- Crisis of sterile injectables rages on, among victims are premature infants who need parenteral nutrition [Washingtonian (“Even if the FDA’s doing something terrible, we can’t criticize them. They regulate us.”) via Tabarrok, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
- “Tweets not medical advice” [@Caduceusblogger via @jackshafer]
- “Why Your Dog Can Get Vaccinated Against Lyme Disease And You Can’t” [Curt Nickisch, WBUR]
- Cites distinctive Connecticut law: “Hospital Successfully Sues its Patient’s Attorneys for Filing a Vexatious Malpractice Suit” [Alex Stein, Bill of Health]
- Should adversarial medical examinations be videotaped? [Turkewitz]
- “Lawyers Have Learned To Distort Pharmacovigilance Signals” [Oliver on FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), earlier]
- Causation from nasal decongestant at issue: “Judge orders UW to pay $15M to Snoqualmie family” [KING5]
- “The ban on compensated transplant organ donation has led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. A ban on compensated sperm and egg donation would lead to a dearth of lives.” [Alex Tabarrok, related on Canada]
Archive for July, 2013
What’s scarier than asset forfeiture operations?
Asset forfeiture operations with private helpers working on contingency fee:
After seizing more than $1 million in cash in drug stops this year, a district attorney has suspended further roadside busts by his task force because of growing criticism over a private company’s participation.
District Attorney Jason Hicks, whose territory includes four Oklahoma counties, hired Guthrie-based Desert Snow LLC with a deal to pay it between 10 and 25 percent of seizure proceeds, depending on whether its “trainers” were present or only department officers. “Sometimes, no drugs were found and no one was arrested, but task force officers took money found in the vehicles anyway after a drug-sniffing dog got excited.” Now criminal charges arising from the stops are being ended, an investigation has been launched into allegedly missing funds, and “some” money is being returned to motorists. A judge said he was “shocked”
after learning the private company’s owner pulled over a pregnant driver along Interstate 40 and questioned her even though he is not a state-certified law enforcement officer….
Forfeited funds are split among the law enforcement agencies of the task force after Desert Snow is paid.
It bears repeating again and again: contingency fees and law enforcement authority don’t mix. Not ethically, anyway. (via Ed Brayton; more from Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform).
Long Island: “Woman who drowned her 3 kids in tub in 2008…”
“… wants cut of wrongful death settlements.” “A mentally disturbed suburban New York woman who drowned her three young children in a bathtub in 2008 wants a cut of $350,000 in wrongful death settlements obtained by the children’s fathers, attorneys said Friday. Leatrice Brewer, 33, was found not guilty because of mental disease or defect in the deaths of her children, so her attorneys say she should not be subject to laws that bar convicts from profiting from their crimes.” [Associated Press/NY Daily News]
Louisiana flood-protection board to sue oil companies
Saltwater incursion and wetlands loss associated with industrial use of coastal Louisiana have worsened the exposure of populated areas to flooding, according to official reports and scientific studies. Now a flood protection board representing much of the New Orleans area is suing energy companies demanding a contribution of “billions” of dollars, though its spokesman acknowledges that government actions were also responsible for weakening the natural environmental buffer. John Schwartz quotes me in his New York Times report today, though without the chance to study the suit’s contentions it was hard for me to make any more than the most preliminary observations.
P.S. More details emerge in an expanded version of the story as well as in a Thursday Washington Post report. The agency is suing “about 100” energy companies. Canal construction and other actions taken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were important contributors to the environmental losses, but principles of sovereign immunity restrict suits against the Corps. Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said “that the levee agency had usurped his authority and that the suit would enrich trial lawyers” and demanded that the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority “cancel contracts with the four law firms that had agreed to handle the case on a contingency basis.”
FDA moving to ban menthol cigarettes
“The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.” (attributed to the Countess of Blessington) The main scientific reason (if it can be called that) cited by the Food and Drug Administration seems to be that adding menthol makes smoking more enjoyable to many users, leading to readier “initiation of the smoking habit.” [Atlantic Wire] In addition, the World Trade Organization ruled last year that it was an arbitrary trade restriction for the United States to have banned clove-flavored cigarettes of the sort formerly imported from Indonesia, as Congress did in the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, without also banning menthol-flavored cigarettes. [Jakarta Post]
More: Get ready for a huge boost to the already-thriving cigarette-smuggling business should the plan go through [ACSH] And from Arthur Caplan at Time: “Antismoking Advocates Have Misused Science.”
Frontiers in Prop 65 enforcement
“A [lawyer’s rep] discovered the scoops while walking through a store with a hand-held spectrometer that can detect the presence of chemicals covered by Prop 65” [Bob Dorigo Jones discussing Wacky Warning Labels contest]
Ramesh Ponnuru on feds’ new college-harassment rules
His new column for Bloomberg concludes:
One danger is that speech that should be allowed will effectively be banned by the federal government. Another is that even when allegations concern things that should be banned, the process will be unfair to accused students and professors who are innocent of them.
No one doubts that some victims of genuine harassment — and worse — get treated badly by university administrators. And sometimes “he said, she said” conflicts just don’t generate enough evidence to determine who’s in the right, and real misconduct can therefore go unpunished. But there are also false accusations, misinterpretations, ambiguities. Whatever the solution to the problem is, the system that President Barack Obama’s administration is creating isn’t it.
Recommended. (Earlier here, etc.)
If your city suppresses social-lodging options like AirBnB…
…maybe City Hall is not your friend [Arnold Kling, Nick Sibilla/IJ, earlier here and here]
Detroit’s decline, and Krugman’s explanation
Having to watch what bad government has done to my home city of Detroit is a bit like Princess Leia having to watch her home planet destroyed. The fate of the Motor City, writes John Steele Gordon, is America’s “greatest urban disaster that didn’t involve nature or war.” But wait: here’s distinguished New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to inform us that it’s not “fundamentally a tale of fiscal irresponsibility … For the most part, it’s just one of those things that happens now and then in an ever-changing economy.” Just one of those things! I reply — with a hat tip to Cole Porter — at Cato at Liberty. (& George Leef (“A tornado is ‘just one of those things’ because is has no human cause. When a city goes bankrupt, it has many human causes”), Ed Driscoll)
P.S. On the role of long-serving mayor Coleman Young, see pp. 12-13 of this Ed Glaeser/Andrei Shleifer paper (PDF). And here’s a HuffPo tag on Detroit corruption.
“Once you go thug, though, you can’t unthug”
The owner of IPNav, which has sued 1,638 companies charging patent infringement, explains his methods to the New York Times. “Mr. Spangenberg has been called ‘a costly nuisance,’ ‘one of the most notorious patent trolls in America’ and many unprintable names in the comments sections of Web sites like Techdirt. He has achieved a certain infamy,” as well as an annual estimated income of $25 million a year. And from Timothy Lee at the Washington Post: “Here’s what it feels like to be sued by a patent troll.“