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Integrative health care treats pain and decreases opioid use
Arizona already licenses the full complement of health professions needed to offer patients an integrative approach to address chronic pain. It is time for health professions to work together for the best interests of our patients. Arizona has the physicians and practitioners needed to be at the forefront in developing integrative approaches to treating patients with chronic pain. Do we have the w[...]
Despite benefits of tax cuts, critics continue to attack
Politics always gets heated in an election year. And Democrats and their well-funded activist army want to make tax cuts the wedge issue. That's fine. While they try to ride their shopworn talking points to victory, Arizona voters will respond with something real that's on the line: their bigger paychecks.
Much not told in ACLU report on criminal justice
What if we provided substance abuse treatment from the point of admission, and cognitive behavioral treatment? What if we just started with drug possession offenders? Re-entry programs are showing significant promise in reducing recidivism and so are diversion and deferred prosecution programs utilizing substance abuse treatment and cognitive behavioral therapies. We should be implementing similar[...]
End mass incarceration crisis created by politicians
If Arizona started on these reforms now and cut the prison population in half by 2025, we would have saved taxpayers more than $1 billion. That’s money that could be spent on education, parks, libraries, and health services. More importantly, if Arizona started on these reforms now, we would prevent countless people from entering a system that destroys lives, families, and communities. It’s[...]
Results show why demand for charter schools remains strong
What Arizona’s charter school revolution has taught us is that educational approaches can be as diverse as the ever-changing needs of Arizona’s students. And thanks to our governor and state Legislature, those diverse needs are being served. It would be a shame for parents and students if the charter school revolution came to an end because a handful of anti-charter advocates managed to convin[...]
No matter the vote, empowerment scholarships have helped many
In November, Arizona voters will decide whether expanding the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program makes sense. It was originally started to help the parents of disabled children, foster children, or parents who are active military. It evolved, with little controversy, to include adopted children, children attending D/F rated schools, and those in Native American communities. About 5,[...]
Cheap water, not lax regulation, at core of Arizona shortage
The recent New York Times article, “The Water Wars of Arizona,” goes into detail about Arizona’s diminishing water resources and blames the problem entirely on “lax regulation,” which, the author says, has enticed large corporate farms to come and suck up all the water. I’m sure they have. But “lax regulation” doesn’t come close to getting to the heart of the problem: water is to[...]
Gerrymandering – the ‘Efficiency Gap’ is too unstable a measure
With such measurement instability, I don’t think the Efficiency Gap measurement can be considered a reliable indicator of the extent of partisan gerrymandering of Arizona election districts.
Updating Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a sensible first step
The Clean Power Plan overreached, in that it would have imposed massive costs on U.S. consumers. But it offered little gain in return. A fully implemented plan would have yielded only a theoretical 0.018 degrees Celsius reduction in global temperatures by 2100, and reduced power plants CO2 emissions by less than 1 percent.
Federal land fund in jeopardy without congressional action
The Grand Canyon and Saguaro National Parks, Lost Dutchman and Patagonia Lake State Parks – if you’ve been to any of these popular outdoor places and many others in Arizona, you’ve enjoyed the benefits of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF)
Bribery case part of cancerous trend in political prosecutions
There is a rot spreading through the nation’s criminal justice system, and federal investigators and prosecutors in Arizona are showing symptoms of the disease. Prosecutors nationwide are bringing extraordinarily aggressive cases against Americans engaged in the political process, and federal prosecutors in Phoenix have recently concluded — and lost, due to a hung jury followed by a dismissal [...]
Transparency the reason for success of Arizona’s opioid action plan
Since June 2017, 1,233 Arizona residents have died from opioid overdose – the highest reported number of opioid deaths in our state in 11 years. The opioid scourge in Arizona is very real. Data reveal that in one Arizona county, four physicians wrote more than 6 million prescriptions for opioids in a one-year period. That county has a population of 200,000.
