Canada spends millions to grow weed: In the February 5, 2001 issue of Nexus, we covered when the Canadian government paid $5.75 million to Prairie Plant Systems Inc. to grow what was described as a literal ton of medical marijuana. This was done to help chronically ill patients and to contribute toward researching the effectiveness of medical marijuana. There was debate as to how much THC would work to help ease chronic pain for patients with cancer or AIDS. At that point, weed was still heavily stigmatized and decriminalization was still up in the air. Today, dispensaries are as easy to find as liquor stores and people smoke for reasons ranging from chronic pain to stress relief, and projects like this helped us get here.
E-commerce, the future of sales?: In this issue we also covered Camosun introducing an electronic commerce class, Business 192, which was intended to be part of the Business Administration program. The class was entirely online, which was rare in 2001, and focused on introducing Business students to the growing world of e-commerce. Business Information Systems chair Felix Ernst firmly believed that the internet would continue growing and that someday all of our shopping would be done online. Although that class doesn’t exist anymore, his predictions were correct. People aren’t just buying small items online—they’re ordering groceries, buying clothes and books… even buying a TV can be done at the click of a button.
Monkey with jellyfish DNA sparks ethics debate: A rhesus monkey named ANDi had his genome modified when it was spliced with a gene from a jellyfish, and we talked about it in this issue. Scientists were hopeful that in learning to splice primate DNA they could test medications on primates rather than humans to help cure diseases, since the two are similar genetically. This caused some controversy, especially from the Animal Allegiance of Canada (AAC), who stated that it was cruel to use primates to help cure diseases that only affect humans. The ethics around genetic modification have been around since humans learned that we could pull off such feats; as scientific progress keeps going, one can only wonder what the next controversial discovery will be.