Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 168

Big Pharma green lights cannabis-based drug for epilepsy

(AP Photo/Dan Balilty, File) (Credit: AP)

It was recently announced that GW Pharmaceuticals, the company responsible for the development of a drug called Epidiolex, has had much success during the clinical trial phase of the FDA’s approval process. The medicine has been shown effective in reducing seizure frequency in test subjects suffering with a severe form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gasaut Syndrome.

Many of the respondents in the clinical trial had experienced lackluster results with other epilepsy medications, but 44 percent of the patients who used Epidiolex experienced fewer seizures, according to a report from the Washington Post.

“It’s very exciting that it shows efficacy,” said Elizabeth Thiele, director of pediatric epilepsy at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead study author. “And of course there’s been a huge amount of interest because it’s cannabidiol.”

Cannabidiol (CBD) is the non-intoxicating compound found in the cannabis plant. Several years ago, this component gained a lot of attention. A number of studies and personal trials show CBD to be a solid treatment for controlling seizures. Some lawmakers eventually began pushing for what is called “CBD-only” or “Low-THC” laws in order to give children from their respective states access this medicine. Several states have legalized marijuana in this manner. Meanwhile, GW Pharmaceuticals has been working with the United States government to bring their version of legal cannabidiol to market. The company has been involved with this process since 2013.

Interestingly, there is not much difference between how GW Pharmaceuticals plans to manufacture and distribute their epilepsy drug and how some companies in legal marijuana states are producing CBD concoctions for patients living with various forms of epilepsy. Perhaps the most common brand of CBD oil available in legal jurisdictions is Charlotte’s Web.

The only real difference is, as long as Epidiolex receives FDA approval, the drug will be distributed in all of the major pharmacies in the country. And regardless of prohibition laws, patients will have the ability to be prescribed this drug. These folks would simply drive to the local CVS or Walgreens and have their prescription filled.

“As a pharmaceutical product, it is the subject of rigorous and intense manufacturing controls. Patients have the reassurance that the product is what we say it is and what they think it is,” Justin Gover, GW’s chief executive officer, told the Post.

Unlike the CBD oil sold in legal marijuana states, most health insurance networks would cover Epidiolex. This is a good thing since the drug is expected to cost patients up to $60,000 per year.

Why millennials are making memes about wanting to die

(Credit: Salon/Ilana Lidagoster)

Why would anyone willingly risk their health to eat a toxic Tide laundry detergent pod? Most adults are probably baffled by a viral Internet meme that has inspired dozens of young people to ingest the colorful capsules filled with laundry detergent for internet laughs. Indeed, both the Tide brand and health professionals have urged the public not to eat the pods, as even a small amount of the detergent can cause diarrhea, vomiting, breathing issues and, at worst, death.

Yet if you were perplexed, even baffled, by the staying power of internet jokes about absurd, brand-inspired forms of suicide, there’s a simple explanation. Millennials — who were born and raised on the internet and produce and consume much of their culture there — have had our whole lives characterized by economic anxiety. We have a dismal economic outlook, the worst of any generation born since the Great Depression. And our own culture-making — this kind of nihilistic, cynical humor epitomized in memes like eating Tide Pods — is merely a reflection of our worldview. It is cathartic in a sense. And it’s not the first time in history a generation has behaved this way in response to the world they were brought up in.

Generational jokes about death via consumer goods aren’t new. Before the Tide Pod meme there was the “drinking bleach” meme, a joke about committing suicide by (obviously) drinking bleach. Social media subcultures like Weird Facebook and Black Twitter share images of bleach in response to undesirable content or to self-deprecate about their mental health. Building on the Tide Pod meme, the Forbidden Snacks meme includes ingesting other household objects that resemble edible treats such as Dungeons and Dragons dice, bath bombs and Himalayan Salt Lamps to name a few.

you guys still doing Tide pods?
that’s cute. pic.twitter.com/MQKFR3VzlM

— Guantanamo Bae (@djschoeny) January 17, 2018

stupid idiots and their tide pods, dont realize theres free chocolate fountains under their cars pic.twitter.com/CYfM5Uwn6V

— QuackityHQ (@QuackityHD) January 18, 2018

What makes millennial humor so nihilistic and absurdist? I think the best way to understand memes like these is to analogize them to a century-old movement: Dadaism. The Dada movement evolved in reaction to World War I and disillusionment over war, violence, capitalism and nationalism. The original Dadaists were European radical leftists who traded the reason, rationale and aestheticism of the warmongering status quo for absurdity, irrationality and anti-capitalism. They rejected conventional notions of art, in turn creating anti-art with no clear purpose that mirrored the senselessness of war.

Later, in the Cold War era, Neo-Dada arose in response to the consumer culture and mass media of the 1950s. See any parallels today?

“The Greatest Generation” suffered through the Great Depression and World War II. Having lived through scarcity and war, they did not want their children to experience the same hardships. As a result, “Baby Boomers” were raised in a world of supposed abundance and to believe they should never live without. Boomers lived during a time of significant prosperity with widespread access to resources, education and a thriving job market. Just as the dismal worldview of millennial internet memes sprang from the fount of economic anxiety, the utopianism of the 1960s counterculture sprang from their far sunnier-seeming world.

By the late 1990s, boomers had gained the greatest social, political and economic influence worldwide, and with this, a multitude of long-percolating crises reached their boiling points – climate change, national debt, and a shrinking middle class, to name a few.

Unlike boomers, millennials have taken on over a trillion dollars in student debt to obtain degrees and fight over good salaried jobs in an increasingly gig-ified economy. Millennials live with their parents longer, and are far less likely to purchase homes or vehicles, let alone marry and have children. Plagued by widespread financial insecurity, millennials have also inherited the negative externalities of boomer excess, of which climate change is the most harrowing.

Promised peace and prosperity, millennials have been delivered the opposite. With this, mass disillusionment with contemporary social, political and economic affairs reigns supreme. The nihilism and absurdity of memes that joke about dying reflect this kind of neo-Dada movement. Likewise, in television and literature, the popularity of dystopias speaks to how we see the future.

In 2011, the anonymous cartoonist known only as “Chris (Simpsons Artist)” created the Facebook page “Simpsons pictures that I gone and done.” Today, the outsider artist has over 1.3 million likes. Chris’ renowned illustrations feature absurdist, often childlike caricatures of cartoons such as “The Simpsons” and “Winnie the Pooh” that look as though they were drawn in the version of Paint that came bundled with Windows 98.  A dark, nihilistic bent undergirds many of Chris’ illustrations, like this one.

The 34-year-old illustrator has released two books and has had regular features in Front and FHM magazines. FHM has described Chris (Simpsons Artist) — as he’s known online and on Wikipedia — as the “Internet’s Picasso…  he lives in Scotland somewhere, no one knows his real name, and he does slightly unnerving pictures of famous people”.

2017, the first full year of the Trump presidency, was a signal era for an emergent dark, nihilistic meme culture.  Two exemplary memes in this regard were SnapChat’s “dancing hotdog” and the so-called Emoji Sheriff. Regarding the former, the dancing hotdog involved an augmented reality filter on social media app Snapchat that let users superimpose an anthropomorphic comfort food onto real life footage of their lives.

Next, he demanded dinner. #snapchat #hotdog pic.twitter.com/pUvK7TqJQl

— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) July 22, 2017

The dancing hotdog became the star of innumerable absurd memes, and understandably: it was just bizarre and uncanny enough to appeal to millennials’ Dadaist sentiments.

As for the Emoji Sheriff, it started with a few users riffing on a stick-figure emoji “sheriff” image that could be easily constructed via one’s phone or keyboard and shared on Twitter. Thousands created their own renditions, be it the “sheriff of gay” or the “sheriff of fucking things up.”

https://twitter.com/eggsbruh/status/8...

https://twitter.com/laurgazm/status/8...

https://twitter.com/jimpjorps/status/...

Twitter user @leyawn put it best: “the two biggest memes now are a hot dog wearing headphones and making a sheriff out of emojis. Also our planet is dying. have a good week”.

Why is our generation laughing over dancing hot dogs and sheriffs made of of emojis? In part, it is, like most social media, escapism: a way to collectively disengage from the unending horror of politics by laughing at meaningless internet jokes that mirror the nonsensical global state of affairs. Like earlier forms of Dadaism, internet memes deconstruct and scramble all coherent thought into incoherent brain goop, left open for you to take what you want from them as you will. For some, that means eating a Tide Pod.

For AI to get creative, it must learn the rules — then how to break ‘em

FILE - In this Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, file photo, an Uber driverless car is displayed in a garage in San Francisco. Uber has pulled its self-driving cars from California roads. The ride-sharing company said Wednesday, Dec. 21, California transportation regulators revoke registrations for the vehicles. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File) (Credit: AP)

American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Every artist was first an amateur.” He likely never thought those words would apply to machines. Yet artificial intelligence has demonstrated a growing aptitude for creativity, whether writing a heavy-metal rock album or producing an original portrait that is strikingly reminiscent of a Rembrandt.

Applying AI to the art world might seem unnecessarily derivative; there are, of course, plenty of humans delivering awe-inspiring work. Proponents say, however, the real beauty of training AI to be creative does not lie in the end product — but rather in the technology’s potential to expand on its own machine-learning education, and to solve problems by thinking outside the box far faster and better than humans can. For example, creative problem-solving AI could someday make snap decisions that save the lives of the passengers in a self-driving car if its sensors fail, or propose unconventional combinations of chemical compounds that lead to new drugs for previously untreatable diseases.

AI with a creative streak will be essential in developing highly automated systems that can respond appropriately to human life, says Mark Riedl, an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing. “The fact is, we do lots of little bits of creativity every single day; lots of problem-solving goes on,” Riedl says. “If my son gets a toy stuck under the couch, I have to devise a tool out of a hanger [to retrieve it].”

Riedl points out human creativity is also important in human social interactions, even telling a well-timed joke or recognizing a pun. Computers struggle with such subtleties. An incomplete understanding of how humans construct metaphors, for example, was all it took for an experiment in AI-generated literature to compose a new Harry Potterchapter filled with nonsensical sentences such as, “The floor of the castle seemed like a large pile of magic.”

Still, getting machines to accurately mimic human style — whether Rembrandt’s or J. K. Rowling’s — is perhaps a good place to start when developing creative AI, Riedl says. After all, human creators often start off imitating the skills and processes of accomplished artists. The next step, for both people and machines, is to use those skills as part of a strategy to create something original.

AI ART SCHOOL

Today’s AI programs are not advanced enough to spontaneously compose hit songs or paint masterpieces. To get AI to do those things, humans must first calibrate a program by feeding it large numbers of examples. German AI artist Mario Klingemann, for instance, has designed artificial neural networks to assemble strange and beguiling images based on existing photographs and other visual artwork. An artificial neural network consists of a series of interconnected processing nodes, a system loosely based on the human brain’s neural structure. In an artificial network each electronic “neuron” takes in an array of numbers, performs a simple calculation on those inputs and then sends the result to the next layer of neurons — which in turn performs more complex calculations on the data.

Klingemann’s approach involves feeding source material such as paintings and photographs into generative adversarial networks, or GANs, which combine the power of two neural networks. One network generates images based on a certain theme or set of guidelines; the other evaluates the images based on its knowledge of those guidelines. Thanks to feedback from the second network, the first gradually gets better at making images that more accurately adhere to the chosen theme. “Right now [the networks] are just tools that augment our own creativity,” Klingemann notes. “We as humans still have to recognize the creativity or novelty.” His goal is to build artistic networks that can independently select and even tweet out their own best work based on the given theme.

Today’s GANs are strictly used to create new content or images within a broader creative system, says Alex Champandard, founder of creative.ai, a start-up that aims to develop AI tools for creative people. GANs are able to produce a lot of material quickly but still rely heavily on people to establish their guidelines, he adds.

FROM THE ART WORLD TO THE REAL WORLD

GANs’ content-generating capabilities are a good start when it comes to developing AI that can solve real-world problems, says Ian Goodfellow, a staff research scientist at Google and lead author of the 2014 paper that first described the concept of GANs. Goodfellow has been working on machine-learning models to let computers invent more dynamic narratives, which could go beyond limited scenarios such as planning out a series of chess moves — something computers have done extremely well for decades.

Take a classic example of forward-planning that humans do all the time: When heading to the airport, we often fuzzily map out — purely in our heads — the expected key details of the journey, such as traffic patterns or road repairs. GANs could plan such a trip but they would likely do so in excruciating detail and come up with many possible routes to the destination, Goodfellow says. What we really need, he adds, is a layer of computation that looks at the many options produced by a neural network and intuitively decides which one is best.

Another key component of human creative thinking is the ability to take knowledge from one context and use it within another. George Harrison picks up a sitar and applies his guitar-playing nous to the instrument. Shakespeare reads stories from Greek mythology and writes an English play inspired by those tales. A chief executive uses knowledge of military strategy, or perhaps chess, to plan a business deal.

To that end, experiments are now underway with AI algorithms that can mix and match material. For example, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are using their “cycle-consistent adversarial network” (CycleGAN) to transform a video of horses into one of zebras. The AI detects the basic shape of a horse in the first video and can play with the aesthetic on top of that image, immediately and seamlessly swapping a shiny brown coat of hair for one with black-and-white stripes while the image is moving. Such work could be a stepping-stone to AI that can enable a self-driving car to adapt to unfamiliar road conditions, avoiding accidents. “If you’re gathering your [road-] training data mostly in California, you might not have a lot of real data [on] snowy situations,” Goodfellow says. “But you could take all your real data in sunny conditions and use [generative systems] to change it into snowy conditions.”

This suggests teaching AI not only the rules, but also how to throw them out the window when necessary — much like amateurs who grow into artists.

The day my daughter told us her disability is love

(Credit: John Michael Weidman via Shutterstock)

I’m pretty sure that if I gave her the chance, my 14-year-old daughter would make out with me. Tongue and all.

That’s how much Sophie loves me. Don’t get me wrong, she hates me too, sometimes, in that brutal way only a teenage girl can loathe the tragically uncool mom who makes all the rules and tries to sing along to Taylor Swift in the car.

Mostly, though, she loves me. She always wants to cuddle — more with me than with her father, she says he’s too bony — and I don’t know when it started but now we’ve got this thing where I let her peck me on the lips. Sometimes I feel her linger and I creep out because — well, you know why.

I pull back quickly and smile and then I get super-serious and ask, “Who do you kiss?”

And she always says, “Only you, Mama. Only you.”

Someday, I know, Sophie might have a boyfriend (or a girlfriend) and then, yes, they will kiss — and other things. I’m fine with that. It is one of my greatest wishes for her.

It’s the rest that keeps me up at night. For most parents, there’s no need to warn your teenage daughter not to kiss strangers, or people you don’t know very well, or who are otherwise inappropriate kissing partners.

But Sophie is different. She’s got curves and her period and all the emotional trappings of a young woman, and yet in many ways she will always be a little girl. Sophie has Down syndrome, the most common genetic difference, one always associated with intellectual disability to some extent.

For Sophie that means she attends a public high school with her typical peers, but she has an aide to help her navigate both the curriculum and the social aspects of school. After school each day, the aide walks Sophie to the parking lot, where our nanny takes over until my husband and I get home from work. We pretty much never let Sophie out of our sight. It’s exhausting.

And, apparently, necessary.

When I heard that National Public Radio was launching a multi-part series on the sexual abuse of people with intellectual disabilities, I was only surprised that it took this long for someone to focus on this aspect of the #metoo movement.

According to the promotional materials for the NPR series, a person with intellectual disabilities is seven times more likely to be sexually assaulted. I don’t believe that for a second. The number’s got to be way higher.

People with intellectual disabilities can’t always speak up for themselves. Often, particularly as adults, they are cared for by virtual strangers — strangers who are underpaid, undertrained, and unsupervised. It’s the easiest recipe for disaster.

And then there is another element — love. Or the desire for it, anyway. Like the rest of us, people with intellectual disabilities have the capacity to love.

And some people with intellectual disabilities even have a little more capacity to love. Sophie’s one of them. It’s a cliché about Down syndrome that holds true with my daughter — although it must be added that she doesn’t love everyone. Far from it. But if you do happen to be the object of Sophie’s affection, trust me, you’ll know it.

Last summer, Sophie’s older sister Annabelle attended a week-long camp that focuses on diversity. We picked her up from the bus on the last day and our little family drove to dinner. Annabelle was full of stories about what it meant to be gay, African American, Latino, Jewish, rich, poor.

I asked if there was any talk of disability. “Just for, like, an hour,” she scoffed. At 16, Annabelle is already an activist, thanks to her sister. “And not about Down syndrome. Only autism and ADHD.”

There was an uncomfortable silence in the car, as the words “disabled” and “Down syndrome” hung in the air. It was an awkward moment. Beginning when she was eight, Sophie has been telling us that she doesn’t want to have Down syndrome. We work so hard to include her in every aspect of our lives, and she works to be included, but sometimes we’re all reminded that Sophie is, in fact, different. My husband Ray, not a fan of awkward silences, jumped in.

“Oh, you’re not even disabled, Sophie!” he said.

Sophie’s response was quick. “My disability is love.”

I caught my breath. Not because I’m sure Sophie knew exactly what she was saying, but because even if she didn’t, there was so much truth to her words.

Sophie is right. Her disability is love. If Sophie loves you, watch out, because a torrent of emotion is headed your way and it might be in the form of a totally appropriate hug, or it might happen in three dozen texts in the middle of the night. If you don’t love her back, she will keep at it until you tell her to go away, and even then she’ll probably still keep at it.

Sophie loves a lot of people — her sister, father, grandmother, her nanny, her best friend from kindergarten, her eighth grade social studies teacher. She loves me most of all, a break-down-the-door kind of love I never would have imagined, let alone craved, and now can’t live without.

No one has taken advantage of Sophie’s love, not so far as I know. But even without hearing the stories on NPR, I know — and have known for a long time — that it’s a very real possibility. Probably more likely than not.

I let my daughter kiss me on the lips even though I know I really shouldn’t. I’m terrified in equal parts that she won’t ever find real, grown-up love — and that she will, but that it won’t be the right kind.

I wonder if I can be enough for Sophie. I wonder what could happen to her when I’m not around, or someday, when I’m gone. I wonder if now, before it’s too late, I should try to teach her not to love, if that will keep her safe.

But without the possibility of love, that doesn’t sound like much of a life.

Trump defends Hope Hicks in NYT statement

Hope Hicks following a news conference between President Donald Trump and Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)

As reports swirl around speculating who Donald Trump is blaming for the Rob Porter fallout, there’s one person he presumably wants the public to know he’s not mad at: Hope Hicks.

The 29-year-old White House Communications Director is allegedly romantically involved with Porter, and it’s been speculated that she helped craft statements for White House officials to defend Porter following news of spousal abuse allegations, sources told CNN.

A White House official told the New York Times that Hicks allegedly didn’t know about the allegations until Tuesday. She later reportedly met with officials to draft the statements to defend Porter. Trump in return allegedly questioned Hicks’s judgement.

As the New York Times explains:

Rumblings began about the president’s unhappiness with a haphazard situation handled without his knowledge, and Mr. Trump spent Thursday working the phones, referring to Mr. Porter in one call as “bad garbage” and saying that he questioned Ms. Hicks’s judgment, according to two advisers.

However, through a spokesperson, Trump released a statement to the New York Times on Friday defending Hicks.

“Hope is absolutely fantastic,” Trump said in the statement. “She was with the campaign from the beginning, and I could not ask for anything more. Hope is smart, very talented and respected by all.”

The Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also chimed in to praise Hicks.

“I have been impressed with Hope since I started working with her on the campaign.” Mnuchin said in a statement “that was volunteered by an aide” to the New York Times. “She is exceptionally talented in leading communications for the administration. I view her as an invaluable asset to the president and us all.”

These statements follow news that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly could also be on the chopping block, and is allegedly willing to resign. Sources told the New York Times in a separate report that a resignation isn’t “imminent,” and that no “formal offer” has been made.

There has yet to be a statement to defend Kelly.

Catching a glimpse of “the black tech renaissance”

Lance Lucas (Credit: Courtesy of the Author)

“Good morning, sir!” Lance Lucas, 42, yells into his phone. “You ready?”

“Already here!” I replied.

People who know me know I always arrive early — extra early. And this week, we were up really early — we had a 6 a.m. flight down to Miami for BlackTech Week.

Founded in 2014, BlackTech Week is a minority-focused ecosystem-building festival, with speakers and pitch competitions, that brings founders, corporations, investors, entrepreneurs, tech workers and innovators together for six days every year.

Lucas describes it as “the genesis of the cultivation of black technology.”

“It’s the single most important event for technologists in America,” he told me.

Lucas rolled up to the airline gate in a Malcolm X-style fedora, holding two cups of coffee. As passionate as he is tall, he started spitting out new ideas by the millisecond. Cybersecurity, drones, new devices, the problems with bitcoin, what we should be focusing on versus what’s being focused on — and on and on. He’s an automatic weapon, loaded with information, and has 10 or 20 extra clips of knowledge laying around at all times.

I meet him at a conference back in 2015. We had both won BMe Genius fellowships, and he was a featured speaker. That’s when Lucas told me all about his Laptops for Guns program­: a yearly event where anyone can bring in a gun from the streets and trade it for a brand-new laptop and tablet or desktop computer. Cops attend, but no one gets arrested. “You pass in your pistol,” Lucas explained. “And then get to freely walk out the door if you want.”

“The gun exchange is only to get the community excited,” he added. “My program does way more.”

I attended Laptops for Guns in Baltimore that year and found it extremely inspiring. Then Lucas showed me where the real change lies — in the network certifications he teaches to participants for free.

“They’re coming for the laptops, but I’m gonna school them on making more through these certifications,” he told me. “I really think we can use technology to end systemic poverty. I have the cure and it’s through technology-driven education.”

Out of the 100 people enrolled in a municipal workforce development program in Maryland that Lucas runs to retrain unemployed workers, 62 found jobs and escaped poverty. Some of his old students have gone on to work for Google and the Department of Defense.

Since then, Lucas has been growing his initiatives, establishing offices and free trainings in Washington, D.C.; Miami and New Orleans. Lance founded the Cyber Warriors Diversity Program, a partnership between his company, Digit-All City, and Northrop Grumman, through the Depart of Defense mentor-protégé agreement. To date, the program has trained roughly 10,000 people and has led to employment for approximately 70 percent of his certified students.

On the plane ride to BlackTech Week, Lucas told me about his newest venture with Cyber Warriors: to “develop a cyber security program for every HBCU in the state of Maryland.”

“I worked with Senator Barbara Robinson on developing the bill” that will fund the program, Lucas said. “She reps West Baltimore and understands what our young people need to be successful.”

The bill has three parts. First, it will fund a Cyber Warrior conference to facilitate national efforts to diversify the field. According to Lucas, and the Department of Labor statistics, only 2 percent of African-Americans are employed in the cybersecurity field. He feels this opportunity can create many jobs in oppressed communities. The second part will follow student participants for three years after they are certified so that their successes can be tracked, published and used for the creation of further opportunities. And the third part will provide free supplies and training — something Lucas has already been doing in troubled communities throughout the county.

In Miami, we met up with a group of his Cyber Warriors. The young Morgan State University students jumped off their plane and were coding in their Lyft, into the house Lucas rented, and all the way up to our first event. I never saw a group of more motivated and hardworking young people, I thought, as they clicked away on their laptops, barely pulling their faces away from the computer screens.

I asked one Cyber Warrior, Jayrell Cephas, 21, for his thoughts on BlackTech Week. “This is one of many necessary events to tackle one obstacle: African-Americans are underrepresented in STEM [and] technology fields,” he said. “It also gives the minority youth hope that success in this field of study is possible. And where I’m from, hope is all we have”

Fellow coder Charles Love III agreed with Cephas. “In a critical period in time, on the most beautiful month of the year, I’m grateful for the opportunity to see just a glimpse of the black tech Renaissance,” he said. “Being in attendance alone is humbling. It’s exciting to see several generations of wisdom given, received and put to use to further our progression as a people.”

During BlackTech Week, the Cyber Warriors will be attending events that place them closer to their dreams, and they will pitch ideas to some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Lucas has taught them that fighting for opportunity is only half of the battle; earning those opportunities and then sharing them with others is what it’s all about. That, along with their hard work, will guarantee their success. I can’t wait to watch them work.

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP to stop promoting opioids to physicians: report

(Credit: AP Photo/Chris Post)

Purdue Pharma LP, an opioid maker that has been at the center of several lawsuits following America’s opioid crisis, said it will discontinue promoting opioids to prescribers, according to a report in Reuters.

“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement to Reuters. “Doctors with opioid-related questions will be directed to its medical affairs department.”

The company also said it will reportedly turns its focus to “other potential non-opioid products.”

“Its sales representatives will now focus on Symproic, a drug for treating opioid-induced constipation, and other potential non-opioid products,” the statement said.

The announcement could be a result of the several lawsuits the company is facing.

“The lawsuits have generally accused Purdue of significantly downplaying the risk of addiction posed by OxyContin and of engaging in misleading marketing that overstated the benefits of opioids for treating chronic, rather than short-term, pain,” Reuters staff explained in the report.

According to data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prescription opioid sales nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2014; during this timespan, overdose deaths from prescription opioids increased as well. While opioid prescriptions should only be prescribed to cancer patients, or those with pain-related diagnosis, only an estimated one out of five fit the bill. Overdose deaths from opioid prescriptions were fives times higher in 2016 than they were in 1999, and overall, 40 percent of all U.S. opioid overdose deaths involved prescription drugs.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse found that half of young people who inject heroin abused opioid prescriptions first; in other words, opioid prescriptions are often a gateway to heroin.

Some cities like New York have taken matters into their own hands and sued the manufacturers and distributors of opioid prescription drugs.

“More New Yorkers have died from opioid overdoses than car crashes and homicides combined in recent years. Big Pharma helped to fuel this epidemic by deceptively peddling these dangerous drugs and hooking millions of Americans in exchange for profit,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “It’s time for hold the companies accountable for what they’ve done to our City, and help save more lives.”

The state of Alabama was the latest to join the string of cities and states to file a lawsuit against opioid makers.

“It will take years to undo the damage but an important first step we must take is to hold the parties responsible for this epidemic legally liable for the destruction they have unleashed upon our citizens,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

Cocaine, black magic and fascism: David Bowie, 1975 edition

(Credit: Getty/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

As far as the music goes, “Low” and its siblings were a direct follow-on from the title track of “Station to Station.” It’s often struck me that there will usually be one track on any given album of mine which will be a fair indicator of the intent of the following album.

—David Bowie, 2001

I see “Low” as very much a continuation from “Station to Station,” which I think is one of the great records of all time.

—Brian Eno, 1999

The “Station to Station” sessions represent the highwater mark of Bowie’s prodigious drug intake. By this stage, Bowie had practically stopped eating and was subsisting on a diet of milk, cocaine and four packets of Gitanes a day. He was leading a vampyric existence of blinds-drawn seclusion in his Hollywood mansion, spliced with all-night sessions in the studio. There were times when he’d start recording in the evening then work all the way through until ten in the morning—and when told that the studio had been booked for another band, he’d simply call up for studio time elsewhere on the spot and start work again immediately. Other times, he could vanish altogether: “We show up at the studio,” says [guitarist Earl] Slick. “‘Where is he?’ He shows up maybe five or six hours late. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up at all.” At this stage, Bowie could go five or six days without sleep, the point at which reality and imagination become irretrievably blurred: “By the end of the week my whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.”

Essentially, Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, a condition very similar to schizophrenia, with its highly distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking. His interviews of the time are classics of messianic delusion, as he raves on about Hitler being the first rock star, or his own political ambitions (“I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism.”). The flipside of messianic fantasy is of course paranoid delusion, which Bowie also displayed in spades. He imagined one of his advisers was a CIA agent; a backing singer was apparently a vampire. During one interview, Bowie suddenly leapt up and pulled down the blind: “I’ve got to do this,” he jabbered. “I just saw a body fall.” He proceeded to light a black candle then blow it out. “It’s only a protection. I’ve been getting a little trouble from the neighbours.” How much of all this was theatre and how much delusion? Bowie was evidently past making such distinctions. His wife of the time, Angie, recounts getting a phone call from him one day in 1975; Bowie was somewhere in Los Angeles with a warlock and two witches who wanted to steal his semen for a black magic ritual. “He was talking in slurred, hushed tones, and hardly making any sense and he was crazed with fear.”

Bowie was quite capable of camping up his “weirdness” when it suited him. And yet if only a quarter of the stories circulating about him from this time are true—of his keeping his urine in the fridge, of black magic altars in the living room, of professional exorcisms of his swimming pool and so on—this would still be a man with serious mental health issues, to say the least. On top of his cocaine addiction and related delusions, Bowie was also physically cut off from any kind of “normal” existence. Life at Doheny Drive, where he’d taken up residence, resembled a kind of court, peopled with musicians, dealers, lovers, and a whole host of parasitic shysters and hangers-on. His assistant Corinne “Coco” Schwab acted as a gatekeeper, sorting out the logistics of his life, insulating him from situations and people that upset him. His ability to do anything for himself had become severely restrained. Fame, cocaine, isolation and Los Angeles (“the least suitable place on earth for a person to go in search of identity and stability,” as he’d put it later) had all conspired to spin Bowie off into a very dark place indeed.

Given this state of affairs, the wonder is that Bowie got anything done in the studio at all. And, in fact, by “Station to Station” there’s very much a sense of the artist as well as the man in crisis. It had been a year since the “Young Americans” sessions, and he’d done very little recording since then. In May 1975 he’d taken his friend Iggy Pop in to record some material, but the session had quickly become chaotic, with Pop and Bowie even coming to blows at one stage. This was at the height of his “stick insect paranoia look,” according to guitarist James Williamson, who’d found Bowie slumped at the control booth, enveloped in a hideous wall of distorted noise.

For “Station to Station,” Bowie went into the studio with only two songs, both of which were eventually changed beyond recognition. He was accustomed to working extremely quickly—the bulk of “Ziggy Stardust,” for instance, was done in a two-week period, itself coming only weeks after the recording of “Hunky Dory.” By contrast, the “Station to Station” sessions stretched out over two and a half months, yielding just five original compositions and a histrionic cover version of “Wild Is the Wind.”

“You retain a superficial hold on reality so that you can get through the things that you know are absolutely necessary for your survival,” Bowie mused in 1993. “But when that starts to break up, which inevitably it does—around late 1975 everything was starting to break up—I would work at songs for hours and hours and days and days and then realise after a few days that I had done absolutely nothing. I thought I’d been working and working, but I’d only been rewriting the first four bars or something. And I hadn’t got anywhere. I couldn’t believe it! I’d been working on it for a week! I hadn’t got past four bars! And I’d realise that I’d been changing those four bars around, doing them backwards, splitting them up and doing the end first. An obsession with detail had taken over.” It was yet another consequence of the psychosis, and that eerie, overwrought quality is all over “Station to Station.” It’s the cocaine album par excellence, in its slow, hypnotic rhythms, its deranged romantic themes, its glacial alienation, its dialogue with God (“Word on a Wing”), in the pure white lines of the album cover, in the hi-fi sheen that’s clean enough to snort off.

California to drug users: We’ll pay for you to test your dope

(Credit: GraCon Design via Shutterstock)

Michael Marquesen first noticed about a year ago that fentanyl, a dangerous synthetic opioid, had hit the streets of Los Angeles. People suddenly started overdosing after they shot up a new white powder that dealers promised would give them a powerful high.

“In Hollywood, they’re like ‘Everybody’s dropping . . . everybody’s overdosing!’” said Marquesen, director of the Los Angeles Community Health Project, which provides support services for people dealing with drug addiction.

The white powder was easily distinguishable from the black, tar-like heroin that is common in California, and users initially believed it was high-end heroin. But it was fentanyl — 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin — said Marquesen, whose group runs a mobile needle exchange out of a white van, serving drug users all over the city.

The deadly fentanyl wave sweeping the East Coast and the Midwest has arrived in California. The number of deaths from fentanyl in the state, though still a fraction of those seen in some other states, has spiked in recent years. And state health officials have responded with a proactive but experimental policy: Since last May, they have supplied needle exchanges with rapid-response test strips that allow drug users to determine if their next high is contaminated with the potentially fatal opioid.

It’s hard for drug users to know exactly what is mixed into their supply, because dealers don’t tell them — and often don’t know themselves. Needle exchange workers say the strips have revealed the presence of fentanyl not only in white powder form but also as an additive to black-tar heroin and even in such non-opioids as methamphetamine and crack/cocaine.

Officials hope that if people know the dangers lurking in their stash, they’ll be more careful to protect themselves from accidental overdoses.

The idea of using the strips to test for fentanyl started at a publicly funded needle exchange in Vancouver, British Columbia. The state of New York also makes public money available for needle exchanges to buy the test strips. Eight New York exchanges, a third of the total, supply them to drug users, according to the state’s public health agency.

Last fall, Marquesen’s needle exchange started handing them out from the white van, along with a brief lesson on how to use them. Eleven California needle exchanges, from Eureka to Santa Barbara, have ordered the strips so far, state officials said.

Kelly, a 44-year-old heroin user in Los Angeles who withheld her last name because her family doesn’t know about her addiction, supports the use of test strips. She nearly died from an overdose of heroin, which she later learned had been spiked with fentanyl.

“There’s dealers who are trying to make their stuff better because it’s garbage,” said Kelly. Those dealers don’t tell their customers about the fentanyl in their drugs, she said, and that puts them at grave risk.

Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids killed 324 people in California in 2016, a jump of nearly 50 percent from 2015 and more than double the toll of five years earlier, according to preliminary data from the California Department of Public Health. The most recent spike is attributable to fentanyl, which accounted for almost three-quarters of those 2016 deaths, the department said.

The California figures still pale in comparison with other states. In New York, almost 1,100 people lost their lives to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2016, twice as many as a year earlier, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the much smaller state of Maryland, over 1,100 deaths were fentanyl-related in 2016, more than triple the number of the previous year, according to that state’s health department.

In Ohio, nearly 2,500 died from fentanyl and related opioids in 2016, double the number of the year before.

Accidental overdoses involving fentanyl were blamed in the deaths of both Prince in 2016 and Tom Petty in October.

In San Francisco, needle exchange workers and users say the ability to test drugs has changed behavior.

“People are much more cautious if they know there’s fentanyl in it,” said Patty, who didn’t want to give her last name because of her heroin and crack use. “Honestly, nobody wants to die.”

But some experts urge caution in using test strips, noting the strategy is still experimental.

Sold for a dollar apiece by BTNX Inc., a Canadian company, .they are designed to test urine and have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use on drug samples, a BTNX spokesman said.

Dr. Karen Mark, chief of the California public health department’s Office of AIDS, said all the evidence suggests that the strips effectively detect fentanyl.

But Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco who researches drug abuse, noted that the strips show only whether a sample contains fentanyl, not how much — so there’s no way to know if it’s a deadly dose. The strips are also too sensitive and could be yielding false positives, he said. That may not be such a bad thing per se, he said, but drug users might stop using them after a series of positives.

Despite reservations, many experts say the severity of the opioid epidemic justifies California’s unproven approach.

“The crisis situation that we find ourselves in . . . definitely calls for a lot of nimble and innovative responses,” said Leo Beletsky, associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. “We’re going to see more fentanyl in our drug supply in coming years.”

Sessions’ war on pot could speed up marijuana legalization nationwide

Jeff Sessions (Credit: Getty/Mark Wilson/AP/Seth Perlman/Photo montage by Salon)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently clarified how the Trump administration intends to treat states that have legalized pot, which remains illegal on the federal level.

The Obama administration eventually took a relatively hands-off approach to this enforcement conundrum. But Sessions instructed all United States attorneys to treat cannabis-related activities like any suspected crime, instead of making them a low priority if they comply with state laws.

This bureaucratic salvo is stirring fears that the Trump administration could be on the verge of a crackdown that could potentially jeopardize the nation’s growing number of legally operating pot businesses. However, based on my research and what I’ve learned while teaching the first U.S. college course on the marijuana business at the University of Denver, I see no reason for supporters of legalization to panic.

In fact, I believe that Sessions may have actually accelerated the process toward federal marijuana legalization.

Obama’s approach

First, a little history.

California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. Alaska, Oregon and other states soon followed.

Since the federal government considers pot to be a Class 1 controlled substance and makes using and selling marijuana for any reason a crime, this put the authorities in an awkward position. Key members of the Clinton administration responded with harsh rhetoric. General Barry McCaffrey, the drug czar, said at the time, “We should ask ourselves whether we really want Cheech and Chong logic to guide our thinking about medicine.” Raids and high-profile indictments followed.

President George W. Bush’s administration also expressed hostility toward medical marijuana, making its growing number of raids on legal dispensaries come as no great surprise. In 2005, as his second term began, the Supreme Court ruled that federal powers trumped states’ rights in this regard.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama suggested that he might not interfere with the power of what was by then about a dozen states to allow medicinal marijuana sales and use. In 2009, his deputy attorney general, David Ogden, released a memo that furthered this impression. It said that small-scale operators in states where medical marijuana was legal were a low enforcement priority.

But Obama’s administration executed dozens of dispensary raids anyway, disappointing legalization proponents.

During Obama’s second term, the number of states that had legalized medical marijuana climbed past the 20 mark. A handful, starting with Colorado and Washington, also legalized recreational weed. Meanwhile, support for legal pot continued to build in general.

Four years after the Ogden memo, James Cole, another deputy attorney general, issued a more comprehensive memo. It directed all U.S. attorneys to treat marijuana businesses operating “in clear and unambiguous compliance” with state marijuana laws as a low enforcement priority.

While still somewhat ambiguous and falling short of support for full federal legalization, Cole’s guidance made cannabis businesses in states that had legalized the product feel less vulnerable.

Rather than fight for more protection against federal raids, marijuana entrepreneurs and social activists at that point instead generally chose to focus on compliance within state laws and continuing to increase public support.

The strategy seemed to pay off with additional states legalizing pot for medical and recreational purposes. While full legalization remained an appealing long-term goal for many Americans, the status quo during Obama’s second term seemed quite workable for states with legal markets. And it took away the impetus to push for more rapid federal change.

Trump takes over

As soon as President Donald Trump named Sessions as his pick for attorney general, the Alabama Republican’s long-held anti-pot views triggered speculation that the federal government would crack down in states where it was legal.

Instead, Sessions waited almost a full year to make a move. Meanwhile, legal cannabis businesses continued to generate tax revenue and create jobs. California launched its recreational marijuana market, the world’s largest. And more and more Americans were exposed to the industry in their home states or while traveling.

Indeed, a Pew Research Center poll conducted in October found that 61 percent of Americans supported legalization — up from 57 percent a year earlier and nearly double the backing for legal pot in 2000. For the first time, Gallup polling determined, a majority of Republicans support legalization.

Even when Sessions finally acted, he took a relatively mild step. Rather than launching a more severe crackdown, such as immediately raiding marijuana businesses, he merely rescinded Cole’s guidance.

Bigger coalition

The way state lawmakers, attorneys general, industry participants and other stakeholders reacted to even this small gesture demonstrated something that Sessions seems to have failed to consider — that the coalition in support of marijuana legalization had grown considerably.

State lawmakers in California, Colorado, Massachusetts and other states, and even some of the Republicans in Congress, objected. A group of 54 House and Senate Democrats sent Trump a letter urging him to reverse course.

“This action has the potential to unravel efforts to build sensible drug policies that encourage economic development as we are finally moving away from antiquated practices that have hurt disadvantaged communities,” they wrote.

State attorneys general, who do not report to Sessions, such as those serving in Colorado, Washington, Pennsylvania and Michigan, have shown no interest in modifying their current practices.

And 19 of them urged Congress to change banking laws so that marijuana businesses in their states would no longer have to rely solely on cash to handle billions of dollars in legal pot transactions. That way, they wrote, their revenue could be fully tracked, aiding taxation and limiting criminal activity that targets cash-intensive businesses.

All in all, the fierce reaction across the political spectrum reaction shows two things: Sessions’ memo is an empty threat and pot’s days as an illegal drug are numbered.

To be sure, the Sessions memo does seem to have scared away some investors who were considering new pot investments. But by adding to the air of uncertainty around marijuana businesses, Sessions seems have only strengthened the resolve of pro-legalization forces.

I believe it will ultimately bring about federal legalization sooner rather than later.

Paul Seaborn, Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver