Words

CalMatters • 10th November 2020

A debunked conspiracy theory fuels a Trump lawsuit

As if permanent markers didn’t already make enough of a mess, enter #sharpiegate.

With votes for Biden mounting, a group of Trump supporters showed up to a ballot counting facility in Arizona’s Maricopa County last Wednesday and cried foul. Their claim: Poll workers were encouraging voters to mark their ballots with Sharpies that couldn’t be read by the county’s vote-scanning machines.

Cal Alumni Association • 21st September 2020

Transitioning with Grace: Coming Out in Academia

For Grace Lavery, coming out as a trans woman was nerve-racking at first. A professor in Berkeley’s Department of English, she was afraid of how her colleagues and students would react. As she explains, a certain amount of criticism comes with the territory of being in academia, adding that, “in my profession, there’s always some degree of anxiety.”

A song should be like a play; it should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should have an idea, build on it, develop it, and finish it. And at the end, you should be at a place different than you began.

Oscar Hammerstein on storytelling

Audio

Steven Rascón_Audio · Fentanyl test strips could save lives, so advocates are handing them out

Fentanyl is almost unthinkably strong. The synthetic opioid is 50 times more potent than heroin and has contributed to a wave of fatal overdoses in LA County. But the risks are especially high in the LGBTQ community. One reason: it’s turning up as a hidden ingredient in party drugs used by club goers.

At Long Beach Pride recently, vendors at dozens of booths were passing out the typical fare -- free condoms and rainbow branded merchandise But Erick Fletes, who does outreach for the Los Angeles LGBT Center, was giving away something different this year: fentanyl test strips.

The strips are about 3-inches long and they can detect if small traces of fentanyl have been mixed into another substance. Fentanyl has played a big role in America’s opioid epidemic all on its own but recently it's been popping up in recreational party drugs like cocaine, meth, and ecstasy. And fentanyl is now linked to deaths in LA’s gay community. These were victims who had no idea their party drugs were cut with the opioid.

For the Los Angeles LGBT Center, it’s personal. Last year a Center employee became one of those fatalities. He died of an accidental overdose from cocaine mixed with a lethal amount of fentanyl.

It was that chain of events that spurred the LGBT Center to start buying up thousands of fentanyl test strips and to look for places to distribute them. They circled Pride festivals on the calendar because it’s one place where casual drug users congregate.