CBC News tells us that a Canadian court has found that medical marijuana users should be able to purchase from growers other than the government:

Currently, medical users can grow their own marijuana, but third-party growers can’t supply the drug to more than one user at a time, a restriction that lawyers for the plaintiffs argued effectively gave Health Canada a monopoly on the distribution of medical marijuana.

Stayner said in his January ruling that the restrictions on the supply of medical marijuana were arbitrary and caused sick users major difficulty in gaining access to the drug.

“In my view it is not tenable for the government, consistently with the right established in other courts for qualified medical users to have reasonable access to marijuana, to force them either to buy from the government contractor, grow their own or be limited to the unnecessarily restrictive system of designated producers,” he wrote.

The government has contracted one firm, Prairie Plant Systems Inc. in Flin Flon, Man., to provide the drug to patients.

Today’s Boston Globe brings us the story of Neurontin, a so-called “blockbuster” drug that generated more than $2,000,000,000 per year in worldwide sales for its maker, the Pfizer company.

It turns out that Pfizer deliberately buried the evidence that Neurontin didn’t work as advertised:

“We must delay publication of [study] 224, as its results were not positive,” wrote Pfizer marketing executive John Marino in a September 2000 e-mail to Angela Crespo, senior manager of major markets for Neurontin.

Later that month, Michael Rowbotham, Neurontin team leader, e-mailed Crespo about the problem of Dr. John Reckless, an investigator on the study who was pressing Pfizer to publish the results for ethical reasons. Along with delaying publication for as long as possible “it will be more important how WE write up the study,” Rowbotham wrote. “We are not allowing him to write it up himself.”

No one could have predicted that creating a huge financial incentive for corporations to demonstrate the efficacy of their patent medicines would lead them to put profit over health and science! Who could have imagined such unethical behavior on the part of a giant pharmaceutical company?

There are more black men in US prisons today than there were slaves in 1840, and they are being used for the same purpose; working for private corporations at 16 to 20 cents an hour. Half the states have private, for-profit prisons whose lobbyists are demanding longer mandatory-minimum prison sentences. Indeed, American blacks are incarcerated at nearly eight times the level of South African blacks during the height of apartheid.

That’s from an incredible op-ed in Saturday’s Boston Globe by Jack A. Cole, the Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Amazing, courageous, timely, truthful — is it any wonder this isn’t even an issue in the presidential campaign?

Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.

“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.

The Schwartz in question was a Colorado delegate to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech, he met a woman at the hotel bar, invited her back to his $319-a-night room, she told him to get naked while she fixed the drinks… and that’s the last thing he remembers; he awoke to discover she had taken, among other things,

…a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, a necklace valued at $5,000, earrings priced at $4,000 and a Prada belt valued at $1,000

The whole article is worth a read…

Way more kitschy moog LPs than you ever knew existed….

ok, I know, this one is actually an ARP…

36 15 Moog

In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”

The NYTtimes story is here.

The NYT talks with the producers of Bjork’s new video, from the SF-based production company Encyclopedia Pictura:

“We basically went into a ritual artistic psychosis mode where we just went to nature and tried to invoke this thing… it involved using psilocybin mushrooms and going out into Nature in a perturbed state.”

See the video on the NYTimes Online.

They built their own stereoscopic camera.

A Washington Post Magazine article details the ongoing clinical trials of MDMA as a therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.