Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Pharma’s Fraught Quest for Addiction Medication Pay Dirt

May 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: The post originally appeared on The Fix, a Pacific Standard partner site. In part one of this investigation, The Fix evaluated Vivitrol's effectiveness. Drugs are commercial products, and drug companies make a profit or die. In the late ‘90s, a Boston biotech called Alkermes picked naltrexone, an anti-craving addiction drug, as its first potential product. Alkermes’ specialty was making extended-release, longer-acting versions of existing drugs. Naltrexone was in dire need of this makeover: Alcoholics and opiate addicts were having a hell of a time taking the daily ... Read More

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Here Is Pussy Riot Member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s Parole Hearing Speech. She Was Denied.

April 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Four days ago, a court in the impossibly-named Russian region of Mordovia—recently famous for wooing French actor/tax fugitive Gerard Depardieu—refused parole for Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, better-known as one of three members of Russian punk protest outfit Pussy Riot. Tolokonnikova received a two-year sentence for her participation in a protest in Moscow's main Orthodox church last year. (We spoke at the time to a Russia expert, who gave us some context around the Pussy Riot phenomenon. Read the interview here.) Apparently Tolokonnikova had drafted a statement before the court, but was ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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Russian Adoptions, Financial Skulduggery, and National Pride

December 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Vladimir Putin has said he’ll sign a bill from Russia’s parliament that bars Americans from adopting Russian children; given that it was his United Russia party that spearheaded the ban through the rubber-stamp Duma, his promise is no surprise. While the “fate” of Russian adoptees in America has been a long-running trope in Russia, always kept at a near boil by equal parts national shame, jingoism, and genuine concern for children, the spur for this ban was a U.S. swipe not at kids but some dodgy legislators, cops, and judges. Most Western news sources have focused on the tiff, and ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Great, Russia’s Crops Just Failed

November 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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While everyone else was worrying about hurricanes, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization quietly published its own news of a disaster, the body's November "Food Outlook" report. It seems Russian wheat production has crashed by 30 percent, owing to freakishly severe droughts, the result of an epic heat wave last summer (remember the horrific Russian wildfires a few months ago?). Fine, 2013 will be a slightly bad year to be a baker, so what? The report explains that part of the problem with a tight market for amber waves of grain is that it also hits cereal production—which ... Read More

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What Does Pussy Riot Mean in Russian?

August 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Pussy Riot at Red Square

In the West, and in English, today's verdict in the Pussy Riot trial—guilty of hooliganism to inspire religious hatred, with two years in jail for the band's three members—is about measuring Putin's tolerance for free speech. Inside Russia, the story is a little more complicated. To help understand the events, we turned to Kevin M.F. Platt, a professor of Slavic Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Platt returned three days ago from a year’s residence in St. Petersburg, Russia. Pacific Standard: Where did Pussy Riot come from? Kevin M.F. Platt:They came to my ... Read More

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Pussy Riot and Russia’s Deep State

August 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Like Madonna and Bjork, I've been following the trial of Russia's Pussy Riot, an all-female punk band that staged a protest of Putin's rule in a Russian Orthodox cathedral in February. Tomorrow the judge will decide whether each of the three women get three-year prison sentences. The odds are against Pussy Riot: the Russian New Times reports the judge has decided "guilty" for 179 of the 180 cases that are listed online, according to Radio Free Europe. But in another part of RFE's site, Russia analyst Brian Whitmore has a very interesting analysis about how Putin's display of force reveals that ... Read More

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Two Russian Films Give Differing Views of Motherland

December 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

That adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same” seems to apply in modern-day Russia, and two films currently in release pound that point home. In one, it’s obvious that pop culture has moved far beyond the days of governmentally approved socialist realism art. In the other, the depressing truth is that the former Soviet Union may now be a nominal democracy, but it is as authoritarian and corrupt as ever. Khodorkovsky is director Cyril Tuschi’s exhaustive documentary about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, now languishing in a Siberian prison ... Read More

More like this: Media, Moving Pictures
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Russian Gas and the Cost of Germany’s Energy Revolution

September 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Last week, in front of a crowd of journalists in Vyborg, Russia, Vladimir Putin sat at a desk and inaugurated a major new gas pipeline to Germany with a banal, 21st-century gesture: He clicked something on a computer screen. The Nord Stream pipeline is Russia's first direct gas link to Europe, and, by next year, it should bring enough gas to the EU to generate the energy "of 11 nuclear power plants," Putin boasted. It was a reference to German energy policy, but Angela Merkel wouldn't have smiled. When the Fukushima disaster pushed her to make the quick decision this summer to shutter ... Read More

More like this: Environment, European Dispatch
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Contending With Afghan Heroin (And How Not To)

March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One open secret about the war in Afghanistan is that it has led to a flood of pure, cheap heroin in the world’s cities since 2001. “Despite reported decreases in white heroin production in most source countries,” the U.S. Justice Department admitted in 2006, “increased production in Afghanistan has resulted in an overall increase in worldwide white heroin production.” The production of white (or pure) heroin, in other words, had generally receded around the world — but supplies from war-torn Afghanistan more than picked up the slack. Now, according to some estimates, Afghanistan ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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Stalin’s Revival in Russia

January 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The theme of this blog since the New Year has been Holocaust denial, which always seems to flush far-right deniers out of the bushes. But denial itself is a nonpartisan affair. Russian Communists have a lot on their conscience, too — along with a steep fall from power and grace, like the Nazis — so a movement in the new Russia to revise the nation's history of the gulag and the purge are perhaps not surprising. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili became the poster boy for this movement last fall when he sued a Russian paper for claiming that his grandfather, Josef Stalin, had personally ordered the ... Read More

More like this: BLOGS, European Dispatch
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