Cato Institute's Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer, also an ACSH advisor, and Dr. Josh Bloom argue in The Philadelphia Inquirer that the unwinnable war on drugs is simply a losing proposition for pain patients.
Policy & Ethics
Maia Szalavitz's terrifying article in Wired, which described the cruel laws and punitive regulations that pain patients are forced to abide by, brought to mind hundreds of similarly tragic comments I've been reading for years. These can be found following any of my ~100 articles about pain, opioid denial, or government malfeasance and ineptitude. Here are a few.
Always eager to win friends and influence people, The Conversation recently published an article claiming that people who refuse to get COVID shots are selfish and un-American. This is not how you convert vaccine skeptics.
Dr. Jeff Singer of the Cato Institute, and also a member of the ACSH Board of Scientific Advisors was invited to participate in a panel discussion on ending the opioid crisis. Here is a description of the event and a link to a YouTube video of the discussion.
Masks offer some protection against COVID-19 infection, but not nearly as much as the authorized vaccines. By telling the public they have to continue masking after immunization, we all but guarantee skeptics will forgo both shots and masks.
A new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association tells us what anyone with two functioning brain cells already knows: When patients on long-term opioid therapy have their meds tapered, bad things happen. Here are the details.
Despite relatively high vaccine uptake, New York City is about to enact mandatory shots for all residents before they can visit indoor restaurants, gyms and entertainment centers. This is unhelpful at best and counterproductive at worst.
Writing for the Reason Foundation, Jacob James Rich and Robert Capodilupo tell us what we already know – that Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) may have had a purpose when first initiated but that time has passed. Now the programs, which are intrusive and possibly a HIPAA violation, serve only to drive up black-market drug use.
The CDC is again recommending that fully vaccinated Americans mask up in certain circumstances. This is bad advice at odds with the available evidence that will only seed more vaccine hesitancy.
New CDC recommendations say that the use of masks indoors should be governed by the level of COVID transmission in a particular area. But the agency's plan is unworkable. Here's why.
The FDA needs to step up and fix the definition of strength. "Business as usual” under the existing language of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 means continued disincentives to promote a more aggressive uptake of biosimilars.
Joe "Crazy Joe" Mercola was just targeted by the Times, which called him "The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online." For Mercola this is probably a compliment since his rejection of science and medicine has enabled him to amass a $100 million fortune selling junk online. It was nice to see The Times weighing in – but they're a little late to the party. ACSH has been doing just this for more than a decade. Some examples of our work.