July 2, 2008
A man charged with cocaine offenses was exonerated in Los Angeles after his lawyer produced a video showing two police officers lied in sworn testimony.
June 30, 2008
Modern Mechanix has a vintage ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Excellent tagline.
Modern Mechanix has a vintage ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Excellent tagline.
June 25, 2008
Liz Spikol, one of my bosses at PW, writes on Huffington Post about the overmedication of the elderly. The New York Times wrote about this earlier this week.

This week's column

It’s about potent pot, and how the government lies to you.
The FDA has approved a 4-in-1 vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline that innoculates people against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough and polio.
NORML’s Paul Armentano writes on Huffington Post about how cannabis is a promising treatment for cancer, even though the U.S. government essentially forbids clinical trials.
Here’s a nice piece from Health Beat about addiction and the social view of drug addicts.
June 22, 2008
Smokers in Scotland could be paid to quit smoking.
June 20, 2008

The DEA is about to let doctors write prescriptions for controlled substances online. Many scheduled substances — Ritalin, for example — are widely used; prescribing drugs online would cut costs. Alex Coolman wonders if online prescriptions would lead to more recreational use.

More from the Wall Street Journal.

Time has a very interesting article titled Should You Drink with Your Kids? It details the results of a study about children who drink with their parents:

A few years ago, a team of North Carolina researchers, led by public-health professor Kristie Long Foley, examined whether adults’ approval or disapproval mattered when adolescents were deciding whether and how much to drink. Foley’s team analyzed surveys of more than 6,000 people ages 16 to 20 in 242 U.S. communities. One predictable finding: kids whose parents gave them alcohol for parties were more likely to binge-drink. That discovery underscored years of research showing that the earlier people start to drink, the more likely they are to become alcoholics.

But another result was surprising: if kids actually drank with their parents, they were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and about one-third as likely to say they had had five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks. As Foley and her colleagues wrote in a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health paper, “Drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends.”