Readers Write: Addiction, the Electoral College, MPD budget, daylight saving time

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Four Minnesotans die every day from drug overdoses. Why aren’t more people carrying the lifesaving antidote that stops those related to opioids? Naloxone, sometimes known by the brand name Narcan, is a nasal spray used to reverse the effects of an opioid-related overdose. Working within two to five minutes of administration, this lifesaving antidote is becoming more and more accessible.

The FDA approved naloxone as a prescription drug in 2015. On March 29, 2023, naloxone nasal spray became available as an over-the-counter medication, but it costs about $50 for two doses. Most people are not able to allocate extra funds to buy a medication they may never need.

However, Minneapolis has come up with a solution to this inaccessibility by establishing its first naloxone vending machine, located at Fire Station 21. Almost exactly in the middle of Minneapolis, it is completely free and dispenses within seconds.

In an interview, Antonio Zaccardi, a public health specialist on the Minneapolis Opioid Response Team said “giving one or two (sprays) of Narcan and waiting for the paramedics to show up can absolutely save a life. (It’s) a matter of life and death.”

People who experience overdose don’t necessarily want to die. I carry naloxone on me to save someone experiencing an opioid overdose, whether they are 59 years old or 16 years old, and you should too.

Rowan Kalar, Hopkins

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Addiction in a candy wrapper — that’s exactly what the e-cigarette industry is selling to our youth. According to the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey, 5.9% of students in the United States, or 1.63 million kids, currently use e-cigarettes, with 87.6% of them using flavored e-cigarettes. This contagious issue threatens to create a generation that is addicted to nicotine, harming brain development, lung health and long-term well-being.

Dr. Lynn T. Kozlowski, professor emeritus of community health and health behavior at the University at Buffalo, says, “The e-cigarette industry exploits loopholes in regulation to target vulnerable populations, particularly teenagers. Flavors such as different fruits or candies are not designed for adults; they are specifically designed to hook and target kids.”

As a sophomore in high school, I have seen friends and peers who never would have considered smoking become reliant on e-cigarettes. What was said to be “just one puff” turns into a series of puffs and eventually an addiction. The American Lung Association has proved and highlighted the dangers of adolescent e-cigarette addiction, saying it can damage memory, learning, impulse control and the lungs.

Action must be taken now. The best solution would be for policymakers to implement a ban on all flavored e-cigarettes, add stronger enforcement on age restrictions and increase education campaigns to inform children of the potential dangers they pose. We all can take action now by reaching out to our local representatives and advocating for local bans.

This generation’s health cannot be compromised for retail profits. There must be a higher demand for accountability.

Madhav Kumar, Minneapolis

I enjoyed Corwin Snyder’s Dec. 20 commentary “As a presidential elector, I believe it’s time to change to the national popular vote.” The article was articulate and well reasoned. I take issue, however, with Snyder’s assertion that a national popular vote will alter the focus of the campaigns for the presidency on only “seven or 10 so-called battleground states” and “utterly ignore” all the rest.

The campaigns will still focus on a few geographic battleground areas, but the voters who will be ignored will shift. Future campaigns would focus on the large industrialized population centers and essentially ignore the vast rural and agricultural sectors of the country whose votes are currently more valuable than those of urban voters but would be devalued by the elimination of the Electoral College. And that, of course, is precisely why our founders created the Electoral College — to gain support for the Constitution from the largely rural south who, without an Electoral College, feared bullying by the industrialized north.

The risk of overturning the Electoral College is that power will shift toward the major urban centers of the country and away from rural and agricultural citizens. I do not intend that my comments be interpreted as opposing a change away from the Electoral College, but if a change is to be made, the people who will lose power because of it should at least be aware that this is an inevitable consequence of the change.

Lindsay Arthur, Minneapolis

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In his Dec. 20 Strib Voices column, Snyder criticizes the “Electoral College’s winner-takes-all tradition” as “deeply non-democratic.” To remedy this perceived flaw, he advocates for the direct popular election of the president through adoption of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).

It is perhaps not coincidental that all of the states currently signed on to the NPVIC (including Minnesota) cast their electoral votes for the Democratic ticket in the 2024 presidential election. This is because direct popular election would shift the focus of presidential campaigns to issues affecting the country’s most populous (and heavily Democratic) urban areas. The issues affecting rural or “flyover country” residents would be only cursorily addressed (or entirely ignored).

There are additional benefits to keeping our current electoral system, including greater certainty of outcome (due to “winner-takes-all” rules in 48 states), its structural promotion of nationwide (as opposed to regionally focused) campaigns, and its discouragement of parliamentary-style multiple fringe parties.

Despite Snyder’s concerns, jettisoning the current system in favor of direct popular election would be one of the biggest mistakes this country ever made.

Peter Abarbanel, Apple Valley

It’s been four years since the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, and it’s frustrating to see people continue to trot out the same old tired tropes about policing and public safety.

It is time to move away from the false dichotomy of “defund” versus “reform.” We all know that to achieve real public safety for our communities, we need to invest in both policing and additional, appropriate alternatives to policing. The 2025 city budget passed by the City Council does just that. Despite what recent statements by Mayor Jacob Frey and Chief Brian O’Hara might have you believe, this budget gives more money to MPD than ever before. When Chief O’Hara took over in 2022, he inherited a $180 million budget. MPD’s budget for 2025 is $229 million.

As Council Member Robin Wonsley wrote in a recent letter (”Let’s set the record straight,” Dec. 20), the council allocated funds for much-needed civilian investigators to help ease MPD’s backlog of over 5,000 assigned unsolved cases. The people of Minneapolis do not gain anything by the constant fearmongering about the City Council’s approach to public safety, especially when it is based on a false narrative that only benefits the Mayor and his political allies.

Mayor Frey has had years to offer residents a vision for public safety in Minneapolis and he has failed to do so. I appreciate having a City Council that invests in comprehensive public safety solutions, including the police, Behavioral Crisis Response teams and much-needed civilian investigators.

Cara Letofsky, Minneapolis

The writer is associate director of the Minnesota Justice Research Center.

The “Think of the children” letter writer on Dec. 23 confused daylight saving time with standard time. “Recall the last few school days around Halloween and those cold, dark mornings at the bus stop before DST kicked in,” he writes. Those mornings were dark and cold because it was before DST kicked out. DST creates the illusion of longer days by making the mornings darker and the evenings lighter. It is all very confusing. Did we gain an hour or lose an hour?

Midday, or local noon, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, has been replaced by arbitrary time zones. Noon is no longer specific to midday, and DST further complicates things. When we spring forward one hour for DST, local noon (midday) is shifted one hour into the afternoon. Just think if we shifted local noon ahead even farther. Children could be home from school by then! It’s no wonder we get confused.

Jeff Bullard, New Brighton

The writer is a retired science teacher.