Talk:Drug policy of Michigan

Peer Review and Responses during the Educational Assignment in Winter 2016

Topic Peer Review 1

Hi!

First off, you have a very interesting topic, and I think it is good for Wikipedia. A lot of people use Wikipedia as a quick resource for everyday questions, so I think your page makes drug policy in Michigan very accessible to everyday users. After reading through your page, I was happy to see so much relevant information on the specifics of policy and punishments for drug use. I think that the overall information is new and not duplicative of any other existing page. You introduction paragraph seems simple and very accessible to non-experts. For content and length, I think that your subtopics had appropriate length and relevant content. However, I think you could potentially add more information to the "Drug-Free Workplace" section. You could maybe go into more detail about these workplace initiatives by providing examples. In addition, there are several spots within your article where I think it could be beneficial for you to add an embedded Wikipedia link. For instance, when you mention "Schedule 1" drugs, "Jennifer Granholm", and the "Michigan Medical Marijuana Act", I think you could link these topics to their existing Wikipedia page for further information. In addition, I really like the high-quality charts that you incorporated into your page. However, I think you could potentially discuss the charts with more detail within the text of your page. For instance, I am still unclear about the meaning of "drugged driving per se laws" as the one chart describes, so you could potentially mention these laws within your section "alcohol". Another option for incorporating your charts would be to add a whole additional section titled "consequences of drug use" to talk about the drug death rates and more. Also, I just noticed a few small spelling errors where marijuana was spelled "marihuana" and workplace was spelled "work place". Those are really minor edits, but just figured I'd mention them. Overall, your page is informative and has many diverse references. Your references come from credible government sources, which is good. Overall, I think your page shows great potential, and it will be a great addition to Wikipedia!

Jmagas (talk)Jmagas —Preceding undated comment added 16:45, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Topic Peer Review 2

You guys picked a really great topic and I found it interesting to read. I am pretty surprised there was no existing page on a subject like this so it is great that you guys picked it!! The first comment I have is about your introductory section. You mention Act 368 but it is never mentioned anywhere else on the page. I think you guys should either explain what this is or link it to a respective Wikipedia page so others can find out more information on it. Secondly, under the header "Cannabis" there is only one subhead which is "medicinal use". Maybe you could split this up so there is medicinal use and also recreational use. Some of the policies you discussed have to do with recreational use as well so I think its important to discuss the legality of recreational use. Under this section you could also potentially talk about crime when it comes to recreational marijuana use, like the number of incarcerations in Michigan due to drug offense. Also just as you classified Heroine on the Drug Schedule you could maybe also classify marijuana and alcohol so there can be consistency across the different substances. I also think that under your alcohol section you might want to list some brief history (just a few sentence) on how the policies have changed over time. You could say what year the drinking age changed to 21 and what year the Michigan liquor control code was created. Also in that section BAC, should be linked to the bodily alcohol content Wikipedia page. In the final section, Jennifer Granholm should also be linked to her Wikipedia page. This section on the Drug-Free Workplace is rather short and after reading it I wasn't sure if any actual legislature or drug policy had been created. I would just expand on this section a bit.

Overall, I think you guys did a great job. There are few grammar mistakes and I think the page is organized well. In terms of content, I think you could maybe expand a little more on the history of Drug Policy of Michigan just to give the reader some context. I also think it would be beneficial to discuss more of the legislature that has impacted drug policy and also talk about the government agencies in Michigan that oversee these policies for example the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. You could also maybe create a chart or a list of the Michigan Schedule of Substances to give readers very brief information on other drugs like Cocaine or LSD. There are also a few other policies that I think would be beneficial to mention like the Park Zone policy or Mandatory Life Sentencing for Repeat drug offenders. I think your figures are great and your references are extensive.

Kamcghee (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:11, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Group Response to Peer Review

First, we would like to start off by thanking everyone who reviewed our Wikipedia page. Starting with Professor Pavel's comments, we have added hyperlinks to other Wikipedia pages throughout our article. We also added a section at the bottom linking to the pages of drug policies for other states. We have added a section on our page about Per Se laws in Michigan since we had a table that referenced them, but did not explain what they were. As for our classmates' reviews, we have also made beneficial edits based on their comments. First, we have addressed the grammatical errors mentioned (we kept "marihuana" spelled as it is because Michigan's legislation regarding Marijuana spelled it that way). Also, as advised, we expanded on our "Other Policies" section. As for some of the other recommended additions, we decided to not add them at this time because we feel that our page has more than enough substance to fulfill the requirements of this project. We hope that other Wikipedia users will add information like this in the future, but also believe that we have set a very strong foundation for the page and do not need to add more for the purpose of this project. Additionally, some of the suggestions made above were things that we already had covered in our article (like talking about marijuana laws outside of medicinal use and explaining what Schedule each drug falls under). Again, we thank everyone for helping us to improve our page.

Suggestions from ChemLibrarian

Great work with adding the new article. Here are a few suggestions before you post it to the main space.

1. It's good that you found images from government report that you can share with a public domain method. If you'd like to adjust the size and location of the images, you can look at this Wikipedia:Picture tutorial to figure out how.
2. You have an error about date format in the reference. Just change the data format to 2016-03-17 . It should solve the problem. Also, I would suggest adding the agency's name as the author of these report so that it's clear who is responsible for these documents.
3. Don't forget to add a section hearing "Reference" before the bibliography.
4. Some more terms can be linked to other Wikipedia article like marijuana etc.

ChemLibrarian (talk) 18:38, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Potential Improvements and Final Remarks

Overall, we are very happy with the page we put together. All of the peer review comments we received (see above) were valuable, but we did not have time to make all of the improvements suggested, nor did we feel some suggestions were necessary for the goals of this particular project. That being said, we hope that in the future the Wikipedia community will add to the page we have started here and include more information, and possibly even some of the suggestions made by our peers. Some examples of additional information that could be provided include: more sections on different drugs such as cocaine, powerful hallucinogens (not marijuana), prescription drug abuse, as well as more policies under the "other policies" section, and generally more information on marijuana legislation. Other sections suggested include the history of drug policy in Michigan, which we agree would be a substantial contribution to the page. With this in mind, we hope our fellow Wikipedia editors will continue to improve upon this page as time goes on, and that this page will prove useful to Wikipedia users everywhere.

Zauberhaft1 (talk) 03:26, 16 April 2016 (UTC)