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Does Sanjay Gupta’s support of medical marijuana really signify a turning point in the debate?
CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, MD’s very public transformation into a proponent of medical marijuana has done more than just inspire late-night talk show hosts to joke that his employer should change its name to the “Cannabis News Network.”
It has at least one pundit speculating that the U.S. has arrived at a “tipping point” in which the American is open to legalizing some drugs that had generally been thought of as illicit.
But despite Gupta’s fame, influence and seemingly heartfelt apology for previously being “dismissive” of medical marijuana, that’s giving him a little too much credit.
That tipping point indeed may have come in 2013, but it came before Gupta’s change of heart. In April, a Pew research poll of 1,500 adults revealed that for the first time in more than four decades of polling on the issue, a majority of Americans (52%) said they favor legalizing the use of marijuana.
Support for legalization rose 11 percentage points in just three years, and has come a long way since 1969, when just 12% were in favor of it, according to Pew.
The Washington Post appears to have been right on when it labeled marijuana as “the new gay marriage,” another issue in which support amongst the American public has risen sharply in recent years.
With marijuana, what’s less clear is exactly why Americans’ acceptance of it is growing. Ballot measures in Colorado and Washington last year, in which voters supported decriminalization and legalization, no doubt have made a difference in making marijuana seem more acceptable to the mainstream. In April, Illinois became the 20th state to legalize medical marijuana.
Still, the answer may be a little more simple. Perhaps more people are supportive of loosening legal restrictions on marijuana because they’ve used the drug themselves. In 2001, Pew found that 38% of adults said they’ve tried pot, and that number had risen to just 40% by 2010. But in the three years since, the number has jumped to 48%, Pew found. Of those who’ve tried it, 47% said they used it “just for fun.”
If the trend holds, the percentage of Americans who’ve tried pot will continue to rise and the number who support legalization is likely to grow right along with it in the coming years.
A reader poll that recenty appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that clinican attitudes on medical marijuana may be moving in the same direction as those of the American public. The poll received nearly 1,500 votes, and 76% of the votes cast were in favor of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. It should be noted that this was hardly a scientifically rigorous poll, but it does serve as a general gauge of sorts for medical providers’ perceptions of medical marijuana.
As for Gupta, he’s predictably faced a little backlash over his rapid about-face on medical marijuana, such as a Boston Globe health reporter who pronounced herself “disappointed” in Gupta for “swinging too hard from one pendulum to the other.”
But at least give Gupta credit for clearly explaining the “why” behind his seemingly abrupt turnaround. Business Insider cites nine reasons that Gupta offered, including that marijuana laws are not based on science, the drug doesn’t have a “high potential for abuse” and that pot is much safer than lots of prescription drugs.
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Change Healthcare raises another $15M to help you save money on medical bills
Change Healthcare, a Tennessee-based company trying to encourage more consumerism and cost transparency in healthcare has raised a $15 million Series D round of funding.
On Tuesday, the company said its latest round, which brings its total amount raised to $32 million, was led by HLM Venture Partners and new investor Noro-Moseley Partners. It also included existing institutional investors BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Sandbox Industries, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc., West Health Investment Fund, LLC, and Solidus Co.
Launched in 2007, the company provides employers and health plans with web-based tools for enabling employees and members to cut costs when it comes to the their healthcare expenses. Similar to startups like Castlight Health and ClearCostHealth, it analyzes historical claims data to help patients comparison shop for procedures and services. If you need a knee replacement, for example, it could tell you where to go for the cheapest…
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Chat Multi-Tasking, Facebook Home’s Game Changer, Could Rattle Apple And Google
The 2013 TIME 100 Poll
It seems he’s at it again. Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter and the Obvious Corp., tweeted on Monday that he’s venturing back into new startup territory with his latest project called Jelly. (Of the fish variety, not the peanut butter one.)
In a blog post titled, “What is Jelly?” Stone didn’t actually explain much what Jelly is, but did hint at a mobile-oriented startup. And yes, the company is based in San Francisco and it’s hiring.
“People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.
Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we”…
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Business leaders need insights to remain competitive, which is driving them to prospect for big data “gold.” But they need help filtering the signal from the noise and don’t want to waste time on standing up the hardware, configuring the software and manually coding point-to-point solutions. They want to get data in and out of Hadoop, or any other big data target, as fast as possible without needing a complement of data science experts on staff.
Snaplogic is an enterprise cloud integration platform that enables users to efficiently build, deploy and manage multiple high-volume, data-intensive integration projects. For enterprises dealing with massive amounts of data, SnapLogic’s Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) solution provides data ingress, egress and data logging for Hadoop to help them get from big interactions to big insights quickly and easily.
This new solution offers regular Joes and data architects alike an easy way to integrate Hadoop data with…
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Electronic health records provider Practice Fusion is bringing in some new blood. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based company said it made its first major acquisition in purchasing 100Plus, a personal health prediction startup.
Founded in 2011, 100Plus last month launched a mobile app that combines data analytics and game mechanics to encourage people to engage in healthy activities.
In the acquisition, 100Plus’ five-person team will join Practice Fusion’s data and product development teams, with Chris Hogg, co-founder of 100Plus, becoming the associate vice president of data science. The company would not share financial details.
Ryan Howard, Practice Fusion’s CEO, who is also a co-founder of 100Plus, said he and Hogg first met a couple of years ago when Practice Fusion challenged about 50 teams to hack anonymized patient records to come up with interesting applications. Hogg created a tool that found patients’ “health twins” and then predicted their future…
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FDA halts operations at peanut butter plant
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration halted operations of the country’s largest organic peanut butter processor Monday, cracking down on salmonella poisoning for the first time with new enforcement authority the agency gained in a 2011 food safety law.
FDA officials found salmonella all over Sunland Inc.’s New Mexico processing plant after 41 people in 20 states, most of them children, were sickened by peanut butter manufactured at the plant in Portales and sold by Trader Joe’s grocery chain. The FDA suspended Sunland’s registration Monday, preventing the company from producing or distributing any food.
The food safety law gave the FDA authority to suspend a company’s registration when food manufactured or held there has a “reasonable probability” of causing serious health problems or death. Before the food safety law was enacted early last year, the FDA would have had to go to court to suspend a company’s registration.
Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods, said the agency’s ability to suspend a registration like this one is a major step forward for the agency.
“Consumers can be assured that products will not leave this facility until we determine they have implemented preventive measures that are effective to produce safe products,” Taylor said.
Sunland had voluntarily closed its plant after a September outbreak and planned to reopen its peanut processing facility on Tuesday, with hopes of selling peanut butter again by the end of the year. Sunland’s Katalin Coburn said FDA’s decision to suspend the registration was a surprise to the company and Sunland officials had assumed they were allowed to resume operations.
The company now has the right to a hearing and must prove to the agency that its facilities are clean enough to reopen. Coburn said Sunland is cooperating with FDA and company officials hope they can be up and running again soon.
Sunland is the nation’s largest organic peanut butter processor, though it also produces many non-organic products. The company recalled hundreds of organic and non-organic nut butters and nuts manufactured since 2010 after Trader Joe’s Valencia Creamy Peanut Butter was linked to the salmonella illnesses in September.
In addition to Trader Joe’s, Sunland sold hundreds of different peanut products to Whole Foods, Safeway, Target and other large grocery chains.
During a month-long investigation, after the outbreak linked to processor Sunland and to Trader Joe’s, FDA inspectors found samples of salmonella in 28 different locations in the plant, in 13 nut butter samples and in one sample of raw peanuts.
The agency also found improper handling of the products, unclean equipment and uncovered trailers of peanuts outside the facility that were exposed to rain and birds.
The FDA said that over the past three years, the company shipped products even though portions of their lots, or daily production runs, tested positive for salmonella in internal tests. The agency also found that the internal tests failed to find salmonella when it was present.
FDA inspectors found many of the same problems — including employees putting their bare fingers in empty jars before they were filled, open bags of ingredients, unclean equipment, and many other violations — in a 2007 inspection. Similar problems were recorded by inspectors in 2009, 2010 and 2011, though government officials didn’t take any action or release the results of those inspections until after the illnesses were discovered this year.
In a statement issued earlier this month, Sunland’s president and chief executive officer, Jimmie Shearer, denied the company knowingly shipped tainted products.
“At no time in its 24-year history has Sunland, Inc. released for distribution any products that it knew to be potentially contaminated with harmful microorganisms,” Shearer said in a statement posted on the company’s website. “In every instance where test results indicated the presence of a contaminant, the implicated product was destroyed and not released for distribution.”
A separate peanut butter outbreak in 2009 not related to Sunland was linked to hundreds of illnesses and nine deaths.
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