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A 21-year-old Canadian woman — who said she thought she was going on a “shopping spree” — sobbed inconsolably in U.S. District Court in Seattle yesterday afternoon when a federal prosecutor announced that she and her partner face 20 years behind bars if found guilty of smuggling about 167,000 tablets of the club drug Ecstasy across the border.

That seizure, which amounts to millions of dollars in the illegal drug, underscores the growing use of Washington by Canadian smugglers who employ the Interstate 5 corridor to move Ecstasy through Seattle and across the United States.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recorded steady growth since 2002 in Ecstasy seizures along the Northwest border with Canada with the numbers spiking sharply this year. In 2003, 47,686 doses were seized. In 2004, the number rose to 258,026. And in just the first four months of this year, 465,220 doses were intercepted at the border.

Methamphetamine from Mexico and now Ecstasy from Canada.

ICE certainly have their hands full.

Dr. Lorne Lavine over at the Digital Dentist tells the story of competing PMS (Practice Management Software) software venders utilizing Apple’s Mac platform:

In a previous post, I raved about two new Mac products for dental offices that I saw at the CDA, idental and MacPracticeDDS. Based on how these companies have been behaving on DentalTown, I would have trouble recommending either of them. The story reads like a soap opera: bashing each other’s products, misrepresentations of the number of users, people with obvious financial connections to the companies pretending to be users of the software, espionage at the CDA meeting…the list goes on. Both of these companies should realize that they look foolish airing their dirty laundry and should spend more time making sure they have usable products and happy customers, which, based on the responses on Dentaltown, are both in short supply.

Dr. Lorne, what do you expect at Dental Town?

A good number of dentists shun the place due to the obvious bias of product recommendations and the demeanor of the dentists posting there.

Lorne, stick to blogging. The future is in the blogosphere and not anonymous bulletin boards, like Dental Town.

Flap travelled a few summers ago to Kelowna, British Columbia to meet up with a friend who happened to play the same computer game: Counter-Strike. It is a beautiful city with picturesque views and seemingly very friendly people.

However, after reading this piece I suppose Flap was lucky to not need a physician or hospital. Here we have an another example of Canada’s Socialized single payor healthcare system.

A Kelowna man who drove an unconscious man to the parking lot of his local hospital couldn’t believe his ears when medical staff told him to call 911 and wait for an ambulance.

Ralph Vogel and his wife had been letting a homeless man sleep in their motor home, but became alarmed when they couldn’t wake him Wednesday morning. So Vogel powered up the motor home and drove the man to the Kelowna General Hospital. He ran inside and told medical staff that a man was either dying or dead in his motor home. When staff told him to call 911 and wait for an ambulance, he told them that the man was just outside in the parking lot. He was still told to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was much too late. The man had already been dead for several hours.

The hospital now admits that staff made a mistake by refusing to treat the man in the parking lot, just in case there was a chance he could still be saved.

This isn’t the first time Kelowna General Hospital staff have refused to treat someone just outside their doors. Three years ago, a woman who collapsed just metres away from the emergency room doors also had to wait for an ambulance.

Alison Paine of the Interior Health Authority says policy changes have been made since that embarrassing incident. But she said the policy’s conditions for helping someone in need of emergency care were not fulfilled in this case. “It is not only [hospital] policy, but Interior Health policy, that if somebody is in need of emergency care in the parking lot, that we go out and help them,” Paine said. “But obviously something has gone wrong here.”

Flap wonders what a tourist from the USA would have to endure if he or she had a medical problem.

In some areas of Canada their residents can just lately purchase private medical insurance without going to jail.

This example of a single payor socialized healthcare system system should remind us what USA medicine could become if Hillary Clinton and her minions are able to “reform” American private healthcare.

As for Flap, he won’t be visiting Canada anytime soon.