May 10, 2016
Philip Morris will get another crack at reducing the punitive damages award in a long-running case brought by a cigarette smoker, as the Second District Court of Appeal found there had been improper rejection of the cigarette company’s proposed instruction on those damages. The case is Bullock v. Philip Morris, B164398. The original punitive damage…
May 2, 2016
Cigarette sales in Indiana have dropped almost 18 percent in the nine months following the imposition of a 44 cent-per-pack tax, the Chicago Tribune reports. To my mind, this fairly dramatic behavior modification based on a small economic tweak says some interesting things about our ability to control drug use through regulated markets as opposed…
April 8, 2016
British programmer Joshua Browder is helping people save a lot of money on legal fees with his latest project – the world’s first robot lawyer. The 19-year-old developed a free service that allows users to ask any kind of legal question and receive relevant answers autogenerated by bots. Browder first started the project last summer…
March 29, 2016
Tests intended to determine whether the drug tenofovir can prevent HIV from entering the body have hit a wave of global opposition, the Washington Post reports. Trials in Cambodia, have all been cancelled because of protests. The interesting thing, as the article makes clear, is that the tests might very well have helped the individuals who…
March 19, 2016
March 17, 2016
Every day this blog gets hits from people interested in Suboxone, which is a drug made from buprenorphine and naloxone that is used to treat opioid dependence. It’s ridiculous in a way, because I’ve previously only posted *one* item on Suboxone and it was nothing but a link to a news story about the difficulties…
March 9, 2016
March 4, 2016
The New York Times’ Bats blog, written by Alan Schwartz, has been live blogging from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s hearing on Major League Baseball steroid use today. (Above: Former Senator George Mitchell, author of the “Mitchell Report” on MLB steroids, at today’s hearing. Photo by Brendan Smialowski, New York Times.)…
February 26, 2016
Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Co. will be indicted Monday for the allegedly failing to take measures to prevent the tsunami-triggered disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, a lawyer in charge of the case said Friday. The three, who will face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury, are…
February 25, 2016
As the American steroids prosecutions drag on, they’ve claimed another victim: former San Francisco 49er Dana Stubblefield has pleaded guilty to “lying to federal agents about his use of performance-enhancing drugs,” the San Jose Mercury News reports. Under the plea deal, he faces up to six months in prison. (Above: Dana Stubblefield leaves the federal…