Just say no to your pharmacist. From Harper’s “Index” (December 1986): “Percentage of drug-related deaths caused by prescription drugs: 70.”
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An ounce of prevention . . . “In some countries, the regulatory philosophy seems more like that of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration than that of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” says the U. of I’s Clark Bullard, chair of the Central Midwest Compact Commission on Low-Level Radioactive Wastes, in CBE Environmental Review (Summer 1986). “That is, the burden is on the developer of a new technology to prove that it is safe before the technology can go on the market, instead of the burden lying with the government to prove the technology is unsafe and force its removal from the market. The former approach has saved the United States in the past from such tragedies as thalidomide, while the latter has left us with the legacies of DDT, leaded gasoline, and countless superfund sites. During the next few years, Illinois will have to decide what kind of regulatory approach it wishes to implement for radioactive waste.”
“A city within a city” is how Timothy Samuelson describes the area around 35th and State in the early years of this century Chicago’s “Black Metropolis” (Historic Illinois, December 1986). A growing black population gave black entrepreneurs the opportunity to serve the city’s burgeoning “Black Belt” from Van Buren to 39th Street along State. The Binga Bank, the Overton-Hygienic Manufacturing Company, the Chicago Bee newspaper, and the Knights of Pythias were among the organizations that erected their own buildings there, making 35th and State “the Wall Street of the black community.” It hit the skids following the Depression, the slowing of black immigration from the south, and the discovery by white investors that everyone’s money is green.
There’s room for more women and blacks at Washburne Trade School without imposing any controversial new guidelines on the apprenticeship programs there, suggests David Moberg in The Neighborhood Works (December 1986). “Richard DeVries, a carpenter who for several years worked with the 18th Street [Development Corporation] pre-apprentice training, notes that roughly 122 slots of a typical yearly enrollment of 400 carpenters are committed to referral programs run by the Board of Education, Job Corps, and two community centers. But last year, he said, only 22 students were referred.”
