Category: USA

California/General interest/USA
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A novel suicide prevention plan

by Fran Johns

Every now and then an innovative idea comes along, and should be applauded. This one, for those who worry about suicide rates, might merit a standing ovation — if it works. Time and Japanese commuters will tell.

As of November, East Japan Railway Co. has put blue light-emitting diode, or LED, lights in all 29 stations on Tokyo’s central train loop, the Yamanote Line, used by 8 million passengers each day.There’s no scientific proof that the lights actually reduce suicides, and some experts are skeptical they will have any effect. But others say blue does have a calming effect on people.

“We associate the color with the sky and the sea,” Mizuki Takahashi, a therapist at the Japan Institute of Color Psychology, a private research center. “It has a calming effect on agitated people, or people obsessed with one particular thing, which in this case is committing suicide.”

What a lovely thought: a moment of calm could save a life. Since long before Anna Karenina flung her life away in Tolstoy’s memorable tale, trains have served as lethal weapons for the desperate and the depressed. Obviously, the blue-light theory wouldn’t work where tracks are in the open  — as with a recent spate of young people in Northern California who tragically ended their lives this way. But passengers on the New York Metro and other subway systems could surely use a moment of calm, whether feeling suicidal or not. In Japan, economic woes added to the usual stress factors have brought rising suicide rates, and the need for response has taken on a special urgency.  Nearly 2,000 Japanese committed suicide by jumping in front of trains last year alone. Conductors, reports Shino Yuasa of the Associated Press, “describe them over the public address system as ‘human accidents’.”

East Japan Railway has spent about $165,000 for the special lights at all the Yamanote stations. The lights, which are brighter than standard fluorescent bulbs, bathe the platform below in an eerie blue light. They hang at the end of each platform, a spot where people are most likely to throw themselves in front of a speeding train. Shinji Hira, a psychology professor specializing in criminal psychology at Fukuyama University in Hiroshima, speculated that blue lights could make people pause and reflect.But he said that if railways want to go further to ensure safety, they should set up fences on platforms, as several Tokyo subway stations have. The barriers have sliding doors that allow passengers access to the trains.

For those of us who grew up in American small towns with Railroad Avenue as the traditional main street, trains hold a special place in the heart. May the blue light plan help get them out of the lethal weapon category soon.

Japan tries to limit suicides on train tracks.

California/General interest/Health/USA
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Cold Weather Won't Make You Sick

by Fran Johns

If trying to follow the progress of healthcare reform is giving you a migraine, and perhaps results of recent balloting have upset your stomach, here’s a little good news from Lindsey Hollenbaugh, writing in the November/December AARP Magazine. Not all of those sometimes-scary bits of advice you grew up with turn out to be true. New studies, Hollenbaugh reports, are busting a few  of those myths.

Myth
Most of your body heat is lost through your head.

Fact
Untrue. This myth likely originated from a 50-year-old military study; subjects enduring extreme cold lost the most heat from their heads. But the head was the only exposed body part, says Rachel Vreeman, M.D., coauthor of Don’t Swallow Your Gum!: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health. The real deal? “You lose heat from whatever is uncovered,” Vreeman says. “There is nothing special about the head.”

Myth
Taking vitamin C and zinc will help prevent or shorten a cold.

Fact
Taking vitamin C daily won’t prevent illness, and if you consume it after feeling sick, it won’t ease symptoms, studies show. As for zinc, three of four well-designed studies found it ineffective, while a fourth found that zinc nasal gel helped relieve symptoms. But in June the FDA recalled some zinc nasal products, since they’re linked to a loss of sense of smell. Bottom line: There’s no need for extra C, and zinc may actually harm you.

Drug-Free Pain Relief
Here’s one more reason to enjoy your cup of morning joe. In a University of Illinois study, 25 cyclists who consumed the equivalent of about three 8-ounce cups of coffee before working out had significantly less pain while training.

Myth
You should drink at least eight cups of water per day.

Fact
There’s no medical reason to follow this advice. In 1945 the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council recommended that adults take in 2.5 liters of water per day (about 84.5 ounces), noting that most water comes from food. Many adherents, however, ignored the last part of that statement. Drink up if you’d like, but studies suggest that most people already get enough H2O from what they eat and drink: the average person takes in about 75 ounces of water daily, according to Department of Agriculture surveys.

Myth
Illnesses come from cold or wet weather.

Fact
Colds and flus come from viruses, not the climate, explains Aaron Carroll, M.D., Vreeman’s co-author. But because some viruses are more common in winter, more people may get sick then. Plus, chilly or rainy weather often results in more people staying inside—and then sharing their icky infections.

From San Francisco, in the balmy sunshine (November? That’s mid-summer) Boomers & Beyond wishes you well.

Cold Weather Won’t Make You Sick.

General interest/USA
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Jail time for texting driver

by Fran Johns

At the risk of invoking the wrath of some readers who disagreed with my proposal to jail texting truck drivers a few weeks ago, I hereby applaud the British Crown Court for sending a texting young driver off to jail where, presumably, cell phones are unavailable. I am sad for her and her family, far sadder for the victim and her family and still angry that such stupidity is tolerated in the U.S.  Here’s the story from Oxford via the New York Times November 2:

Inside the imposing British Crown Court here, Phillipa Curtis, 22, and her parents cried as she was remanded for 21 months to a high-security women’s prison, for killing someone much like herself. The victim was Victoria McBryde, an up-and-coming university-trained fashion designer.

Ms. McBryde was killed when her car was struck while stopped beside the road.

Ms. Curtis had plowed her Peugeot into the rear end of Ms. McBryde’s neon yellow Fiat, which had broken down on the A40 Motorway, killing Ms. McBryde, 24, instantly. The crash might once have been written off as a tragic accident. Ms. Curtis’s alcohol level was zero. But her phone, which had flown onto the road and was handed to the police by a witness, told a story that — under new British sentencing guidelines — would send its owner to jail.

In the hour before the crash, she had exchanged nearly two dozen messages with at least five friends, most concerning her encounter with a celebrity singer she had served at the restaurant where she worked.

They are filled with the mangled spellings and abbreviations that typify the new lingua franca of the young. “LOL did you sing to her?” a friend asks. Ms. Curtis replies by typing in an expletive and adding, “I sang the wrong song.” A last incoming message, never opened, came in seconds before the accident.

With that as evidence, Ms. Curtis was sentenced in February under 2008 British government directives that regard prolonged texting as a serious aggravating factor in “death by dangerous driving” — just like drinking — and generally recommend four to seven years in prison.

There are no winners in this story, only losers and sadder losers. But there could be a small win if it served as a wake-up call anywhere about the fact that driving a car requires two hands and an engaged brain. It is not possible to engage the brain in watchful, decent driving when pieces of it are off somewhere in cyberspace. The only reason why there are not literally thousands of additional casualties every day from the callous stupidity of texting/cellphoning drivers is that other, saner drivers — and cautious pedestrians, who know they are at constant risk — have noticed and managed to avoid them. But texting/cellphoning drivers are outnumbering other, saner drivers at an increasingly alarming rate. They should face jail time.

Victoria McBryde had, herself, been texting her friends before her car broke down. From the side of the road she called her mother, Jennifer Ford, to say she was frightened and worried because the car service company had not appeared.

Ms. Ford told her daughter to make sure the flashers were on and that she was pulled off the road. “She was like, ‘Mom, of course I did these things,’ ” Ms. Ford recalled in an interview.

When she called her daughter back 20 minutes later, no one answered. By that time Victoria McBryde was dead.

Driven to Distraction – Britain Sets Tough New Laws for Texting While Driving – Series – NYTimes.com.

California/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Obama shifts justice department resources away from medical marijuana

by Fran Johns

A little ray of sanity from President Obama: the feds won’t be going after legitimate users of medical marijuana. This will be welcome news in San Francisco, where federal raids on legal suppliers during the Bush administration met with widespread protests; possibly unwelcome news in Los Angeles, which is cracking down on its over-supply of dispensaries; and interesting news in the U.K., where guardian.uk.com reported on it Monday.

The US justice department today told federal law enforcement officials to shift resources away from investigation and prosecution of medical marijuana users and suppliers.

In a memo sent this morning to federal prosecutors, officials at president Barack Obama’s justice department said that prosecutions of individuals who are clearly using or supplying marijuana for medical purposes are “unlikely to be an efficient use of limited federal resources” if the targets otherwise comply with state and federal laws.

Fourteen states allow some use of marijuana for medical purposes, though it remains banned under federal law. The Bush and Clinton administrations – the first to grapple with the conflict – essentially ignored the state laws, treating medical marijuana as illegal.

“The federal government is no longer at war with the 13 states that have chosen to allow patients to use marijuana for medical purposes,” said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which favours decriminalisation of the drug.

“It’s going to provide relief to a lot of people who have been anxious about whether or not they’re going to be arrested for helping patients get their doctor-recommended medicine,” said Tom Angell, a spokesman for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which claims 1,500 former police, prosecutors, border patrol agents and other one-time fighters in the war on drugs among its membership.

This would’ve been good news for my sister, whose brief search for relief a few decades ago was mentioned in the post below. It would’ve made life a little easier for a lot of people with AIDS in recent decades.  Set aside the arguments pro or con recreational use; when a drug is known to help suffering people, and is legal in a particular city or state, wasting federal tax dollars to interfere seems to make very little sense.

The memo doesn’t legalize marijuana or end prosecution of illegal, for-profit sales etc. It does, though, leave these to local federal officials. And clarifies the federal government’s position.

It puts into writing remarks by attorney general Eric Holder, who in March said the federal government would end raids on legitimate medical marijuana dispensaries. Obama has indicated he is sympathetic to medical marijuana use, noting during the presidential campaign that his mother had died of cancer and that he saw no difference between morphine prescribed by doctors and marijuana used to relieve pain.

I don’t do pain very well. Given its prevalence in long, drawn-out illnesses today, I’m in favor of whatever palliative care and pain-relieving medicines there are. It is nice to have a president who understands.

via Obama justice department to shift from investigating medical marijuana cases | World news | guardian.co.uk.

California/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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The aches & pains of medical marijuana

by Fran Johns

An article in Sunday’s New York Times details the struggle in Los Angeles to regulate the cannabis dispensaries which have proliferated around the  city over the past six or eight years, raising the old medical marijuana questions about how to control, whether to tax and how useful it is in the first place. Reporter Solomon Moore cites Oakland, California’s Harborside Health Center as the place to which many are looking for a model.

‘Our No. 1 task is to show that we are worthy of the public’s trust in asking to distribute medical cannabis in a safe and secure manner,’ said Steve DeAngelo, the pig-tailed proprietor of Harborside, which has been in business for three years.

Harborside is one of four licensed dispensaries in Oakland run as nonprofit organizations. It is the largest, with 74 employees and revenues of about $20 million. Last summer, the Oakland City Council passed an ordinance to collect taxes from the sale of marijuana, a measure that Mr. DeAngelo supported.

Mr. DeAngelo designed Harborside to exude legitimacy, security and comfort. Visitors to the low-slung building are greeted by security guards who check the required physicians’ recommendations. Inside, the dispensary looks like a bank, except that the floor is covered with hemp carpeting and the eight tellers stand behind identical displays of marijuana and hashish.

There is a laboratory where technicians determine the potency of the marijuana and label it accordingly. (Harborside says it rejects 80 percent of the marijuana that arrives at its door for insufficient quality.) There is even a bank vault where the day’s cash is stored along with reserves of premium cannabis. An armored truck picks up deposits every evening.

City officials routinely audit the dispensary’s books. Surplus cash is rolled back into the center to pay for free counseling sessions and yoga for patients. “Oakland issued licenses and regulations, and Los Angeles did nothing and they are still unregulated,” Mr. DeAngelo said. “Cannabis is being distributed by inappropriate people.”

I don’t know where Los Angeles will go with all this, or how well Harborside will continue to operate for how long. What I do know is that marijuana serves a real medical purpose. Probably serves a real recreational purpose too, and there’s the rub; but since I missed the pot party — thank heavens, as I am addicted to anything that comes down the pike, and please don’t try to tell me one cannot get addicted to marijuana — I can’t address that issue. Everything I know is anecdotal, but convincing.

Decades ago my beloved sister was suffering acute gastro intestinal distress, much later identified as a symptom of celiac disease but this was before anybody really knew anything about celiac sprue. One day she said, “You know, everybody at X High School either smokes pot or knows where to get it. Could you get me some so I could at least try it?” Well, even though the statute of limitations would probably protect the surviving players I think I won’t go into details of this adventure. But what I learned was: buying and selling illegal pot is a little scary for the novice, but the deal was easy and nobody went to jail. It did indeed give relief to my suffering sister. Though both of us wished she could have that relief on an ongoing basis, we reached a mutual conclusion that the risk was not worth the reward, and that was the end of that.

Fast forward to the 1990s, when everyone I knew with AIDS knew how marijuana could relieve some symptoms of the disease, and most had a supply. I was in San Francisco by then, and celiac disease pales in comparison to AIDS. I don’t even recall how legal it was for this relief; too many other issues were more important. But again, I saw its usefulness.

The Times article quotes Christine Gasparac, a spokeswoman for California Attorney General Jerry Brown, as saying his office is getting calls from law officials and advocates around the state asking for clarity on medical marijuana laws. I know that’s tough, and that the answer will in many cases be left to the courts. I also know that legalizing marijuana, whether here in woo-hoo California or elsewhere, raises a multiplicity of sticky issues.

But still. It’s a useful drug. If Big Pharma were producing and marketing it, it would probably come in a little pill that costs a fortune and would be covered by expensive insurance policies. Every governmental body in the U.S. needs money. Taxes raise money. Are there not some dots that could be connected here?

General interest/Lifestyle/Politics & Causes/USA
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Right time for gay rights?

by Fran Johns

President Obama, having repeated his promise to end “don’t ask, don”t tell” on Saturday, got an additional nudge from the National Equality March on Sunday. Tens of thousands of gay rights supporters from across the country poured through the streets of the nation’s capital to demand equal rights for LGBT citizens. They have their work cut out for them. With a few small, scattered gains having been made, there are battlegrounds shaping up everywhere from Maine to California over the issues highlighted by the events of this past weekend.

My friend Joe, who celebrated 35 years with his partner last summer, asked why I haven’t written about gay rights. Boomers and Beyonders, he says, have a unique perspective. “We have won a few battles that won’t have to be fought again, but there’s a long road ahead and the netroots now taking the lead need to have strong support from the veterans.”

So here goes.

While reiterating his promise to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Obama  gave no timetable for doing so. It’s time. Given everything else on his plate, those of us who support gay rights may be willing to cut the president a little slack, but this small step toward clearing some of the large injustices gays and lesbians have lived with since approximately forever is one Obama should be taking soon. 2010 sounds about right.

Other gay rights battlegrounds are active in Maine, where a ballot measure would repeal marriage rights for gays and lesbians, in Washington where a referendum must pass if full domestic partnership benefits are retained, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, according to Change.org, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops “is planning a major statement on marriage in November, preparing to issue new language about how the church views same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, the new language is more of the same… hateful, tired and representative of a theology that views people who are LGBT as less than.”

Compared to the record of togetherness set by Joe and Robert, my marital history is pretty lousy. (Up until this, my final marriage, that is, and its extraordinarily happy 17 years.) So it is hard to see my marital state being threatened by theirs being legitimized. Joe and I were also part of an AIDS support group during the 1990s, and witnessed tragic injustices suffered by dying young men whose hospital doors were barred to those who loved them best. A lot more needs changing than just “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan) was quoted by Elizabeth Williamson and Neil King in Monday’s Wall Street Journal as saying it was “now possible ‘to get a buy-in from the military’ to end a policy opposed by gays and many liberals since it was passed by Congress in 1993.” The monumental pile of global problems to be solved may keep Obama from seizing this good opportunity; gay rights supporters could keep that door open until he does act.

Global issues aside, one home front fact remains: LGBT Americans have been unjustly treated in innumerable ways, for innumerable years.

Getting rid of “don’t ask, don’t tell” seems a very good way to start putting things right.

Health/Politics & Causes/USA
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Public option still alive: believe it…or not

by Fran Johns

The fact that there are still believers in the public option, and its inclusion in whatever health bill eventually survives, may say more about the believers than the belief. But Nancy Pelosi hasn’t yet caved, and a few among the many who see this as the only way real reform will happen are still betting on it. Two of those are strategic technology consultant Robert Weiner and his research chief Rebecca Vander Linde who penned an op ed in the San Francisco Chronicle Friday. I’m not a gambler, but I cheer their position.

Opponents’ caricatures have become commonplace – the Republican National Committee video puts House Speaker Nancy Pelosi side by side with James Bond’s villainess, Miss Galore. The Iowa Republican, a party newsletter, on Sept. 18 called Pelosi “inept at her job.” Actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson labeled her “naive.” On Sept. 10, master Republican strategist Karl Rove asked, “How much capital will Speaker Nancy Pelosi have” to pass health care?

Pelosi answered that in a conversation Sept. 29 at House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers‘ 80th birthday party, after the Senate Finance Committee had just rejected the Medicare-like public option for all by a 10-13 vote: “We will not be deterred. We will pass the bill.”

The public option is still viable. The House is set to pass it. It is neither “fading” nor “waning” (New York Times) nor on “life support” (ABC News).

Citing a recent CBS News poll that showed public support for the public option rose from 57 to 68 percent after President Obama’s speech to Congress in September, Weiner and Vander Linde argue that keeping it is the only way to “counter the insurance stranglehold” that makes our current system so dysfunctional — and that Pelosi will keep it in the blended version of the three House bills and eventually see it through.

For those who doubt Pelosi’s ability to pass the bill, know that she has passed every bill she has brought forward, usually with 60-plus margins, since the Democrats recaptured the House in 2006. These include the Recovery Act, Credit Card Bill of Rights, Homeowner Affordability, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay, Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and State Children’s Health Program expansion to 11 million youths.

About the Senate…

Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., said he could not vote for the public option because “I can’t see how we get to 60 votes.” The Constitution and the law require only a majority 51. The Senate amended its rules to require a “supermajority” to end debate. This procedure, called cloture, is a pander to allow special-interest contributors (Baucus has a million dollars from insurance companies) to block bills. Pelosi is right to support Senate “reconciliation,” which would allow a simple majority to pass health reform Americans want.

We believers may turn out just to be dreamers, but we’re still sending e-mails to Speaker Pelosi.

via Public option still alive – believe it.

General interest/Politics & Causes/USA
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The Peace prize & the 20th Century

by Fran Johns

While applauding Mr. Obama, I’m among those who wish the Nobel folks had waited. I do hope peace might actually, some day, happen in the world, but given last century’s record, things are chancy at best.

My father, born in 1897, used to talk a lot about world peace. His father, born just after the end of the Civil War, lost two of his five sons to World War I, but he took comfort in the certainty that peace would abound from then on. He died in the mid-1930s, presumably not looking very closely at Germany.

My father was an eternal, though not unrealistic, optimist. The afternoon we learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed we gathered around the Philco radio to listen to Mr. Roosevelt, and my father talked about what a terrible thing war was. But for a few years we had that one, the last ‘good’ war. There was optimism after it ended but not much peace, because we plunged right into the Cold War.

In 1953 my father — Earl Moreland was his name, he was a good guy — was president of the Virginia United Nations Association and brought Eleanor Roosevelt to Richmond to speak on — world peace. It was a plum for my fresh-out-of-college first PR job and a memorable time for me, since I got to pick up Mrs. Roosevelt at the quonset hut that passed for Richmond’s airport at the time and watch that singular lady in action. She was eloquent and reservedly hopeful. For a while in the 1950s peace seemed dimly possible, if you could look beyond SEATO and the Geneva Accords and a few issues with Communism, and ignore (as many of us did) the plight of the Palestinians.

Then came Vietnam. If that war seemed endless, which it was, at least after we made our ungraceful exit there was another tiny hope that somehow there might be a little peace… as long as you ignored the North/South Vietnam problems and weren’t looking at Israel and Palestine.

My father was a big fan of Anwar Sadat. When Jimmy Carter managed that little sit-down with Mr. Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David, I was visiting my father at his home a hundred or so miles south. This time we hunkered in front of the little living room TV set, and I remember my father saying “By George! I think we could see peace over there one day.” Well, we did hope. Of course, by then it was getting close to time to start looking at Afghanistan, a country many Americans (certainly including this one) thought of more as a storybook land than a real place where one bunch of people have been fighting with another bunch of people since time immemorial.

The rest is (more recent) history. It will be evident that this space is not the History Channel, but more precisely one woman’s view of the 20th century and the peace in our time that didn’t exactly happen. American Nobel peace laureates Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, George Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Kissinger — MLK, definitely a peacemaking sort but Henry Kissinger? — and Jimmy Carter didn’t formulate much 20th century peaceable wisdom for their 21st century follower.

Barack Obama is a believer, in hope, and peace, and possibilities. I wish him well.

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