Here at P+P, we are constantly re-thinking the best ways to organize content and deliver a reading experience outside the punditry and beltway-blogger echo chamber. As such, we’d like to offer up a new permanent Monday fixture that will throw out some hand-picked stories from the weekend for your reading pleasure, along with some brief news analysis for that tangy P+P twinge. Enjoy!
My wife recently endured the pharmaceutical gauntlet with a failed Yaz experiment and a system-ravaging run with the mega-antibiotic Cipro, so this skewering of Big Pharma that got a ton of run on Digg struck particularly close to home. Like any debate worth having, it’s complex and too easy to generalize. Sure, many people out there take many drugs that save their lives or keep them stable without any severe side effects. It’s no secret, however, that Big Pharma is rivaled only by oil, tobacco, and Israel when it comes to lobby power in Washington. No other country in the world markets drugs the way we do in the US. One has to step back and wonder, as noted in the blog entry linked above, how is it legal to market anti-depressants wide instead of administering only under strict psychiatric recommendation? Doesn’t that constitute baiting people who just may be having a bad week? When money changes hands between doctors, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies, aren’t the best interests of the patient lost somewhere in the capitalist shuffle?
*****
As I was reading the LA Times’ news analysis piece of Bush’s Middle East tour, a quote from Bush directed at Arab nations struck me as pretty preposterous, even by his standards: