Day: 04/05/2015

Brainy quotes on Senators

https://swo8.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/the-senators-blues-by-swo8-blues-jazz/

“When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not guilty.'”  Theodore Roosevelt

“Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.”  Will Rogers

“The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver.” Jay Leno

“Rome had Senators too, that’s why it declined.”  Frank Dane

They’re coming for your allergy medication…

http://www.aacp.org/governance/SIGS/selfcarenonprescriptionmedicine/Documents/

Newsletters/2014%20Spring%20Self%20Care%20Newsletter.pdf

American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy
Self-Care Therapeutics/Nonprescription Medicines
Special Interest Group Newsletter
Spring 2014 Newsletter

Despite these efforts, the number of meth lab incidents have started to increase again – in 2010 there were over 15,000 incidents in the United States; majority (over 9,000) being in the Southeastern United States…

Since the sales restrictions mandated by CMEA and a national electronic tracking system have not completely reduced the number of meth lab incidents, several states have tried to further restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine. Oregon, Mississippi, and several local governments in Missouri require patients obtain a prescription for pseudoephedrine; Oregon and Mississippi require pseudoephedrine prescriptions to be entered into their state prescription drug monitoring program. Between 2010 and 2012, eighteen states introduced bills requiring a prescription for pseudoephedrine products. In 2013 alone, 8 states introduced legislation requiring a prescription for pseudoephedrine products; some went further and classified pseudoephedrine as a controlled substance…

New Mexico Patients Respond to Cannabis Producers

http://cannagramma.com/2015/03/24/new-mexico-patients-respond-to-cannabis-producers/

A recurring theme among may of the producers was that if the state mandates testing of cannabis and cannabis products, this would force them to raise prices. Patients believe this is a cost of doing business and they should not be forced to shoulder the cost of testing when many of the producers are expanding their non-profit businesses with ancillary products, new locations and increased production. Such expansion already come at a cost to the patients who have been waiting four years for prices to come down to where they should be – well below the black market…

Johns Hopkins Sued for $1 Billion Over Deliberate STD Infection Scheme

http://www.truthdig.com/

More than 750 plaintiffs are suing the Johns Hopkins Hospital System Corp. over its role in medical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and 1950s in which subjects—including orphans, other children and mental patients, according to plaintiffs—were deliberately infected with venereal diseases without their consent…

The suit also alleges that Hopkins and the Rockefeller Foundation, which is also named as a defendant, “did not limit their involvement to design, planning, funding and authorization of the Experiments; instead, they exercised control over, supervised, supported, encouraged, participated in and directed the course of the Experiments”…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says researchers initially infected Guatemalan sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, then permitted them to have sex with soldiers and prison inmates with the goal of spreading the disease…

http://www.rockefellerdrugwars.com/

Most people are not aware that John D. Rockefeller Junior (1874 to 1960) was the man directly responsible for creating and instigating the destructive war on drugs. The war on drugs which has continued for many decades since it was started in the early 1900s was carefully planned and orchestrated to protect the family ownership of a chemically-based pharmaceutical monopoly…

Warren Buffett’s mobile home empire preys on the poor

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/03/17024/warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-preys-poor

Berkshire Hathaway, the investment conglomerate Buffett leads, bought Clayton in 2003 and spent billions building it into the mobile home industry’s biggest manufacturer and lender. Today, Clayton is a many-headed hydra with companies operating under at least 18 names, constructing nearly half of the industry’s new homes and selling them through its own retailers. It finances more mobile home purchases than any other lender by a factor of six. It also sells property insurance on them and repossesses them when borrowers fail to pay.

Berkshire extracts value at every stage of the process. Clayton even builds the homes with materials — such as paint and carpeting — supplied by other Berkshire subsidiaries. And Clayton borrows from Berkshire to make mobile home loans, paying up to an extra percentage point on top of Berkshire’s borrowing costs, money that flows directly from borrowers’ pockets.

More than a dozen Clayton customers described a consistent array of deceptive practices that locked them into ruinous deals: loan terms that changed abruptly after they paid deposits or prepared land for their new homes; surprise fees tacked on to loans; and pressure to take on excessive payments based on false promises that they could later refinance…

Clayton provided more than half of new mobile-home loans in eight states. In Texas, the number exceeds 70 percent. Clayton has more than 90 percent of the market in Odessa, one of the most expensive places in the country to finance a mobile home…

Kirk and Patricia Ackley, of Ephrata, Wash., pleaded with 21st Mortgage for the terms they were promised. They were baffled by the reply: “We don’t care. We’ll come take a chainsaw to it — cut it up and haul it out in boxes.” …

Fifteen years ago, Congress directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development to examine issues such as loan terms and regulations in order to find ways to make mobile homes affordable. That’s still on HUD’s to-do list…

Happy Birthday, Heath Ledger, we miss you

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/08/heath-ledger200908

Above all else, Ledger was devoted to his young daughter and feared he might lose custody. “He was absolutely obsessed about Matilda,” Gilliam continues. “Before we started shooting [Doctor Parnassus], he literally put her in a backpack, got on the tube, and would come up to my house. It was wonderful.” According to the director, “The thing that really made Heath snap” was legal wrangling over Matilda. “He said, ‘Just fuck all of you! I’m not giving Michelle anything.’”

Pecorini says Ledger’s drug use—“He used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, like probably 50 percent of Americans”—became an issue. “From that moment, he went clean as a whistle. He was so bloody clean that he didn’t drink a glass of wine anymore.”

With his chronic insomnia, Ledger would typically spend night after night awake, diverting himself with time killers like re-arranging the furniture in whatever space he happened to be living in at the moment. Now, physically run-down by the arduous shoot, unable to sleep, and distraught over his differences with Williams, Ledger found some measure of relief in massages and prescription drugs.

On Tuesday, January 22, sometime between 3 and 3:30 a.m., a masseuse found Ledger dead in his loft, on Broome Street in New York’s SoHo. An autopsy would find that his death was accidental, resulting from “the abuse of prescription medications,” according to a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner. Among the drugs found in his body were the essential ingredients of Valium, Xanax, Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Restoril—a stew of painkillers, anti-anxiety medication, and sleeping pills. “It’s the combination of the drugs that caused the problem,” said the spokeswoman, “not necessarily too much of any particular drug.”

One of the ironies surrounding Ledger’s death is that he wanted to make a movie about Nick Drake, a British singer-songwriter in the depressed Donovan vein, who died in 1974 at the age of 26 and developed a posthumous cult following. During pre-production of The Dark Knight, Ledger had created a music video based on one of Drake’s songs, “Black Eyed Dog.” The eerie part of it is the singer suffered from depression and insomnia, and he died from an overdose of amitriptyline, an antidepressant. Whether it was accidental, as some of his family claims, or a suicide, as the coroner’s report states, remains in dispute…