by Alison Bass | Jul 28, 2015 | human trafficking, prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, trafficking, Uncategorized
Sex workers like to work together because it’s safer for them. A co-worker who knows where they’re going and who they’re with can intervene if necessary. Now, a new Canadian study has found that working together or what the researchers call...
by Alison Bass | Jul 8, 2015 | prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
Law enforcement officials have been unable to shut down Backpage, a website for personals and sex work ads, by legal means. So they have resorted to a more indirect approach: asking credit card companies to deny transactions by sex workers seeking to pay for ads on...
by Alison Bass | Jun 16, 2015 | pimps, prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
At the beginning of June, northern Ireland became the only part of the United Kingdom to outlaw the purchase of sex, adopting what is known as the “Nordic model” because Sweden was the first country to criminalize the buyers of sex. The Nordic model has...
by Alison Bass | Jun 3, 2015 | pimps, prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, underage prostitution, websites
Two weeks ago, Eric Omuro, a California man who operated myRedbook.com, a website for personal ads, was convicted of facilitating prostitution and sentenced to 13 months in prison. Omuro and a coworker had been arrested last June and myRedbook shut down, much to the...
by Alison Bass | May 7, 2015 | prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work
Even some of the most respected news outlets in the United States are getting it wrong. In a recent Talk of the Town in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch referred to the men who are smuggling migrants from Africa to Europe as traffickers instead of what they really...
by Alison Bass | Nov 8, 2014 | prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
Nick Kristof is at it again. On Sunday, the New York Times columnist wrote yet another column about sex trafficking that was filled with inaccuracies and misleading statements. He was writing about a new lawsuit filed by two young women who say they were trafficked as...
by Alison Bass | Oct 6, 2014 | prostitution, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
For the past four years, I have been working on a new book that is a departure from my previous book, Side Effects. Tentatively titled Getting Screwed: Sex Work and the Law, the new book weaves the true stories of sex workers (past and present) together with the...
by Alison Bass | Jun 10, 2013 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, FDA, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, scientific misconduct
I reviewed two books now circulating about the DSM and the current controversy over the DSM-5 for The American Scholar — see review here. The two books are The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg, and Saving Normal: An Insider’s...
by Alison Bass | Feb 13, 2013 | antidepressants, drug marketing, FDA, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, university industry collaboration
I went to see Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Side Effects, with anticipation and dread. The movie, after all, carries the same name as my 2008 book, Side Effects and from what I could tell of the trailers, its plot seemed loosely based on the issue I explore in my...
by Alison Bass | Nov 26, 2012 | biotech industry, drug marketing, medical devices, opiods, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, public health, Uncategorized
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...
