DailyDirt: Time Flies When You're...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of myths and aphorisms about the passage of time. A watched kettle never boils. Time flies when you're having fun. However, these observations could lead to some important discoveries about human psychology and how our brains perceive and remember various events in our lives. Does "proportionality theory" really explain why 8yo kids and 80yo senior citizens judge time differently? Here are just a few links on the topic of time.

• Does the perception of time really speed up as you get older? It depends on the time frame -- days and weeks may pass at a normal speed, but it's the years that seem to fly by. [url]
• The perception of time passing can be changed by emotions (fear seems to slow time down), disrupted routines and new experiences. Also, drugs that affect dopamine function in the brain (eg. Ritalin, Adderall and anti-psychotic drugs) can speed up or slow down how a person perceives time. [url]
• If the maximum sentence for criminals is life in prison, could we make the punishment worse by giving inmates drugs that make the time seem to pass more slowly? Obviously, there are some serious ethical questions about customizing punishments with technology, but it's an issue that should be debated as medicine comes up with ever more ways to extend human lifespans. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: aging, drugs, lifespan, perception, psychology, punishment, time

Sheriff's Dept. Charges Man With No Drugs With 'Intent To Distribute Counterfeit Controlled Substances'

from the if-you-don't-like-punishment,-don't-not-break-the-rules dept

Live a clean life and the cops should leave you alone, right? RIGHT?!? Harvey Silverglate wasn't being facetious when he wrote "Three Felonies A Day." There are all sorts of laws waiting to be broken, laws that boggle the mind in their insipidity.

As we covered recently, the FBI arrested one of its own handcrafted "terrorists" for "conspiring" to materially aid a terrorist organization. This "conspiring" apparently took the form of the suspect talking about possibly joining a terrorist group and, with undercover agents' urging, traveling to Canada to fill out some sort of terrorist job application. He was arrested at the border, having really done nothing more than talk big and wear the "rube" label really well.

More recently, Techdirt covered Judge Otis Wright's beration of the ATF for setting up stooges to pull off a fake crime -- a conspiracy to rob a "stash house." Of course, the stash house didn't exist, but this didn't stop the government from bringing criminal charges against the "criminals" and seeking sentences based on the entirely fictional contents of the fictional house. The ATF told its stooges that the house contained 20-25 kilos of coke in the house. Judge Wright asked why not just say 10, or 100 or 1,000, as long as the government's just making up numbers? No crime here because said "stash house" simply didn't exist and yet, people were arrested and put on trial.

Here's another case of no criminal activity somehow turning into a crime in the hands of zealous law enforcement officers who apparently couldn't handle not getting the drug bust they were obviously seeking. (via Reason)

Deputies said they stopped Delbert Dewayne Galbreath at NW 10th Street and Interstate 44 for a broken brake light. The deputy said Galbreath admitted he did not have a license to drive. Two deputies asked to search his car and he agreed.

A deputy found a cigarette pouch that had 16 pieces of a rock-like form, which authorities generally associate as crack cocaine. The deputies said they also found a digital scale.

Authorities tested the rocks and said they did not contain cocaine. When they asked Galbreath what the rocks were, he said they were Scentsy.
Galbreath was arrested on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute imitation controlled dangerous substance (CDS), possession of drug paraphernalia, driving under a revoked license and defective equipment.

Read that again: a man was arrested for not possessing drugs. Note the oddly specific denial. The man said they were "Scentsy." This doesn't sound like someone just blurting out the first thing that came to mind when deputies searched his vehicle.

If you're not familiar with Scentsy, it's a direct marketing company that specializes in "wickless candles," which are scented wax cubes that are warmed on its proprietary warmers. (All images taken from Scentsy's catalog unless otherwise noted)

Here's how the process works.


Here's a shot of a couple of Scentsy cubes sitting in a warmer with a vaguely scale-like shape.


Here's some more scale-esque warmers Scentsy offers.


And here's another scale-like warmer that's included in every Scentsy starter kit.


And here's some vaguely crack-colored wax sitting in a Scentsy warmer.


And for comparison's sake, here's a DEA file photo of crack cocaine.


So, this seems like an entirely plausible explanation. The plausibility factor shoots way up when you factor in the negative test results. But rather than investigate whether Galbreath's claims were accurate after the "NOT COCAINE" determination, the deputies ran with their original plan: nail Galbreath for drug dealing. Instead of dealing drugs, Galbreath was trying to sell fake drugs, which is completely indistinguishable from actual criminal activity when you're sitting in a jail cell.

Maybe the Sheriff's Dept. is hoping to sweat out some more info from the jailed "dealer," like who his pissed off customers are or who's further up the chain supplying him with fake drugs and taking a percentage of each sale he makes. (My hunch? A regional director in Oklahoma as well as any number of intermediaries along the direct marketing food chain.)

"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time," they say. But they somehow fail to add, "Don't NOT do the crime if you can't do the time," because everyday citizens like you and me might find that statement baffling, horrifying and complete bullshit.

Filed Under: delbert dewayne galbreath, drugs, fake crimes, law enforcement, scentsy

Bayer's CEO: We Develop Drugs For Rich Westerners, Not Poor Indians

from the refreshingly-honest dept

We've covered the continuing efforts of emerging economies to provide key medicines for their populations at affordable prices. To do that, they often invoke their right to use compulsory licensing to bring down costs. For understandable reasons, the big pharma companies aren't happy with that approach, but usually dress it up as a concern about the supposed threat to "innovation" that it represents -- their claim being high prices are needed to fund expensive research. But as Techdirt has noted, pharma's estimates of expenditure here tend to be hugely inflated, which rather undercuts that argument.

One of the companies that has been affected by compulsory licensing moves in India is Bayer. Here's what its CEO said on the subject according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek:

Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers called the compulsory license "essentially theft."

"We did not develop this medicine for Indians," Dekkers said Dec. 3. "We developed it for western patients who can afford it."

That's a refreshingly honest admission that rather than wanting to save lives around the world, what Bayer is interested in is maximizing its profits by selling expensive drugs to "western patients who can afford it," and that those who can't pay can just, well, drop dead -- which, of course, is precisely what many of them will do without Bayer's drugs.

Some might say that's a perfectly reasonable position -- after all, Bayer and the other pharmaceutical companies are for-profit concerns. But they weren't always so dismissive of humanitarian concerns. Here's what George Merck, who became president of his father's eponymous chemical manufacturing company in 1929, said on the subject, as quoted on the Today in Science History site:

We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.

Bayer's CEO obviously disagrees.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: drugs, india, marijn dekkers, pharmaceuticals, poor, rich
Companies: bayer, merck

Cops Subject Man To Rectal Searches, Enemas And A Colonoscopy In Futile Effort To Find Drugs They Swear He Was Hiding

from the a-vulgar-display-of-power dept

This post is going to be very short on commentary because the hideous abuse of justice has basically rendered me near speechless.

David Eckert, a resident of Deming, NM, was pulled over by police officers after failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. For whatever reason, the officers decided Eckert was hiding something, or perhaps they were unsatisfied that a routine stop hadn't blown up into something bigger.

They asked him to step out of the car and then searched his vehicle (without his consent). Another officer brought in a drug dog which reacted (a relatively worthless indication of anything -- drug dogs can easily be "alerted" by their controlling officers) to the driver's seat. (Eckert's lawyer calls into question this dog's training, presenting documents that claim to show it hadn't received the proper field training and recertification. See exhibits listed under docket item 27.) Then the officer "observed" that Eckert was standing "erect with his legs together" and his "buttocks clenched." This was all the justification the Deming police needed to subject Eckert to the following horrific chain of events at a hospital in neighboring Silver City.

1. Eckert's abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
4. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
5. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
6. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert's anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

At no time did Eckert give his consent to these searches. The police did obtain a warrant to rectally search Eckert but that warrant itself was problematic. For one, it was severely lacking in probable cause. For another, it was valid only for Luna County but the searches were executed in Grant County. Third, the warrant was only valid for four hours, up until 10 pm that night. Eckert was held for 14 hours and, according to medical records, prep for the colonoscopy didn't even commence until 1 am the following day.

Why the venue shift? Because the doctor at the Deming hospital told officers the proposed search was "unethical." Drs. Robert Wilcox and Okay Odocha of the Gila Regional Medical Center apparently had no qualms about forcibly "searching" Eckert eight times.

There's more in Eckert's complaint, including the fact that the second x-ray was of his chest, an area completely unrelated to the region where he was supposedly "concealing drugs." In addition to what can be proven from medical records and police reports obtained by Eckert's attorney, there are additional allegations that the officers Chavez and Hernandez mocked him and made derogatory comments about his "compromised position." They also allegedly moved the privacy screen repeatedly to expose him to others in the hospital hallway. This verbal abuse apparently continued during Eckert's ride back to the Deming police station. Understandably, Eckert now claims to be "terrified to leave the house" and does so "infrequently."

There are many lawsuits filed where most details are alleged. This isn't one of them. Most of what's "alleged" by Eckert is documented by the routine paperwork that accompanies medical procedures and search warrants. And, to add insult to injury, KOB4's news team states that the Gila Regional Medical Center is billing Eckert for the invasive, non-consensual medical procedures and has threatened to take him to collections for non-payment.

The only question that remains is why no one involved on the "law" side ever thought that anything past the first step on the list above might be excessive. These officers, along with two shamefully compliant doctors, went as far as they could to humiliate and violate someone simply because they could -- in a collective effort that looks far more like making Eckert pay for the "crime" of making the cops look stupid than any sort of legitimate law enforcement effort.

Filed Under: abuse, cavity searches, david eckert, doctors, drugs, ethics, law enforcement, war on drugs

DailyDirt: Replacing Exercise With A Pill

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people really enjoy exercising. Some people really don't. And some people have physical limitations that restrict the amount or kinds of exercise they can do. If there were a pill that could provide some of the benefits of exercising, plenty of folks would take it. Not surprisingly, a lot of research is looking at how exercise affects the body -- and some projects might lead to a pharmaceutical solution for couch potatoes. Here are just a few examples.

• Drug candidate SR9009 sounds like a pill from The Jetsons that helps you lose weight and build muscle -- without exercising. Mice treated with this drug showed increased metabolic activity in skeletal muscle and improved athletic endurance for running. [url]
• Different colonies of intestinal bacteria may spur obesity or prevent it. Studies of lab rodent fecal transplants suggest that some kinds of bacteria can help keep fat mice lean when eating a low-fat, high-fiber diet. [url]
• Regular exercise may help boost autophagy processes in the body that clear out surplus proteins and other cellular detritus -- potentially leading to some anti-aging benefits. Researchers are just beginning to learn more about autophagy mechanisms (and maybe someday we'll get the benefits without the exercise). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: anti-aging, autophagy, bacteria, drugs, exercise, health, medicine, pharmaceuticals, sr9009

DailyDirt: This Is Your Brain On Caffeine. Any Questions?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Making the perfect cup of coffee is an experiment that's been studied for decades -- if not for hundreds of years since coffee was first brewed in the 1300s. It's not an exact science yet, but studies on coffee drinking seem to point to it being mostly beneficial. Here are just a few interesting links for coffee lovers out there.

• According to one study, you're probably drinking too much coffee if you consume more than 28 cups per week. But if you're over 55, it apparently doesn't matter much to your health if you're drinking more than that amount of coffee. So if you're younger than 55 and drinking more than 4 cups every day, you just need to live a little longer and you can drink as much as you want. In fact, some other studies say coffee can lower the risk of premature death. [url]
• If you think that decaffeinated coffee is free of caffeine, think again. Decaf just has lower amounts of caffeine -- 3 to 15 milligrams per cup versus 85 milligrams (or more) for regular coffee. Those milligrams can add up if you're drinking a lot of decaf coffee. [url]
• Conventional wisdom says that pregnant women shouldn't drink coffee (or drink alcohol or eat sushi), but maybe the risks of doing so aren't that high? Better safe than sorry, though, right? [url]
• Even though people have been drinking coffee for centuries, the effect of coffee on our health isn't really clear. Caffeine might not be the only active ingredient in coffee, and studies haven't always separated out the smokers who seem to drink a lot of coffee. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: caffeine, coffee, decaf, decaffeinated coffee, drinks, drugs, food, health, medicine, pregnant

The Joy Of Monopolies: Orphan Drug Price Increasing By Nearly 40% Each Year

from the no-surprise-there dept

A couple of years ago, Techdirt carried an article by Andy Kessler about the difference between entrepreneurs who create value, and those who lock it up. The former tend to drive prices down constantly, innovating all the while in order to make a profit; the latter, by contrast, typically enjoy monopolies that allow them to push up prices without offering anything more in return.

Here's another great example of the latter from The New York Times, which concerns so-called "orphan drugs" -- that is, those intended to treat more uncommon diseases, which are often overlooked by Big Pharma only interested in Big Markets and Big Profits. Here's what happened with a company called Jazz:

To get drug developers to focus on these relatively small pools of patients, the federal government offers inducements like a 50 percent research-and-development tax credit as well as a longer period of market exclusivity (seven years after Food and Drug Administration approval, rather than the typical five). These long monopolies often give orphan drug makers a free hand to raise prices.

That's precisely what Jazz has done, often multiple times each year, at an average annual rate of nearly 40 percent. Today, Xyrem costs more than $65,000 per year for the typical user.

Of course, the standard justification for such incredibly expensive drugs is that they are incredibly expensive to develop. Techdirt has debunked that notion in general, and The New York Times article does so again for this particular case:

Xyrem, which is a modification of a long-available compound, was inexpensive to develop, as new drugs go. Indeed, Jazz paid only $146 million for Orphan Medical [the company that did the original work on Xyrem and other orphan drugs], just a fraction of what it now earns each year from Xyrem alone. (The company contends that it has spent considerably on its development.)

So however laudable the aim of the 1983 Orphan Drug Act might have been, its effect can turn out to be just what you would expect from granting yet more government-backed monopolies: ever-higher prices for no additional benefit -- the very definition of a company locking up value, rather than creating it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: drugs, monopolies, orphan drugs, patents, pharmaceuticals
Companies: jazz

Man Asks For Weed On Twitter, Local Police Tweet Response, Hilarity Ensues

from the high-guys dept

Look, when it comes to illicit narcotics, I don’t know a whole lot beyond the peyote-driven walkabouts my heroin-addicted cult leader sends me on with requests to make sure I pick up all the mushrooms along the way. Still, even in my ignorance, I have to think there’s a better way to score some coolness than putting the pot-signal out on Twitter. I mean, isn’t there a high school or college in the area?

Apparently not for one man in Canada, where I could have sworn enforcement of marijuana crimes was handled in the same way as jay-walking. Unfortunately for him, but very fortunately for the rest of us, the local police were users of both Twitter and humor.

The young man, posting under the user name Sunith Baheerathan, was apparently at work on Tuesday when he wrote, "Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff or two to help me last this open to close."

The York Regional Police noticed the post — which has since been removed — and replied: "Awesome! Can we come too?"

While I tend to have some trust issues with police (But not with the local Chicago police! Swear to god, you guys are the dog's bollocks and all that. I haven’t heard a gunshot in hours! Progress!), I can still appreciate when police mix a refusal to overreact to a situation with a little humor. So, apparently, can lots of other people, since the exchange between Sunith and the YRP was retweeted approximately a gazillion times. Guess who happened to be among the YRP’s Twitter followers?

By Tuesday evening, Mr. Lube tweeted, "Thank you to the York Regional Police for your help and great work. The matter has now been handled."
Sunith Baheerathan also tweeted: "Just got the call of termination."

Since then, Sunith has made much noise about how his tweets weren’t serious and how he didn’t know weed-smokers were hated by society more than “shooters and rapists,” two statements which both seem to contradict one another, while also making me wonder how many Canadian police departments are gleefully responding to tweets about shooting and raping folks, but I digress. The lesson here is you shouldn’t try to score drugs on Twitter.

Filed Under: canada, drugs, police, social media, weed, york

Using Patents To Needlessly Drive Up Healthcare Costs: The Economic Impact Of Evergreening Drugs

from the evergreening-profits dept

One technique in the world of pharma that has started appearing here on Techdirt is "evergreening" -- making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer's control over it. The advantages for pharma companies are evident, but what about the public? What economic impact does evergreening have? That's what a fascinating new paper in the open access journal PLoS Medicine seeks to establish:

The researchers identified prescriptions of eight follow-on drugs issued by hospital and community pharmacists in Geneva between 2000 and 2008. To analyze the impact of evergreening strategies on healthcare spending, they calculated the market share score (an indicator of market competitiveness) for all prescriptions of the originally patented (brand) drug, the follow-on drug, and generic versions of the drug. The researchers then used hospital and community databases to analyze the costs of replacing brand and/or follow-on drugs with a corresponding generic drug (when available) under three scenarios (1) replacing all brand drug prescriptions, (2) replacing all follow-on drug prescriptions, and (3) replacing both follow-on and brand prescriptions.

And here's what they found:

Using these methods, the researchers found that over the study period, the number of patients receiving either a brand or follow-on drug increased from 56,686 patients in 2001 to 131,193 patients in 2008. The total cost for all studied drugs was €171.5 million, of which €103.2 million was for brand drugs, €41.1 million was for follow-on drugs, and €27.2 million was for generic drugs. Based on scenario 1 (all brand drugs being replaced by generics) and scenario 2 (all follow-on drugs being replaced by generics), over the study period, the healthcare system could have saved €15.9 million and €14.4 million in extra costs, respectively. The researchers also found some evidence that hospital prescribing patterns (through a restrictive drug formulary [RDF]) influenced prescribing in the community: over the study period, the influence of hospital prescription patterns on the community resulted in an extra cost of €503,600 (mainly attributable to two drugs, esomeprazole and escitalopram). However, this influence also resulted in some savings because of a generic drug listed in the hospital formulary: use of the generic version of the drug cetirizine resulted in savings of €7,700.

Obviously, this is just one study, in one area, although on the plus side it involves quite a long time period, and many patients. Despite its limitations, it nonetheless offers a useful first analysis of the economic impact of evergreening drugs. It's certainly an aspect of drug prescription that hospitals and doctors need to consider. As the study concludes:

Evergreening strategies have been successful in maintaining market share in Geneva, offsetting competition by generics and cost containment policies. Hospitals may be contributing to increased overall healthcare costs by listing follow-on drugs in their RDF. Therefore, healthcare providers and policy makers should be aware of the impact of evergreening strategies.

That suggests we can expect to see many more evergreened drugs in the future as highly-profitable compounds start to come off patent, and pharma companies search for ways of maintaining their high profit levels.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: drugs, evergreening, healthcare, patents, pharma

Stopping Big Pharma From Using New .pharmacy Domain To Block Legal Pharmacies They Don't Like

from the speak-up dept

A few months ago, we wrote about how Big Pharma -- a collection of the largest pharmaceutical companies -- has been trying to get the .pharmacy generic top level domain from ICANN. The whole idea, of course, is actually to use it to block legitimate pharmacies that offer reimportation of drugs at cheaper prices. As you hopefully know, pharmaceuticals jack up the prices for Americans, and you can often get the exact same drugs from Canadian pharmacies. In fact, some US politicians -- including President Obama -- have supported this "reimportation" or "parallel importation" as a way to reduce the costs of healthcare.

But Big Pharma loves to conflate legitimate Canadian pharmacies with "rogue pharmacies" that sell either counterfeit drugs or just fake drugs. Of course, some studies have shown that much of the product from "rogue pharmacies" is actually genuine (killing off your customers isn't good business...), but the legal Canadian pharmacies still have a much higher level of legitimacy. And the pharmaceutical companies hate that, because they like their monopoly pricing.

RxRights, an organization that represents many of those Canadian pharmacies who are helping Americans get more affordable medicines so they can, you know, stay alive, has put together a petition asking ICANN not to support Big Pharma's digital landgrab.

Due to the applicant's history of actions positions, we have little doubt that, if approved, NABP will prevent safe, regulated and licensed Canadian and other international online pharmacies from registering domains in the .pharmacy gTLD. Such an action would block trusted distance care providers from utilizing the gTLD that global consumers will come to regard as a mark of authenticity for safe medication.

Large pharmaceutical companies and NABP---member U.S. pharmacies oppose personal importation because Americans can obtain identical, legitimate, but lower cost prescription medications through licensed online pharmacies domiciled outside the U.S. This opposition is significant in light of the fact that U.S. pharmaceutical companies have largely funded NABP's application for .pharmacy. Further, NABP uses funding from pharmaceutical companies and U.S. pharmacies for its programs and activities. We believe that it is an inherent conflict of interest. Through its .pharmacy application, NABP seeks to control access to affordable medication not just for Americans but for all global consumers with an Internet connection.

Large pharmaceutical firms seek to keep drug prices high for as long as possible through a combination of dubious and aggressive tactics, including regional differential pricing arrangements and payments to prevent the availability of lower cost generics. Their backing of the .pharmacy application seeks to extend these inflated pricing measures to the Internet retail sector.

The .pharmacy gTLD must be operated in a manner that ensures that this unique global Internet resource provides benefits to all consumers seeking access to safe and affordable medicines no matter where they reside. ICANN must act in the global public interest by ensuring that NABP cannot endanger hundreds of thousands of lives through control of .pharmacy. A fully inclusive advisory board that includes legitimate online pharmacies and consumer groups from around the world should set the registration policies for .pharmacy.

The problem of drug affordability is a global issue. Within the U.S., unique among wealthy nations, it is dire--the Commonwealth Fund reports that 50 million Americans chose not to fill a prescription last year because of high U.S. costs. If NABP's .pharmacy application is approved, access to affordable medicine will be further restricted through the denial of domain registrations to licensed and regulated providers of lower cost prescription drugs, compounding this public health crisis.

Please don't let that happen.

Filed Under: big pharma, drugs, icann, parallel importation, pharmaceuticals, reimportation, rxrights, top level domains
Companies: icann, nabp