discrepancies in enforcement and penalties.   Even though the rates of illicit drug use are nearly the same between black (10.5%) and white (9.5%) populations, African Americans are arrested at over 2.5 times the rate as Caucasians. We also see that adolescents and young adults with higher socioeconomic status are more l...

Shortly after I started working at PiM, an Arts High School where I now teach, there were two interactions with students that happened in the same day that got me thinking about how we treat learning disabilities.   The first was with a student in my Math Foundations course who was obviously trying and obviously frustrated. We learned to work well together but any math was tough for them. We’d often break work periods into alternating 5 minutes of working and 5 minutes drawing; they would often grasp concepts but following the thread through longer problems was an issue; they would regularly come in with multiple caffeinated drinks in the morning and explained to me that the constant influx of caffeine helped them work. In short, they hit a lot of symptoms on my ADHD radar: unable to concentrate on a subject that doesn’t interest them while being able to work on subjects that do, easily distracted, unable to break larger problems into smaller parts on own, self-medicating with a s...