opioid-crisis

In response to claims that Harlem is overburdened by drug-addiction rates and overdoses, a methadone clinic is being built on 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in West Harlem. However, community members argue that this clinic is not needed in the area.

Before speaking to Luis Velasquez, I never knew it was possible to be in Peru, China, Harlem, and on Wall Street all at once.

Since August, over 300 students have been trained to administer the life-saving drug naloxone to counter the effects of opioid overdose as part of an initiative led by Columbia Health, the Mailman School of Public Health, and the School of General Studies. The team seeks to assess the confidence in participants to carry and administer naloxone, and consider opportunities and barriers for program nationwide expansion to other college campuses.

Over 300 faculty, students, and alumni called on Columbia to end its $150,000 contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection for emergency medical services at the border, condemning the partnership as a legitimization of CBP cruelty in a faculty-led petition sent to administrators last week.

cri·sis

The war in Syria started in 2011. Today, after five years of ongoing conflict, the world still fails to respond adequately to the humanitarian consequences of the Syrian crisis.

To the editor:

Sunday morning, New York Times readers across the country faced a front-page profile of one female student's horrific experience with sexual assault at Columbia. Sexual assault has been in the spotlight since February, when the Blue and White published a story about Columbia's failure to properly adjudicate a repeat sexual assault offender. Two patterns have emerged in the dialogue since then. First: There is lack of accountability in the University's response to complaints. Second: There are flaws in student culture around consent. Perpetrators, the direct cause of sexual assault, are products of our very own Columbia community and culture. Columbians can and should hold University administrators accountable for their failures, but we also must take ownership of Columbia's culture around consent and support for survivors.

Editor's note, Jan. 18 at 10:50 a.m. An initial version of this editorial called for Sexual Violence Response to have a professional listening hotline and a partnership with RAINN. However, SVR already has a 24/7 listening hotline staffed by professional survivor advocates, and has had a working partnership with RAINN for several years. Accordingly, the article below has been corrected to include only the demands that are informed by fact. We have also corrected a statement about the frequency of sexual assault as a function of the time of day to indicate that the highest proportion of assaults occur between 6 p.m. and midnight. Spectator regrets the errors.