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Are The ‘Green 20’ Suppressing Scientific Dissent?

If you know a local politician has accepted a small fortune, $300,000, from corporations with a specific agenda, would you believe:

(1) They are compartmentalizing their decisions so funding does not matter;

(2) They are simply getting donations for beliefs and work they've already done, so it does not sway them or;

(3) They are engaged in pay-for-play.

If you are at politically-motivated, dark-money-funded sites like Mother Jones or Sourcewatch, or at one of the 300 corporate marketing groups (US Right To Know et al.) that are propped up by Organic Consumers Association, the answer will always be (3) because you sell stories of conspiracies and evil corporations and scientists being bought off.

How about if I add a wrinkle? What if I note that the...
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'Local Control' Is A Beard For Environmentalists Blocking Energy Progress

Terms like "local control" and "best practices" are sure to warm the hearts of any evidence-based libertarian. To the more libertarian mindset, government centralization is inherently bad; it too often leads to corruption and inefficiency. We don't have a United States Police Force, for example, because we want people who understand the local community to be handling local crime, and we want education to be local so that school districts represent the teaching values of the diverse communities across our nation. 

In opposition to freedom, the social authoritarian mindset starts at the top, lobbying and donating to federal government officials (and...
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How Might a New FDA Head Improve Drug Approval?

Donald Trump. The Pharmaceutical Industry. If those terms two don't get you into a fight at a cocktail party, nothing will.

But, they need to be discussed, because there could be some big changes coming in both the manner and speed with which new drugs navigate the arduous US Food and Drug Administration pathway from lab bench to pharmacy.

Just one example to provide some context. Media have been making much of the fact that Jim O’Neill, a libertarian with a free-market mindset, has been floated as one possible candidate to head the FDA. Some of his prior statements are troubling but his philosophy could also be helpful, since he is "pro-biotech."

Either way, in talking about one even...
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Kratom: When Laws Collide

Kratom, which I once satirically referred to a "The Supplement That Will Kill Godzilla," will, in fact, not kill Godzilla. Nor is it a supplement (1). It is by any definition, a drug. As such, it should be treated like one.

The drug (actually a mixture of dozens of drugs), has been squarely in the news lately because of two reasons. First, it is being seized by the DEA, which has at this time classified it as a Schedule I substance—no legal use in the US and a high potential for abuse. Second,...
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Before Antibiotics, How Did Doctors Treat Infections?

The development of antibiotics and other antimicrobial therapies is arguably the greatest achievement of modern medicine. However, overuse and misuse of antimicrobial therapy predictably leads to resistance in microorganisms. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus species (VRE) and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) have emerged. Certain CRE species are resistant to multiple antibiotics, and have been deemed superbugs in the news.

Alternative therapies have been used to treat infections since antiquity, but none are as reliably safe and effective as modern...
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Kratom: The Supplement That Will Kill Godzilla

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 3.40.10 PMU.S. Marshals, acting on a request from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized yet another ridiculous "dietary supplement," and this one's a doozy. About 90,000 bottles of a bunch of garbage with the brand name RelaKzpro, which is sold by Dordoniz Natural Products of South Beloit, Illinois,...
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Nosophobia and Fear of Invisible Toxins

“If it smells bad, it’s bad; if it smells good, it’s bad,” says Aileen Gagney, asthma and environmental health manager with the American Lung Association in Seattle. (1) Obviously then, the key to a healthy life is to have no smells around you. How unfortunate, since we are excellent smellers!

The tongue can detect sweetness at a dilution of one part in 200, saltiness at one in 400, sourness at one in 130,000, and bitterness at one in 2 million. (2) All of this pales when compared with our ability to detect extremely low levels of smells (i.e., in the range of 50 parts per trillion to 800 parts per billion. (3)

If you are inclined to agree with Ms. Gagney, perhaps you have nosophobia, the irrational fear of contracting a disease -- or perhaps I should say nose-ophobia,...
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Good Science

This piece appeared on NationalPost.com.

The recent proposed Canadian restrictions on products such as baby bottles containing the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) is but the latest unscientific legislation made possible in part by a dangerous prevailing assumption: namely, that anti-corporate claims are by definition "good science" while claims made in defense of industry or new technology -- by anyone with the slightest ties to industry -- are by definition "suspect science." Ironically, consumers end up paying higher prices as a result of such ostensibly consumer-protecting measures (as products need to be replaced or reformulated) or even end up using less...
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Juicing the Truth (from Spiked-Online.com) UPDATED!

A new ad by US orange juice promoters tries to scare consumers away from "chemical-packed" rivals

By Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H.
Posted: Monday, September 12, 2005

This article first appeared on Spiked-Online on September 12, 2005:

A recent ad by U.S. orange juice promoters the Florida Department of Citrus -- referred to on its website as "The Laboratory" -- shamelessly plays on...
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Smoking Risks and Resistance

Smokers shorten their lives by an average of seven years, according to insurance actuarial tables (one of humanity's greatest inventions and a model for rational calculation that the rest of the culture would do well to imitate). At least, seven years is what studies suggest is the handicap insurance companies are putting on smoking. Insurance companies normally don't officially open their actuarial tables to outside inspection, since those numbers are the basis of all the gambling-like choices the companies make about who to charge how much, the odds of having to pay out, and so forth. Insurance companies' habit of treating smokers as a separate, unique category of human being on questionnaires should give you some hint how much worse a hand the house thinks you're playing if you're a...
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