Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Friday, September 27, 2019

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RILEY DEHR | COLUMN

Legalize mushrooms... and everything else

Reconciling feminism and multiculturalism

DIVYA GUMUDAVELLY | COLUMN

DESI DIKOVA | OP-ED

D

enver is famous for its 
drug culture. Whether 
it 
be 
the 
marijuana 
dispensaries lining almost every 
street or the microbreweries 
littering the city’s burgeoning 
“hip” (gentrified) neighborhoods, 
it’s certain that the Mile High 
City knows how to have a good 
time. This became obvious to me 
the summer before last after my 
mom and I moved there from 
Nebraska.
On our way to see a band named 
BoomBox, my mom, my friend 
Nadezhda and I stood together 
outside of the Ogden Theatre, a 
famous concert venue off of the 
infamous Colfax Avenue. The 
sun had just set, bringing this 
particularly 
raunchy 
section 
of Colfax to life. Various shady 
characters 
stumbled 
up 
and 
down the street, past groups of 
raucous, 
bar-hopping 
tourists 
staying at the Ramada down the 
street. Two political canvassers 
surfed the sea of buzzed, soon-to-
be concert-goers.
One 
person 
signed 
their 
petition, followed by another 
and then another. What political 
issue was so urgent to inspire this 
gaggle of inebriated adults?
One of the canvassers yelled 
out the answer.
 “Legalize mushrooms!”
“Yeah, right,” my friend and 
I snickered before walking into 
the concert hall and forgetting 
about the comedic situation. 
That was my first experience 
with 
Denver’s 
burgeoning 
“mushroom movement.” Until 
this May, that is, when Denver 
citizens 
narrowly 
passed 
a 
measure 
decriminalizing 
the 
use of hallucinogenic “magic” 
mushrooms. This significantly 
deprioritized 
the 
police’s 
enforcement of laws prohibiting 
their use. This shouldn’t have 
surprised me, given the almost 
constant smell of weed that 
hovers over the state of Colorado, 
where 
a 
thriving 
Deadhead 
culture has promoted the use of 
psychedelic drugs for over half a 
century — but it did. 
Being the child of a drug-
addict father and an ex-hippie 
mom, my experiences with drugs 
varied greatly depending on 
which parent was doing them. 
One of my earliest memories 
is my parents fighting in the 
driveway after my father decided 
to pawn our VHS player (along 
with 
almost 
everything 
else 
not nailed down) to sustain his 
lifelong drug addiction. The sour 
memories of ruined Christmases, 
crashed cars and a frequently 
disappearing dad didn’t sour my 
view towards drug use, though, 
with my mother and her band of 

hippie musician friends teaching 
me the importance of moderation 
and safe experimentation.
During my childhood, it wasn’t 
uncommon to see my mom and 
her friends crowd into our small 
kitchen for midnight “jam-out” 
sessions, no doubt with a few 
joints floating about the room, as 
the other kids and I played hide-
and-go-seek in the basement. As 
I grew up, I heard many of these 
friends describe their spiritual 
experiences 
with 
mushrooms 
and heard funny stories involving 
various other “hippie” drugs. 

My parents met in Leadville, 
Colo., — literally the highest 
incorporated 
city 
in 
the 
continental 
U.S. 
— 
during 
the peak of its hippie/grunge 
phase. My first piece of clothing 
was a tie-dye onesie, so I was 
born into the hippie life. But 
decriminalizing shrooms?! It just 
felt odd to me, letting people trip 
out on hallucinogenic fungi with 
the government’s tacit approval. 
What got me out of this very 
un-Coloradan attitude were the 
same people I had scoffed at with 
my friend outside the Ogden. 
Kevin Matthews, the man who 
organized 
the 
Decriminalize 
Denver campaign, said of their 
victory, “A lot of people who 
signed our petition said they are 
tired to see (sic) people going to 
jail over what they choose to put 
in their body.” I couldn’t argue 
with his rationale. It’s the same 
argument used by pro-choice 
and assisted-suicide advocates: 
The government shouldn’t have 
a say in what one does with their 
own body. It’s a radical idea in 
the U.S.,that an organization 
corrupted by centuries of greed 
and ignorance shouldn’t be able 
to imprison someone for eating 
a mushroom. In Portugal and 
Uruguay, however, this is the 
reality. 
These 
countries, 
for 
reasons ranging from cultural 
preservation to trying to stifle 
the deadly and failing drug wars 
that ravaged their countries, 
have decriminalized all drugs 
for personal use. Not only has it 
made these nations much cooler 
Spring Break spots, but it has also 

made most of them significantly 
safer, more economical and 
more humane. With our nation’s 
current prison occupancy at 
103.9 percent due to the epic 
failure of the war on drugs, it’s 
foolish to not entertain the idea 
of decriminalization. After all, it 
saved Portugal from a similarly 
unwinnable, 
American-style 
war on drugs that overloaded 
prisons, stigmatized seeking 
treatment and exacerbated the 
problem. 
In 
2001, 
after 
decades 
of 
failure, 
the 
Portuguese 
government 
desperately 
pulled a 180-degree turn and 
decriminalized 
all 
drugs 
for personal use, halting the 
costly and draconian policy of 
criminalizing drug users, and 
instead invested money toward 
taking care of the addicted. 
Eighteen years later, all of the 
nation’s drug-related issues have 
been greatly alleviated. 
This isn’t a guarantee the 
same would work here — nations 
are as unpredictable as the 
people that live in them — but 
other countries like Bolivia 
have followed suit, effectively 
fighting 
their 
nations’ 
drug 
problems through the humanity 
of decriminalization rather than 
the violence of criminalization. 
Mexico’s president even released 
a plan this May to follow 
Portugal’s lead and says he hopes 
the U.S. will eventually do the 
same.
Michigan and other states 
have already embraced this idea, 
albeit on a smaller scale, with the 
legalization of marijuana. With 
the federal government seemingly 
hell-bent on maintaining its 
failing strategy, the process of 
drug decriminalization would 
most likely follow weed’s lead, 
becoming a state issue before a 
federal one. 
While I am almost certain 
that Denver’s decriminalization 
of mushrooms was more about 
tripping out than avenging the 
people caught using them, they 
seem to have discovered the 
coveted and elusive solution 
to a problem that has ravaged 
our nation, and my family, for 
generations.
Decriminalization is by no 
means an endorsement of drugs. 
Rather, it’s an endorsement of 
allowing our government to 
treat its citizens, especially those 
who cannot stop using illegal 
substances 
without 
suffering 
through the terrible symptoms 
of withdrawal, with compassion 
rather than austerity. 

Riley Dehr can be reached at 

rdehr@umich.edu.

T

he origins of Western 
feminist thought in the 
early 1900s were rooted 
in 
political 
and 
sociological 
theories of gender differences, 
a certain angst that came with 
the 
patriarchal 
institutions 
that dictated day-to-day lives. 
The movement that emerged 
from 
this 
struggle 
became 
intent on altering the prominent 
perspectives on where women 
stand in Western society. While 
the 
movement 
maintains 
its 
objective to advocate for equality 
on the grounds of gender identity, 
its members are often ignorant 
of the other intersections that 
characterize 
an 
individual, 
namely culture and ethnicity.
In 
the 
era 
of 
Western 
feminist imperialism, we must 
critically examine our discourse 
and actions and how they’ve 
created a new conflict between 
multiculturalism and feminism. 
Surely both can coexist. But 
do they? Historically, Western 
colonialism has systematically 
subdued 
people 
of 
color 
through 
action 
and 
intent. 
Currently, Western ideologies 
are 
establishing 
the 
notion 
of 
gendered 
orientalism, 
a 
misrepresentation 
of 
“other 
women” and their rights through 
incomplete 
dialogues 
and 
stereotyped viewpoints on a 
global, national and local scale. 
The central tenets of Western 
feminism typically, though not 
always, revolve around shared 
and accepted beliefs: a world 
without misogynistic violence, 
where pay parity is the norm 
and women have the freedom of 
choice. The context in which these 
are explored, however, needs 
to be one of cultural humility, 
which means understanding how 
certain cultural ideas compare 
and contrast with what people 
consider “expertise.”
As 
evolved 
from 
colonial 
thought, there is a ubiquitous, 
unacknowledged 
notion 
that 
Western philosophies present 
other cultures through a pitied, 
stereotypical 
viewpoint 
— 
which is also evidenced in the 
global feminist movement. For 
instance, the 2015 documentary 
“India’s Daughter,” directed by 
British filmmaker Leslee Udwin, 
offers a detailed and sobering 

account of the 2012 gang rape 
and murder incident of a young 
woman in India. While shedding 
light onto the cultural divide that 
galvanized a new movement in 
an image-conscious country, the 
film’s portrayal of the victim, Jyoti 
Singh, as a daughter propagates 
a rather dangerous notion as to 
who Indian women are and when 
their rights are worth fighting 
for. The film’s Western gaze 
constructs a narrow, almost two-
dimensional image of who Indian 
women are. Jyoti is reduced to a 
cultural stereotype — a virtuous, 
pure and hard-working student 
who needed protection. 
The film casts her as an abstract 
symbol exploited by those who 
knew and wronged her. Hence, 
she is reduced to these people’s 
thoughts of her, which is further 
muddled by the direction of a 
Western filmmaker. Her memory 
and existence in the history of 
the world are completely defined 
by one aspect of her identity — 
an Indian daughter — and her 
gruesome fate is misrepresented 
as a consequence of a culture that 
subjugates women. While these 
cultural tropes are not necessarily 
untrue, it is important to note that 
the crime was heinous because it 
was committed, not because it 
was committed against a pious 
Indian woman. 
Apart from globally reducing 
culturally-charged, 
feminist 
narratives to mere stereotypes, 
on a national level, Western 
feminism is ruptured in that 
advocacy is rooted in fulfilling 
Caucasian agendas that do not 
necessarily apply to minority 
populations. As Chandra Mohanty 
writes in her essay “Under the 
Western Eyes,” white feminism 
often 
overshadows 
without 
encompassing the complexities of 
colored experiences. A common 
topic of discussion, especially in 
today’s sociopolitical climate, is 
the income inequality that exists 
between men and women. The 
narrative that women make 82 
cents for every dollar that a man 
makes is incomplete and ignorant 
of broader systemic problems. Yet 
the full, racialized picture rarely 
receives as much attention as the 
fragmented one does. 
The startlingly large wage 
gap in the U.S. between women 

of color and white women is 
a discussion that is limited 
to political debate but little 
ground level recognition and 
action. The onset of new age 
feminism, dubbed the Fourth 
Wave of Feminism, carries the 
successes of the legacies created 
before it — voter equality, 
governmental 
representation, 
etc. — but compounds on the 
faults of the eras before it as 
well. It lacks intersectionality. 
Just like how women of color 
received the right to vote much 
later than white women, the 
war for equal pay seems to be 
serving only a portion of the 
population. The majority of 
the advocacy surrounding this 
issue is changing perceptions 
to lead to systemic changes. 
The perception becomes that 
women choose jobs that pay 
less, thus women deserve less 
pay when they choose to have 
children, hence women are not 
as professionally capable as men. 
Perceptions, 
however, 
are 
multilayered. The schema for 
a Black or brown woman is 
very different from the schema 
for a white woman, and so 
there must be room in the 
feminist movement for women 
of all intersecting identities to 
speak for and represent their 
experiences. 
The 
Western 
feminist framework must expand 
to value minority experiences as 
much as it values white ones and 
must find place in the collective 
consciousness of society and not 
just in political debates. 
On a local level, feminist 
discourse 
must 
translate 
to 
actions — ones that are inclusive, 
intersectional and champions 
of 
multiculturalism. 
Protests 
like 
the 
national 
Women’s 
March or even campus-wide 
ones 
must 
emphasize 
the 
experiences of both minority 
and white women, so that these 
experiences are woven into an 
overarching narrative rooted in 
multiculturalism. All women, 
regardless of whether they fit 
stereotypical Western images, 
deviate 
from 
Westernized 
agendas or otherwise, deserve 
representation and equal rights. 

Divya Gumudavelly can be 

reached at gumudadi@umich.edu.

Considerations on clean energy
T

he apparent abundance 
and efficiency of fossil 
fuels revolutionized our 
energy systems. Research had yet 
to confirm environmental, health 
and economic risks, and even when 
it had, communication was poor. 
This lack of foresight has led us to 
the current, established system that 
resists change despite confirmed 
harm — sacrificial zones, energy 
poverty, ecological catastrophe, 
global warming and climate crisis. 
Fossil fuels catalyzed the Second 
Industrial 
Revolution 
at 
the 
expense of countless communities 
and regions around the world.
Unsurprisingly, 
it 
was 
the 
threat of scarcity rather than 
environmental and ethical issues 
that started pushing us away 
from fossil fuels. Research into 
alternative 
energy 
accelerated, 
with solar as one of the most 
attractive 
candidates 
due 
to 
abundant solar irradiance, though 
this can be limited as there are only 
so many hours in a day. Moreover, 
the process of fabricating a solar 
cell is incredibly material and 
energy intensive, and there are 
limited resources on Earth. What 
do we do once we’ve extracted it 
all? What do we do when we’re 
left with nonfunctional solar cells? 
Experts predict that we would 
generate 78 million metric tons of 
photovoltaic waste by 2050 under 
our current system. It is critical 
that we consider the full lifetime of 
a solar cell — from the harvesting 
of raw materials to methods of 
waste management. There are 
limited 
natural 
resources 
on 
Earth. Confronting this unsettling 
reality demands the development 
of more efficient and widely 
applicable methods to repurpose, 
remanufacture 
and 
recycle 
materials necessary to renewable 
energy sources. Namely, a circular 
economy of energy. 
The circular economy model 
first became popular in the 1970s 
and has since been championed by 
the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 
a UK-based charity that promotes 

and 
funds 
circular 
economy 
advancements. 
The 
current 
global economy runs in a linear 
fashion: production, use, waste. A 
linear economy depletes Earth’s 
raw 
resources 
and 
generates 
massive waste, a model that is no 
longer sustainable. In contrast, a 
circular economy keeps all raw 
materials within the economy 
through 
repair, 
refurbishment, 
remanufacture 
and 
recycling. 
Consider a cell phone in a circular 
economy: Repair would constitute 
customer care such as replacing 
the battery; refurbishment would 
require 
the 
manufacturer 
to 
replace parts like the screen or 
camera; 
remanufacture 
would 
take the phone apart to install 
new hardware; recycling would 
take the phone apart completely 
to extract individual materials, 
such as precious metals, wiring 
and plastics. Our current economy 
does not significantly include 
any of these pathways except 
recycling. 
But 
taking 
apart 
products completely is wasteful, 
needless and energy intensive. 
Furthermore, recycling in the U.S. 
is declining since exporting waste 
is no longer an option and no cost-
effective 
domestic 
alternatives 
exist. Radical action is needed to 
establish a true circular economy. 
It’s the only way to sustainably 
minimize waste.
These same principles must 
be applied to energy systems. 
Currently, 
silicon 
solar 
cells 
dominate 90 percent of the solar 
cell industry. Yet, while silicon is 
the second most abundant element 
on Earth, it remains a limited 
and problematic candidate for 
solar cell materials. Modern solar 
cell advancements rely on new 
materials with better electronic 
properties but potentially more 
hazardous materials. Perovskite 
solar cells, for example, have 
skyrocketed in efficiencies but 
often contain lead and other 
potentially hazardous materials. 
These 
hazardous 
materials 
demand 
multiple 
extractions, 

refinement 
and 
a 
lengthy 
period of transportation. These 
processes 
elevate 
the 
initial 
carbon footprint of producing 
solar cells. Furthermore, relying 
on trace materials has the 
potential to make us vulnerable 
to scarcity. Regardless of what 
material is used for our solar 
cells, circular economy principles 
will be key to designing a system 
that lasts.
Fossil fuels are an empire 
built on unethical, unsustainable 
practices that become impossible 
to correct as the empire grows. 
Thus, it is critical to investigate 
sourcing and waste management 
before committing to a new 
system. 
Our 
desperation 
to 
escape 
disastrous 
climate 
change by ditching fossil fuels 
has the potential to make us 
reckless 
and 
vulnerable. 
We 
must 
hold 
our 
industries, 
scientists, 
policymakers 
and 
energy companies accountable 
for 
answering 
the 
following 
questions: How are we mitigating 
exploitation, 
emissions 
and 
waste? Where will the energy 
be produced and maintained? 
How will it affect and support all 
communities? These are not trivial 
questions we can ignore while 
consuming seemingly limitless, 
cheap, consequence-free energy.
Solar 
irradiance 
may 
be 
infinite, but the raw materials 
needed to capture it are not. We 
cannot continue down a linear 
economy model, consuming raw 
materials and producing solar 
cell waste. There is no future 
in a linear economy. We must 
confront resource scarcity and 
waste generation by demanding a 
circular economy. Solar cells could 
make up a sustainable energy 
system, but they could also become 
the next fossil fuel disaster. No 
energy system under a linear 
economy can succeed.

Desi Dikova is a senior studying chemistry 

and minoring in energy science and policy.

It’s foolish to 
not entertain 
the idea of 
decriminalization

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