Headlines for Tuesday, November 29, 2022

According to the Ithaca Times, Cayuga Medical Center is the latest Tompkins County organization to offer free Narcan, or naloxone, to patients on site. The change was prompted as part of the county’s Opioid Overdose Prevention Program, designed to prevent fatal overdoses from drug use. The program also helps to remove common obstacles that have made the life-saving drug difficult to obtain, including lack of insurance and transportation. Community organizations have been hasty to implement the program as overdoses in Tompkins County have increased, from 19 deaths in 2020 to 25 deaths in 2021. 

As part of New York’s Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, 36 recreational marijuana dispensaries will be coming to New York State, including one in Ithaca. According to the Ithaca Times, New York began issuing licenses to businesses to sell marijuana last Monday, a development that has been long-awaited since the state legalized adult recreational use of cannabis in March of 2021. The program aims to provide a leg-up to businesses started by people who were most impacted by the prohibition of cannabis—most often in communities of color. The state is still reviewing the site where Ithaca’s new dispensary is planned, with the expectation that it will open early in 2023. 

On Wednesday, Cornell Law School Dean Jens Ohlin announced that the school will not withdraw from the U.S. News and World Report Rankings of law schools, in sharp contrast to some of its Ivy League peers, including Columbia Law, Yale Law, and Harvard Law. According to the Cornell Daily Sun, the trend began as a protest against alleged distortions in the rankings. Ohlin argued that withdrawals will make little change, citing U.S. News’ announcement that they will continue ranking the schools, using data that all law schools are required to report to the American Bar Association. The Dean did acknowledge that numerical rankings were still “a fundamental distraction from academic progress” and pledged to focus on improving academic quality at Cornell Law.