Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2009

Not quite the solution they were looking for

Filed under: Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Jacob Sullum looks at a not-very impressive result in clinical testing:

A study reported this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that an experimental “cocaine vaccine” was mostly ineffective at reducing consumption of the drug. Less than two-fifths of the subjects injected with the vaccine, which is supposed to stimulate production of antibodies that bind to cocaine molecules and prevent them from reaching the brain, had enough of an immune system response to significantly reduce their cocaine use (as measured by urine tests). Even among those subjects, only half cut back on cocaine by 50 percent or more.

[. . .]

Vaccine boosters think the real money lies in an effective anti-nicotine treatment, which they believe would attract “inveterate smokers” who have repeatedly tried to quit with other methods. But as The New York Times notes (in the headline, no less), such a vaccine “does not keep users from wanting the drug.” If all goes well, their cravings are not diminished in the slightest; they just can no longer satisfy them. And that’s assuming the vaccine is fully effective (as opposed to maybe 10 percent effective, like the one in the study); if not, it could actually increase consumption by neutralizing a percentage of each dose. A partially effective nicotine vaccine could be hazardous to smokers’ health if it encouraged them to smoke more so as to achieve the effect to which they’re accustomed. In any case, it’s not clear how appealing the idea of biochemically taking the fun out of smoking will be; the success of such a product hinges on consumers looking for a way to frustrate themselves.

If you take the cynical view, it’s a perfect Puritan drug: take away the benefit without reducing the desire. That way, you see, the sinners would still get all the suffering they’re entitled to without any satisfaction at all. Hell on earth, just the way Puritans like it.

October 1, 2009

Canada as prescription drug “parasite”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:07

I guess the discussion on medical costs got boring without bringing international issues into play. Senator Bob Corker got into it with Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett:

An American legislator called Canada “parasitic” on Wednesday for siphoning U.S. dollars to Canada with low prescription drug prices while his country does “all the innovation.”

Canada benefits financially from America’s role as a world leader in medical advances, Republican Sen. Bob Corker charged in an exchange with a Liberal MP as she testified before a U.S. Senate committee.

“One of the things that has troubled me greatly about our system is the fact that we pay more for pharmaceuticals and devices than other countries, and yet it’s not really our country so much that’s the problem, it’s the parasitic relationship that Canada and France and other countries have towards us,” the Tennessee lawmaker told Carolyn Bennett.

Canadian provinces have a financial lever that is a direct result of the single-payer model: if you want to sell your drug in Canada, you have to sell to the government monopoly for each province. The market is small, and there are only a limited number of buyers, so the best price you can get for your product will end up being the price all of the geographical monopolies are willing to pay . . . or you don’t sell into that market at all. Under the circumstances, it’s rational for the companies to sell at close to cost: the bulk of their costs are already sunk in the R&D effort and the regulatory effort to get the drug on to the domestic market.

That doesn’t make the charge any more palatable, but there’s some justice to making it.

September 30, 2009

A different approach to healthcare reform

Filed under: Government, Health, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:03

“John Galt” has a different suggestion for fixing what ails the American healthcare field:

We have some real problems: Bizarre incentives that have led to runaway costs. Rescission. An employer stranglehold over workers’ healthcare. Overuse in the form of care prescribed to protect doctors from lawyers, rather than protecting patients from illness. Arbitrary requirements to carry coverage for other people’s expensive risks.

The truth is that every one of those issues could be addressed — right now, and in a bipartisan fashion — without a single-payer system, a mandate, or any other form of “universal healthcare.” It wouldn’t even take a single massive “reform” bill — just a few simple bills, mostly repealing existing regulation.

But the left has settled on universal healthcare. The “public option.” No other reform is acceptable. No other reform will be permitted. Nothing can actually be fixed if it will lower the number of people who might benefit from a universal system, or if it will reduce national dissatisfaction with market-based care.

It’s quite true that there’s already massive government involvement in the health market, and that a lot of that consists of regulations that have dubious health benefits, but measurable detriments to patients, doctors, and hospitals.

The intersection of the War on Drugs with the government’s role in healthcare, for example, has led to a number of doctors being imprisoned for “inappropriate” prescriptions of painkillers to patients with chronic pain issues. It has also led to a huge number of doctors being afraid to prescribe what their patients actually need, for fear of being charged and convicted of “drug trafficking”. Many patients now suffer prolonged pain because they can’t get an adequate dose of painkillers and can’t find doctors to prescribe them.

All this, in pursuit of getting tough on illicit use of prescription medicine. Government at its finest.

September 18, 2009

I didn’t think this was legal

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:49

Linked from The Agitator, a little bit of legal trivia . . . even if the jury finds you not guilty, the judge can still sentence you to prison anyway:

Indeed, my friends, welcome to our world.

Not only have many defendants been sentenced for stuff the jury said they didn’t do (or at least wasn’t proven), but yesterday the Supreme Court refused to do anything about it. The cert denial came in the case of Mark Hurn of my hometown, Madison, Wis. Hurn ate 15 years extra years in prison for possessing crack cocaine, even though a jury acquitted him of the charge. It’s true. Though he was convicted of having powder cocaine in his house, (for which he was looking at two or three years in prison), he was sentenced to almost 18 years. Why? Because even though the jury acquitted him of the crack charge, the judge kind of figured he’d done it and therefore found, by a preponderance of the evidence that he’d done it, and sent him to prison as if the jury had actually said “Guilty” rather than “Not Guilty.”

September 1, 2009

Woodstock: not so much remembered, as hallucinated

Filed under: History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

I wasn’t at Woodstock. I didn’t want to be at Woodstock. I wasn’t even consciously aware of Woodstock until long after it happened. I have my excuses: I was not quite nine years old at the time, for a start. I point this out not because of any wanna-be-boomer longings, but because Jon (my former virtual landlord) frequently accuses me of being a hippie, or at least wanting to be one.

P.J. O’Rourke, however, has a different excuse:

I was slightly disappointed to be missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it had turned into a catastrophic, drug-addled, rain-drenched disaster area lacking food, water, shelter, and Port-A-Potties. Then I was furious to be missing Woodstock.

What this says about 21-year-old boys I needn’t tell anyone who has been, dated, or raised one. Furthermore, Sunflower’s suicide attempt was the result of a fight with her mother about a department store charge plate bill for a $128 peasant blouse and had nothing to do with Sunflower’s desperate romantic feelings for me.

To top it off, a few years later I became a Republican.

What with one thing and another, I was always touchy on the subject of Woodstock. I’m over it now, thanks to various books celebrating the 40th anniversary of too many people in bad haircuts going to an upstate New York dairy farm for no good reason. I’ve counted three of these books so far. Since counting to three was as much as most Woodstock attendees could manage on goof butts and silly pills, three is where I stop.

This is actually from a review of three books about the Woodstock phenomenon (or cultural disaster, take your pick):

The Road to Woodstock is “by” Michael Lang, one of the two original promoters, “with” Holly George-Warren who is coeditor of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and thus, presumably, knows the alphabet. I have no idea how much of the book Lang wrote, but he doesn’t seem to have read it. He is described therein by a pair of ex-business partners as having “a face that is, by turns, evil, wanton, fey, impish, and innocent.” This is more than I would let ex-business partners of mine say about me in my book.

And yet, if you reverse the order of the adjectives, you get the progress of the sixties, perfectly delineated.

It was not, by the way, a decade: The sixties were a strange episode of about 80 months’ duration that started when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia (roughly the 1966-67 school year) and came to a screeching halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.

August 31, 2009

The last Whizzinator joke?

Filed under: Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

Anyone remember Onterrio Smith? Anyone? Okay, an easier question: does anyone remember a Vikings player caught with a Whizzinator? That was Onterrio Smith. (Kinda topical posts on the old site legacy plays on:

Matt Little called his sister over the weekend and told her, “You’ll never guess what I just bought.” He then asked her if she had heard of the Original Whizzinator that had been in the news.

“She said, ‘Yeah, some idiot paid $750 for that thing.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that was me,'” Little said with a laugh Sunday night.

Little, 26, owns Buster’s, a sports bar in Mankato. He is the mystery man who purchased the Whizzinator that ex-Viking Onterrio Smith was so famously detained with at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in 2005. That piece of inglorious local sports history — a device with a prosthetic penis attached to a jock strap and filled with “clean” urine to help pass a drug test — was up for auction Friday night in Shakopee.

It’s probably just the 7-year-old in me that finds it amusing that this particular device was being auctioned off in a place called Shake-o-pee.

August 21, 2009

QotD: Heroin as a treatment for addiction

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Stripped of the medicalese, what the researchers found is that if you give heroin addicts heroin, they will keep coming back for more. They will also be less likely to buy heroin on the street or commit crimes to support their habit. These findings, similar to the results of European studies, are not exactly surprising. The puzzling thing is that we’re asked to pretend that heroin is a “treatment” for heroin addiction. “Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction,” says the headline over a New York Times story that begins, “The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form.”

What the study actually shows is that the problems associated with heroin addiction are largely caused by prohibition, which creates a black market in which prices are artificially high, quality is unreliable, and obtaining the drug means risking arrest and associating with possibly violent criminals. The drug laws also encourage injection by making heroin much more expensive that it would otherwise be and foster unsanitary, disease-spreading injection practices by treating syringes and needles as illegal drug paraphernalia. When you take these dangers out of the equation, regular use of heroin is safe enough that it can qualify as a “treatment” dispensed by men in white coats. That rather startling fact should cause people to question not just current addiction treatment practices but the morality of trying to save people from themselves by making their lives miserable.

Jacob Sullum, “This Just In: Heroin Addicts Like Heroin”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-21

July 28, 2009

“The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States”

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Ryan Grim looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade:

Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, leaving South Florida with an idle army of welltrained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of the dark arts that would become valuable in the cocaine smuggling business. They knew how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades’ hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload, or dock elsewhere along Florida’s 3,000 miles of coastline.

The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn’t created solely for cocaine, or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and other products subject to tariffs. A “mother ship,” either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the shore, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats — named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco — would zip out to the offshore vessel to load up with coke. The drug also came in by air. In the late ’70s and early ’80s customs officials estimated that more than 80 cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980 the U.S. Customs Service seized 200 cigarette boats and 50 airplanes, one of which was a World War II–era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations.

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