Report of Increasing Overdose Deaths that include Acetyl Fentanyl in Multiple Counties of the Southwestern Region of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 2015–2016

Acetyl fentanyl is a Schedule I controlled synthetic opioid that is becoming an increasingly detected “designer drug.” Routine drug screening procedures in local forensic toxicology laboratories identified a total of 41 overdose deaths associated with acetyl fentanyl within multiple counties of the southwestern region of the state of Pennsylvania. The range, median, mean, and standard deviation of blood acetyl fentanyl concentrations for these 41 cases were 0.13–2100 ng/mL, 11 ng/mL, 169.3 ng/mL, and 405.3 ng/mL, respectively. Thirty‐six individuals (88%) had a confirmed history of substance abuse, and all but one case (96%) were ruled multiple drug toxicities. This report characterizes this localized trend of overdose deaths associated with acetyl fentanyl and provides further evidence supporting an alarmingly concentrated opiate and opioid epidemic of both traditional and novel drugs within this region of the United States.     

“Legality with a Vengeance”: Reclaiming Distribution for Sociolegal Studies

The law and society community has argued for decades for an expansive understanding of what counts as “law.” But a content analysis of articles published in the Law & Society Review from its 1966 founding to the present finds that since the 1970s, the law and society community has focused its attention on laws in which the state regulates behavior, and largely ignored laws in which the state distributes resources, goods, and services. Why did socio‐legal scholars avoid studying how laws determine access to such things as health, wealth, housing, education, and food? We find that socio‐legal scholarship has always used “law on the books” as a starting point for analyses (often to identify departures in “law in action”) without ever offering a programmatic vision for how law might ameliorate economic inequality. As a result, when social welfare laws on the books began disappearing, socio‐legal scholarship drifted away from studying law's role in creating, sustaining, and reinforcing economic inequality. We argue that socio‐legal scholarship offers a wide range of analytical tools that could make important contributions to our understanding of social welfare provision.     

User review portability: Why and how?

User reviews of products on the e-commerce platforms are a critical determinant of inter-platform competition, as a large number of consumers base their purchasing choices on the related reviews written by other users. The network effects between the number of reviews and new users give a sustainable competitive advantage to incumbent platforms. While business literature has recognised the commercial value of the user reviews, legal scholarship has paid little attention to levelling the playing field between incumbents and new e-commerce platforms by exploring the portability of user reviews. This paper bridges this gap. We explore the possibility of porting user reviews through two legal mechanisms—first, traditional Intellectual Property law; second, the new Right to Data Portability (RtDP) as enshrined in the GDPR. After recognising the limitations of these mechanisms in enabling the portability of reviews, we suggest that pure data aggregators, such as Personal Information Management Services (PIMS), are best placed to make user reviews available to multiple platforms.     

Trauma-Informed Resource Parent Training and the Impact on Knowledge Acquisition,Parenting Self-Efficacy,and Child Behavior Outcomes: A Pilot of the Resource Parent Curriculum Parent Management Training (RPC+)

This pilot study illustrates one state’s development, implementation, and outcomes of a trauma-informed curriculum called the Resource Parent Curriculum + CARE (RPC+). The RPC+ is an intensive co-trained curriculum intended to be trauma-informed and skills-based focused on ameliorating child behavior problems that are frequently the source of parenting stress and placement instability. This article will provide a literature review of child and caregiver needs, describe the training curriculum, and present the results from the pilot implementation of the curriculum. Preliminary findings from this study show participants of the RPC+ show positive changes pre- to post-training on a number of dimensions that have been correlated with placement stability for children including knowledge of trauma, parenting self-efficacy, and child behavior outcomes.     

Journey history reconstruction from the soils and sediments on footwear: An empirical approach

The value of environmental evidence for reconstructing journey histories has significant potential given the high transferability of sediments and the interaction of footwear with the ground. The importance of empirical evidence bases to underpin the collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation of forensic trace materials is increasingly acknowledged. This paper presents two experimental studies designed to address the transfer and persistence of sediments on the soles of footwear in forensically relevant scenarios, by means of quartz grain surface texture analysis, a technique which has been demonstrated to be able to distinguish between samples of mixed provenance.It was identified that there is a consistent trend of transfer and persistence of sediments from hypothetical pre-, syn- and post-crime event locations across the sole of the shoe, with sediments from ‘older’ locations likely to be retained in small proportions. Furthermore, the arch of the shoe (the area of lowest foot pressure distribution) typically (but not exclusively) retained the highest proportion of grain types from previous locations including the crime scene. A lack of chronological layering of the retained sediments was observed indicating that techniques that can identify the components of mixed provenance samples are important for analysing footwear sediment samples. It was also identified that the type of footwear appeared to have an influence on what particles were retained, with high relief soles that incorporate recessed areas being more likely to retain sediments transferred from ‘older’ locations from the journey history. In addition, the inners of footwear were found to retain sediments from multiple locations from the journey history that are less susceptible to differential loss in comparison to the outer sole. These findings provide important data that can form the basis for the effective collection, analysis and interpretation of sediments recovered from both the outer soles and inners of footwear, building on the findings of previously published studies. These data offer insights that enable inferences to be made about mixed source sediments that are identified on footwear in casework, and provide the beginnings of an empirical basis for assessing the significance of such sediment particles for a specific forensic reconstruction.     

A case study in public child welfare: county-level practices that address racial disparity in foster care placement

Racial disproportionality has been a longstanding issue within child welfare. The continued overrepresentation of black children in the foster care system is troubling. The authors of this article conducted a case study of two counties in New York State that have steadily decreased the number of black children in foster care in an effort to identify what aspects of their child welfare practice impacted the decline. The case study employed document analysis, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with child removal decision makers. Utilizing a grounded theory approach to content organization and analysis, several themes emerged as noticeable factors. Some of the most salient themes included preventive services and resources, community collaborations, case practice development, family meetings, workforce diversity, the court system, and, the most unique, blind removal meetings. The themes found in this study present promising practices to assist in decreasing the racial disparity in child welfare removal decisions.     

Enhanced elution of sperm from cotton swabs via enzymatic digestion for rape kit analysis

This report describes development of a method for enhanced cell elution from cotton swabs. The method exploits an enzyme mixture for digestion of the cotton to remove intact cells, and can be utilized in conjunction with or to circumvent conventional differential extraction (DE). Samples digested with Aspergillus niger cellulase yielded sperm cell recoveries (18+/-3.5%) similar to conventional DE buffer (23+/-7.8%) while providing intact epithelial cells. Storage time affected the concentration of enzyme required for optimal sperm cell recovery, with longer times requiring increased cellulase concentrations. Cellulase from A. niger yielded a twofold enhancement in sperm cell elution over buffer alone, and preliminary testing of higher activity cellulases from Trichoderma reesei and Trichoderma viride showed even greater enhancement. These results indicate that cellulose-digesting enzymes enhance the release of sperm and epithelial cells from a cotton swab over buffer alone, providing for efficient DNA analysis.     

Gender and International Relations: A Global Perspective and Issues for the Caribbean

In this paper we discuss the relatively recent integration of feminist thinking in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that the theoretical foundations of International Relations are still primarily based on traditional male-female dichotomies, particularly that of separate public and private spheres. By extension, women are largely excluded from state power and decision making. The state is itself gendered. The growing recognition of the links between the global economy and gender forces us to engage with International Relations in foreign and international policy. In this article we look at feminist interpretations of three main International Relations areas: international security, human rights, and international political economy and their implications for gender policies in the Caribbean. We also look at the contributions of Caribbean women to the international feminist agenda and suggest a research agenda for ongoing feminist theorizing in the discipline of International Relations.