Malpractice insurance rates have created a crisis in American medicine. Rates are rising and reimbursements are not keeping pace. In response, physicians in the states hardest hit by this crisis are feeling compelled to take political action, and the current action of choice seems to be physician strikes. While the malpractice insurance crisis is acknowledged to be severe, does it justify the e...

May 2011, Vol. 101, No. 5 SAMJ Cannabis legal debacle To the Editor: The editorial in the SAMJ1 questioning whether it is time to decriminalise drugs refers. The Central Drug Authority (CDA) produced the South African Position Paper on Cannabis in 2004; however, the document was never made public or released.2 The Position Paper builds a case for prohibition on a ‘public health’ basis and osten...

Constraints are an important aspect of role-based access control (RBAC). Although the importance of constraints in RBAC has been recognized for a long time, they have not received much attention. In this paper we classify RBAC constraints into two major classes called prohibition constraints and obligation constraints. To specify these constraints, we utilize a formal language, named RCL2000. I...

National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33)--the "noble experiment"--was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that p...

Brazilian public policy on drugs has been permeated by two diametrically opposing approaches: one focusing on prohibition and the other on non- prohibition. Similarly, there have been two opposing approaches to mental healthcare, one centered on hospitalization and the other psychosocial care and development. In the context of these different paradigms, this article presents an analysis of twen...