You'd like to believe that the drugs prescribed to you and your loved ones are of the highest quality, that they've been tested and retested in clinical trials conducted by an elite corps of physicians with the highest level of competence and integrity, and that federal overseers are vigilant in protecting your best interests.

Unfortunately, that's not necessarily so, according to a New York Times investigation. Focusing on Minnesota, the paper found more than 100 doctors who had been disciplined or criticized by a medical board but who, nonetheless, had been paid by drug companies to conduct clinical trials or to promote certain medicines. At least two of those doctors had been convicted of criminal fraud. Altogether, drugmakers were found to have paid $1.7 million from 1997 to 2005 to 103 doctors who had been cited by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice.

The Times put Minnesota under the microscope because only it and Vermont make public their records on the financial arrangements between doctors and drugmakers, but it's clear that the industry's use of questionable doctors for research and marketing runs nationwide. Some drugmakers told the Times that they rely on the doctors themselves to report disciplinary or criminal cases. The Food and Drug Administration said it needed to strengthen regulations on clinical trials and the doctors who conduct them. That seems obvious.

The Times zeroed in on a Minneapolis psychiatrist, Dr. Faruk Abuzzahab, who, it said, continues to collect money for testing drugs on patients despite having been cited a decade ago by the state medical board for reckless and willful disregard for the welfare of 46 patients, five of whom died. One of those patients jumped to her death from a bridge in 1994 after Abuzzahab stopped giving her an antidepressant so she could enter a clinical trial.

What's offered is a narrow view of a wider problem: a pharmaceutical industry that lavishes more and more money on doctors to push more and more products onto a consumer market that may already be excessively medicated. The American Medical Association reported that nearly one in six Minnesota physicians took money from drug manufacturers in 2005 for speaking, consulting and research.

The conflict comes, of course, in the potential for doctors to place the best interests of patients below their financial arrangements with drug companies. That possibility gets even more troubling when a doctor's ethics have already been questioned.

The FDA should keep a closer eye on the records of doctors hired by drug companies. The public deserves a higher level of confidence that prescription drugs have been tested by doctors of the highest integrity and motive.

— Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

It is the ugliest of ironies: U.S. senators elected to uphold open government are instead placing "secret holds" on bills aimed at improving access to government documents.This double-whammy of dark dealings has occurred twice in the last month. Yet now, mercifully, there is light. At least one of the phantom senators has been exposed and, with luck, another soon will be.The first bit of radiant sunshine involves Senate Bill 849, which would require the federal government to speed up its response to federal documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill in April, and an identical one had already passed the House. It was headed toward the president's desk, but then the bill ran into a senator who placed an anonymous hold on the bill.Who was this masked senator?Until last week, it was hard to know. The U.S. Senate operates under many archaic rules; one of them allows senators to place an anonymous hold on any bill they don't like.Advocates for open government decided to unmask this lone tyrant. The Society of Professional Journalists launched an Internet campaign, with members querying all 50 senators in an effort to get one to fess up. Finally last week, the staff of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., acknowledged that their boss had placed the hold on the bill. Kyl, like the Justice Department, objects to a provision in the bill that would penalize federal agencies that don't act quickly on document requests.The unmasking of Kyl strikes a blow against closed-door deliberations on bills, but another phantom still lurks in the shadows. For more than a month, a lone Republican senator has kept a hold on Senate Bill 233, a bill that would require U.S. Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically, as do presidential candidates and other members of Congress.Who is this phantom? We still don't know. Until he or she is exposed and dealt with, any Republican senator could be the culprit.<B><I>— Sacramento Bee</I></B>