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go unpublished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