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About Me
Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and MIT's Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University.
Category Archives: public health
One solution to prescription drug overdoses: make Oyxcontin and similar drugs safer
Share In my previous blogs about West Virginia’s shockingly high rate of prescription drug overdoses — the Mountain State has the second highest rate of overdoses in the nation — I focused on “the culture of disability” that created this … Continue reading
Posted in biotech industry, drug marketing, medical devices, opiods, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, public health, Uncategorized
Tagged drug formularies, Medicare, Oxycontin, pharmaceutical companies, prescription drug overdoses, Vicodin, West Virginia, West Virginia University
3 Comments
West Virginia’s prescription drug problem: a gift from the coal mining industry?
Share Ever heard of the term “culture of disability?” It was first coined by Judith Greenwood, who published a paper in the ’80s about how the coal mining industry in West Virginia, because the jobs were so difficult and dangerous, … Continue reading
Posted in coal mining industry, disability, opiods, overdoses, prescription drug abuse, public health
Tagged coal mining, culture of disability, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, prescription drug abuse, prescription drug overdoses, public health problem, theft, West Virginia, West Virginia University
5 Comments
Falsely inflated statistics about sex trafficking in the U.S. make bad policy and laws
Share Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes? I thought of his famous quote when my husband passed along a link he had … Continue reading
Why West Virginia has second highest rate of prescription drug overdoses in the nation
Share Did you know that West Virginia has the second highest rate of deaths from prescription drug overdoses in the country? I didn’t, until I moved to the Mountain State to live and work and became curious as to what … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, drug marketing, health care costs, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug overdoes, public health
Tagged CDC, Charleston Gazette, drug commercials, Massachusetts, Oxycontin, prescription drug overdoses, universal health care, West Virginia, West Virginia University
5 Comments
Why shutting down Backpage won’t curb sex trafficking or underage prostitution
Share A coalition of folks opposed to sex trafficking paraded last week in front of the Village Voice headquarters in Cooper Square, urging the shutdown of its classified website Backpage on the grounds that its online ads foster the trafficking … Continue reading
Posted in prostitution, public health, sex trafficking
Tagged Back page, HIV/AIDS, Netherlands, prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sexual violence, Village Voice
1 Comment
Fast-moving bill in Congress would weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and devices
Share Congress is moving quickly to pass a bill that would authorize higher industry fees for the FDA in exchange for speeding up the approval of some drugs and medical devices and eliminating restrictions on financial conflicts of interest among … Continue reading
Sex offender laws are creating public health problems, not solving them, research shows
Share Reading Russell Banks’ fascinating new novel, The Lost Memory of Skin, has inspired me to blog about a public health problem that strays from my usual mandate. Banks’ book is about a 21-year-old man who was convicted of having … Continue reading