Tuesday, February 14, 2012

News and Events - 07 Feb 2012




07.02.2012 8:04:22

NGO says there has been a rampant compromise with human life

7-FEB-2012

J. VENKATESAN

NEW DELHI : The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Centre on a writ petition alleging that illegal clinical trials of untested drugs were being conducted by pharmaceutical companies on adults, children and even mentally ill persons in various States.

The Indore-based Swasthya Adhikar Manch was the petitioner.

NGO's counsel Sanjay Parikh told the Bench of Justices R.M. Lodha and H.L. Gokhale that in a large number of cases, multinational corporations were using contract research organisations for carrying out clinical trials of unapproved drugs. As a consequence of these trials, 1,727 patients had died from 2007 to 2010.

The Bench sought a response from the government in six weeks.

The petitioner said these trials “are conducted in India either because they are not allowed elsewhere or because they are cost prohibitive in the country of origin. Further, the poor, illiterate and vulnerable sections become subjects of these trials. In conducting them, the doctors, with the sole aim of making money, grossly compromise with ethical medical practices.

The trials are conducted without regard to the consent of the subjects, despite apparent conflicts of interest.”

The NGO said: “The manner in which these trials are conducted is grossly illegal and violative of Article 21 of the Constitution. The inaction of the government in not banning/restricting these trials is violative of Article 14. The issue has been raised in the Rajya Sabha, the Vidhan Sabha of Madhya Pradesh, by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) Madhya Pradesh and in several study reports/magazines/journals/newspapers etc. The government has still not taken any action concerning this extremely important and sensitive issue.

There has been a rampant compromise with human life and the entire episode demonstrates a sordid nexus, which is nothing but a scam.”

The petitioner said that as per the guidelines the subject should know the nature, duration and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it was to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which might possibly come from his participation in the experiment. But it said there was no transparency in these tests and patients were not informed. Hence, it sought a ban on them.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2866585.ece


__________________________________________________________________________________

PIL on ‘illegal’ drug trials: SC notice to govt

7-FEB-2012

NEW DELHI : The Supreme Court on Monday issued notices to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Medical Council of India on a petition seeking judicial intervention into allegations of clinical trials of untested drugs being conducted on patients, mostly poor, without taking their prior “informed” consent.

A PIL taken up before a Bench of Justices R M Lodha and H L Gokhale said these drug tests are prevalent because laws are not being implemented strictly by the government and its agencies, providing pharma companies with a loophole.

“In India, illegal clinical trials are taking place because of lax regulations and their flawed implementation,” it said.

The PIL wants the court to institute an independent panel of experts to regulate the drug trials.

“India is being used for conducting clinical trials by the multinational corporation owing to the reason that the laws are not implemented strictly, because of legal lacunae and because of poverty and other economic reasons the subjects for these trials are easily available,” advocate Sanjay Parekh, appearing for an Indore-based NGO Swasthya Adhikar Manch, argued.

The Medical Council is being made a party as the petition directly questions the ethical stand of medical practitioners who allegedly conduct the tests for pecuniary benefits.

“Doctors often receive benefits from the trial sponsors which sometimes become the main source of their income, creating a glaring conflict of interest. Not only the most essential principle of informed consent is rampantly violated, but the conflict of interest is clearly visible in these clinical trials,” the petition said.

They receive commissions per patient recruited, creating an incentive to enroll more people in the trials, the petition said.

“This leads to a violation of the physician-patient relationship of trust,” the petition added.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

PIL filed against illegal drug trials

6-Feb-2012

Divya Rajagopal

MUMBAI: The Supreme Court of India today admitted a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) regarding the alleged illegal clinical trials that were conducted on adults, children and mentally ill patients across the country. The PIL was triggered by the recent news reports that found illegal and unethical drug trials were conducted on mentally challenged patients at the M G M Medical College in MP.

The PIL filed by NGO Swasthya Adhikar Manch has quoted the report by Economic Offence Wing that found gross irregularities in clinical trials at Madhya Pradesh, where the principal investigator who was also part of the ethics committee violated the guidelines prescribed by the Indian Council for Medical Research. It also pointed out on the inadequate compensation paid to the patients who were affected by drug trials. They petitioners have asked for a strict regulatory framework for Contract Research manufacturing companies or CRO's who are responsible for drug trials.

According to a statement made by Union Minister for Health, Gulam Nabi Azad, in the last three years alone 1727 patients died while participating in a drug trial. The PIL has demanded for a through investigation of the 4000 odd drug trials carried out in the last 5 years. It further demands to examine the present legal set up and guidelines concerning the clinical trials, direct the Govt. of Madhya Pradesh to act on report of EOW, grant of compensation and other reliefs including medical treatment to trial patients adversely affected.

The apex court has send notices to the Ministry of Health, the Government of India, ICMR, Drug Controller of India and the State of Madhya Pradesh, asking them to respond to this PIL.

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06.02.2012 7:20:43
Greg Barns

With the Australian summer come music festivals like the national Big Day Out concerts which finished up in Perth on Sunday.

And with these music festivals come the police and their sniffer dogs, looking for cannabis, party drugs and any other so called 'illicit' substance which festival patrons might have in their pockets or bags. But is this anti-drugs tool a waste of time, resources and money?

Yes is the answer. Because a sniffer dog's capacity to detect drugs is poor and their presence at music festivals has little or no deterrent effect.

This summer police around Australia have used sniffer dogs to arrest and charge around 100 people with possessing drugs.

The chances are that many of those people alleged by police to have used or possessed drugs at music festivals over the past few months have been wrongly accused. This is because sniffer dogs get it wrong. Late last year the New South Wales Greens MP David Shoebridge released figures from that state's police which showed that in a staggering 80 per cent of cases sniffer dogs came up with a false positive - that is, they thought they sniffed drugs but didn't.

As the ABC's Amy Simmons
reported on December 12 last year, Shoebridge's figures show that "New South Wales police officers have carried out 14,102 searches on people as a result of a sniffer dog indicating the presence of an illegal drug. Of those searches, illicit substances were not found on 11,248 occasions - which means four out of five times the dogs are getting it wrong."

Disturbingly, the response of the New South Wales Parliamentary Secretary for Police Geoff Provest was effectively, who cares if four out of five people are innocent.

"Sure there is an element of error but it also creates an element of fear in people with drugs," Provest said.

Well actually Mr Provest it does not create an element of fear. Research carried out by Matthew Dunn and Louisa Degenhardt in 2009 found that "regular ecstasy users do not see detection dogs as an obstacle to their drug use". Monica Barratt, a Melbourne-based researcher in this field notes that patrons of music festivals and clubs have learnt to avoid sniffer dogs by, for example, "storing their drugs internally in the canisters wrapped in condoms".

It is also the case that sniffer dogs' capacity to accurately search for drugs is undermined by their handlers' behaviour. Research conducted by the Department of Neurology at the University of California at Davis, and published early last year, shows that a sniffer dog's accuracy in detecting drugs is undermined by their handler's behaviour. The dogs pick up unconscious cues of their handlers such as when a police officer stares at a particular person, or leads a dog to a particular location, or encourages dogs to display unusual interest in a specific location. In the experiments carried out by the researchers dogs raised 225 alerts, all of them false. As The Economist wryly noted in a report about the study, to "mix metaphors, the dogs were crying 'wolf' at the unconscious behest of their handlers".

The real evil of the use of police sniffer dogs is that they allow for the search of an innocent individual and his possessions, including his house. If a dog wrongly alerts the presence of drugs then the police can frisk, strip search, cavity search and turn a car or house upside down. The Chicago Tribune unmasked this disturbing breach of human rights in a 2011 study which found that police dogs falsely alerted the presence of drugs in 56 per cent of cases that the Tribune examined from three police departments in Chicago. That means, there are large numbers of innocent people who have been subjected to the trauma of a police search.

The message from all this is that music festival goers around Australia will have their rights infringed because police stubbornly refuse to heed the evidence and stop tramping around festivals with their notoriously inaccurate detection tool, the sniffer dog. Why do governments allow this to happen? Surely the millions of dollars that such operations cost could be better used in crime prevention activities that actually produce results.

But the sniffer dogs fiasco is just another example of the moral and policy bankruptcy of the war on drugs. We as a society will do anything, including using false accusations, because we have an obsession with cannabis and party drugs. How about we allow the sale of these drugs to festival patrons through a properly regulated, quality controlled market which the state can tax? Then the sniffer dogs could go and do something useful.

Greg Barns is a barrister, former Liberal Party advisor and national president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance. View his full profile
here.


hbottemiller@foodsafetynews.com (Helena Bottemiller)
07.02.2012 12:59:03
Just days after the reelection of Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou, Washington is stepping up pressure on the administration to back down on its ban on ractopamine, a leanness- and growth-promoting drug used widely in pork and beef production in the United States. Taiwan's zero tolerance policy for the drug, which applies to both domestic production and imports, has become a critical barrier to further liberalizing trade between the two countries.

The ractopamine dispute is front page news in Taiwan. The country's newly sworn in cabinet will discuss the contentious dispute at its first meeting later this week and President Ma has already publicly discussed the issue, according to local media reports.

"We have always maintained the same position as U.S. officials -- that Taiwanese have concerns about U.S. beef imports and the use of ractopamine," said Ma, at a recent press conference.

The opposition party has been especially outspoken against lifting the ban on ractopamine.

"No meat products, whether beef, lamb, pork or chicken, should be allowed into Taiwan if it contains leanness enhancers," said one lawmaker, according to
Focus Taiwan

Taiwan, which is the sixth largest export market for beef and pork, began testing U.S. beef for ractopamine in January 2011 and within days found trace levels of the drug. U.S. food safety officials said the levels found ranged from 2.4 to 4.07 parts per billion (ppb), which falls below both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration standard, of 30 ppb, and the proposed international standard of 10 ppb, but Taiwanese officials pulled the meat from the shelves of grocery stores, including Costco, citing consumer concerns.

In early June, Taiwan rejected nearly 100 tons of frozen U.S. beef after it tested positive for ractopamine at 1.5 ppb. Ten days later, Burger King Taiwan temporarily suspended sales of products containing bacon after the Taiwan Department of Health found U.S.-imported pork products to contain ractopamine and seized the pork before hitting grocery store shelves. Public health officials said they found 3 ppb in fully cooked bacon products. Burger King declined to comment on the matter.  

The issue has strained the U.S.-Taiwan trade relationship. Taiwan's policy on ractopamine is often cited as a primary reason the two countries have tabled bilateral Trade and Investment Framework Agreement talks. U.S. officials maintain that Taiwan's policy is not science-based.

With renewed pressure from Washington to lift the ban, consumers and farmers are threatening protest, according to Focus Taiwan. 

Ractopamine, a drug made by Elanco, a division of Eli Lilly, was first approved by the FDA for pork production 1999, it has since been approved in 25 other countries. The drug has sparked long-running trade conflicts beyond the U.S.-Taiwan hangup.

A recent
msnbc.com report, produced by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, described the deadlock between China, the European Union and the United States at the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets global food safety standards.

"The EU and China, which together produce and consume about 70 percent of the world's pork, have blocked the repeated efforts of U.S. trade officials to get a residue limit European scientists sharply questioned the science backing the drug's safety, and Chinese officials were concerned about higher residues in organ meats, which are consumed in China."

High level controversy at Codex is rare. Though the commission adopts dozens of standards each year by consensus, Codex has been stalled on a residue standard for ractopamine since 2008. 

"U.S. trade officials say China wants to limit competition from U.S. companies, and the EU does not want to risk a public outcry by importing meat raised with growth-promoting drugs, which are illegal there," added the report.

"Setting a Codex standard for ractopamine would strengthen Washington's ability to challenge other countries' meat import bans at the World Trade Organization."
 
While ractopamine use remains controversial abroad, there is little awareness in the United States, even though there have been issues with the drug.   

"Although few Americans outside of the livestock industry have ever heard of ractopamine, the feed additive is controversial. Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of pigs in the United States, it has sickened or killed more of them than any other livestock drug on the market, an investigation of Food and Drug Administration records shows."

The full
Food and Environment Reporting Network story, which was also been
picked up by Taiwan media, can be found
here.

 


07.02.2012 1:59:29
In his best-selling - and uncannily prophetic - 2009 book, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, author Nick Reding compared crystal meth to a "sociocultural cancer." The easy-to-make stimulant can spread with the speed and destructiveness of a disease, but curiously, it can take many years to take hold, like a cell mutation triggered by decades of bad decisions. The subject of Reding's book was a struggling town in Northern Iowa called Oelwein, home to a population of 6,415. A once-wholesome community, Oelwein had fallen on hard times during the past decade, when the collapse of its industries - including many family-run farms - threatened its citizens livelihoods as well as their way of life. In classic post-traumatic stress mode, Oelwein fell victim to the crank epidemic, becoming a midwestern focal point for speed dealers. Reding spent years reporting and writing Methland, which struck a chord in a nation experiencing a painful recession. He pointed out how economic problems had spurred towns like Oelwein to become unlikely centers of the drug trade. A sizable percentage of the town's citizens ended up becoming addicted to meth or pills. Others were engaged in manufacturing or transporting illegal drugs. To mark the recent paperback release of his book, Fix columnist Jeff Deeney talked to Reding about the current state of Oelwein and similar towns across America. Deeney works as a drug counselor in inner-city Philadelphia, where he regularly witnesses what life is like for the dealers and addicts who remain invisible to most of us. Like Reding, he has witnessed first-hand the toll that America's declining economy has taken on the underclass, who have increasingly come to view drugs not just as an escape but also as a rare avenue of opportunity. The two writers talked recently.

info@foodsafetynews.com (Steve Suppan)
06.02.2012 12:59:07
"There's no money for . . ." well you name it. At a time when all manner of government services are being cut, trillions in bailouts to the financial services industry aside, why should food safety be spared? In fact, food safety protections are being systematically slashed across the board--and while this might achieve some short-term savings, the long-term costs could be catastrophic.
On January 9, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would close 259 offices, laboratories and other facilities to save $60 million in its $145 billion budget. These closings include five of the 15 Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) offices. FSIS is responsible for ensuring meat, poultry and egg safety. USDA undersecretary Dr. Elisabeth Hagen said, "There will be no reduction in inspection presence in slaughter and processing facilities and no risk for consumers." Unfortunately, previous inspector cutbacks and FSIS rules to limit the number and detail of inspector reports on industry non-compliance do put consumers at risk, as a recent 36-million pound meat recall attests.
Aside from closing offices, the budget cutting axe has weakened agencies in charge of protecting public health. In November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stated it cannot afford to withdraw the many animal drugs used non-therapeutically in livestock feed to promote growth and prevent disease.  Non-therapeutic use, resulting in meat laced with antibiotic residues, is a factor in increasing human antibiotic resistance. FDA, responding to petitions by medical associations and non-governmental organizations, the first of which were filed in 1999, alleged that the withdrawal of just one drug used in poultry production took five years and $3.3 million, due to industry legal resistance.  Instead, FDA proposes to begin a program with animal drug manufacturers to phase-out some drugs voluntarily. Keep Antibiotics Working (KAW), a coalition to which IATP belongs, wrote to FDA protest that the decision violated FDA's public health mandate. 
In September, USDA announced that budget cuts would curtail or end data collection and reporting on pesticide use on fruits, vegetables and in livestock pens by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). NASS surveys are used to help formulate food and farm worker safety policy. In November, NASS announced cutbacks to its survey of pesticide and fertilizer use on field crops. Non-governmental organizations protested the cutbacks, saying that the public would be forced to rely on pesticide and fertilizer companies for unverified reporting about agricultural chemical use. 
Our thin budgetary margin for error in curtailing the spread of foodborne illness was brought home forcefully by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC (and its state partners, especially in Colorado) took justifiable pride in tracing back a Listeria monocytogenes infection to the packing facility of a melon farm in Colorado just 10 days after the initial hospital report of listeriosis, which had led to 29 deaths by the end of November.
Thomas Frieden, the CDC director, noted in a recent speech that his agency had absorbed the biggest budget cuts in its history in 2010 and 2011. (The U.S. House of Representatives is promising further cuts to the 2012 budget.) Furthermore, "there are 44,000 fewer people working at the state and local level because of the fiscal crisis" in the public health professions.  As a result, in Colorado, college students used their own cell phones and a CDC questionnaire to interview those afflicted with listeriosis. The students helped to trace back to a single farm the source of the Listeria, doing work that had previously been done by public health officials.  "How many more cuts to food safety?" -- before students equipped with cell phones and a CDC questionnaire cannot trace back the source of foodborne illness before many more than 29 people die?  It should not take a spike in death or illness from foodborne disease to shock us into recognition that food safety is not cheap, nor can food safety be self-regulated among competing companies.  Systematic failure to regulate the financial services industry resulted in ongoing bailouts that have forced FDA and other agencies to claim that rules to protect public health are too expensive, despite plenty of evidence to show the economic and human suffering costs of food safety failures.
--------------------------
Dr. Steve Suppan has been a policy analyst at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) since 1994.


06.02.2012 14:19:18

Andrew Hall, 29, of Beresford Street, Oldham, has been charged with supplying drugs and being concerned in the supply of class A drugs.

A 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has been charged with supplying drugs.


07.02.2012 19:05:14


Nassau, Bahamas - In keeping with the Commissioner of Police Policing Plan, “Tackling Crime”, officers of the Central Division continues to remove illegal drugs from the streets of New Providence. On Monday 7th February, 2012 sometime around 7:00 pm officers of the Central Division acting on information went to a bushy area in Fox Hill where they discovered a large quantity of suspected marijuana. The drugs weighed fifteen (15) pounds and have an estimated street value of fifteen thousand ($15,000.00) dollars. No one was taken into custody. Active police investigations continue.

A 15 year old teen male is in police custody after being found in possession of an imitation firearm...


07.02.2012 22:21:18



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06.02.2012 21:20:00
?Montana legislator Diane Sands has come under investigation by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, and she's not sure why. But Sands said she suspects the investigation is because she advocates liberalizing the marijuana laws.Sands told the Colorado Independent's Scot Kersgaard that she has no involvement in medical marijuana other than her work in the Montana Legislature. But the Missoula Democrat has been outspoken in advocating for reducing penalties for marijuana, and also advocating for the federal delisting of cannabis so that the issue can be decided by individual states."Because of the federal supremacy clause, federal law always trumps state law," Sands said. "We fought a civil war over this. There is nothing a state can do to make marijuana legal, or even to make medical marijuana legal, but there is a process to change that at the federal level. Now that so many states have made medical marijuana legal, the federal government should remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controllled Substances Act, and let the states regulate marijuana as they see fit."
Continue reading "Pro-Marijuana Legislator In Montana Targeted By DEA" >

07.02.2012 6:40:57

A man wanted in Greece for his alleged role in a drug ring has lost a legal bid to stop his extradition from Australia.


06.02.2012 23:02:18



Colorado marijuana activists have about two weeks to collect an additional 2,500 signatures to get a proposal legalizing possession of the drug for recreational use on the ballot after the secretary of state said Friday that tens of thousands of signatures turned in were invalid.

Organizers with the Campaign To Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol said they plan to redouble efforts to get their measure before voters in November.

read more

http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/content/2012/02/06/Marijuana-Proposal-Fails-Make-Colorado-Ballots-After-Activists-Miss-Signature-Thr#comments

07.02.2012 19:48:42

HBO's Terence Winter loves to dazzle viewers with plots that take both surprising and truthful turns. "Storyteller" should be Winter's middle name, and as executive producer, head writer, and creator of
Boardwalk Empire
, his commitment to narrative integrity fuels the show's success.

Winter has reason to feel proud because the accolades keep coming. Two weeks ago,
Boardwalk
won the 2012 SAG Award for Best Ensemble, a welcome follow-up to the 2011 Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a New Series and the 2011 Golden Globe for Best Television Series Drama.
Boardwalk's
second season ended this past December 11 with a closing shot that electrified the fans, but Winter and his creative team had already been in their writers' room since September, devising plot lines for season three. The producer is also collaborating on a new series with
Boardwalk's
executive producer, Martin Scorsese, and rock icon, Mick Jagger. He's so busy these days, he admits that his secret desire is to "read a book that's not connected to work."

Winter, known to colleagues as Terry, is a canny Brooklyn native who takes nothing for granted, not even his success, although he broke into TV in the 90s without a single industry contact. After a few years of writing sitcoms, he found his dream job in 1999 working for producer David Chase of
The Sopranos
. Over the next seven years, Winter wrote (or co-wrote) 25
Sopranos
episodes, earning four Emmys and three Writers Guild Awards, a track record that led to his current high-profile role at HBO. The following is Part One of our recent telephone interview in which Winter riffs on
Boardwalk Empire
and
The Sopranos
, and his next project.


2012-02-04-tw4500x3332.jpg


As you're developing season three of
Boardwalk Empire
, what's the most difficult challenge of keeping the show fresh?

Well, where do I begin? We ended in the late summer of 1921 and now it's New Year's Eve 1922, so we're jumping ahead sixteen months. The world has changed in a lot of ways and so have our characters, and we're having to reintroduce everyone. Obviously, season two ended with a very dramatic moment with Nucky Thompson (played by Steve Buscemi) killing Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) who in many ways was like a son. Season two was the wrap-up of many story lines that we've set up since the pilot when Jimmy told Nucky, 'The world is changing with Prohibition and you can't be a half gangster anymore.' So one of the biggest shifts is that we've seen Nucky evolving from a 'half gangster' into a 'full gangster' -- and it's been a long arc to get us there.

Is Nucky's killing of Jimmy his Don Giovanni moment, when he crosses the line?

Yes. I never really thought of it that way, but that's a good analogy.

I'm concerned about Nucky's wife Margaret who, as the season ended, was signing over Nucky's prime land to the Catholic Church. Will Nucky kill her, too?

All I'll say is, she's still alive! (Laughs) It was a daring act, but Margaret (Kelly Macdonald) is a daring person, and I think she felt very duped by Nucky. He poured his heart out to her about how she meant everything to him, so she married him and didn't testify against him, thus saving his life. But when she learned about Jim Neary's suicide she knew Nucky was complicit in his death; she also knew it was a lie when Nucky told her Jimmy Darmody had joined the Army again. She decided, 'The hell with this!' So signing the deed to the church was like writing a check to God and saying, 'I'm paid in full.' And now they can move on with their lives, though she's made Nucky pay. That land is the price for Margaret getting Nucky off the hook.

You seem to have an ability to take amoral people with a lot of flaws and make them sympathetic.

It's challenging in a way, but if you depict anyone with all the colors of human emotion and show those moments -- with their families, with their children -- the worst of us have elements of real humanity...Up until
The Godfather
, I don't think we ever went home with a gangster before, and
The Sopranos
took that to another level. You saw Tony and his kids and they became very relatable, and it sort of screws with the audience's head. On one hand, they think this guy's despicable, but they also see that he has the same kind of fights with his teenage daughter that everyone has. Yet every time the audience starts to relate to these characters and thinks, 'He's a fun, cuddly kind of guy I'd like to have a beer with,' he beats someone to death with a shoe, and the audience's reaction is always, 'You fooled me! You made me feel something, and then you made me feel something very different.'

We went through something similar after
Boardwalk's
season two finale. During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star. So people just got settled in and the question became, 'How's he [Jimmy] going to get out of this at the last minute?' And at the last minute, it played out exactly the way they didn't think it would happen which is that Nucky did kill Jimmy. And if you watch the episode, it's all there. Jimmy Darmody knows he's going to be killed and this is what he feels he deserves. But the audience couldn't accept the idea that we broke the conventions of television and killed off the second lead, even though, according to the code of gangsters, Nucky couldn't let that transgression [Jimmy's betrayal] go unpunished.

I gather you're especially happy with that plot device. Why?

Viewers are so savvy now, and there's so much chat about everything on the internet. People talk about the plots and what happened, and they see your tricks a mile away. So the fact that we could shock people was very satisfying for me.

Are you already mapping out future seasons so you know where the show is heading, or are you allowing things to develop slowly?

It's a little of both. We really have to take it one season at a time, hoping that the audience wants to continue to see this series and that HBO wants to continue to produce it. I want to take a very optimistic view and assume we'll be on for many seasons to come, so ultimately I have a couple of ideas of how it would end. But until we get there I'm not ready to etch that in stone -- or even edge it onto paper with an ink-jet printer.

How will the Prohibition era boost the show's drama during season three?

We're moving into 1923 when the Twenties really became the 'Roaring Twenties.' The economy began to boom and this became the Flapper Era. The parallels between then and now are obvious because that period mirrors the world we live in today. Prohibition, for instance, is the model for the illegal drug business; it's what made millionaires out of gangsters. People were buying political favors, and big business controlled everything. But from a more practical standpoint, there haven't been many shows about Prohibition since
The Untouchables
and the era was ripe to be explored. It's appealing to do it on HBO where you can show things honestly.

You based the character on a real person, Nucky Johnson, but you changed his name to give yourself more leeway, right?

I didn't want to be married to the real guy's life story. I realize we have certain real characters such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, and if you don't know their history, it's easy to find on the internet. So in order to stay ahead of the audience I knew we needed to fictionalize as many characters as possible, and I wanted to take our Nucky into places that the real Nucky Johnson might never have gone -- emotionally, violently. I also didn't want to sully the real person's reputation in case he has family. That wouldn't be fair.

Are writers' rooms the best way to produce great television?

I've heard of shows that don't have rooms and it sounds kind of weird. First of all, the experience is really fun. You get to sit around a table with five, eight, or ten really funny, smart people and talk about stories all day, and it's a great way to work if the room is functioning well. The meetings can last for weeks on end -- for
The Sopranos
, for instance, we'd sit for six weeks, eight or nine hours straight, and even eat lunch together, and talk all day asking, 'What if this? What if that?' and then we'd start generating story ideas. For
Boardwalk Empire
season three, we spent two months last fall, and then we split up and everyone went off to write their episodes, and as of now we already have the bulk of season three written.

Is it true that you, Martin Scorsese, and Mick Jagger have already met with HBO executives to discuss a new hour-long series?

Yeah, our work is ongoing. I've written the pilot and am currently developing what will be season one, and hopefully it will happen during 2012-2013. It's set in New York in the early Seventies at the dawn of the hip-hop, punk, and disco era. It centers around a record-company executive who's going through a personal crisis and takes off from there. Years ago, Mick and Marty had collaborated on the documentary,
Shine a Light
, and they wanted to do a project, and since I'd written for Marty on
Boardwalk
, they brought me in and we kicked around a lot of ideas. Mick will be an integral part of the project; he's a tremendous resource.

Do you think that series TV can rival movies as an art form?

I look at the feature films that come out, and by and large, 85 percent of them are things I wouldn't in a million years sit down and watch. The more interesting storytelling is happening on television, by a long shot. One of the nicest things I ever read about our show was that a critic felt
Boardwalk Empire
could be the beginning of the blur between television and cinema, because the production values are so high and the storytelling is so compelling.

How do you feel about reality TV?

I've stumbled on some reality TV that I think is interesting, such as
Rock of Love
with Bret Michaels, or
Project Runway
, or Danny Bonaduce's show from a few years ago, I
Know My Kid's a Star
. It has its place. TV is a level playing field, and you're competing for eyeballs. So look, does
Jersey Shore
make me sad for humanity that this is what's passing for entertainment? Well, this is a business and if that's what millions of people want to watch, I can't fault someone for producing it. And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sucked in by some shows, such as anything about repairing a house, or people playing poker. I'll stop on that, and for fifteen minutes I'm in a trance. So I can't really criticize it because I'm part of that audience sometimes -- mostly not -- but I get it.

Author's note: Part Two of my interview, coming next week, depicts Terry Winter's move from New York to Hollywood as he morphed from an unhappy lawyer into a successful TV writer-producer.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-dormady-eisenberg/terence-winter-boardwalk-empire_b_1254667.html#comments

06.02.2012 20:47:20
?Three Pacific Grove, California residents were in jail on drug charges Thursday after the Santa Cruz Anti-Crime Team raided an Airport Boulevard warehouse, which was adjacent to a state Department of Justice crime lab in Watsonville, according to sheriff's deputies.Law enforcement also searched a home in Pacific Grove after finding an illegal marijuana operation growing 480 plants inside the warehouse, reports Cathy Kelly at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Continue reading "Warehouse Full Of Growing Marijuana Found Next To Crime Lab" >

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