The Dish

Sean Dunne’s painkiller-addiction documentary Oxyana, which the Dish spotlighted in April and which won a documentary award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, has left some residents of Oceana, West Virgina, decidedly unimpressed. Local critics have called the film sensational and raised concerns about its accuracy. Alec MacGillis, who agrees that the town has a serious drug problem, says the filmmaker lays it on a bit thick:

[Oxyana] is, as the promotional materials promised, a hellscape, one that little resembles the bedraggled but not blasted town I passed through on my April visit, a typical deep-Appalachian strip with a Bible bookstore and a medical supply shop and a WIC office and car repair shops and a foot and ankle clinic and a sign advertising for foster parents and another identifying the Afghanistan veteran for whom a small bridge has been named and an AT&T outlet store with the Kindle Fire on sale and, yes, a couple of pharmacies.

Conceding that “an AT&T store isn’t exactly material for a documentary film,” MacGillis considers the film’s objective:

Portraying people and places at the outer edge of despair is a fraught enterprise—finding the line between exposing wrong and suffering without wallowing in it. “Oxyana” is, in a sense, the Appalachian version of the ruin porn we’ve become used to from cities like Detroit. To just toss the images out there, one after another, without sufficient context and perspective, as Dunne has done with the broken people he found in Wyoming County, can start to look awfully gratuitous.

More Dish on Oxyana here and here; more on painkillers here and here; and more on ruin porn here, here, and here.

A. Barton Hinkle notes that “both state laws and departmental policies seem to let police officers use deadly force as a first resort against family pets that often present little or no threat.” He wants this to stop:

The Justice Department says not only that “dogs are seldom dangerous” but that even when they are, “the overwhelming majority of dog bites are minor, causing either no injury at all or injuries so minor that no medical care is required.” As Balko writes, “If dangerous dogs are so common, one would expect to find frequent reports of vicious attacks on meter readers, postal workers, firemen, and delivery workers. But according to a spokesman from the United States Postal Service, serious dog attacks on mail carriers are vanishingly rare.”

Yet serious – deadly – attacks against dogs are all too common. They shouldn’t be. And the solutions are obvious: Departmental policies, backed by state law, should require police officers to use lethal force against companion animals only as a last resort. Officers should receive training in safe and non-lethal methods of animal control – and in dog behavior: “An approaching dog is almost always friendly,” according to the Justice Department; “a dog who feels threatened will usually try to keep his distance.”

Recent Dish on cops shooting dogs here and here.

Michael White explains why a cure for cancer has been so elusive:

Cancer genome projects are the latest front in the War on Cancer. The U.S. National Institutes of Health created The Cancer Genome Atlas (whose acronym, TCGA, consists of the abbreviations for each of the four chemical letters in DNA), and the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust is assembling the Catalog of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC). The goal of projects like these is to exhaustively map out the genetic terrain of cancer by identifying every mutation in the genomes of tumors from tens of thousands of cancer patients. The hope motivating these projects was that scientists would discover a core set of cancer driver mutations for each type of cancer, mutations that could be targeted with smart drugs.

What researchers have discovered instead is that cancer is a much more fiendishly complicated genetic mess than we ever imagined. Instead of a handful of cancer-causing driver mutations for each cancer type, scientists have found that there are many different genetic paths to the same cancer. Many driver mutations for a particular cancer type occur in less than 20 percent of cancers of that type, which means that drugs targeted at that mutation will only help a minority of patients. A recent review of the subject noted that the COSMIC project has cataloged more than 800,000 mutations, covering nearly every gene in the human genome. The authors of the review suggested that “the cast of genes involved in any single cancer type will be in the neighborhood of 50–100.”

Pareene calls the new PBS documentary “Two American Families” one of “the best, most heartbreaking, documentaries I’ve seen this year”:

It wasn’t “hard to watch” because it was about a singularly awful moment in human history or one unspeakable monstrous act — a hurricane or war or even a specific crime committed by specific people — but because it just happened to document the lives of some struggling working-class families beginning at shortly after the point when the ground fell out from beneath the American lower middle class and ending now, when there’s clearly no hope for a return to economic security.

To use the regrettable cliché, both families “played by the rules.” They are in fact superhumanly devoted to the rules. They both attend church — Claude is actually a minister — and they hate the idea of going on the dole and they take any available work and the kids are Boy Scouts and their parents are dedicated to their educations. The families are so virtuous, so imbued with the great American work ethic, that it is practically unfair to other struggling Americans; families that fuck up deserve our sympathy, and the support of a social safety net, as well. But as George Packer wrote earlier this month, the film serves as a rebuke to right-wing social critics like the execrable Charles Murray, “who believe that the decline of America’s working class comes from a collapse of moral values, social capital, personal responsibility, and traditional authority…” These people are overflowing with personal responsibility.

Previous Dish on the documentary here.

Oregon college students may soon be able to pay for college by pledging a percentage of future earnings rather than paying tuition upfront. Dylan Matthews provides details:

The actual bill text is very spare and doesn’t specify a set percentage or payment period, though the bill’s supporters tell the New York Times that something like 3 percent over 20 years would cover costs. And [John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute] is quick to note that there would be some substantial upfront transition costs, which, for universal adoption in Oregon, are estimated at $9 billion. “25 years from now, it will be self-financing,” he says. “The question is, ‘How do we get there?’”

It’s a big question. Oregon’s commission will have to figure out not only what rate to charge and how long to charge it, but whether one can take a “buyout” by paying off tuition costs early, as is possible with student loans, and how to enforce the plan for students who move out of state. If you can’t take a buyout, then students who earn high incomes later on could find themselves paying far, far more than their education actually cost. And if enforcement is tougher in Oregon than out of state, that could provide a perverse incentive for state university graduates to skip town.

Michelle Asha Cooper lodges other criticisms:

[P]utting aside the complexity and feasibility of implementing such a system, this supposedly “debt-free” plan only covers tuition and fees, which is less than half of the costs most students incur while in college. Furthermore, the plan could have a negative impact on efforts to ensure equal opportunity in higher education because it may encourage recruiting practices that identify students on the likelihood of future employability, limiting access to our nation’s most underserved students.

Tony Lima doubts the Oregon experiment will work:

[A]ssume there are two types of students.

One type (S) majors in art, English composition, history, and ethnic studies.  The other (H) majors in mathematics, hard science, engineering, or even economics.  While type S individuals may not know it, their major will, on average, result in lower lifetime income than those in group H.  Type S individuals will happily accept Oregon’s offer since three percent of their income over 20 years is a good deal.  Type H individuals, however, are likely to think that three percent of their income is a high price to pay.  They will seek alternative methods of financing their education, paying the standard tuition and fees.  (This proposal could, in fact, revive the private student loan market — but without government intervention.)

Result: Oregon will collect far less than they are predicting.  The percentage of income will rise and the duration of the loan will also increase — to 25 years, then 30 years.

Richard Vedder wants to tweak the proposal:

A more successful approach would vary the percent and length of the payback on the investment with the student prospects for financial success, as measured by probability of, say, successfully completing a degree (as predicted by high school grades and ACT/SAT test scores) and the earnings experience of the student’s major. While less politically popular, this would make the program more financially viable.

Still, long term, this novel approach ducks the real problem: the cost of college is rising faster than earnings of graduates. No financial scheme — no matter how innovative — can overcome the ultimate reality that this is not an economically sustainable long-term trend.

Andrew Norton notes that Australia already has a similar plan in place.

Filmmaker Greg Gilderman composed six evocative profiles of individuals intimately connected to the AIDS crisis in Russia. From his intro:

Russia is dying. Much has been written about the country’s demographic crisis—the declining population, the low birth rate, the life expectancy that puts the country on par with the world’s poorest—but bleak as those figures are, they don’t yet include masses of people dying as a result of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. The World Bank estimates that in 2020, Russia will lose 20,000 people per month to AIDS. Russia has experienced the fastest-spreading HIV/AIDS epidemics in any one country in history, but there remains a lack of effective preventative measures to slow it down—in large measure because the people most affected are also the country’s most reviled.

From the profile of a former heroin addict, featured in the above video:

Irina Zolotova has AIDS; her infant son is HIV-positive.

He shares her bed in a tiny room on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. HIV in Russia is spreading most quickly among the sexual partners of people who became infected in the 1990s, when it seemed every young person was experimenting with injection heroin use. Irina was one of those early heroin users. She is a part of the massive cohort of Russians in their late 30s and early 40s that has transitioned from being HIV-positive to having AIDS.

The irony isn’t lost in Irina that her generation, the most hopeful in Russian history, the one that experienced political and personal freedom in its youth, is becoming housebound and frail in middle age. “It’s difficult to say,” Irina says, “but it really feels like everything has left you, and nothing is left.” …

The Russian government’s most aggressive move in the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic—arguably its only effective move—has been to provide antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women who are living with AIDS. The goal is to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. But the consumption of those drugs is no guarantee that no child of an HIV-positive mother will become infected.

Five more video profiles and a photo gallery here.