Steven Chapman is the sort of blogger whom White Rose readers ought to keep on their list of haunts. He has White-Rose-relevant material here about how war erodes civil liberties, even in the face of the strongest written constitutions, and here about car surveillance via road pricing, with a link to this Observer story.
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There’s a White Rose angle to the Pfizer drugs story, and of course Pfizer aren’t the only drugs company involved. They just seem to have a higher profile. The present situation is that the Canadian government is making it a condition of sale for the drugs companies that in Canada they must charge less for their drugs than they would like to. In the USA no such rule applies, and the prices charged for their drugs are higher. So, some Canadian retailers of drugs are, as predicted, making money by selling on some of the drugs they buy at the cheap rate, back to the USA. This has caused the drug companies to intensify their already elaborate product tracking efforts so that they can spot Canadian retailers who are doing this.
The general point: when an economy is working without state interference, a seller is glad to sell to anybody, so long as the seller is willing to pay the asked-for price. Once he has, great. The buyer can then do with the product anything he likes, including resell it to someone else. The seller, in other words, will have no motive to spy on buyers to see what they do with the product. But in an interfered-with market, sellers do have a motive for such tracking. Well, correction. Sellers often do want to know what buyers do with products. It’s called market research. But if a customer wants to buy a product, but doesn’t want to cooperate in such market research, the seller usually takes the money and does the business, and lays off with the market research. Not so, with these errant Canadian drugs retailers. They definitely don’t want to tell the drugs companies how they are using their products, if they are using them by reselling back to the USA. But the drugs companies really want to know about this. If that makes for a fight, too bad. The drugs companies still want to know. The retailers are playing dirty if they resell to the USA. The drugs companies will also want to play rather dirty, to find out, the way they never would to do mere market research. It all makes for bad vibes, and creates a drugs-companies-lead demand for further intrusive and creepy product tracking systems which normally they might shun, on the grounds that regular customers might not like such arrangements. August 7th, 2003 | Comments are closed
 Who makes the crucial decision about whether to prosecute in the first place? And who picks the person who does this? And who have they picked? From today’s Independent:
Doesn’t sound good, put like that, does it?
I suppose that could be true. August 6th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
SFGate.com reports on a legal challenge to the Patriot Act:
August 6th, 2003 | Comments are closed
John Lettice of The Register writes:
That’s paragraph one of his piece. It’s worth continuing. Whatever you think of Lettice’s judgements and fears about all this, you will probably learn something. August 6th, 2003 | Comments are closed
David Farrer comments here on the case of a someone who may be sent to jail for using a mobile telephone to record and transmit proceedings in the Perth Sheriff Court. Apparently they don’t like it so much when we use technology to keep tabs on them. August 4th, 2003 | Comments are closed
This story in today’s New York Times is fascinating:
Which, to cut a long story and Alex Malo’s small intestine short, caused big problems. If your intestine is too short, you can’t eat. But Dr Kim had already been thinking about this. Here’s his idea:
This had to be tested on animals first, and “a million forms” had to be signed saying yes, it could kill Alex but please do it anyway. They did. It worked. Read the whole thing. There are many lessons to be learned from this story. I suggest four: One: the New York Times still has its uses. Two: testing on animals has its uses. Three: people with names like “Kim” are making a huge contribution to life in America. Four: you need the right institutional setting to do clever things.
Entrepreneurship is just as much a medical thing as a more conventionally “business” thing, or, to put it another way, running medicine rather like a business, as the USA is famous for doing, can also do a lot of good. I don’t know the details of how well or badly Britain’s National Health Service works in circumstances like these, but I doubt it would have been such a good environment for Dr Kim, or for Alex Malo. August 4th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit links to this story, and quotes a fellow lawyer who alerted him to it that it shows you shouldn’t automatically disbelieve a client who says he doesn’t know how some porn found its way onto his hard drive.
In a world where simply being charged with a crime causes millions to presume some degree of guilt, and gives personal enemies their chance straight away to move in for the kill by making use of other bits of the legal system, then the decision merely to prosecute becomes a sentence in its own right. August 4th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Telegraph yesterday:
This last is to counter the fear among the teachers that the cameras will also be used to spy on them.
Not for the first time, my reaction to being told the cost of some surveillance kit is: that’s cheap. Soon, if they want it to be everywhere, and they do, it will be. August 4th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Provoked by a couple of the comments on this, I’ve just posted a potentially rather boring blog posting about the problem of the potential boringness of blog postings, at my Culture Blog. But I don’t want to go on about it here. August 3rd, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
It certainly is. Says Michael Blowhard:
Go here and do what Michael says. This one is my favourite. Mouse click on one of the row of dots at the bottom, and enjoy. Michael again:
Indeed. Anyone here know of other stuff like this? August 2nd, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
This from Harry Mount in the Telegraph today, on speed cameras:
It’s worth reading more of it of course, but that struck me as the killer para. August 1st, 2003 | Comments are closed
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