Rebecca Schoenkopf grew up with a daddy who was an addict, so she knows first-hand the scourge of drugs. Still, she finds vexing the myriad hypocrisies of the war on drugs and thinks the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's $170 million budget is outrageous. OC Weekly sent Schoenkopf to the Office's panel discussion, "Marijuana & Kids," where she found reasonable looking "experts" who misused statistics and contradicted each other as well as their own press materials in their rush to demonize the evil weed.
After World War I, there were only 3,000 miles of paved roads in the United States. Then came Route 66 -- dubbed the "Mother Road" by the dustbowl Okies heading to California in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath -- which linked Chicago to Los Angeles and ran through eight states. In Illinois Times' annual Route 66 issue, Paul Ingle looks at the Dixie Truckers Home, which opened 75 years ago in McLean, Illinois, just north of the state capital, Springfield. The Dixie's story mirrors the history of the Mother Road and the golden age of the small-time entrepreneur. But on July 31, the Dixie passed into corporate hands, and the pioneering ideas of the oldest truck stop on Route 66 will be absorbed into a franchising plan that will stamp the name cookie-cutter fashion on a variety of businesses on the laser-straight Interstate 55, and the true Dixie will then take its place in history alongside the fabled Route 66.
An ad for the prescription drug Zoloft asks: "Feeling sad? Anxious? Tired?" Zoloft is sold by Pfizer as a treatment for depression and other disorders. It is but one of many print and broadcast advertisements that pitch prescription drugs directly to consumers - a category of ads scrutinized last week at a hearing held by the Food and Drug Administration.
While the rest of America frets over an unemployment rate of 6 percent, unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Lakota Nation, is estimated to be between 60 percent and 80 percent. A century and a half of mistreatment and neglect by the federal government has left Pine Ridge and other Lakota reservations with staggering rates of poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, diabetes, teenage pregnancy, murder, suicide and infant mortality. Some Lakota tell Terje Langeland that their tribes need to wean themselves off government assistance, through education and the formation of small businesses. "We're more or less sitting here expecting handouts," says Homer Whirlwind Soldier, an elder from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. "We need to teach our kids to be self-sufficient."
Zimbabwe-born Charles Mudede has been writing the unique "Police Beat" for five years. According to The Seattle Times, Mudede "visits police stations once a week, checks the log, and, after talking with the officers involved, incorporates whatever he finds most interesting into his column." Director Robinson Devor says his love for Seattle and Mudede's "fantastic" journalism convinced him to make the low-budget independent film: 'Police Beat' particularly caught my eye because it has a poetic tone to crime that other crime logs in other papers do not."
SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Service) members can now access newspaper circulation and readership data directly from SRDS' online newspaper rate listings, a change aimed at facilitating media planning.
