Youth Marijuana and Prescription Drug Abuse in Anchorage

Complete issue of Alaska Justice Forum 33(1), Spring 2016 at https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/handle/11122/6883.This article examines results of the Adult Perceptions of Anchorage Youth: 2015 Survey (APAYS) to examine perceptions and concerns of Anchorage adults, both parents and non-parents, about youth marijuana use and youth non-medical use of prescription drugs. A resource list is included.Youth Substance Use / National Data on Youth Access to Substances / The Role of Adults and Parents in Youth Substance Use / About the Survey / Concern about Marijuana and Prescription Drug Use / Relative Safety of Various Substances / Risk of Harm from Marijuana and Prescription Drugs / Consequences of Marijuana and Prescription Drug Use / Youth Access to Prescription Drugs / Conclusion / Definition of Non-Medical Prescription Drug Use (sidebar) / Glossary (sidebar) / Resources (sidebar

What's Good for Washington: Fair Prescription Drug Pricing and the Biotechnology Industry

The rising cost of prescription drugs is consuming an ever-larger portion of limited funds for basic health care and other important services in Washington state. At the same time, there are almost one million Washingtonians who go without any prescription drug coverage, including the uninsured and the elderly.During the 2002 legislative session, prescription drug legislation that would have saved Washington state millions on prescription drugs and extended prescription drug savings to seniors and the uninsured was blocked by heavy lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry. One of the arguments raised against the legislation was that lower prescription drug prices would create a hostile environment for biotech research. However, the evidence shows that the biotech industry can continue to thrive in our state alongside lower drug prices. Allowing our state to be a wise consumer and to use its market power to rein in prescription drug costs is a sensible, near-term solution to skyrocketing health costs and will allow expanded access to prescription drugs. 1. Fair drug prices will not cause biotech firms to leave the state. Biotech companies make location decisions based on the presence of strong research institutions, venture capital, human capital, and overall quality of life.Prescription drug legislation to make drugs more affordable in one state does not translate into a hostile environment for biomedical research in that state.The global market for prescription drugs determines profits for the bio-technology and phamaceutical industries. 2. State government has a responsibility to prioritize spending and strive for efficiency. Prescription drug costs are consuming scarce dollars needed for other important programs and populations.Meanwhile, many state residents have no prescription drug coverage, leading to poorer health outcomes and ultimately costing the state even more for expensive emergency room treatment.Two problems -- cost and access -- can be addressed with one solution -- smarter shopping

A new prescription for soft gluon resummation

We present a new prescription for the resummation of the divergent series of perturbative corrections, due to soft gluon emission, to hard processes near threshold in perturbative QCD (threshold resummation). This prescription is based on Borel resummation, and contrary to the commonly used minimal prescription, it does not introduce a dependence of resummed physical observables on the kinematically unaccessible x->0 region of parton distributions. We compare results for resummed deep-inelastic scattering obtained using the Borel prescription and the minimal prescription and exploit the comparison to discuss the ambiguities related to the resummation procedure.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. Final version, to be published in Phys. Lett. B. Several typos corrected (in particular eqs 26,41,53); fig. 3 adde

Redesigning the 'choice architecture' of hospital prescription charts: a mixed methods study incorporating in situ simulation testing.

Objectives: To incorporate behavioural insights into the user-centred design of an inpatient prescription chart (Imperial Drug Chart Evaluation and Adoption Study, IDEAS chart) and to determine whether changes in the content and design of prescription charts could influence prescribing behaviour and reduce prescribing errors. Design: A mixed-methods approach was taken in the development phase of the project; in situ simulation was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the newly developed IDEAS prescription chart. Setting: A London teaching hospital. Interventions/methods: A multimodal approach comprising (1) an exploratory phase consisting of chart reviews, focus groups and user insight gathering (2) the iterative design of the IDEAS prescription chart and finally (3) testing of final chart with prescribers using in situ simulation. Results: Substantial variation was seen between existing inpatient prescription charts used across 15 different UK hospitals. Review of 40 completed prescription charts from one hospital demonstrated a number of frequent prescribing errors including illegibility, and difficulty in identifying prescribers. Insights from focus groups and direct observations were translated into the design of IDEAS chart. In situ simulation testing revealed significant improvements in prescribing on the IDEAS chart compared with the prescription chart currently in use in the study hospital. Medication orders on the IDEAS chart were significantly more likely to include correct dose entries (164/164 vs 166/174; p=0.0046) as well as prescriber's printed name (163/164 vs 0/174; p<0.0001) and contact number (137/164 vs 55/174; p<0.0001). Antiinfective indication (28/28 vs 17/29; p<0.0001) and duration (26/28 vs 15/29; p<0.0001) were more likely to be completed using the IDEAS chart. Conclusions: In a simulated context, the IDEAS prescription chart significantly reduced a number of common prescribing errors including dosing errors and illegibility. Positive behavioural change was seen without prior education or support, suggesting that some common prescription writing errors are potentially rectifiable simply through changes in the content and design of prescription charts

The ıϵ\imath \epsilon prescription in the SYK model

We introduce an $\imath \epsilon$ prescription for the SYK model both at finite and at zero temperature. This prescription regularizes all the naive ultraviolet divergences of the model. As expected the prescription breaks the conformal invariance, but the latter is restored in the $\epsilon \to 0$ limit. We prove rigorously that the Schwinger Dyson equation of the resummed two point function at large $N$ and low momentum is recovered in this limit. Based on this $\imath \epsilon$ prescription we introduce an effective field theory Lagrangian for the infrared SYK model.Comment: Second version: the effective field theory part of the paper (subsections 2.1 and 3.1 and discussion) adde

On the Factorisation of the Connected Prescription for Yang-Mills Amplitudes

We examine factorisation in the connected prescription of Yang-Mills amplitudes. The multi-particle pole is interpreted as coming from representing delta functions as meromorphic functions. However, a naive evaluation does not give a correct result. We give a simple prescription for the integration contour which does give the correct result. We verify this prescription for a family of gauge-fixing conditions.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

Predictors of Antibiotics Co-prescription with Antimalarials for Patients Presenting with Fever in Rural Tanzania.

Successful implementation of malaria treatment policy depends on the prescription practices for patients with malaria. This paper describes prescription patterns and assesses factors associated with co-prescription of antibiotics and artemether-lumefantrine (AL) for patients presenting with fever in rural Tanzania. From June 2009 to September 2011, a cohort event monitoring program was conducted among all patients treated at 8 selected health facilities in Ifakara and Rufiji Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS).It included all patients presenting with fever and prescribed with AL. Logistic regression was used to model the predictors on the outcome variable which is co-prescription of AL and antibiotics on a single clinical visit. A cohort of 11,648 was recruited and followed up with 92% presenting with fever. Presumptive treatment was used in 56% of patients treated with AL. On average 2.4 (1 -- 7) drugs was prescribed per encounter, indicating co-prescription of AL with other drugs. Children under five had higher odds of AL and antibiotics co-prescription (OR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.46 -- 0.85) than those aged more than five years. Patients testing negative had higher odds (OR = 2.22, 95%CI: 1.65 -- 2.97) of AL and antibiotics co-prescription. Patients receiving treatment from dispensaries had higher odds (OR = 1.45, 95% CI: 0.84 -- 2.30) of AL and antibiotics co-prescription than those from served in health centres even though the deference was not statistically significant. Regardless the fact that Malaria is declining but due to lack of laboratories and mRDT in most health facilities in the rural areas, clinicians are still treating malaria presumptively. This leads them to prescribe more drugs to treat all possibilities

Is Drug Coverage a Free Lunch? Cross-Price Elasticities and the Design of Prescription Drug Benefits

Recently, many U.S. employers have adopted less generous prescription drug benefits. In addition, the U.S. began to offer prescription drug insurance to approximately 42 million Medicare beneficiaries in 2006. We use data on individual health insurance claims and benefit data from 1997-2003 to study the effects of changing consumers' co-payments for prescription drugs on the quantity demanded and expenditure on prescription drugs, inpatient care and outpatient care. We allow for effects both in the year of the co-payment change and in the year following the change. Our results show that increases in prescription drug prices reduce both the use of and spending on prescription drugs. However, consumers substitute the use of outpatient care and inpatient care for prescription drug use, and about 35% of the expenditure reductions on prescription drugs are offset by the increases in other spending.