“Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day. Nutley, ten minutes west of the Lincoln Tunnel, is home to the corporate campus of the Roche pharmaceutical company, which a couple of weeks ago threw a birthday party for Valium and its inventor, Dr. Leo Sternbach. Valium was turning forty; Sternbach, ninety-five. Both are diminished but are still going strong.” New Yorker Talk of the Town

“The US government can forcibly administer mind-altering drugs to render criminal defendants competent to stand trial, but only under certain limited circumstances.

In a case with potential implications for those opposed to conventional medical care, the US Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 Monday that the government’s interest in bringing defendants to trial outweighs an individual’s decision to be free from forced medication.” Christian Science Monitor

If you scan the press coverage of this Supreme Court decision, you will find two distinctly different takes on it. One emphasizes that the Court upheld forced medication; the other that such stringent restrictions were placed on it. The ruling is a victory for the defendant in the case, although it dismisses the notion that there is a fundamental right under the Constitution to refuse treatment. A lower court ruling forcing the defendant to take medications against his will to restore his competency to stand trial was vacated and the court was instructed to reconsider the case with the toughter criteria, which he is not likely to meet.

The criteria are as follows:

• “First, the court must find important government interests are at stake.
• Second, it must conclude that involuntary medication will significantly further those government interests.
• Third, the court must conclude that involuntary medication is necessary to further those interests.
• And fourth, it must conclude that administration of the drugs is medically appropriate in light of the patient’s best medical interests.
• The justices also noted that a court must find administration of the drugs is substantially unlikely to have side effects that will significantly interfere with a defendant’s ability to assist in his or her defense at trial.”

While the majority opinion by Justice Breyer cautions that the permissible instances for forced medication may be rare, I am not so sure. Arguably, the government will argue that “important interests” will be met simply by restoring comeptency and allowing someone to be brought to trial, for most crimes even if not for this one. Involuntary medication will usually, if not invariably, be seen as the most expedient if not the only way, and inherently medically appropriate, to further such an objective. I am not saying I agree with construing things in that way, but I predict that is how the criteria will be applied.

The case at hand was one of a dentist indicted for Medicaid fraud who refused to take medication for a mental illness — diagnosed as delusional disorder, persecutory type — which rendered him incompetent to stand trial, i.e. unable to collaborate with his attorney in defending himself (likely because he was too paranoid to trust his lawyer). The article comments:

(The) case is unique in that the court determined he was legally incompetent to stand trial but he was nonetheless competent to make his own medical decisions. In addition, the appeals court ruled that he did not pose a danger to himself and others.

This, however, is really not so surprising, since competency is always determined relative to some particular sphere of functioning. Traditionally, courts have had more stringent criteria for finding someone incompetent to make decisions about bodily integrity or sanctity than competency in other spheres. And dangerousness and competency are totally distinct concepts. Although the patient was incompetent, he was not dangerous to self or others, and the Court suggests that in the absence of a burden to protect him or society, the state’s interest, merely to bring him to trial and prosecute for fraud, was not a compelling one and that it was wrong to force him on that account to take medication.

Hospital said to seek help on Virgin image:

Overrun with worshipers praying before a likeness of the Virgin Mary in a third-story window, Milton Hospital officials have asked the Archdiocese of Boston to caution people against placing faith in the image, a church official confirmed yesterday.

Word of the likeness, which hospital officials say is made by a chemical deposit inside a sealed window, began to spread last week. Over the weekend, more than 25,000 people crowded onto the grounds to see it, officials said.

(…)

A church official said the hospital has asked the archdiocese for help in cautioning people against placing faith in the image. In the past, church leaders have been reluctant to comment one way or the other on such phenomena. Boston Globe

The sheer number of devout visitors hoping to pray before the apparition has edged out parking spaces for staff and patients with healthcare needs and made it impossible to keep that sector of the hospital clean. But a further danger is that the Blessed Mother seems to be interfering in healthcare policy:

Among the theories was that Mary had come to warn Milton Hospital not to join with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In February, the two announced they had formed a clinical affiliation. Milton Hospital does not perform abortions.

Nick Gillespie in Reason:

Teutonic-style outrage over the infinitely exploding amount of spam – unsolicited bulk emails – has officially replaced weapons of mass destruction and even monkeypox as the leading threat to all that is good and decent about life in these United States. …

In the current climate – which includes various pending and sure-to-be-useless legislative fixes – isn’t anyone brave enough to say something good about spam? Well, I am. I love spam – and not only because I just placed an order for a guaranteed system that will enlarge my penis so that I can use it to clean my septic tank while playing solitaire with a deck of Iraq’s Most Wanted cards. (As long as I’m sharing, I should mention that I only paid $59.99 for all this, using the same unsecured credit card that allowed me to take advantage of Mr. Kwame Ashantee’s generous and urgent invitation to invest heavily in the Ghana Gold and Diamond Mining Corporation. As a highly valued early investor, I also received 30 lbs. of herbal Viagra and refinanced my mortgage at the absolute lowest rate of negative 3.4 percent. Who said the Internet hasn’t delivered the goods?)

Gillespie goes on to cite the entertainment value of the spam he receives, opening a window on an alternative universe he would not otherwise know existed. But his main point is that legislative approaches to controlling spam are going to be ineffective. Since spam transcends national boundaries, no jurisdiction can effectively regulate it. Furthermore, spam is in the eye of the beholder. For these reasons, the only approaches that stand a chance of working are decentralized ones that empower the end-user. And that Gillespie finds worth appreciating. [Of course, this argument is a little like the one saying you should bang your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop… — FmH]

A reader commenting on his article makes another point in favor of spam, claiming; that it is a great guarantor of personal privacy, making it much harder for the information-awareness Carnivores of the world trying to monitor the email traffic of strangers to recognize what is relevant. I don’t agree with this argument at all, though. Even if 90% of the email traffic is at some point spam, this would just make the surveillance effort more demanding; not impossible. The extra filtering is just an inevitable cost of doing business, but not a prohibitive one.

“The development of colour vision may have lead to Old World primates, and hence their human descendants, to lose their ability to detect pheromones, suggests a new genetic study. Pheromones are highly specific scent molecules that many animals rely upon to find and assess a potential mate.” The study establishes that the genetic emergence of full color vision in Old World primates coincided roughly with the shutoff of the pheromone signal transduction pathway, around 23 million years ago. How the switch to a visually-based approach to mate-selection conferred a selective advantage is a matter of speculation; it may relate to the ability to see color from a safer distance. New Scientist

Exotic Pets Come Bearing Exotic Germs : “Epidemiologists can be such killjoys. Consider, for instance, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, who has been publicly denouncing prairie dogs since 1997. A prairie dog in a burrow is one thing, but a prairie dog in the house makes Dr. Osterholm a bit edgy.” NY Times

“Behind the rhetoric — and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in the name of national security but actually used to prevent public scrutiny — lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn’t fit the administration’s agenda.

Yesterday The Washington Post printed an interview with Rand Beers, a top White House counterterrorism adviser who resigned in March. “They’re making us less secure, not more secure,” he said of the Bush administration. “As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done.” Among the problem areas he cited were homeland security, where he says the administration has “only a rhetorical policy”; failure to press Saudi Arabia (the home of most of the Sept. 11 terrorists) to take action; and, of course, the way we allowed Afghanistan to relapse into chaos.” — Paul Krugman, NY Times op-ed

“…(T)hough national support for capital punishment may be softening, this does not mean that fewer people will be sentenced to die in prison.” NY Times

Firm Finds Way to Keep Lost Dogs on Leash: “Japan’s largest home and office security provider Secom Co Ltd thinks it can offer the paranoid pet owner a little peace of mind.

Secom said Monday it plans to unleash a new service later this month to track missing dogs, using satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile phone networks… The technology used by Secom is an extension of a similar service offered since April 2001 for tracking young children, the elderly and missing automobiles.” Yahoo! News

‘The apparent benefit “can be entirely attributed to measurement error,” said researcher Paul T. Williams, a biostatistician in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.’ AP/Salon

“Bill Clinton won the youth vote. Al Gore split it with George Bush. Will Democrats realize they must embrace pop culture, not demonize it, to win back the White House?”

As Goldberg points out — and no other political pundit, to my knowledge, has noticed this — in 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 19 points among voters under 24. In 2000, George W. Bush and Gore were dead even in that age group, a total of about 9 million votes. Restore even half of Clinton’s ’96 edge with youth, and the result of the election is clearly different, with or without the much-debated Nader factor.

— Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

wrote of unusual sex objects: feet. “William A. Rossi, 92, a podiatrist whose masterwork ”The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe ” elicited laughs from laymen and knowing nods from shoe salesmen, died Saturday at his home in Marshfield.” Boston Globe