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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (March 21, 2012)
WWW . THESKANNER . COM M ARCH 21, 2012 P ORTLAND , O REGON V OLUME XXXIV, N O . 12 CENTS Health, Wellness and Nutrition p.5-8 C HALLENGING P EOPLE TO S HAPE A B ETTER F UTURE N OW Drug Trials Mislead 25 OUGHTA BE A LAW Doctors, patients lose when critical studies go unpublished By Helen Silvis Of The Skanner News PHOTO BY BERNIE FOSTER D octors learn which treatments work best by reading about the latest drug research in medical journals. But the journals don’t publish every drug study, and they prefer to report studies that show posi- tive results from drugs. That’s a problem, says researcher Erick Turner, M.D., an assistant professor at the OHSU School of Medicine, because doctors are not told which drugs work better than others. Turner’s research team today released a study of antipsychotic drug research in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Medicine, titled “Publication Bias in Antipsychotic Trials: An Analysis of Efficacy Comparing the Published Literature to the US Food and Drug Administration Database.” “Publication bias can blur distinctions between effective and ineffective drugs,” Turner’s research team writes. And Turner adds, “There’s some information that is not getting out to doctors.” Antipsychotic drugs are used to combat symptoms of a range of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and bipolar disor- der. The study looked at the newer antipsychotics. They include Abilify and Seroquel, which have been marketed direct- ly to consumers as cures for severe depression, as well as the drugs: Risperdal, Fanapt, Zyprexa, Invega, Consta and Geodon. The research team found journal articles on antipsychotics showed only a slight bias toward positive studies. In fact, most of the studies, 20 of 24, did have positive results. But the research also revealed that one drug worked less well than the others, yet journal articles did not offer doctors that important detail. “As far as the FDA (Food and Drug Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, left; James Crosby of the CityNews Newspaper Group in Cincinnati, OH; Clovis Campbell Jr., current NNPA chair and publisher of the Arizona Informant; and past NNPA Chair Danny Bakewell Sr., publisher of the Los Angeles Sentinel, discuss offshore payday lending during Black Press week in Washington D.C. Online Payday Lending Sen. Jeff Merkley seeks regulations on offshore digital lenders By Lisa Loving Of The Skanner News S he was desperate to pay a handful of crucial bills, so she went online and researched digital loans. She read about Internet pay- day loan companies and how they work – but she found one that seemed better than the others. “In order to find out if I qualified I had to give them my bank account and social security number like you would for any loan,” she told The Skanner News. “There was my first stupid thing.” This Oregon resident — who has requested anonymity because she hasn’t yet told her family that a $400 loan turned into a $1,000 nightmare — has helped touch off a national effort by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI) to regulate the billion-dollar offshore payday lending industry. Merkley and Akaka this month officially requested that Consumer Financial Protec- tion Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray take action against such payday lenders, who appear to be reaching right into unwary consumers’ bank accounts and siphoning out everything they can get. Merkley brought the issue to the National Newspaper Pub- lishers’ Association last week in Washington D.C., during Black Press Week. “We have to bring order to the Wild West of the lending market,” Merkley says. The issue of storefront pay- day lending caught fire in Oregon’s legislature in 2007, when lawmakers sought to put limits on interest rates, rollover of short-term loans, and Internet scams entrapping consumers in debt over trivial loan amounts – some with interest rates as high as 500 See LENDING on page 3 See DRUGS on page 3 INDEX News ...................2,3 Opinion .................4 Health, Wellness & Nutrition...............5 - 8 A& E ...............9,10,12 Bids/Classifieds ......11 Decolonize PDX Focuses on Prisons New group organizes events linking modern jails to enslavement By Bruce Poinsette Special to The Skanner News W hen law enforcement cleared Occupy Portland demonstrators out of their downtown camps last fall, many worried that the movement would falter. This spring in North and Northeast Port- land, a handful of new activist movements against racism, homelessness and foreclo- sure have been joined by Decolonize PDX — which is placing the prison industrial complex front and center. The group — all activists of color — have been mobilizing through the winter to high- light the connections between the prison system, racism oppression, and colonialism — in which a conquering force takes land and freedoms away from an oppressed peo- ple. “It is doing exactly what it was intended to do,” says Walidah Imarisha. “Prison is a direct descendent of slavery. There is a loophole in the 13th Amendment. Slavery is prohibited, except as punishment. With the increase in people of color there is an increase of people looked at as bodies.” See DECOLONIZE on page 3
