Some newspaper articles cause me to wonder what is NOT being said. The Herald today runs the headline: Denied help for sexual abuse, dead days later A review of new rules for sexual abuse counseling has come too late to save a South Auckland mother who died four days after her claim for ACC-funded counselling [...]

Remember those candy cigarettes we could buy as kids (now long ago done to death by the nannies)? I see there has been some fuss in the Herald about the adult equivalent, the so-called e-cigarette. The e-cigarette is an electronic device made to look like a cigarette that nebulises a dose of nicotine from a [...]

Once more the media appear to be wading in to the campaign to lower the legal driving limit for blood alcohol to 0.05%. Strangely, they quote the recent spate of road traffic fatalities as if this somehow bolsters their argument. This is simply lazy journalism. There is plenty of evidence that lowering the legal Blood [...]

The amphibious one over at Frogblog has pointed out the extraordinary consensus in the blogosphere of the matter of Simon Power’s knee-jerk dismissal of the findings of the Law Commission’s report on Controlling And Regulating Drugs (PDF). While everyone is unanimous (including me) in their opinion that Power has been far too dismissive of the [...]

I have to say I am amused by the frenzied reaction to the story of the Chinese drug dealer who was drawing a sickness benefit and living in a state house. Does anyone actually think this is an abnormal situation? Judging by the reactions over on Kiwiblog, I would say the answer to that is [...]

I support strong measures to persuade people to stop smoking. It is a nasty habit with extremely serious health consequences. But I have to say that I find it impossible to approve of the current drive to ban smoking in most outdoor places. Make no mistake, I hate it when I’m sitting at the beach, [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article. Thanks to Crusader Rabbit for pointing me to this lovely bit of medical spam at News.com.au: Energy drinks’ ‘serious’ heart risk JUST one energy drink can cause “serious heart conditions”, a world-first study has found. The report, according to [...]

Moves are afoot in National’s “War on Drugs” to restrict the sale of codeine in all its forms, including the combinations with paracetamol (Panadeine, Codalgin et al.). The Herald reports: Public access to a widely-used class of painkillers containing codeine is likely to be restricted within months because of what is said to be an [...]

There is a fair amount of news about drug addiction at the moment, with John Key announcing a (somewhat laughable) $7 million boost for P treatment. Garth George, in one of his best columns for some time, points out that the real killer in terms of drug addictions is, of course, alcohol. He laments the [...]

Force Quit is what you do on a Mac when a program freezes to remove the offending program from memory. Force quit also appears to be what the DHBs have in mind to achieve their goal of 80 per cent of hospitalised smokers be given advice and help to quit. Most DHBs are way under [...]