This 20-page report says that adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007, the last year for which complete data were available. About one in three of the more than 25.4 million adult drug arrestees during that period was African American. [...more]
A peek into the grocery carts of many families shopping at their neighborhood supermarkets is telling. As we watch prescription drug use, obesity rates, childhood diseases, and other health problems reach epidemic proportions we need look no further than these shopping carts for a glimpse into the nation's health crisis. It is not a conservative estimate to say that half of the prescription drugs today could be eliminated just by fixing the three most common mistakes people make when shopping for food. [...more]
New figures showing that US incarceration rates are climbing even higher, with racial minorities greatly overrepresented in prisons and jails, highlight the need to adopt alternative criminal justice policies, Human Rights Watch said today. [...more]
Drug giant Merck has been caught red-handed in a scheme to deceive the FDA and the public over the integrity of its scientific studies, say top medical authorities. According to reports that were (amazingly!) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and detailed in the Washington Post, Merck waged a "campaign of deception" to disguise its in-house study authors as independent scientists working for universities. This scheme made the studies appear independent and unbiased, allowing them to carry more apparent credibility to FDA officials, doctors and other scientists. [...more]
