What is a good 'public issue' that I can focus my 5000 word college class project on?

health care reform
legalizing marijuana
stem cell research
genetic engineering
animal experimentation
cloning
climate change
euthanasia

the recent supreme court decision to make the US a corporate oligarchy

My personal fave and my term paper topic for this year is : 2ond amendment and California’s strict gun laws or any states gun laws

I know this is an old topic, but the public can always be more aware of “the dangers of nicotine”. I am currently doing a personal project for school on nicotine, and I can already tell you that there is quite a lot of information to be found on the subject. There is definitely 5000 words worth of info, although much of it could be considered boring. Hope this helps.

Abortion- (pro-life or pro-choice)
the morning after pill vs RU486

Whatever topic you pick, be it one of the great ones mentioned in this thread or any other—make it one you feel passionate about. Your project will be all the better for that.

What about whether pharmacists can ethically refuse to sell prescribed medications on the basis of their personal or religious objections.

For example, refusing to sell birth control pills to unmarried women, or young teenage women.
or selling the morning-after pill to any women.

@ragingloli That’s what I was going to say. Sweepingly important and as current as you can get. It doesn’t have a huge crowd with hardened opinions arguing it yet, so the arguments can be fresh and interesting, not rehashes of what we have all already heard.

If you want to bring in @coolbeans idea, you can take it a step further. If, as the SCOTUS siad today, overturning hundreds of years of case law, Corporations are just like individuals when it comes to 1st Amendment Rights to freedom of speech, why not 2nd Amendment rights too? Why can’t Wal-Mart and Exxon-Mobil have their own private militias of any size they want?

Legalization of marijuana is huge where I live. For you, though, it might not really be discussed all that much.

Patent law and why genes are allowed to be patented, and why they should or should not be. A lot of people are for and against GMO’s on the basis of whether or not they believe GMO’s pose some kind of health risk. Only time will tell if there is one. The better point to argue is whether or not genes should be allowed to be patented, because the effects of doing that are not unknown.

If you choose this topic, I would appreciate keeping in touch as it is something that I have been meaning to look into myself and just haven’t got around to yet.

Kids are over-prescribed and a lot of the stuff they give them is off-label. Maybe that would be an interesting project. Very controversial in the school systems.

The role of FNMA and Freddie Mac in the housing bubble. Or more specifically, the role of the government in the pressure to lend without control or moderation.

The National debt has been one of my favorite topics to study. The devaluing of our paper currency is also something of great concern.

@writemyselfaletter Do you know that less than 15% of the defaulted loans were to minorities or the poor. The problem was not that. THat was just the tip of the iceberg. Deregulation of the Gramm, Leach, Bliley act of 1999 made it possible for a single firm to be a bank, investment bank, insurer and hedge fund all at once. They made ultra-risky bets, packaged them as leveraged securities, resold them to be further leveraged. The profits were enormous, and the taxpayers had the risk, because they were too big to fail.

If the poor are really the ones that sucked 13 trillion dollars out of the US economy, it’s odd they are still poor.

You could always do campaign finance in face of the Supreme Court decision yesterday.

Here’s a link to a discussion about it here on the site. It could be fun to make into a project. Especially if you run with the all the possible extrapolations.

http://www.fluther.com/disc/70723/does-money-equal-free-speech/