March 29, 2024

Clinton abused powers on abortion drug

COMMENTARY

OPINION:

While the Supreme Court analyzes the technical legal standing of pro-life doctors to sue the Food and Drug Administration over the chemical abortion pill mifepristone, the case holds the potential to highlight the health dangers to women posed by the drug and its politically prompted approval (“Supreme Court justices weigh rolling back use of the abortion pill,” Web, March 26).

When I worked with these doctors and pro-life advocates in 2002 to help draft the original “Citizen Petition” complaint against the FDA‘s politically tainted fast-tracking of the drug, we noted that the “FDA's violation of its standards and rules have put women’s health and lives at risk.” We detailed how the FDA waived its own rules in fast-tracking the drug (such as not requiring testing on minors). The FDA also developed a drug regimen inconsistent with clinical trials. Transvaginal ultrasounds that can date a pregnancy and rule out dangerous ectopic pregnancies, for example, while employed in the U.S. clinical trial, were not required under the FDA's regimen.

We also revealed the intense lobbying for the drug by the Clinton administration, first to bring what was then a French abortion pill to the U.S. and then to fast-track its approval by the FDA.

We highlighted the disturbing fact that “President Clinton reportedly wrote to [French abortion pill manufacturer] Hoechst asking the company to file a new drug application with the FDA—an unprecedented situation in the pharmaceutical industry—which Hoechst intransigently refused to do.” Undeterred, the Clinton administration, with Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala leading the campaign, worked feverishly to get the drug’s patent rights transferred to an American company, which then hired a Chinese manufacturer to produce the drug.

Ultimately, the FDA illegitimately and perversely deployed Subpart H—a fast-track mechanism developed for rapid approval of drugs for life-threatening illnesses such as HIV—to approve a life-ending abortion drug.

Whatever the court decides regarding the legal standing of pro-life doctors in this lawsuit, nothing will change the dangers posed by the drug to women or the dangers posed to the American public by a politicized FDA.

JONATHAN IMBODY

Mechanicsville, Virginia

 

Biden's Catechetical Dementia

Edited and published in The Federalist, April 27, 2022. Original version is below:

How the administration's abortion ideology-driven assault on faith and conscience threatens care for millions of needy individuals

By Jonathan Imbody[i]

The year is 2024, and the Biden administration's assault on conscience freedoms has taken a tragic toll on the healthcare landscape.

Since the 2022 elimination of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) conscience protections for health professionals, government-sanctioned discrimination has driven out of medicine persons of faith and pro-life convictions, accelerating and exacerbating the long-predicted physician shortage crisis. The shortage leaves millions of patients, especially the poor and marginalized, without the faith-based care on which they had depended.

From medical students to doctors to hospitals and clinics, no one who hews to Hippocratic or Judeo-Christian ethics can survive the administration's ideological purge of healthcare.

Purple Haze: The Dangerous Illogic of Politicians Pursuing Pot Profits

 

A Washington Times editorial, "Pot is growing like a weed" rightly calls out politicians "racing to earn their trendy credentials" by "commoditizing and taxing vice" and legalizing marijuana commerce. As usual, in the pursuit of pot profits, the politico-economic calculus ignores the costs of increased government social services and human risk and loss.

As to human risk and loss, the data is clear and compelling. The National Institute on Drug Abuse cites studies finding that "9% of people who use marijuana will become dependent on it, rising to about 17% in those who start using in their teens" and that "30% of those who use marijuana may have some degree of marijuana use disorder."

The CDC reports that marijuana users are three times more likely to become addicted to heroin. A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that marijuana users were more than twice as likely to abuse prescription opioids.

Besides the human toll, these addictions and disorders also increase government costs for health and social services.

Marijuana use can be deadly. Studies of Colorado found that "marijuana-related traffic deaths increased 48% in the three-year average since Colorado legalized recreational marijuana."

Pot profits are both bad government business and bad social policy. The reasoning of politicians and activists suggesting otherwise in the face of the overwhelming evidence is best described by the late Jimi Hendrix:

"Yeah, Purple Haze all in my eyes
"Don't know if it's day or night
"You've got me blowing, blowing my mind
"Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?"

Faith Steps excerpt: A personal journey--existential angst and the Strange Book

Part V in a series of excerpts from my new book, Faith Steps, which encourages and equips people of faith to engage with friends and in the public arena on vital issues.
From Chapter Four, A Personal Journey:

The cultural revolution of the 1960's, launched during the tumult of the Vietnam War and fed by radical ideology and drugs, had shaken the traditional American foundations of faith, morality and even reality itself. It hadn't taken much, it seemed, to strip the nation of its religious facade, revealing superficial beliefs ungrounded in Scripture and a cultural religion that had drifted far away from the living God.

No one, as far as I could discern, seemed to come even close to offering any real answers to the meaning of life, the nature of man or the existence of a Creator.

Haight Ashbury hippies turned out to be better at turning on to drugs than offering any substantive alternatives to the American capitalism they simultaneously despised and depended upon. My parents' generation had won World War II and provided wonderfully for their families, but many couldn't muster much meaning in life beyond financial security. So their children, wise to their parents' emptiness and hypocrisy but not to their own, traipsed off into Zen, LSD and Woodstock.

American political leaders had launched a successful race to the moon and built an unrivaled economy but then violated the public trust with moral lapses and bungled burglaries. Mainline religious leaders had long since lost the biblical moorings for faith and taken to mumbling a social gospel that eschewed spiritual life for the latest hip political ideology. Educators were trading traditional scholastic disciplines for subjective, "relevant" explorations–like the high school course I took on Rock and Roll.

I found the silence of meaning terrifying.

Good News / Strange News

In desperation, I took up reading a paperback copy of Good News for Modern Man–a loose, modern translation of the New Testament. I would read passages for a while but could only take so much of what struck me as bewildering, even bizarre.

I was looking to plant my feet on firm ground, not float off into spooky spiritualism. Angels and demons, prophecies and parables. That stuff practically made me shiver.

Yet after a time, for some reason, I would once again delve into the pages of the Strange Book....

Read more: 

Amazon paperback: http://tinyurl.com/nhanq29

Kindle e-book: http://tinyurl.com/p2q8ywg  

Study: Marijuana use causes brain dysfunction. Hey, man...whoa. Dys-what?

To the dismay of pot smokers who are still able to read to the study, The Journal of Neuroscience tamps out the fast-spreading notion that casual marijuana use does no harm. From the news report in the Washington Post:

A study in The Journal of Neuroscience says even casual marijuana smokers showed significant abnormalities in two vital brain regions important in motivation and emotion.

“Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week,” said co-author Hans Breiter, quoted in Northwestern University’s Science Newsline. Breiter hailed the study as the first to analyze the effects of light marijuana use. “People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone is doing OK with work or school,” he said. “Our data directly says this is not the case. 

“This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences,” he added.

Washington and Colorado have legalized the drug for recreational use, and 21 states and the District of Columbia permit medical marijuana use. Turns out the Rocky Mountain high may lower cognitive function. But if the study is correct, it may be too late now for Coloradans and Washingtonians to figure that out.