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Alternative medicine on PBS's Frontline - Tues. 9 pm

With all the stuff we've been posting about medicine lately I figure it'd be worth plugging this showing on PBS's Frontline tomorrow night (9 pm):

The Alternative Fix:  Americans are spending billions on alternative medicine treatments. And major hospitals and medical schools are embracing them. But do they work?

And if you miss it, fear not: the entire show is viewable online, along with additional interviews and analysis.

Got pranks?

For the upcoming "pranks and hoaxes" issues of Stay Free! we'd like to hear from you, dear reader.

Ever pulled off a stellar prank - or been the unfortunate victim of one? If so, tell us about it: the hows, the whys, the results. Stories can be as short as a couple of sentences or up to several paragraphs long. We'll edit our favorites and include them in the February 2006 issue of the magazine. If we choose yours, we'll send you a free issue.

Send responses to temporary181 (a) stayfreemagazine.org

Here are some past readers polls, to give you an idea of the format:

After breaking up with someone, what do you do with their stuff?
Every been fired?
Readers share their fast food experiences

Another disaster waiting to happen

News outlets report that ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown is starting a disaster-preparedness firm. One supposes his first bit of advice might be something like: don't hire an incompetent asshole with no relevant experience in disaster-preparedness.

In other news, convicted pedophile priest Paul Shanley is opening a day care center. (ba-dum-bump)

Absolut cease-and-desist

With all of the Absolut parodies floating out around there, you might think that the makers of the overpriced vodka had a "thing" for the First Amendment... but you might think wrong. The Swedish liquor firm is going after blogger Maria Lupinacci who created a fake ad -- "Absolut Corruption" criticizing the Bush administration.

A lawyer for Absolut's owners, V&S, e-mailed Lupinacci Nov. 14, saying the parody infringes on Absolut's copyright and trademark, and requested it be immediately removed. The firm's policy is to stay away from political statements of any kind, attorney Jenny Bergquist wrote, and "you are using the Absolut trademark in order to promote your political message."

So far, Lupinacci and her co-blogger, David DeAngelo, haven't budged.

The human lab rat racket

If you don't know much about the drug testing industry, well, you're not alone. Until coming across this Bloomberg News story, I didn't realize that pharmaceutical companies outsource most of their clinical trials to third parties - private companies that are scarcely regulated, practice under dangerous working conditions, and often lack licensed medical doctors. Drug companies love 'em, though, because the outfits turn trials around quickly and, should something go afoul, the drug companies can maintain plausible deniability.

Of course, if there is one job title that makes working at Wal-Mart sound good, it is "human lab rat." But the illegal immigrants and other poor who participate don't have much choice, and the companies take full advantage.

[A drug trial for Purdue Pharma] paid volunteers $2.78 an hour, or $66.72 per 24-hour day, for the first nine days of confinement. For those who remained, payment jumped to $333.33 a day for the final three days, with a bonus of $800 paid following a single follow-up visit.

Such payment backloading is coercive and thus unethical, says Peter Lurie, a physician who is deputy medical director of Public Citizen, a Washington-based group that monitors patient safety issues. "It provides a very powerful incentive for somebody to continue in a study even if they're being made uncomfortable by it,'' he says.

What's more, like good marketers, the clinical farms describe tests to subjects in a misleading way. For instance, one company lists the goal of one of its study as determining "the highest daily dose of TD-6301 that will not cause an undesired increase in heart rate." But as a University of Miami biologist points out, what they should really be saying is: the purpose of this study is to make you sick in order to find out how much of this drug people can handle.

Anyway, those curious to learn more about clinical testing should check out Guinea Pig Zero. Formerly a print zine, GPZ is now defunct but an anthology is available and selected archives are  online.

Weak Minds Think Alike

Our friend Jim Hanas noticed that times are so tough in the dinosaur media world that the New York Post and Daily News are sharing their front page layout staff:

Of course, the Daily News didn't blame the verdict on liberals undermining our soldiers in Iraq.

C'mon, touch that kid like a man!

Ohio has proposed mandating that serial sex offenders and pedophiles use pink license plates.

On Wednesday, Cuyahoga Falls Republican Kevin Coughlin introduced legislation in the state Senate that would require the [pink] plates. He says it would be a good method for warning parents and children.

A warning of what? That a sex offender wants to pass you on the highway? Or is somewhere in the vicinity of the Parmatown Mall? I guess you would have to take the bus to interview for childcare jobs.

What bothers me about this isn't the light-Scarlet-Letter vibe, but the assumption that calling sexual predators feminine is more of an insult to pedophiles than it is to, say, women or the terminally fabulous.

(Via Broadsheet at Salon)

Seeking a volunteer copyeditor

We're looking for someone with professional copyediting experience and a solid block of free time to help out with the upcoming issue of Stay Free! If you or someone you know is interested in (or at least willing...) helping out, please get in touch: stay.free at verizon.net.

Support the EFF's Bloggers Rights campaign

One of our favorite nonprofit organizations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is having a fundraising drift for its Bloggers' Rights campaign. If you've seen the EFF's Legal Guide for Bloggers, you know the issues at stake here: threats to free expression, political speech, and privacy, for example.

The EFF has also a key player in the Copyfight (they helped defend yours truly when our Illegal Art Exhibit received some legal threats last year)... so send 'em your money today!

Great old Brand Names Foundation ad

Friend of Stay Free! Jim Hanas recently posted this awesome 1950s trade ad from the Brand Names Foundation that instructs readers on "How to get rid of an inferiority complex in a single day."

How does one get rid of an inferiority complex? According to some hilariously circular reasoning, by recognizing that corporations exist to please YOU:

[S]ay out loud: “I’m the boss! If a brand becomes famous, it’s because of me! If I and people like me stop buying a particular brand, that company goes out of business! I make the wheels go ‘round in America. I am the American consumer!”

As Jim points out, the current ad industry mantra about the "powerful consumer" is, thus, nothing new. The Brand Foundation and other trade groups have been making this argument for decades

I'm curious to know more about the Brand Foundation, though. I've got some old ads from the 1920s promoting brand-name goods, which made a lot of sense in a period when people were still acclimating themselves to a burgeoning consumer society. But, generally, the industry only initiates these kind of awareness campaigns when its public image is somehow suffering (from public criticism or other external threats). And in the early 1950s, when this ad appeared, the ad industry was doing quite well. If any of you knows more about this organization, let me know.

Ikea opening attracts homeless, unemployed

Is waiting in line for over a week to get a gift card for cheap furniture "extreme endurance" or thrift? I don't know but I almost feel dirty in perpetuating this story about the frenzy in Massachussetts about the opening of a new store.

The Swedish chain was awarding gift certificates ranging from $500-5,000 to the first five customers, who stood in line for as many as 12 days. First in line and the top winner, Mike Rice, flew from Georgia to take part in the contest, which turned intense. Third-in-line Jeffrey Beaudette, who stood in line for seven days, told the Boston Herald: “If you look at the five of us now, no one’s really talking to each other.

Hm. Six to twelve days for $500 to $5,000? I wonder what the hourly rate on that works out to on that. The suits in Ikea's publicity department are clearly doing their job. Reminds me of another wiseguy publicity stunt, Elite Designers Against Ikea.

Comments now need authentication (sorry!)

Due to the massive amounts of comment spam we've been getting, I've had to switch to requiring registration for comments. Please accept my apologies. I've sent Typepad (which hosts this blogs) many emails begging them to implement a simple human test so we wouldn't have to resort to this, to no avail.

To avoid registering, you can use the login I set up for "AnonymousCommenter"

login: carriemclaren
password: blogging

(in other words, any comments you submit under this login will show up as AnonymousCommenter)

Interview with Leslie Savan on pop language

It's been almost eight years since my friend and hero Leslie Savan stopped writing her advertising column in the Village Voice and hunkered down to write a book. Lo and behold, her labors have finally delivered us the think-book of the year: Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever is now out.

At first blush, Slam Dunks is a bit of a departure from Savan's advertising criticism. But on closer look? Not so much. The book focuses on American pop language--on everyday expressions and their ability to spread like viruses--Bring it on! Whassup? or “thinking outside the box." So how does this connect to Savan the ad critic?

Imagine, if you will, a society overwhelmingly dominated by advertising aliens, one in which people not only confront ads in schools, hospitals, homes, and offices, but internalize the language and values of advertising in their personal lives. How might you expect the inhabitants of this peculiar world to communicate? Well, one could reasonably expect that their lingua franca would resemble the advertising that surrounds. It would be pithy, punchy, with a bit of Hollywood glitz. It would, in other words, be pop.

Savan, in this smart and original book, documents the handprint of commercial media on American language, drawing parallels along the way between our homogenous cultural landscape and increasingly homogenous language. Pop language, Savan convincingly argues, resembles advertising itself.

I talked to Savan via phone from her home in New Jersey last week. An edit of our conversation follows below. For some basic background on the book, you might find it helpful to read the Q/A on the Knopf site--or Savan's piece in the New York Times Magazine--first.

INTERVIEW BELOW THE JUMP

Stay Free!: You mentioned that the strongest influence on pop is black American vernacular. Why is that?

Leslie Savan: Under slavery, black people in American often spoke in code in order to communicate under the master’s eye without him suspecting what they were really feeling. The code inevitably led to a kind of cool stance--a show of self-control and restraint. [As in, "keep cool."] They couldn't be seen yearning for escape. White people assumed a lot of slave songs were about God and heaven when they were really more along the lines of, "Get me out of here!"

Speaking in code also produced a lot of clever wordplay, and a playful, ironic alternative to the standard tongue. Creating a language that allows you to speak to “the Man" while at the same time giving a wink to your fellows is in itself an art, a form of poetry. I'm interested in the point at which language changes from poetry to PR.

Stay Free!: And, of course, the oral tradition is central in African American culture...

Leslie Savan: Yes. Partly because throughout much of American history blacks weren't allowed to be educated or to own property. They passed things down using storytelling and music. To this day, a lot of black English is full of irony and wordplay, and much of that came down through music.

Stay Free!: What about the word cool itself?

Leslie Savan: It comes down to us from black American vernacular. Cool is the preeminent pop word-the engine that drives most of pop culture itself. The fashion business, the entertainment industry, they're all striving for the Holy Grail of cool. In this day and age you can't separate cool from consumption. We think we can buy cool through our purchases, or borrow it by using pop phrases, which are a form of advertising for ourselves.

Stay Free!: Is the phenomenon of whites talking black universal? Does it happen in other cultures?

Leslie Savan: There is a universal tendency to seek out what sociolinguists call "covert prestige"; that's where a high status group gains prestige by imitating a lower status group. It's not necessarily a white/black thing. In England, upper-class white men have been shown to imitate the speech of working class white men.

Stay Free!: Why? Because it makes them sound more masculine and tough?

Leslie Savan: Yes...

Stay Free!: So is it mostly men who do this?

Leslie Savan: Yes, especially young men. Men are more prone to associate formal speech with being “proper” and being proper with femininity. This is nothing new; it's been true for generations. But more and more now, girls are also aspiring toward a certain toughness. In speech this comes out, say, in You go, girl! Or in women referring to themselves as “guys.”

Stay Free!: Corporations have been co-opting slang speech for ages. You mentioned that in the 1940s, Hallmark issued a “jive” series of greeting cards. In the past, this kind of mainstream attention signaled the demise of a slang term. Is that still the case?

Leslie Savan: When a word goes mainstream, it's no longer slang or outsider, but it doesn't necessarily die. It MIGHT just lose its edge.

Stay Free!: But don't some words die out once they become popular? Jive, for instance. Once suburbia started using it, it just sounded ridiculous...

Leslie Savan: Words of all kinds die when we don't need them anymore. Often, technology makes them irrelevant. Sometimes it becomes too embarrassing to use a particular phrase, but many phrases hang around longer than we think. I remember in the early 80s “Go for it!" was hot and we'd use it around the Voice office ironically. But we continued to use it long after it was hot and after a certain point it ceased to be ironic. Even as tepid as the phrase has become now, it still has a patina of glamour, a bit of a punchline in itself.

Stay Free!: You wrote a chapter on "weapon words"-phrases like Hel-lo?!, Puh-leeze!, and Ex-CUSE me? that serve as a kind of comeback or put-down. Weapon words remind me of a trend in advertising toward portraying a beleaguered everyman who has to deal annoying people, when the everyman would rather just be consuming some product. Like a husband will be playing sick in bed so he doesn't have to go out with his wife, and he's fantasizing about ducking out and riding around in a new SUV.  Do you see any parallels with this kind of thing and weapon words? Both seem to reflect a kind of mean strain in pop culture...

Leslie Savan: Many Pop phrases are punchlines that replace a punch. As I say in the book, there are parallels between pop phrases and ads themselves. Both like to have snappy endings, both are good deal-closers. Pop phrases are basically mini- or micro-ads. They advertise us, tell our audience that we "get it" and that we have the crowd behind us. The first job of any ad is to get attention. Like effective ads, pop words are more likely to pull attention and consensus their way. The problem is that we're more likely to be persuaded not on merit of an argument but on how catchy it sounds.

When television first came out, people feared that images would overtake language and literacy. And in many ways they have. One thing I find interesting is that pop words are as much like images as words can be. In many ways, pop language has more in common with images than words—it’s the word as image.

Stay Free!: Pop words are like brands or logos.

Leslie Savan: Like logoed thoughts--licensed thoughts, licensed in the sense that they seem to descend from something big and flashy in the media. They’ve got the sound of money running through them.

Stay Free!: Your point about pop phrases working like images reminds me of an old debate among primatologists about gorillas and chimps who learn sign language. Some scholars say that when primates sign, they're not actually using language because they don't put words together to form original sentences. They're not coming up with their own ideas, they're just using isolated words, which, some argue, is comparable to dogs that do tricks. Maybe pop language is the equivalent of ape sign language, then. It's not actually language because the words aren't used in a sequence to form distinct ideas.

Leslie Savan: That's a great metaphor.  It's language at a primal level--a primate level! [laughs]

Stay Free!: So many marketers have used pop phrases as a form of advertising. And yet it still seems to be that many pop phrases don't have a specific author or source. Most don't originate with marketing but rather boil up from "real people." Why do you think that is?

Leslie Savan: All language comes from real people using and spreading it. A phrase that began with an advertiser wouldn't attract as many people because most wouldn't know what it meant. You want to use language that people are already using. I think Wendy's really did come up with Where's the beef? but Show me the money, which was popularized by the movie Jerry McGuire, could be traced to a baseball player who almost certainly got it from someone else.

It's hard to draw a line between "real" people and Hollywood, because the words are reflected back. You could think of the road to pop as three steps. First, a phrase is used by "real people." Next, TV, movies, or advertising pick up and spread it. And, finally, more real people use it, and with an extra bit of pizzazz.

Stay Free!: Some pop phrases seem sourceless. I remember years ago, out of the blue, I started saying HIH-larious [with an exaggerated emphasis on hih] all the time and my friends came to associate it with me. But later I realized that people similarly say hi-larious [with an exaggerated hi]

Leslie Savan: I've experienced that too with different words. Things come to us before we are conscious of them, and spread.

Stay Free!: Exactly is another one.

Leslie Savan: Right. It's a placeholder. When we flounder in conversation we grab certain words and feel more together and in control.

Stay Free!: You write that street talk once rarely made it into print. And that it's only been relatively recently that the gap between written and spoken language has narrowed. Obviously, electronic media and marketing are a large part of that, but why do you think marketers were reluctant to use street talk in, say, the 1930s?

Leslie Savan: Because it was associated with lower classes and advertisers wanted to reach higher classes. Of course, now advertising plays to "the street" because that's where it's at. This goes back to the idea of covert prestige. When corporations use black street language it comes from the same desire to be cool, masculine, and tough. This is deliberate. Companies pay big money to look like outsiders.

Stay Free!: Yet corporations are as inside as it gets!

Leslie Savan: Yes. There's a Sprint TV ad with a silver-haired CEO who says something like, "This will reallly show them that we want to stick it to the man." His assistant replies, "But, sir, you are the man." So Sprint execs are taking the fake rebel sell one step further—they’re telling us they know they’re ridiculous for claiming to stick it to the main, but are they cool or what for sticking it to the conventions of postmodern advertising?

Stay Free!: But going back to weapon words, I've noticed that a lot of pop words-especially weapon words-end with what are called plosives, the letters B, D, G, K, P, T—and especially the last three. They have a hard sound. So do a lot of dirty sex words: suck, fuck, shit, poop... and so do words that mean to hit: hit, pop, whack. I think it's a primal thing. The sensation in the mouth is a miniature of the sensation you're talking about—something connects and either hurts or penetrates.

Stay Free!: Is this cross-cultural? Is it true in other languages?

Leslie Savan: One linguist I talked to said no. But another linguist, who co-edited a book called Sound Symbolism, says yes. If you look at comic books in other languages, you'd see a fair number of plosives for words that essentially mean “hit.” The word pop is itself a plosive. Making plosive sounds is fun! Explosions are fun—they provide a feeling of release. That's the basis of pop language--the fun. And that's partly why it's such a useful tool to sell with. Fun, like sex, can persuade you of something that wouldn't otherwise stand on its own merits.

Stay Free!: There's a good anecdote in your book about the origins of the word Coca-Cola...

Leslie Savan: A linguist was teaching an ESL class in the 80s or so, and, to warm up the crowd, she'd ask the students for words that had been incorporated into English from their native language. Well, these people from other countries all thought Coca-Cola came from their country. They didn't believe her when she said it came from America.

Stay Free!: Are academics studying pop?

Leslie Savan: They're always studying slang, but they're not looking much at the connection to media and marketing--unless, of course, they’re anthropologist types hired by marketing researchers. Pop is really a dialect of media and marketing.

Stay Free!: Conservative critic PJ O'Rourke has accused you of being a killjoy. How do you respond to people who mistake you for the grammar police?

Leslie Savan: I use pop phrases all the time; I can't think without them! [laughs] So I'm not saying pop language is "bad" and never, ever use it. I just think it's fascinating to look at how language is changing and why. Does that make me a killjoy? I don't think so.

Next Stay Free! mag out February 2006

Apologies for my absence lately. I've been trying to do more freelance work while also looking for a house, so my blog obsession has turned into a real estate obsession.

Anyway, I just wanted to give subscribers a heads up that the next issue of the magazine will be out around February 2006 (pushed back from its original fall 2005 date). That's all.

It's My Blog Now. Deal With It.

Back at the end of August, Mo Ibrahim—a reporter from the Long Island Press—contacted me after reading this post. He was writing an article about MySpace, specifically MySpace Music, and I was one of the only people he had found who had said anything negative about the wildly popular online community. Mr. Ibrahim asked for my thoughts, but also asked for me to speak on behalf of Stay Free!. In my reply, I prefaced my comments with, "Here are my layman's/indie-rock lover's views (I can't speak on behalf of Stay Free!, so for that please email Carrie McLaren)."

That was the last I heard of it till today, when Mr. Ibrahim sent me the link to his article. Well, in your face, McLaren! In paragraph #20, my comments are introduced thusly: "Jack Silbert wrote on his Stay Free! blog..." That's right, new readers from Long Island, it's MY blog. Sure, I only post every couple of months, but that's because I'm very, very busy with...uh...you know...important blog-running related matters. HTML and the shift key and other highly technical things I won't bore you with.

Anyway, read Mo Ibrahim's article. He's done his homework, on MySpace at least. He's also perfectly captured my inherent wishy-washy nature. And there's some solid commentary from Ryan Creed of Stay Free!, one of my most trusted employees. Oh, and check out my original post for a growing collection of letters from bogus girls around the world. Have I forgotten anything? Ah yes. Amy Fisher has a recurring column in the Long Island Press. Enjoy.

Why the Complete New Yorker is a mess, and other insights from the Wall Street Journal

You all should take advantage of the fact that the Wall Street Journal site is free this week and check out this story about why the Complete New Yorker DVD is so clumsy and hard to navigate. (Answer: copyrights prevented the publisher from reformatting the pages.) See also this curious piece on surgery for gored matadors and an article about authors who assume aliases after their books flop.

Advertising's chemical imbalance

Zoloft commercial stolen from Ad-Rag.com

I couldn't help but notice Lilly's new "depression hurts" ad in a recent New York Times Magazine. A little infograph off to the side says, "Serotonin and norepinephrine may play a role in depression."

Aha! I thought, upon noticing the “may.” Could the FDA finally be going after pharmaceutical companies for falsely advertising that a lack of serotonin causes depression?

For years, as a recent essay in PLoS Medicine explains, advertising has pitched the causes of depression as a lack of certain brain chemicals--particularly serotonin--though evidence is sorely lacking.  In fact, the PLoS writer provides a handy collection of quotes illustrating the divide between what the drug ads say verses the scientists. For example:

ADVERTS SAY: "Celexa helps to restore the brain's chemical balance by increasing the supply of a chemical messenger in the brain called serotonin." ...to bring serotonin levels closer to normal, the medicine doctors now prescribe most often is Prozac."

SCIENTISTS SAY: "Given the ubiquity of a neurotransmitter such as serotonin and the multiplicity of its functions, it is almost as meaningless to implicate it in depression as it is to implicate blood." -- John Horgan, in The Undiscovered Mind (1999). "Some have argued that depression may be due to a deficiency of norepinephrine or serotonin because the enhancement of noradrenegic or serotonergic neurotransmission improves the symptoms of depression. However, this is akin to saying that because a rash on one's arm improves with the use of a steroid cream, the rash must be due to a steroid deficiency." -- Stephen M. Stahl, Essential Psychopharmacology (2000).

Hell, even Prozac king Peter Kramer says Prozac--the first major selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI)--is no more effective than earlier drugs, which had little effect on serotonin. And in fact, other treatments--both drug an nondrug--have been found to be just as effective as SSRIs.

In short, there exists no rigorous corroboration of the serotonin theory, and a significant body of contradictory evidence. Far from being a radical line of thought, doubts about the serotonin hypothesis are well acknowledged... To our knowledge, there is not a single peer-reviewed article that can be accurately cited to directly support claims of serotonin deficiency in any mental disorder, while there are many articles that present counterevidence.

But, alas, my theory about Lilly righting its wrongs was, uh, wrong. In a commercial for the same campaign, a motherly voiceover states matter-of-factly that depression "is thought to be caused by an imbalance between serotonin and norepinephrine."

Thought to be caused...? By whom?  Let me guess...

Lilly.

---

For more info on the false claims made about the causes of depression, see Eliott Valenstein Blaming the Brain.

Thanks to Yoni for the PLoS tip.

Find out why no one will lend you money

If you haven't yet heard about a government law requiring the three major credit reporting companies to provide a free credit report to U.S. citizens once a year, well, now you have: AnnualCreditReport.com allows you to get up to three free reports, one each from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

I tried to get all three myself, but TransUnion refused to believe I was me. The company required me to provide the card numbers of a couple of old retail cards I have long since canceled; without them, I couldn't view my report. Had I thought about it, I could have gotten the credit card numbers from the other two credit reports. Doh!

Hawking Hawking E-Trade?

I may be hallucinating, but I think a commercial just led me to believe that Bob Dylan, Arthur Ashe, Ernest Hemingway, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Vince Lombardi, and Stephen Hawking think I should invest with E-Trade. Apparently the ad debuted back in March, but this was my first viewing. Students of advertising: What is the process to obtain permission to use footage of such luminaries? Students of the end of civilization as we know it: Where are we, countdown-wise?

The Return of Intelligent Design

The Kansas Board of Education voted (6 to 4) to include "intelligent design" in the science curriculum in Kansas schools. Yes, I'm outraged, too, but in actuality "intelligent design" has been taught in schools across the country since the late 1940s - courtesy of the Moody Institute of Science (division of the Moody Bible Institute) who had been releasing such science films to schools. One such film is "Carnivorous Plants." On the surface, this film may seem like an average biology film, but like most of films from the Moody Institute of Science, there is an ulterior motive. While revealing the complexity of nature, their films would end with the film saying that this complexity was part of God's plan rather than evolution. Originally, these films were made to use the wonders of science (described as the wonders of God's creation) to attract people to Christianity, but the discounting of evolution sowed the seeds for the modern "intelligent design" movement.

Streaming file of "Carnivorous Plants" (courtesy of Internet Archive and AV Geeks)

Cancer costs $1

Maybe I'm too cynical. And maybe big corporations just love kids and hate money. Either way I still can't shake the feeling that when New York City paid $1 to Keyspan for the former site of the Elmhurst Gas Tanks to convert it into a public park, the City got ripped off.

KeySpan has worked extensively with the State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Coordination, to clean up the property and prepare it for public use.

If you say so, Bloomie. But it still feels like the City just bought a Superfund site and absolved Keyspan of any liability if the remediation isn't quite as complete as everyone thought it was. Elmhurst isn't midtown Manhattan, but even real estate in Queens is worth a lot of money. (Don't get snippy with me in the comments; I spent over 20 years receiving mail in 11366. I know my Queens.)

If Keyspan sold it for a buck, that ground is poison.

(Via Gothamist)

Merck execs get a jury of peers

"Sometimes you can improve two lives with a single perscription." Because grandma wants to die, and the kid wants her money.

Whenever a verdict that makes no sense is handed down, one's instinct is to think that the jurors were stupid. It usually isn't true; the facts are often complicated and the reported version of the case is frequently different from what the jury saw. Rarely are we given concrete proof that the jury was a collection of unforgivable morons. Enter the latest Vioxx jury.

[Juror Marie Kerr, a 51-year-old administrative assistant,] said she wasn't moved by a Merck document titled "Dodgeball" that Mr. Seeger portrayed as a way to teach sales representatives how to avoid questions about heart attacks. "We've all seen games like dodgeball at our work," she said...

Apparently Marie Kerr is an administrative assistant at Abu Ghraib.

Vickie Heintz, a 40-year-old juror, said she felt Mr. Seeger "cherry picked" a few select emails and tried to impugn the company with them.

I agree. We should thank Merck for all of the emails that didn't talk about ways to avoid letting people know that its product kills people.

Ms. Heintz said she wasn't bothered by Merck's aggressive marketing of Vioxx or documents that showed the company calculating the loss in profits if the warning label was changed to reflect increased risk of heart attack. "Medicine is business," she said. "If I had a business I would calculate what the loss of one of my big products would mean...This is about making money. Merck doesn't do this because they are flower people."

This is great news for the murder-for-hire business.

Another juror, Patricia Harley, 44, said: "If someone peeked through all my emails, forget about it."

Patricia Harley has killed 18 people and can't help but brag about it. She was absolved by Ms. Heintz because - in addition to the confessions - there were 2000 emails of funny cat pictures.

Which reminds me: If you haven't yet read the internal Merck memo reprinted in Harper's, we highly recommend it.

---

Previously on Stay Free! Daily: Could Vioxx come back from the Grave?

Cafepress: Copyright Cops

I've had only good things to say about working with Cafepress in the past but this time they are out of control.

After a reader sent me a note wondering what happened to our Panexa merchandise, I noticed that Cafepress has removed it due to copyright and trademark infringement! (T-shirt front pictured at right; click for t-shirt back or mug) For those of you unfamiliar with Panexa, it's a fake drug that Jason came up with to parody pharmaceutical advertising. He created a webpage and everything.

Apparently, one of the genuises in Cafepress's police division thinks Panexa is an actual product and that we are infringing. I sent Cafepress an email about this and am awaiting a response. In the meantime, I found this notice on the company's site:

Generally parody, like Fair Use, is a difficult and murky concept, even for experts, and you should consult with an attorney before using copyrighted or trademark material in connection with the CafePress.com service.

What I find galling is that Cafepress doesn't even give you a chance to consult an attorney! The company makes an arbitrary decision on its own and then it's up to you to argue them out of it. Grrrr. Fuck 'em.

UPDATE: CafePress has restored the Panexa merchandise. The matter has been amicably resolved, so, um, unfuck 'em.

Boutique doctors in the New York Times

The New York Times had an interesting story on Sunday about what it calls "a new breed of 'boutique'" doctors who make money by charging patients an annual fee instead of charging per appointment. The article raises an important point -- such a model, should it proliferate unabated, will harm the U.S. health care model. The uninsured, not to mention people who rely on Medicare or standard HMOs, will be left out.

But what the article doesn't fully acknowledge is that the standard health care model is screwed up to begin with! Calling a doctor who doesn't keep you waiting for hours, provides same-day care, and offers 24-hour emergency phone access "boutique" just goes to show how low are expectations are for medical care in the U.S.

Ok, granted, patients have to pay $1600-$2000/year for concierge doctors, but they get better care and don't have to pay per appointment. For those of us who can't afford $350/month for health insurance, that $1,600 actually looks like a decent alternative. (Click here for the NYT's handy chart of the advantages of concierge care.)

In the 19th century, before the rise of the medical industry, this "annual fee" model for doctors -- and the personalized care that went with it -- was the standard. Of course, mainstream medicine in the 19th century was in many ways a disaster, but it's worth revisiting why this model faded (short answer: economics) and what about it might be worth resurrecting.