Maryland’s preparation for the full implementation of health care reform on January 1, 2014 offers an exciting opportunity to make significant changes to our substance abuse treatment system. Open Society Institute-Baltimore and our grantees have spent many hours working to ensure that comprehensive substance abuse services are part of the essential health benefits in Maryland. This is an enormous step forward and will undoubtedly increase the number of individuals who are able to access substance abuse treatment next year.
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Technocrats of the Drug War
Saturday, February 23, 2013The Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (W/B HIDTA) was named the 2012 HIDTA of the Year by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. The January announcement was made by the University of Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences where the W/B HIDTA is housed. The little noted award ceremony, honoring a […]
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Murdered in Maximum Security
Sunday, February 17, 2013Let us speak on behalf of the dead—because we are implicated in these particular homicides. But let’s first be clear on who these murder victims were. Ricky Bailey and Michael Armstead were convicted rapists. Charles David Richardson IV was convicted of murdering two people. They were not innocents. They were violent criminals. Yet all three […]
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How to be gritty: what children don’t know can hurt them
Monday, February 11, 2013If you’ve heard more in the past year than ever before about the role that grit and resiliency play in student achievement, that might be “a response to No Child Left Behind and this narrow focus on standardized testing,” Angela Duckworth suggests.
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DNA, Race and Public Safety
Saturday, February 09, 2013On February 26 the Supreme Court will hear arguments to determine the constitutionality of Maryland’s DNA collection law. The DNA Collection Act (2009) allows law enforcement to obtain and analyze genetic information from individuals without a search warrant who have not been convicted of any crime and have merely been arrested. Strongly supported by the […]
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Ending gun violence
Wednesday, February 06, 2013Gun violence does not only affect those directly wounded. Gun violence affects our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, our cousins and play-cousins. Gun violence affects our neighborhoods, our schools, our churches, our homes, our playgrounds. It is an epidemic, a contagion that we should treat the same way we treated polio.
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Baltimore, BGF and “Deadly Symbiosis”
Saturday, February 02, 2013The young man handed me a piece of notebook paper, fragile at the creases where it had been folded and unfold many times. Kept in a pocket, taken out often to be reviewed and studied, it was a handwritten bibliography of works he was required to read as a new member of the Black Guerrilla […]
