>> L.A. got a new medical marijuana shop law. “The ordinance caps the number of dispensaries at 70 and creates a buffer zone around schools and places of worship.” It’ll be at least 45 days before the new rules will start being enforced.
>> Vaccines and autism aren’t linked — and a 12-year-old paper linking the two was formally retracted by the medical journal the Lancet. Slate republishes an article about why the myth that vaccines can cause autism lives on; NPR has an interview with risk consultant David Ropeik discussing how the risk of vaccines got so overblown.
>> Relatedly, Wired published a great feature piece a few months back: An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.
>> Can a heroin maintenance program work for addicts? Vancouver’s experiment sounds promising: “88 percent of the heroin maintenance group stayed on their course of treatment, versus 54 percent in the methadone group.” Why this news should be interesting to non heroin addicts: “An untreated heroin addict costs the state $45,000 a year in legal and medical bills; heroin maintenance costs $7,000.”
Questions remain, though, about whether other programs might be safer or more effective, or whether this program is flawed because it doesn’t actually get addicts unaddicted.
Photo by Anthony Citrano
It seems that the mayor and the city council care nothing about the walkability of neighborhoods and how limiting the medical marijuana collectives and banishing them hundreds of feet from so many different locations severely hurts people when there wasn’t a significant issue with increased crime near the collectives. Whereas someone like me could walk to a couple different ones in a reasonable amount of time, I’ll probably have to travel 5-10 miles to get to the closest one with the new rules. From my perspective this is a major step backward. If these same decision makers had to use anything but their car to get everyplace, they would also understand how limiting the locations and closing times are. Sad.
Comment by M — February 4, 2010 @ 7:34 pm