Current TV
previously & previously, the media company founded by Al Gore after the 2000 election, has picked up the kinds of in depth long form journalism being rapidly dropped by major networks, but has been tantalizingly unavailable for those without cable; until now. They have been putting their Vanguard episodes up on their website and on YouTube.
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posted by Blasdelb
on Apr 30, 2011 -
24 comments
Bill Moyers interviews David Simon "Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America."
posted by bitmage
on Apr 17, 2011 -
67 comments
The recently retired Manny Ramirez was one of the most inscrutable players in recent history. Ben McGrath of the New Yorker attempted to figure out Ramirez's motivations in
this 2007 piece.
posted by reenum
on Apr 11, 2011 -
32 comments
TheFix.com is a new site targeting the more than 40 million Americans who are recovering from drug and/or alcohol addiction. It features Ask-An-Expert
videos, news, editorials and thorough
reviews of rehab facilities based on Zagat's system.
Founded by Maer Roshan, one of the founders of Radar Magazine.
(Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 7, 2011 -
36 comments
"In the Bible, God appeared to Ezekiel as a “wheel within a wheel”. Spirals and concentric circles are commonly found in petrogylphs carved by cultures long dead. Similar visual effects are reported during extreme psychological stress, fever delirium, psychotic episodes, sensory deprivation, and are reliably induced by psychedelic drugs." Form Constants and the Visual Cortex, or Where Psychedelic Visuals Come From.
posted by Taft
on Mar 15, 2011 -
51 comments
The Wire's
Felicia ("Snoop") Pearson has been arrested as part of large scale drug raids
according to the Baltimore Sun.
Life imitates art, but in this case art had closely imitated life, as Pearson was not a trained actress, but grew up in tough Baltimore neighbourhoods and has a conviction for second degree murder for an act at the age of 14. However in recent years she had been involved in anti-violence campaigns and other work with young people.
posted by philipy
on Mar 10, 2011 -
101 comments
Progesterone caproate injections have been used to reduce the likelihood of premature births in at-risk pregnant women for years. Up until now, the drug was custom-compounded by wholesale and specialist pharmacies, legally, but without federal approval. These injections cost between $5 and $15 a dose and were regularly reimbursed by insurance companies and Medicaid.
Last month, the FDA announced
their approval of a commercially produced version of the compound, to be marketed under the brand name Makena by a company called KV Pharmaceuticals.
No stranger to controversy and trouble, KV barely survived a rash round of
layoffs and wrongful termination lawsuits. Their former chief executive
now faces criminal charges surrounding the company's failure to notify the FDA that they were producing oversized morphine tablets.
(He could also do for a shave, it appears.)
Now, KV has announced that the new drug will be available at a cost of
$1,500 per dose,
bringing the total pregnancy term cost of treatment to $25,000-$30,000, from its former cost of $250-$300, a
100-fold increase—but it gets worse...
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posted by disillusioned
on Mar 9, 2011 -
63 comments
Descendents of early French Huguenots, the Ravenel family of South Carolina ranked among the most prominent members of the state's planter class. Arthur Ravenel, Jr. continued the Ravenel tradition of public service, serving in
the South Carolina house and senate and then in the
U.S. House of Representatives. He once referred to the NAACP as the "that organization known as the National Association for Retarded People" although he later apologized,
but only to people with mental and physical challenges. He also once called for
the military to shoot down any plane suspected of smuggling drugs. Arthur's son
Thomas Ravenel had little contact with his father after his parent's divorce, became a self-made millionaire through real estate development, narrowly missed winning the Senate seat now held by Jim DeMint, was elected South Carolina Treasurer,
was the subject of an investigation into his cocaine use (
of which he was warned by his father),
was indicted on a federal cocaine charge and resigned,
and served 10 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy with intent to distribute cocaine. On Saturday, Thomas Ravenel took to the pages of the Charleston Post and Courier
to call for an end to drug prohibition,
hoping the celebrity of being a former rising star in the Republican Party who went to prison will help advance his position.
posted by ND¢
on Feb 8, 2011 -
51 comments
Two years ago, Mann says, he had never seen a pot plant. Today, he envisions weGrow becoming the "Wal-Mart of Weed", a vertically integrated chain of big-box stores perfectly positioned to cash in on California's booming marijuana industry as it moves from the shadows to the mainstream. In this "green rush" for semi-legal weed, Mann and his partner Derek Peterson, a 36-year-old investment banker, seek to be the modern equivalents of Levi Strauss and Samuel Brannan—the Gold Rush entrepreneurs who made a killing not from mining, but from selling pans, pickaxes, and victuals to the forty-niners.
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 27, 2011 -
43 comments
The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding". The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Dec 2, 2010 -
73 comments
Andrew Fraser was a successful Victorian barrister until he was
jailed for drug trafficking. The investigation against him was led by Detective Sergeant Malcolm Rosenes, but before Fraser entered prison Rosenes was charged with
drug trafficking and conspiracy, for which he himself was later imprisoned. In an unlikely twist, Rosenes later approached Fraser to write an account of police corruption in Victoria.
The book has been
withdrawn from sale in Victoria, allegedly because it identifies informers and a "protected witness", but the publishers
say that the material is old news that is
publicly available (pdf), while Fraser suggests that the government wishes to avoid any embarrassment immediately before a State election.
posted by Joe in Australia
on Oct 15, 2010 -
11 comments
In a pilot Phase II
study of PTSD sufferers with a median of 19 years since diagnosis, MDMA-assisted therapy resulted in 10 out of 12 patients no longer meeting the diagnostic criteria.
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posted by daksya
on Jul 24, 2010 -
88 comments
Is laundering Mexican drug cartel money too big too fail? Wachovia/Wells Fargo are discovered to be laundering many many billions of dollars. As in
$380,000,000,000. Charles Bowden, in a
recent interview with Amy Goodman, discusses the everyday reality of what life is like in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, and his most recent non-fiction account of the "Global Economy's New Killing Fields", in the just published book
Murder City. Meanwhile, the drug violence now involves
car bombs in Ciudad Juarez, the city across the border with El Paso. Guns go out of America, and drugs come in.
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posted by tarantula
on Jul 20, 2010 -
48 comments
