By Katie Booth This November, voters weighed in on an array of state ballot initiatives on health issues from medical marijuana to health care reform. Ballot outcomes by state are listed below (more after the jump). Voters in Alabama, Montana, and Wyoming passed initiatives expressing disapproval of the Affordable Care Act, while a similar initiative in…
By Scott Burris This is a succinct paragraph from the weekly newsletter of U. Maryland’s Center for Substance Abuse Research. Seems relevant both to the conference on law enforcement and public health I reported on earlier this week, and the election results on marijuana: There were an estimated 12,408,899 arrests in the United States in…
By Scott Burris We know, and now most people acknowledge, that police activity has some clear, and in some instances intentional, effects on health. To start with the obvious, police are instrumental in reducing the number of people who are murdered, assaulted, raped, or otherwise terrorized. Policing – like any form of social intervention –…
As you have already heard a few times on this blog, Professor Einer Elhauge, the Petrie-Flom Center’s Founding Faculty Director and Petrie Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has a new book out on health care reform called Obamacare on Trial. The book collects various essays that Prof. Elhauge published in popular media outlets, along with…
By Arthur Caplan Weighing in on Question 2, Massachusetts’ ballot initiative on physician-assisted suicide, Art Caplan says we should vote “yes”: Mass. should legalize physician-assisted suicide Of the numerous ballot initiatives that will be decided at the state level on Tuesday, none is more hotly contested than the Massachusetts bill to decide whether to legalize physician-assisted…
by Jonathan J. Darrow Until recently, most ordinary people had never heard of “pharmacy compounding.” Then, a number of deaths and illnesses caused by a drug that was compounded in a Framingham, Massachusetts pharmacy propelled drug compounding to the national spotlight (see, e.g., Denise Grady et al., Scant Oversight of Drug Maker in Fatal Meningitis…
Friday, November 2, 2012 8:30am – 6:30pm (reception to follow) Milstein Conference Rooms, 2nd Floor Wasserstein Hall 1585 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA The Petrie-Flom Center and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics will be co-sponsoring a day-long symposium organized by Dr. David Korn on institutional financial conflicts of interest in research universities. The speaker line-up is incredible, including Derek Bok and Zeke…
By Arthur Caplan Fixing genes using cloning technique is worth the ethical risk A team of scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and the Oregon Health & Science University are reporting a remarkable advance in the treatment of inherited genetic disease in the journal Nature. They show it is possible to repair a tiny part…
By Nir Eyal As the New York Times reports (quoting me on the ethics), some American IVF clinics are now running raffles where the prize is IVF services. The contests give clinics publicity and sometimes serve charitable causes. Are IVF raffles unethical? Should we ban them? Gambles and contests over the ability to have babies…
By Scott Burris Graduated Drivers’ License Laws have apparently been a major success in reducing crashes among novice drivers. (A couple of studies have suggested the laws might just be postponing crashes, but so far that hypothesis remains unproved, and the weight of expert opinion seems to be that the association is spurious.) There has…
