Are Pro Life Drugstores Legal, Ethical?
An article in the Washington Post, ‘Pro-Life’ Drugstores Market Beliefs: No Contraceptives For Chantilly Shop, introduced me to the concept of a “Pro-life Drugstore.” This is a place were prescriptions are filled, but not for prophylactics, birth control, or Plan-B:
When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.
That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy” — meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.
The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.
“The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience — that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral,” said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. “Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing,” Brejcha said.
They cite a think tank who has the same immediate objection that comes to my mind:
“If you are a health-care professional, you are bound by professional obligations,” said Nancy Berlinger, deputy director of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y. “You can’t say you won’t do part of that profession.”
There’s a good article here about why faith must not trump the Hippocratic oath. It’s for the same reason that in diagnosis Doctors follow established statistical treatment plans; they’re proven to optimally treat patients. Some religions don’t allow blood-transfusions, yet they are critical processes for recovery in many severe traumas. As a medical professional, can you ethically refuse to dispense a medication simply because you find it personally distasteful?
Is Marijuana Healthy for You?
As you know, Marijuana or Cannabis is illegal drug in the US with medical properties that have made the subject of much recent research. With over 69 million Americans over the age of 12 who have tried Marijuana, it is by far the most commonly used illegal drug in the United States.
Did you know that:
- Marijuana contains more than 400 chemicals, including most of the harmful substances found in tobacco smoke. Smoking one marijuana cigarette deposits about four times more tar into the lungs than a filtered tobacco cigarette. (Drug Enforcement Administration)
- Risk of a heart attack is five times higher than usual in the hour after smoking marijuana. (Harvard University, Marijuana & Heart Attacks, Washington Post, 3/3/2000)
- Reaction time for motor skills, such as driving, is reduced by 41% after smoking one joint and is reduced 63% after smoking two joints.
Still, there is substantial belief that Marijuana is harmless or that it is valuable as a therapeutic drug for cancer, AIDS, or depression. There is some evidence that a synthetic cannabinoid derived from THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) named Dronabinol, can help with Alzheimer in the elderly. The most common reason for a “legal prescription” of Marijuana (the so-called medical marijuana legal in California) is to relieve pain.
Reuters today reported on a story that will make you cringe, though. Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain talks about a study published in the American Medical Association’s journal Archives of General Psychiatry by two Australian researchers looking at men who had smoked at least five joints a day for 20 years. Brain scans indicated their hippocampus and amygdala were smaller compared to nonusers:
The hippocampus regulates memory and emotion, while the amygdala plays a critical role in fear and aggression.
“These findings challenge the widespread perception of cannabis as having limited or no harmful effects on (the) brain and behavior,” said Murat Yucel of ORYGEN Research Centre and the University of Melbourne, who led the study. “Like with most things, some people will experience greater problems associated with cannabis use than others,” Yucel said in an e-mail. “Our findings suggest that everyone is vulnerable to potential changes in the brain, some memory problems and psychiatric symptoms if they use heavily enough and for long enough.”
Among the 15 heavy marijuana users in the study, the hippocampus volume was 12 percent less and the amygdala volume was 7 percent less than in 16 men who were not marijuana users, the researchers said.
Criticism of the study centers around the fact that these men are extremely heavy users; had they been smokers or alcoholics, the effects would certainly have been more pronounced. Note that I am not a medical doctor, and this cannot constitute medical advice, but my opinion on Marijuana would be to generally avoid it. It’s clear that it’s harmless in moderation and small amounts, but over time it seems as if it can have profound effects, dumbing down your brain and numbing your nervous system. What do you think? Is there a cost, and is it worth it?
Twitter is Shared Perception, Not Science
Today’s post by Robert Scoble on the earthquake that rocked China brings out an important distinction about the nature of a distributed messenging service like Twitter. Scoble eulogizes over the speed of information delivery in his post, thrilled that he knew about the earthquake 50 miles from Chengdu three minutes before anyone else did:
I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. [...] Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!
While this is a great leap in keeping the world informed about what is going on in any part of it literally at the speed of light, what Twitter does is let you share perception and opinion with the rest of the world. This is different than sharing facts about what is going on. For example, the USGS report which came out three minutes after Chinese citizens began twittering that there was seismic activity, is full of precise details:
Magnitude: 7.9
Monday, May 12, 2008 at 06:28:00 UTCLocation: 31.099°N, 103.279°E
Depth: 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region: EASTERN SICHUAN, CHINA
Distances 90 km (55 miles) WNW of Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Location Uncertainty: horizontal +/- 5.8 km (3.6 miles); depth fixed by location program
Event ID: us2008ryan
If you look at Robert Scoble’s twitter stream, what you get instead is a succession of misinformation, subsequent corrections, noise, predictions of doom, and frenzy:
- 06:37:49 – @dtan just reported an earthquake in Beijing. Wonder how large it is?
- 06:40:50 – @keso reported earthquake too. @dtan said it lasted 10 seconds. I’d guess it’s a 4.5 then.
- 06:41:21 – @michaelrice says it was a 7.8.
- 06:44:14 – @gaberivera says it’s 57 miles from Chengdu, which has 11 million residents.
- 06:57:46 – @jwalkerjr says to hold off on predictions. Well, I need to pass along my experience with earthquakes. This is a HUGE one.
- 07:15:20 – @casperodj just said it felt like the earth was going to split. Literally everything was shaking.
- For more just wade through the mud…
To his credit, you can get an impression of the event, as seen through his and others’ eyes. You can get an idea of the scope, and the impact it has had on people around the world. But, you can’t get trustworthy facts from listen to what the general public is saying in the face of a disaster. A calm rationality is needed that Twitter cannot provide.
Still, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC is holding out hope that Twitter can mature into a real-time news service:
Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen. Twitter is fast, and it will let you share your experiences, but it will never replace solid journalism and hard facts. What do you think?
