drugs

Ninety-six people were arrested in a San Diego State University drug bust.

Where's Captain Renault when you need him? I'm shocked, shocked, to learn that drug dealing is rampant at fraternities at San Diego State (one of Playboy's top 10 party schools). Actually, what shocks me is the price the student dealers were charging for cocaine: $35 a gram. In my college days almost 30 years ago, at a small, northeastern liberal-arts school with a less illustrious party heritage, a gram cost $100. So in constant dollars, the price of cocaine has fallen by 85 percent, to about $16 a gram -- imagine how many more coke-fueled novels Jay McInerney could have written at that price!

Congress grills pharmaceutical firm Baxter International and the Food and Drug Administration about tainted drugs that killed 81.

For those scared or curious enough to pay attention, this week's hearings offered a jarring look at how globalization is affecting the medicines we take. True, some testimony was predictable: the FDA denied that it could have averted the tragedy with an earlier (and required) inspection of the suspect Chinese factory; Baxter's CEO played the victim card, claiming that his firm's heparin, an anticoagulant, was the target of a deliberate adulteration scheme. (The Chinese government, meanwhile, argued that the faulty ingredients weren't to blame for the deaths.) But the statement of David Nelson, the senior investigator of the committee holding the hearings, sandblasts the varnish off such evasions, especially Baxter's dubious behavior, and is worth a read.

A new study from the University of Hull says that SSRIs, the most commonly prescribed anti-depressants, do no better than sugar-pills at alleviating depression.

Don't hurl the Zoloft into the trash just yet. Though headlines trumpeted the paper as shocking news, in fact one of its authors published a study ten years ago showing the same results. The most interesting finding, in fact, is that for the seriously depressed, the drugs do have some effect. Moreover, critics have pointed to problems with the results of the study, which was really a "meta-study" that analyzed previous research, including unpublished work. Most notably, the studies it analyzed were often short (six weeks or less, which is about how long anti-depressants typically take to work). MORE