I wonder how these 61 people were selected to have the President commute their sentences? I’d have expected him to start with jailed drug users, not dealers.  Some of these people were jailed for selling kilos of cocaine, for example.  Today’s WaPo lists the names and charges of every one of these 61 lucky people.

On March 29, 2016 the White House issued a press release on its new heroin initiative.  The Washington Post described how much Obama proposed to do.  The long list of fixes and new public-private partnerships address addiction treatment almost exclusively, with a sop to law enforcement.  The 1 billion dollars spent, Obama said, will treat…

Why is oil so cheap these days?  Maybe part of the answer is that the US government absolutely had to stop fracking– because it finally admitted the resulting earthquakes could not be tolerated, nor could the poisoned water be ignored any longer. Like so much else in our modern USA, the profits derived from fracking…

Can you be sickened any more by the us role in Syria?  how many sides has the us government supplied?  how much must the syrian people pay for our recklessness?   how many us troops are shooting at each other in syria? Below is verbatim from the March 27 Los Angeles times:  read it and…

An interview with my favorite scientist, Dr John Ioannidis (excerpts below), discusses the problem of bogus medical and scientific findings, which are now ubiquitous– as the standards are low and the funders have come to view many of the studies they fund as marketing. John Ioannidis is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most…

Here is the first half of a wonderful piece by Professor Donald Light on the mess at FDA, which misguides the process of drug evaluation and approval.  The entire piece can be found here: A forthcoming article for the special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), edited by Marc Rodwin and supported by the Edmond J….