Dennis Quaid is here in Santa Fe to film Legion. We were horrified to learn what happened to his twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, who were last November accidentally given 1,000 times the common dosage of the blood thinner, Heparin, already under scrutiny because of contamination presumably in the manufacturing process in China; according to the New York Times, this process involves grinding up pig intestines in family kitchens/factories that seem ordinary for China, but which would seem monstrously filthy in most nations.

Cedars of Sinai Hospital officials denied that any of the victims suffered any ill effects. (These Quaid twins were conceived with a surrogate mother and are wonderful little blue-eyed bundles of joy already.)

Cedars Chief Medical Officer, Michael Langberg confirmed that three patients received vials containing 10,000 units per milliliter of heparin, instead of vials with a concentration of 10 units per milliliter. The patients were receiving intravenous medications and the heparin was used to flush the catheters to prevent clotting.

Once the hospital staff realized the error, they tested to measure the patients' blood clotting function. One test was normal, but the other two were given another drug, protamine sulfate, that reverses the effects of heparin. Further tests "indicated no adverse effects from the higher concentration of heparin," Langberg said. Heparin is used to treat and prevent blood clots in the veins or arteries and comes in different concentrations; too much can be deadly.

Last year, three premature infants at an Indiana hospital died after a pharmacy technician mistakenly stocked the medicine cabinet with heparin vials containing a dose 1,000 times stronger than what the babies were supposed to receive. Three others also suffered overdoses but survived.

Quaid and his wife, Kimberley Buffington, are the biological parents of the twins, who were born Nov. 8 to a surrogate mother."God has definitely blessed us," the couple said in a statement announcing their birth. Quaid, 53, has a 15-year-old son, Jack Henry Quaid, from his marriage to Meg Ryan. His credits include "Great Balls of Fire!" "Any Given Sunday" "The Big Easy" and "Far From Heaven."

This nightmarish story is of great concern to me, given my focus on consumer protection. Two week old children should not be administered such risky drugs in the first place. Quaid and his wife are correct to be suing the manufacturer because of the shoddy labeling on each vial, although the $50,000 they are asking for seems like chump change for what sort of terror as parents they had to have gone through; Quaid told me that he is very keen on getting them to standardize their labeling all over the world, so this won't happen again. Baxter Health Care stated that: "this is not a product issue. The issue here is about improper use of a product."

In a prepared statement, the hospital said a pharmacy technician took the heparin from the pharmacy's supply without having a second technician verify the drug's concentration, as hospital policy requires. Then, when the heparin was delivered to a satellite pharmacy that serves the pediatrics unit, a different technician there did not verify the concentration, as required. Finally, the nurses who administered the heparin to the patients violated policy by neglecting to verify that it was the correct medication and dose beforehand, the hospital said.

Quaid's suit argues that the heparin was "unreasonably dangerous" as it was packaged and sold because both the small and large dosage vials had labels with blue backgrounds when the vials should have been completely distinguishable (by) size and shape. He can wait up to eight years to sue Cedars Sinai, which is warranted, given the developmental damage that might have occurred with the heparin overdose, which hopefully will not materialize during the next seven ½ years.

Quaid told me that out of concern that he and his wife Kimberley will be addressing a Congressional hearing in the near future on this matter, and is even more concerned that the United States Supreme Court does not extend its immunity blanket to drug manufacturers in a decision expected this summer. "The Supremes" have already given blanket immunity to medical device manufacturers, and of course extending this to Big Pharma becomes an obscene and brazen gift from the Bushie Neocons-doing-business-as-the-US Supreme Court to some of the biggest corporate monsters in America.

Mike Adams of Newstarget.com, one of the sharpest and most astute alternative health commentators in the USA, decried this situation in a great column and recent post as no less than the veritable end of our nation as we know it, if the Supremes hand the "get out of being sued" card to Big Pharma. Let's hope that Mr Quaid and his wife can add momentum and some celebrity impact to this discussion when they appear before Congress, and let's hope that some of the venerable Supreme Court Justices might just happen to be listening!

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev