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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2012
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MEDICAL
Prescription drug shortage affects students
VIRAJ AMIN
vamin@kansan.com
Adderall, which is prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), has been difficult for students at the University of Kansas to get. There has been a shortage in Kansas, and across the United States.
The shortage has caused frustration among students. Whitney Beck, a senior from Lenexa, said the lack of Adderall has made it difficult for her to focus in school. Whitney was prescribed Adderall
her freshman year of college.
"It makes studying a lot more difficult. It definitely takes me longer to study or do homework when I am out of Adderall," Beck said.
Pharmacies such at CVS, Walgreens and Target have been in short supply since the beginning of the fall semester. Beck said that she starts calling pharmacies a week before her prescription runs out in order to make sure she can get it refilled. Recently, Beck has gone to local pharmacies around Lawrence to get her refill.
Cathy Thrasher, Pharmacist
in-Charge at Watkins Memorial Health Center, said the shortage stemmed from a few problems. Adderall is classified as a C2 drug, which is the most restricted level of prescription. Drug manufacturers cannot produce C2 medications whenever they want. They need DEA approval first, and the DEA has strict quota restrictions.
Thrasher said that more students have been coming into Watkins this year to fill their Adderall prescriptions, and that they try to help students as much as possible.
"We do the best we can to try
not to turn away students. If a student comes in with a prescription for 10 milligrams of Adderrall and all we have is 20, then we contact the doctor to see if we can prescribe them half tablets of 20 milligrums" Thrasher said.
President Obama issued an executive order in October
2011 directing the FDA and the Department of justice to take action to help prevent further shortages. The Obama Administration said they would increase staffing resources for the FDA's Drug Shortage Program. There will also be early notification of potential shortages by manufacturers. Furthermore, the Obama Administration released a report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation which assesses the underlying factors that lead to drug shortages. Finally they will
include an FDA report on its role in monitoring, preventing and responding to these shortages.
Thrasher says the problem hasn't been resolved yet, but steps are being taken in the right direction.
"There has been loosening up. It's not as tight as last semester. The manufacturers are starting to catch up to the demand," she said.
Edited by Jeff Karr
POLITICS
New bill that requires proof of citizenship advances in legislature
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOPEKA — Secretary of State Kris Kobach's bill to require some potential voters to prove U.S. citizenship ahead of this year's presidential election received first-round approval Wednesday in the state House, though disagreements surfaced among fellow Republicans.
The measure would impose the proof-of-citizenship requirement on June 15, more than six months ahead of schedule and in time for the normal surge of first-time registrations before a presidential contest. Legislators enacted a proof-of-citizenship requirement last year that wouldn't take effect until Jan. 1, 2013.
The House advanced the bill on a voice vote, setting up a final vote Thursday to determine whether the bill goes to the Senate.
Kobach, a Republican and former law professor who helped draft tough laws in Alabama and Arizona designed
to crack down on illegal immigration, contends the requirement will keep non-citizens from registering and is part of a larger effort to combat election fraud. Critics
residents hunt down birth certificates or other documents.
"You've heard the other facts, and I'm not going into them, but the practicalities for each nursing home should weigh in on what we do," Brookens said.
One issue has been a $40 million upgrade of the computer system for issuing driver's licenses to comply with a federal law that requires Kansas to verify citizenship before renewing them. The goal is to allow the state Division of Vehicles to transfer electronic copies of birth certificates and other documents to election officials. The division's officials say the system should be ready before June 15.
During a morning GOP caucus meeting, Republican Rep. Caryn Tyson, of Parker, noted that county election officials already are dealing with a law that took effect this year to require voters to show photo identification at the polls. During the House's debate, Rep. Bob Brookens, a Marion Republican, said the rule could be a burden for nursing homes, which may have to help new
note reports of non-citizens voting in Kansas remain rare and say the proof-of-citizenship rule will prevent poor, minority and elderly Kansans from registering.
Kobach's bill had appeared likely to pass the House, where Republicans have a large majority and most share Kobach's conservative views. But a few GOP legislators joined persistent Democratic critics on Wednesday in wondering whether state officials, election officials and Kansans involved in registration efforts are ready to have the rule in place this year.
Some lawmakers also question whether Kobach's office can do enough voter education this year. He is planning a $300,000 campaign and said it will blanket the state with broadcast and print ads.
"If we don't get this proof-of-citizenship requirement in, in June, we are going to have more people that are not legally qualified to vote in Kansas on the rolls."
Kobach and his allies contend fears that Kansas is unprepared are unfounded. House
JOHN RUBIN
REPRESENTATIVE
members
supporting
his bill say it
makes sense
to have the
proof-of-cit-
izement rule
in place earlier
because
a b o u t
150,000 new
voters are
expected to register between July and mid-October, when registration closes.
The secretary of state's office said it found 32 non-citizens on registration rolls last year.
"If we don't get this proof-of-citizenship requirement in, in June, we are going to have more people that are not legally qualified to vote in Kansas on the rolls," said Rep. John Rubin, a Shawnee Republican. "It is extremely difficult to find and remove the aliens on the voter rolls once they get on."
But Rep. Ann Mah, a Topeka Democrat who voted for the final version of last year's legislation, said imposing the requirement early will hamper voter registration drives. She predicted that it won't be easy for many Kansans to find their birth certificates and other documents.
"How many tens of thousands are just going to give up?" she said. "The bill is bad on many levels."
New York police watch Muslim groups in effort to combat terrorist recruiting
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK—The mayor faced off with the president of Yale University on Tuesday over an effort by the city's police department to monitor Muslim student groups for any signs that their members harbored terrorist sympathies.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Associated Press revealed over the weekend that in recent years the New York Police Department has kept close watch on Muslim student associations across the Northeast. The effort included daily tracking of student websites and blogs, monitoring who was speaking to the groups and sending an undercover officer on a whitewater rafting trip with students from the City College of New York.
Yale President Richard Levin was among a number of academics who condemned the effort in a statement Monday, while Rutgers University and leaders of student Muslim groups elsewhere called for investigations into the monitoring
I am writing to state, in the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States," Levin wrote.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, dismissed those criticisms as baseless.
"I don't know why keeping the country safe is antithetical to the values of Yale," he said.
On Wednesday, Feb. 15, people walk on the University at Buffalo campus in Buffalo, N.Y. The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the University at Buffalo, the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned.
He said it was "ridiculous" to argue that there was anything wrong with officers keeping an eye on websites that are available to the general public.
"Of course we're going to look at anything that's publicly available in the public domain," he said. "We have an obligation to do so, and it is to protect the very things that let Yale survive."
Asked by a reporter if he thought it was a "step too far" to send undercover investigators to accompany students on rafting vacations, Bloomberg said: "No. We have to keep this country safe."
"It's very cute to go and blame everybody and say we should stay away from anything that smacks of intelligence gathering," he said. "The job of our law enforcement is to make sure that they prevent things. And you only do that by being proactive."
Bloomberg, an independent, added that he believed that police officers had respected people's privacy and obeyed the law.
The campus monitoring program was part of a broad effort by the NYPD, initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, to try to spot any burgeoning terror cells in the U.S. before they had a chance to act. The NYPD monitoring of college campuses included schools far beyond the city limits.
Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in upstate Buffalo. The undercover agent who attended the City College rafting trip recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed. Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Officers kept tabs on student
An NYPD spokesman, Paul Browne, explained the effort as an attempt to learn more about student organizations that could be ripe for infiltration by terror recruiters. He cited 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, or MSAs.
Levin said Yale's police department did not participate in any monitoring by the NYPD and was unaware of it.
groups at Yale; Columbia; The University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; Rutgers; New York University; Clarkson University; the State University of New York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.
He acknowledged that police monitored student websites and collected publicly available information but said law-abiding students have nothing to fear.
"Students who advertised events or sent emails about regular events should not be worried about a terrorism file being kept on them,"
Syracuse University does "not approve of, or support, any surveillance or investigation of student groups based solely on ethnicity, religion or political viewpoint," said Kevin Quinn, senior vice president for public affairs at Syracuse.
Columbia University "would obviously be concerned about anything that could chill our essential values of academic freedom or intrude on student privacy," spokesman Robert Hornsby said.
"An MSA is simply a group of Muslim students; just because a terrorist happened to be member of an MSA does not mean that MSAs, which nationally represents hundreds of thousands of Muslim students, have any connection to criminal activity," Hamid said. "Law enforcement should pursue actual leads, not imaginary ones based on Islamophobia."
The University of Buffalo said in a statement that it "does not conduct
A Muslim student leader at Yale, Faisal Hamid, challenged the NYPD's justification.
he said. "NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe might be involved in unlawful activities."
this kind of surveillance, and, if asked, UB would not voluntarily cooperate with such a request. As a public university, UB strongly supports the values of freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, and a reasonable expectation of privacy."
The University of Pennsylvania contacted the NYPD and received assurances that none of its students is being monitored, a spokesman said.
The Connecticut chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for officials to investigate to determine the extent of the monitoring and how to prevent it from happening again.
"They're just going out and casting a wide net around a whole community, so they're criminalizing in a way a whole community based on their religion," said Mongi Dhaouadi, director of CAIR in Connecticut.
Rutgers University, based in New Jersey, called for the NYPD to investigate its own activities. The Muslim Student Association at Rutgers called the monitoring a violation of civil rights.
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