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A smoking gun in the drugs debate 

Dr Alex Wodak's plan to have the Government sell cannabis in little packets at the post office wasn't just a throwaway line to a bunch of senile hippies at the Mardi-Grass festival in Nimbin last weekend. . . .

But just because there are Australians who smoke cannabis is not a sound reason to legalise the drug, particularly at a time of mounting scientific evidence of its long-term devastating health effects, in particular its link to schizophrenia.

It is exactly the wrong time to legalise cannabis, just as its popularity among young people is diminishing, as shown by the latest Australian Secondary School Students' Use of Alcohol and Drug Survey. . . .

It is irresponsible for a doctor in his position to play down serious research showing the link between marijuana and schizophrenia, and not just for those who are already psychotic.

What he is doing is no different from the tobacco industry denying the links between smoking and lung cancer.

Medical opinion is moving against him, with the journal The Lancet, on July 28 last year, recanting its 1995 editorial which claimed smoking cannabis was not harmful to health, and citing studies which showed "an increase in risk of psychosis of about 40 per cent in participants who had ever used cannabis".

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Plastic industry's influence questioned after FDA ruling 

Despite more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that have raised health concerns about a chemical compound that is central to the multibillion-dollar plastics industry, the Food and Drug Administration has deemed it safe largely because of two studies, both paid for by an industry trade group.

The agency says it has relied on research backed by the American Plastics Council because it had input on its design, monitored its progress and reviewed the raw data. . . .

Congressional Democrats have begun investigating any industry influence in regulating BPA.

"Tobacco figured this out, and essentially it's the same model," said David Michaels, who was a federal regulator in the Clinton administration. "If you fight the science, you're able to postpone regulation and victim compensation, as well. As in this case, eventually the science becomes overwhelming. But if you can get five or 10 years of avoiding pollution control or production of chemicals, you've greatly increased your product."

Mitchell Cheeseman, the deputy director of the FDA's office of food-additive safety, said that the agency is not biased toward industry.

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A Georgia Community With an African Feel Fights a Wave of Change 

During slavery, Sapelo was part of the plantation economy, but after the Civil War blacks began to buy land and formed settlements. Those were consolidated by the island’s last white owner, the tobacco heir R. J. Reynolds Jr., who forced black residents to relocate to Hog Hammock in the ’50s and ’60s, an act still remembered with bitterness.

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Contrary imaginations. 

This is the final installment of a three-part series on radical skepticism and the rise of conspiratorial thinking about science. . . . .

Thus far, the strategy of the creationists has been one of radical skepticism: They look for signs of uncertainty, gaps in the fossil record. Like the tobacco companies, the drug manufacturers, and the environmentalists, they need only the shadow of a doubt to make their case: . . .

Like the producers of Expelled, Farber portrays mainstream, government-funded science as a repressive regime intolerant of dissent.

Harper's has shown a peculiar affinity, over the years, for contrarian science: In addition to the Farber piece, the magazine has run repeated attacks on the theory of evolution from former Washington editor Tom Bethell, not to mention last month's excerpt from David Berlinski. But it's also the place where Richard Hofstadter laid out his seminal thesis on "the paranoid style in American politics"—an analysis of the conspiracy-minded, radical right that might just as well describe today's radical skeptics of science. The essay first appeared in November of 1964, the same year as the first surgeon general's report on the dangers of smoking, and not long before the tobacco companies geared up the machines of manufactured uncertainty.

The paranoid style, Hofstadter wrote, "is nothing if not scholarly in its technique."

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Lincoln No-Accord Stance Avoids Tobacco-Sized Awards (Update1) 

Lincoln Electric Holdings Inc., the world's largest welding-equipment maker, has escaped the fate of tobacco and asbestos producers by scoring upset victories over trial lawyers claiming its products caused symptoms resembling Parkinson's disease.

Workers' attorneys won only 3 of 15,000 cases filed this decade after predicting litigation would bankrupt the industry. New suits against 12 welding-products makers fell from 9,510 in 2003 to 57 last year, said John Beisner, a lawyer for the companies. Lincoln was named in most of the cases.

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Alzheimer's disease: To have and have not 

A paper presented at the American Academy of Neurology's Annual Meeting in Chicago this week may cast some light on this mystery—and perhaps how to slow down the disease's progress. Deniz Erten-Lyons, who works at Oregon Health and Science University, in Portland, and her colleagues think they have found a consistent feature of the brains of those who have the internal stigmata of Alzheimer's disease without suffering the outward manifestations: their brains are larger. In particular, their hippocampuses are about 10% bigger than average.

Germany: Marijuana Smokers Were Poisoned With Lead in Leipzig  

They had stomach cramps, nausea, anemia and fatigue, and some even had a telltale bluish line along their gums — classic signs of lead poisoning. But the cases, last year in Leipzig, Germany, puzzled doctors. Lead poisoning is rare in Germany, and yet here were 29 cases in just a few months. The doctors noticed a pattern: the patients were young, from 16 to 33; they were students or unemployed; and they had body piercings and a history of smoking.

In a letter published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors wrote, “On questioning, all the patients eventually conceded that they were regular users of marijuana.”

Three provided samples for testing. Sure enough, their marijuana was full of lead. One bag bought from a dealer even contained lead particles big enough to see, which meant the lead must have been added deliberately, rather than being absorbed into the plant from contaminated soil.

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Medicine: Cheap, Homemade MRI Does a Better Job Imaging Lungs Than the Real Thing 

If you need an MRI, you can always just use this makeshift MRI that was built using a cardboard tube, coils of wire, and other items that you can pick up at your local hardware store. The thing is, it really works.

Built by a couple of researchers at Harvard, the makeshift MRI was cost less than $100,000 to make, but it does a better job of imaging the lungs than traditional MRIs do. That's because while traditional MRIs are great at imaging liquid within the body, the lungs are full of air, which doesn't come out in the scans. Not this hobbled together contraption; it uses a weak magnetic field to image aspects of the lungs that are invisible to all other imaging techniques.

So really, this is a very specialized MRI machine, albeit one that was essentially built in a garage by a couple of crazy geniuses. So no, you won't be able to go down the street to your neighborhood mad scientist's shed to get an MRI on the cheap anytime soon, but it's a nice thought, isn't it? [Technology Review]

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Clinical Trial Volunteers Uneasy About Some Financial Ties 

Many volunteers in clinical studies aren't overly concerned if researchers have financial conflicts, but there is some loss of trust, suggests a U.S. study.

"Though peoples' willingness to take part in a hypothetical clinical trial did not suffer substantially based on the types of financial disclosures, and many of our study respondents were still likely to say that they would participate despite researchers' financial interests, we captured a sense of unease about some financial ties -- particularly owning company stock -- that did affects peoples' attitudes and trust in clinical research," Dr. Jeremy Sugarman, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

"We need to keep this in mind as we determine how best to disclose acceptable financial interests to fully inform potential study participants," Sugarman said.

He and colleagues at Duke University and Wake Forest University sent a description of a hypothetical clinical drug trial to 3,623 adults with asthma or diabetes. Each description included one of five different financial disclosures. . . .

The study was published online April 2 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

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Profile of Robert Mugabe, longtime ruler of Zimbabwe 

He came to power in 1980 after a seven-year bush war for black rule, serving first as prime minister and then as president. At independence, he was hailed for his policies of racial reconciliation and development that brought education and health to millions. Zimbabwe's economy thrived, and Mugabe appealed to whites to stay in the country.

Twenty years later, many wished they hadn't.

Mugabe ordered the often-violent seizure of white-owned farms on behalf of a landless black majority. But instead, he gave the farms to black relatives, friends and cronies. . . .

Mugabe is now 84 years old. During his rule, the average life expectancy of Zimbabweans has fallen from 60 to 35 years.

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Zimbabwe Opposition Declares Victory  

At independence, Mugabe was hailed for his policies of racial reconciliation and development that brought education and health to millions who had been denied those services under colonial rule. Zimbabwe's economy thrived on exports of food, minerals and tobacco.

The unraveling began when Mugabe ordered the often-violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms turned over to blacks, mainly relatives, friends and cronies who allowed cultivated fields to be taken over by weeds.

Today, a third of the population depends on imported food handouts. Another third has fled the country and 80 percent is jobless. Inflation is the highest in the world at more than 100,000 percent and people suffer crippling shortages of food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 35 years.

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Claims of Industry Tampering with Science Are Overblown 

scientists' ties to industry and point to a Scientific progress has long benefited from collaboration between science and business -- so concludes a new report from the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a non-profit group critical of unscientific claims. Nevertheless, self-appointed "consumer advocacy" groups now routinely assert that science is being perverted byhandful of scandals to make their case -- despite the lack of evidence showing that ties to industry are especially corrupting.

"Conflicts of interest activists assert that ties between researchers and industry are harming patients and consumers," writes science journalist Ronald Bailey in ACSH's report Scrutinizing Industry-Funded Science: The Crusade Against Conflicts of Interest. "In addition, the anti-industry activist groups are trying to exclude academic researchers who have any ties whatsoever to industry from government scientific advisory boards." That side of the story is by now a familiar one. "However," concludes the ACSH report, "even the activists' own flawed studies can't demonstrate that industry 'influence' is distorting the decisions made by those boards."

Furthermore, the activists' crusade has costs: "The campaign to purge any experts with industry ties -- no matter how slender -- from advisory panels is chilling scientific debate and depriving regulators and the public of valuable insights,"

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Mobiles 'more harmful than smoking' 

MOBILE phones will overtake asbestos and smoking as a leading public health danger, a top neurosurgeon says.

Research by Canberra Hospital's Vini Khurana found that in the next four years, the full impact of brain tumours caused by mobile phones would be revealed.

Dr Khurana's report, Mobile Phones and Brain Tumours - A Public Health Concern, has sparked debate in the UK and the US.

"It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking, and directly concerns all of us, particularly the younger generation," Dr Khurana said in a research paper.

In the paper published on his website, Dr Khurana said industry and governments needed to take immediate steps to reduce the impact of mobile phone radiation.

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Dingell, Stupak Continue 'Science for Sale' Probe Request Consulting Firm Case Studies 

Reps. John D. Dingell (D-MI), the Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak (D-MI), the Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, today sent a letter to The Weinberg Group requesting the details of several case studies that were previously posted on the firm's website. Of particular interest to the Members are case studies in which the DC based consultancy touts its successes in certain scientific and regulatory matters.

"These case studies that were trumpeted on The Weinberg Group's website appear to take credit for keeping drugs with dangerous side effects on the market and for keeping in circulation other products that may be harmful to consumers," Dingell said. "The Committee is interested to learn which firms and what products were involved in these case studies."

In January, the Members announced an investigation into the use of the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) in products intended for use by infants and children.

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Flooded Village Files Suit, Citing Corporate Link to Climate Change  

Lawyers for the Alaska Native coastal village of Kivalina, which is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate, filed suit in federal court here Tuesday arguing that 5 oil companies, 14 electric utilities and the country’s largest coal company were responsible for the village’s woes.

The suit is the latest effort to hold companies like BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, Duke Energy and the Southern Company responsible for the impact of global warming because they emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases, or, in the case of Peabody, mine and market carbon-laden coal that is burned by others. It accused the companies of creating a public nuisance.

In an unusual move, those five companies and three other defendants — the Exxon Mobil Corporation, American Electric Power and the Conoco Phillips Company — are also accused of conspiracy. “There has been a long campaign by power, coal and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming,” the suit says. The campaign, it says, contributed “to the public nuisance of global warming by convincing the public at large and the victims of global warming that the process is not man-made when in fact it is.” . . .

Some lawyers in the case participated in the long-running litigation against American tobacco companies in the 1990s, and some of the same legal theories echo through the complaint. But the hurdles may be greater than those in the tobacco wars. Global warming is a diffuse worldwide phenomenon; a successful public nuisance case requires that defendants’ behavior be directly linked to the harm.

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