News of the Day 10-18-06

The Christian Science Monitor runs a good overview of the difficulties associated with the empaneling of 12-person juries these days. I got to go through this once and was actually impressed with the process, but I was in Madison, WI, where these things are taken pretty seriously. Worth your time unless you've been part of a mess before. . . . And a couple of notes from Science Daily. The first describes the growing problem with prescription drug abuse and how it doesn't seem to be following the traditional distribution of abuse of other drugs geographically across the country. States with large metro areas (NY, IL, TX, CA) didn't have high distributions, meaning that monitoring will have to follow different patterns. The other points out that early use of nicotine increases chances for life-long addiction and raises the possibilities of genetic strategies at relief through strengthening of cell receptors, that other drugs do the same, and that nicotine may be a "starter drug." Hmm. Wonder how that would play out if it turned out true. . . .