Safety on campus remains important despite false claims
Main Editorial

On the front page of this issue, the “Student reports fake assault” article reports that the GRCC student who claimed in Oct. that she was punched and then robbed in the Lyon St. parking ramp was lying to police.

The assault never occurred, but the precautionary measures that GRCC and students are taking should continue regardless.

One person crying wolf does not change the fact that there is crime on campus and it’s important to be aware of one’s safety.

The installation of more security cameras, one measure taken because of the “assault” that occurred has helped with crime on campus.

When students were surveyed earlier this school year about safety in the parking ramps, the addition of security cameras was the biggest demand.

According to larceny statistics taken by Campus Police Lieutenant Harold Woolworth, the number of larcenies from Jan. 1 to March 31 has dropped 21 percent compared to last year.

“I believe the drop in larcenies can be attributed to the arrests that were made around the first of the year, along with the implementation of security cameras and officers patrolling,” Woolworth said.

Now, at the end of the school year, is not the time to disregard students’ safety. Instead this should be a time when we look ahead to the next year of classes and the incoming new students.

These new students may be unfamiliar with the surroundings of downtown Grand Rapids and their campus should be a safe haven.

By increasing the measures taken on campus, GRCC can assure that every student is as safe as possible and in no way fearing their walk to a parked car on campus.

It’s sad that the woman who made the false claim has gotten the attention she was obviously seeking, and it is aggravating that resources were wasted to find the fictitious suspect.

However it’s important that the police patrols remain.

Although it is wrong to make up a story about an assault and send police after a criminal who doesn’t exist, this one instance may have been the key to getting GRCC safety up to par. With campus police and parking lot attendants on the look out for suspicious figures, the parking ramps have and will remain safe for students.

(Top/ Index)

Dietary police, bewareC
By MCT Campus

Sugar is sugar is sugar. That’s what many dietitians said for years when asked about the difference between the sugars naturally contained in fruit juice and those added to, say, soda. New research at Princeton University, however, undercuts the familiar adage, showing that high-fructose corn syrup, a common ingredient in processed foods because it’s cheaper and extends shelf life, has a remarkable ability to fatten rats.

Even when rats were given much lower concentrations of the commercial sweetener than are found in soda, while other rats were given higher concentrations of table sugar, the corn-syrup rats gained more weight. Not only that, but they developed a dangerous condition known in humans as metabolic syndrome, which is marked by abnormal weight gain, increases in triglyceride levels and more fat deposits around the belly. Even rats fed a high-fat diet don’t consistently gain weight, psychology professor Bart Hoebel said.

And who got it right in the whole low-carb, low-fat debate? Another study, out of Stanford University, suggests that both sides did to some extent. Low-carb diets work best for some people based on their genetic makeup, while low-fat diets are more effective for others.

As the United States tries to find its way out of the growing trend toward obesity that threatens the nation’s health, studies like these sound a warning to be careful about well-intentioned laws that seek to limit one ingredient or another as a way of trimming society’s collective waistline and staving off certain diseases.

That’s something New York City school officials should keep in mind with their new regulations limiting bake sales on campus. Homemade goods, even if they’re as wholesome as spinach pies, are banned, while certain Pop Tarts, the ones that contain whole wheat, are allowed. The goal is admirable: limiting the junk food that children consume. The question is whether school officials know which kind of food is more reprehensible. The Pop Tarts contain high-fructose corn syrup, an ingredient seldom used by home cooks.

New York deserves a healthy round of applause for being concerned about how dietary habits affect well-being; it led the nation in requiring restaurant menus to include calorie information. Research finds that customers do cut down on their calorie intake once they have those sometimes hefty numbers in hand. But when it comes to regulating consumers’ intake, rather than informing their choices, the chances of moving the nation’s habits in the wrong direction are heavy, indeed. It’s wise to remember that what we “know” today might well be disproved tomorrow.

The Bottom Line:
Instead of following the latest fad diet that claims to help you lose 20 pounds in two days, take a breath and research which habits are best for your genetic makeup. Chances are, you’ll stay healthy and happy.(Top/ Index)

Time to freshen up the nation’s outdated food safety regulations
By MCT Campus

Here’s something to think about next time you’re at the dinner table: Most U.S. food-processing plants haven’t been inspected in at least five years.

That unappetizing tidbit comes from a new report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s inspector general. It documents an outdated and ineffective federal food safety program with too few inspectors, too skimpy legal authority and too little funding.

The FDA doesn’t even have enough inspectors to visit U.S. processing plants.

Nor does it have the authority to order a recall when tainted food comes to light. It can’t even track dangerous food from the plant where it was processed to the stores where it was sold.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The last time U.S. food safety laws were updated was in 1938, when penicillin was a “wonder drug” and radar was secret, cutting-edge military technology.

As soon as this week, the Senate could take up a new food-safety bill that would update the FDA’s authority, allow it to dictate “best practices” for processing and preparing food and mandate more frequent inspections.

The Food Safety Enhancement Act was approved by the House last summer. It would require a food-tracking system so that when inspectors discover problems at a food-processing plant, they quickly can trace where tainted products were shipped.

Despite a near-constant stream of high-profile food recalls that have included e. coli-laced cookie dough, peanut butter spiked with salmonella and tainted spinach, cilantro, tomatoes and bean sprouts, all sold to unsuspecting U.S. consumers in recent years.

The inspector general’s report, released last week, details a system in urgent need of attention. Staffing for FDA food safety programs fell by 18 percent between 2003 and 2007, even as the number of U.S. food-processing plants climbed to 51,229. The number of FDA inspectors has increased, but it remains below the level in 2003.

In about 36 percent of cases in which serious problems were found, the FDA didn’t conduct follow-up inspections to ensure that the violations had been corrected.

Some 76 million Americans contract a food-borne illness every year. Most cases are mild, but about 325,000 people are hospitalized and about 5,000 die each year from those illnesses.

One obvious problem that will remain is the disjointed nature of oversight, which now is shared by the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It makes sense to centralize authority for food safety and to adequately fund it. But over the years, the FDA has been starved of resources.

The Bottom Line:
Americans can see the results in headlines about recalls of tainted food. Unfortunately, you can’t see some of the problems on your dinner plate until it’s too late.

(Top/ Index)

A whiff of change in pot vote
By Dick Polman
MCT Campus

The voters of trend-setting California may well decide this November to legalize marijuana, there’s a ballot referendum, and 56 percent of Californians are in favor. No doubt this would be great news for the munchie industry, the bootleggers of Grateful Dead music, and the millions of stoners who have long yearned for an era of reefer gladness.

Seriously, this is a story about how desperate times require desperate measures. Legalization advocates have long contended that it’s nuts to keep criminalizing otherwise law-abiding citizens while wasting $8 billion a year in law enforcement costs. That argument has never worked. But the new argument, cleverly synced to the recession mind-set, may well herald a new chapter in the history of pot prohibition.

It’s simple, really: State governments awash in red ink can solve some of their revenue woes by legalizing marijuana for adults and slapping it with a sin tax.

So much of the marijuana debate used to be about morality; now it’s mostly about economics and practicality, which is why New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are also floating measures to legalize and tax; why similar voter referendums are in the works in Washington state and Oregon; why 14 states have legalized medical marijuana, and why even Pennsylvania, hardly a pace setting state, is weighing the sanction of medical pot, complete with 6 percent sales tax.

But California is the likeliest lab for a massive toke tax, given its dire financial straits and the fact that marijuana is the state’s top cash crop, racking up an estimated $14 billion in annual sales, twice as much as the No. 2 agricultural commodity, milk and cream. State tax collectors say that pot could put $1.4 billion a year into the depleted California coffers, which helps explain why 56 percent of Californians like the legalization option, and find it preferable to the ongoing layoffs of teachers and other public servants.

Actually, I doubt most stoners see themselves as sinners - what’s immoral about seeing “Avatar three times, or strip-mining a tray of brownies, or punctuating the conversation with lines like, “I’m sorry, what was I just talking about?” - but most would probably be willing to pay a “sin tax” in exchange for the opportunity to imbibe, hassle-free, with no fear that they might join the 765,000 Americans who were reportedly busted last year for possession.

Even the reformers of ‘77 said it was “naive” to believe that Americans would ever buy legalization. Today’s generation is more shrewd; the word “legalization” doesn’t even appear in the California ballot proposal. The proponents, including a retired Superior Court judge who got fed up with handling pot cases, are calling it the “Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act.”

Frankly, California and other cash-strapped states don’t have a whole lot of sin-tax options. Cigarettes and booze are already taxed to the max, and, as Philadelphia is discovering, any attempts to slap special levies on sugared water are fiercely resisted by soda companies that fear any curbs on their freedom to rot kids’ teeth. By contrast, stoners crave the respectability of being taxed; the fiercest tax opponents are probably the Mexican drug cartels, which would lose market share just as the mob lost out on liquor when Prohibition ended in ‘33.

Granted, nobody quite knows whether or how the California pot plan would fly in practice. Pot use would still be illegal under federal law, the director of the National Drug Control Policy has said that “legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary,” and the U.S. Constitution decrees that federal law trumps state law. On the other hand, the Obama team has stated that it has no interest in hassling the medical-marijuana states.

The big question is how such a sin tax would be structured. Would all sellers be licensed? Would it be a point-of-sale excise tax on top of the sales tax?

The Bottom Line:
Legalizing marijuana is no longer a matter of morality, it’s about economics. Eventually a presidential candidate will be saying exactly that from behind a podium.

(Top/ Index)

Looking back at one student’s years at GRCC
By Stephanie Sicard
Opinion Editor

Another school year draws to a close, and each student faces the question of what happens next.
For this editor, this will be my final semester at GRCC.

How strange it will seem to not roam the halls of the Cook and Main buildings, or fight other students for a spot in the Bostwick Parking Ramp.

In writing a story for this issue about high school seniors attending GRCC in the fall, I had the chance to speak to a class of seniors at Creston High School, my alma mater. I emphasized the importance of attending college and not waiting.

In my case I left high school having no clue what I wanted to do, but knowing college was an important step. GRCC was crucial in starting me off on the right path. No matter which major you choose, almost every one will require you to take the same basics classes and by getting those out of the way you will be one step closer to a degree. Then when you chose a major, the classes remaining will fly by.

After nine years of attending classes at GRCC, on and off again, I feel prepared and confident as I move forward to study at Grand Valley State University.

I have made endearing friends with students and faculty alike and will always look back at my time here at GRCC with fondness.

(Top/ Index)

Student Shoutout Online results

Should Professors be required to issue exams?
Yes, and cumulative at that 25%
Yes, but not necissarily cumulative 0%
Not an exam persay, but some form of final evaluation 50%
No 25%
Undecided 0%
(4 total votes)

Click here to vote in our current poll asking about your plans for the fall.

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