It’s awkward. How entangled do universities want to get with businesses like Millennium?

A federal grand jury in Boston is investigating Millennium Laboratories of San Diego, a fast-growing private company selling urine drug testing services to pain clinics across the United States.

The company not only is under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of health care fraud but also for intimidating former employees, one who was portrayed in a slideshow at a company meeting as a corpse in a body bag…. [It is also accused of] getting doctors to order unnecessary urine tests [-- the testing, amid an epidemic of pain pill use, reveals whether patients are abusing the drugs --] and charging excessive fees to Medicare and private insurers.

I mean, nothing wrong with industry money, but you do want to keep an eye on the particular representatives from industry offering it.

Millennium sales tactics [it is alleged] included a chart showing doctors how much they could boost their own income by increasing the number of urine drug tests they ordered. For instance, a $15 payment to test for one drug could balloon to about $800,000 a year if 20 people a day were tested and each urine sample was tested for 11 drugs, the chart said.

It is a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Keep prescribing the pain pills — the medical profession almost has the entire American population on them — and then, concerned at the shocking escalation in their abuse, make your patients pay for urine tests. It’s funny to think about how America’s hundreds of thousands of pill mills will be giving the test to make sure their customers are taking their Oxy and Roxy. If you’re in the urine testing biz, like Millennium, you get them coming and going, as it were.

So, you know, a very becoming business altogether, and if you’re Duke or Washington you might want to keep an eye on the Justice Department proceedings and ask if you want to continue whitewashing the reputation of these outfits.

Richard Friedman’s “call for caution” on the use of anti-psychotic drugs in the American population comes a bit late in the day. Professors like Joseph Biederman remain at places like Harvard.

… Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.

Friedman doesn’t even talk about the grotesque over-prescription of these drugs for children.

The professors putting together the upcoming edition of the DSM are also doing their bit, pathologizing moods like “mild emotional discomfort” so that everyone will feel comfortable medicating them with powerful anti-psychotics.

… is the motto of many American universities, whether diploma mills or for-profits. Their admissions requirements are can we get you to come and stay long enough for us to collect federal money?

The latest recruiting practices lawsuit is against San Francisco’s Academy of Art .

“The suit claims there were no other legitimate criteria on which the recruiters were judged” beyond hurling bodies forward.

… will serve as a
temporary motto
for Columbia University.

Its actual motto is
IN LUMINE TUO
VIDEBIMUS LUMEN.

But Columbia has just sued a
biotech company, Illumina,
for mucho money, because they
say Illumina stole some of
their gene sequencing patents.

So instead of IN THY LIGHT
SHALL WE SEE THE LIGHT, it’s
ILLUMINA, WE SUE YOU.

… used since its inception as an ATM by administrators, has scored its first guilty plea. A vice-president stole tens of thousands of dollars. But he’s doing okay:

“You go to bed with it, you wake up with it. You have good days and bad days, but it’s always there,” he said. “Thank God for medication and professionals [helping me] through all of this and my family.”

… Tiffany’s.

… and the best visual, in response to the Bin Laden porn stash story.

Best title so far: Lawrence of a Labia.

Y’all know about T. Boone and how he runs Oklahoma State, right?

Well, it’s the same thing with the Koch boys and Florida State; only instead of choosing coaches and shit, they’re running the econ department! Staffing it and everything.

Smaller FSU donors get to write syllabi. BB&T bank “funds a course on ethics and economics in which Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is required reading.”

Controlling interest in courses and departments continues to be available at FSU, but you should probably act fast to get your first choice.

… is I guess what you’d call it if a public university were under pressure from a state legislature to sell a very valuable Ezra Pound manuscript in its possession… But what do you call it when it’s a Pollock?

Proceeds from the sale [of Jackson Pollock's Mural, valued at $140 million,] would go into a trust fund that would provide scholarships to University of Iowa undergraduate art majors from Iowa.

Can this painting really be worth $140 million???

An art professor comments:

“It will never happen because it would be a terrible disgrace to the state and people of Iowa,” he said. “What I think is that we should sell Kinnick [football stadium] to Illinois or sell the State Capitol. That would be much more reasonable.”

… expect a new category of university stories: Physicians at teaching hospitals arrested for various “pill mill” schemes.

Pill mills have so far mainly operated out of storefronts, and have been run by doctors without a university affiliation. But as states begin to crack down on these easily-identified businesses, expect more stories like this one, from Jersey Shore University Medical Center.

… Many of these [outsourced] trials are conducted for the benefit of international drug companies, at unacceptable cost to the local population; … trial subjects could be put at risk; … subjects often have not given their informed consent to participate; … they might be provided care that is of lower quality than if they had been recruited for a trial in the West; … injuries during a trial might not be investigated thoroughly, and … those injured may not receive treatment of the highest standard, or even compensation; and … drugs that are tested are often too expensive for people who need them in India.

The kidney minyan has already alerted us to desperate people around the world induced to sell this or that organ; this journalist from Himal South Asian describes The India Advantage.

India is now prominently on the radar screen of the international pharmaceutical industry in terms of clinical trials, given its vast population of potential trial subjects…

An increasing number of reports are coming to light of unethical and illegal practices that exploit people’s social and economic vulnerability, subject them to serious risks without their knowledge and consent, and do not even assure them of access to the drugs developed from the trials. Certain types of trials depend on paid volunteers who desperately need money. In Gujarat, unemployed diamond workers and migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar get paid between INR 5000 and INR 20,000 to take part in bioequivalence trials – sums large enough for them to put money over personal safety. Indeed, trial participants may be both financially and socially vulnerable.

… The pharmaceutical industry depends on constantly getting new drugs into the market. New drugs include new uses for old drugs (a cancer drug that can also be used for infertility?) or ‘improved’ or ‘me-too’ versions of older drugs (all those antacids, blood-pressure and cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-depressants or antibiotics). These drugs must be tested on human beings before they can go into the market. Permission has to be obtained, patients have to be recruited, trials carried out and the results filed – all at top speed, because time is money.

… Clinical trials in developing countries depend not only on physical infrastructure – hospitals and laboratories – and trained human power. They also depend on drug companies getting access to bodies on which they can test their drugs. So, [Contract Research Organizations] in India market Indian bodies. In a 2006 advertisement on their website (which has since been removed), a CRO named Igate advertised the ‘India advantage’ as “40 million asthmatics, about 34 million diabetics, 8-10 million people HIV positive, 8 million epileptic patients, 3 million cancer patients.”

… The reports of people dying in trials are likely to be merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg…

University of New Mexico police say 52-year-old Joseph Gutierrez had been stealing bikes on the university’s campus for at least a year and a half. He now sits in jail, and bikes on the UNM campus are a little more safe.

… [A] student … witnessed his bike being stolen by Gutierrez and saw him set down a coffee cup. Police used that cup to link Gutierrez through DNA…