11/04/04

LC041104

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Police are cracking down on an unusual group of suspects:
unlicensed doctors and dentists.

Theresa Lane>> I've seen everything from somebody operating in
their garage next to motorcycles, filthy, smutty floors, having
water lines that go from the irrigation of a patient's mouth to
the water line going from a toilet into the outside to be
drained.

Val>> And then, a diva, an aging super hero and a charming cad.
Our FilmWeek critics find out "what's it all about".

Next on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Imagine buying prescription medicine from a clerk at a
toy store or a shoe store. Well, that's not an imaginary
situation. There exists in Los Angeles County a dangerous
network of illegal pharmacies and unlicensed medical personnel.
Law enforcement and health officials have joined forces to find
and arrest these illegal doctors, dentists and pharmacists.
NewsHour correspondent, Jeffrey Kaye, shows us the work of this
unique taskforce.

Jeffrey Kaye>> They readied their weapons, strapped on
bulletproof vests and went over tactics. Law enforcement
agents, many under cover, who gathered in a parking lot in Long
Beach, California last July weren't preparing to bust a murder
suspect or a drug dealer. Their target was a dentist or, more
specifically, a man suspected of practicing unlicensed dentistry
in his apartment.

>> "I told him I had a toothache. I told him my right lower
molar was hurting. He said, come on in, I'll check it out."

Jeffrey Kaye>> Minutes after their briefing, the agents
accompanied by personnel from the Los Angeles County Health
Department arrived at the suspect's door and went in.

[Film Clip]

Jeffrey Kaye>> What they found inside was a bedroom converted
into a makeshift dental clinic, a pretty well-equipped one at
that, said Theresa Lane, a supervising investigator with the
State of California's Dental Board.

Theresa Lane>> He can do endodontic surgery. He has the dental
high-speed hand pieces, he has the water irrigation. I mean, he
can do fillings, he can do root canals. He has all the
materials here to do anything he wants to do and be mobile.

Jeffrey Kaye>> This backroom dental clinic wasn't nearly as bad
as some that Lane has seen in her thirteen years as an
investigator, as she told producer Saul Gonzalez.

Theresa Lane>> I've seen everything from somebody operating in
their garage next to motorcycles, filthy, smutty floors, having
water lines that go from the irrigation of a patient's mouth for
the water line going from a toilet into the outside to be
drained. I've seen that. We've seen instruments that are
absolutely not sterile. They're wiped off with alcohol and, of
course, if you're going to inject something that's dirty or
putting something in it, it's just going to build the bacteria
and cause even death.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Authorities say illegal dentistry is only one
facet of a growing public healthcare and law enforcement
challenge. In largely immigrant neighborhoods, a vast medical
underworld offers customers everything from illicit
pharmaceuticals to medical care to plastic surgery.

Daniel Hancz>> From a health perspective, it's a very
significant problem. We have people that are unlicensed, and
they're oftentimes untrained, providing medical care to
residents of Los Angeles County.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Daniel Hancz is a pharmacist as well as an
investigator with the five year old Los Angeles County unit
called H.A.L.T. That stands for the Health Authority Law
Enforcement Taskforce. It comprises healthcare and law
enforcement personnel and investigates and cracks down on
illegal medical activities whose consequences can be lethal.

Daniel Hancz>> I think you need to look at the reason the
taskforce was started. Specifically one case that involved an
eighteen month old child, Celine Sagoro Rios, who was treated at
a toy store and she was given injections and she was reassured
by the clerk of the facility that the child would be fine after
receiving the injection. The problem was that the baby had some
significant medical problems and it was delay in care combined
with the medication that was administered that resulted in the
patient's death.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Much of H.A.L.T.'s work involves investigating
the distribution of illicit pharmaceuticals by unlicensed
medical practitioners.

Daniel Hancz>> We get patients that are getting the wrong drug.
They're getting the wrong dose. They're having delay in medical
care. They're oftentimes receiving drugs that are sub-potent or
super-potent. They haven't been stored properly. Drugs that
have been banned by the FDA or they're gray-market, potentially
counterfeit drugs. So there's a wide gamut of health-related
issues that do come into play.

Jeffrey Kaye>> In a storage room in the basement of the Los
Angeles County Health Department, Hancz showed off just some of
the pharmaceuticals his unit had seized in recent raids,
medication that was sold in swap meets, private residences, even
in back rooms of retail stores.

Daniel Hancz>> Here we have antibiotics potentially that could
cause a severe allergic reaction, sulfadiazine --

Jeffrey Kaye>> -- are these counterfeit or are they the real
thing?

Daniel Hancz>> Well, we don't know. We haven't tested them to
be counterfeit, but these are drugs that are not approved by the
FDA and they're not authorized to be sold here in the United
States.

Jeffrey Kaye>> And people went to the shoe store to get drugs?

Daniel Hancz>> People went to the shoe store to obtain their
pharmaceutical needs, yes.

Jeffrey Kaye>> To alert the public to the dangers of illegal
medicines, the health department sends out social workers such
as Connie Sarinara to schools and community centers.

Connie Sarinara>> "Our children die because we take them to
places that are not safe. Why? Because we like to think that
we know best, but we don't. It's better to go to a public
clinic or a doctor with a license so you can stay safe and stay
healthy."

Jeffrey Kaye>> Sarinara points out the dangers of using
prescription medication and untrained clinicians, but many
immigrants who lack insurance and are often afraid to go to
public hospitals say they have little alternatives.

Dina Moran>> Insurance is very expensive and a lot of us can't
afford it, so we look for solutions that are cheaper. That's
why we go looking for medicine without prescriptions.

[Film Clip]

Jeffrey Kaye>> The man targeted in the raid on the bedroom
dental clinic said he was providing an affordable alternative.
Juan Jose Loza defended his illegal practice by saying he'd been
a licensed dentist in his native Mexico and was offering a
service to people in need.

Juan Jose Loza>> The people here, the majority of the people
here, just don't have insurance. They don't have the money to
go to the clinics. The clinics can be very expensive, so that's
why they seek out our services. We charge very little. Ninety
to ninety-five percent of the people out there just don't have
the insurance or the money to pay.

Theresa Lane>> I think it's a rationalization. I don't think
there's much to that. He's not providing anything to the
community. How could he? He has unsterile conditions. He
doesn't have an autoclave. He doesn't properly sterilize his
instruments. I think he's putting the public at risk, greatly
at risk. I don't think he's doing any service whatsoever.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Social worker Sarinara says, if poor people need
medical care, they can get it. She suggests they go to county
facilities or private clinics which treat the uninsured.

Connie Sarinara>> We do have the facilities, our private
partnership with the private facilities the county has, so
people can go there too. The county is given a certain amount
of money so that people can have access to this, maybe low-cost
or maybe free, depending on their money coming in.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Since it began, Los Angeles County's H.A.L.T.
team has investigated nearly nine hundred cases of illicit
medical services. They're limited only by time and resources.
For all their successes, they say the problem of underground
medicine is growing as healthcare costs and the number of
uninsured rise.

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Val>> He's one of those rare people who can bridge the gap
between science and the rest of us. His name is David Suzuki
and you probably know him as host of the long-running series,
"The Nature of Things". Well, now he's taken a look at the
environment and history through the life of a single tree. I
met David Suzuki at the beautiful Barnsdall Art Park in
Hollywood where he told me how he came to be fascinated by trees
and how trees actually communicate with each other. David
Suzuki, your training is in zoology and genetics and you didn't
even like plants as a child, so why did you write a book about a
tree?

David Suzuki>> (Laughter) That's true. I'm guilty, I'm
guilty. I mean, trees I always took for granted. They were in
the background, you know, so as a kid, you climb them or take a
hatchet and chop off a branch without thinking about it.
Really, I've fought for, you know, protecting forests and
stopping clear-cutting, but always a forest's habitat is a place
for other creatures and never really thought much about a tree.
A lot of my friends are saying, well, you're a zoologist, you're
an animal guy. What do you know about a tree? Well, not very
much.

But it was about ten years ago sitting down looking at a tree on
my property that's actually drawn in there, I realized, you
know, that tree is growing at a weird angle, like it's growing
straight out and then it curves up like that. You realize that
it must have started off like this, then the ground shifted and
it got tilted over, so it started to go like that. So there's
some history there. Then I realized, you know, it's tough being
a tree. The seed lands and it can't pick up and say, "This is a
crummy piece of land. I've got to go somewhere where there's
lots of goodies." (laughter). It's stuck. You know, I'm sure
you've seen trees growing out of rocks and you wonder how the
heck did they ever do that.

Val>> Phenomenal. In the middle of the Grand Canyon, in some
little crack, there'll be a tree.

David Suzuki>> Exactly. And when that seed lands, that's where
it's got to make a living. It's got to get all the water, it's
got to get everything it needs to grow into a tree that might be
three hundred feet tall. It'll live for a thousand years and
it's got to get all of the energy it needs to power that growth
from the sun. You start thinking about it. That is really
quite formidable. And when the thing starts growing, it can't
wipe off an insect or an animal that wants to eat it. It's just
got to stand there and take it. How does it do that?

Well, I mean, they've got a whole repertoire of arsenals to
defend themselves. So when an insect tries to bore into it,
they immediately produce a whole raft of complex ring molecules
that are insecticides. They're toxic to the insect. But the
interesting thing is that those molecules are often very
volatile. They evaporate into the air and they circulate
through the forest and trees around it detect those ring
molecules and they go, "My God, Jack's under attack." They
start making their own insecticides.

Val>> You never think of trees communicating with each other,
but they do. Even in their root system.

David Suzuki>> Exactly, exactly. And in the soil as well. I
mean, when they come into contact with another tree, they don't
kind of back off and say, gee, that is that tree's territory.
They actually intertwine and they may actually penetrate the
roots of another tree even of a different species. There is a
symbiosis, a mutual exchange of material. If you sterilize the
soil so there's no fungus in there, the tree is just this
spindly thing because it needs the fungus and the fungus can't
grow without the sugar made by the tree. So these are called
mycorrhizal fungi. They are a special kind of fungus. Every
tree has these fungi in them and needs them in order to grow.
It's an amazing relationship. You know, we just call it dirt,
but soil is this complex community of organisms that are all
helping each other out.

Val>> You also talk about fire and how some trees actually
depend on fire to perpetuate themselves.

David Suzuki>> Yes. I love the opening scene, in fact, in the
book which starts with a forest fire and it's quite a remarkable
experience. You see how the fire grows and spreads through the
forest and it is an absolutely integral part of the ecology of
the forest. That is, many of the plants and trees have evolved
to need the fire that takes place. There are some trees like
Lodge-Pole Pines, for example, that can't release their seeds
until they're actually burned and the cones reach a certain
temperature, so they depend on that.

A lot of the litter, the stuff that dies and grows up on the
forest floor, is material that the fire clears out and returns
nutrients to the soil so that other organisms can grow up. We
come along and we say, well, a fire is going to endanger the
trees and we need those trees, so we suppress. Well, we
suppress an ecologically important thing. Smokey the Bear has
got a lot to account for here.

Val>> So what's the most threatening behavior or attitude that
human beings have toward trees that could wipe them out?

David Suzuki>> We think that we're so clever, we know what
we're doing and that we can manage the whole system so that we
try to impose a human notion of order and structure onto a
forest ecosystem. That is driven by an economic agenda. You
see, the problem we face is that, whenever the economy turns
down, we then say, okay, well, we'll take more out of nature.

In British Columbia, the economy has suffered and so our
government says, okay, cut more trees. Even though we're
cutting way more trees than the forest can sustain, we just
demand that the trees be cut down and we think we're smart
enough. Well, we'll plant trees that can grow faster. So we
kind of think that we can put nature onto steroids and get them
really pumped up and have a generation faster and faster.
That's the arrogance of the human mind that thinks we're so
smart, we're in control, but we're not. That, I think, is the
greatest danger.

It's not just the forests. When the fish are in trouble or our
economy is in trouble, we go in and say catch more fish,
increase the catch and we'll just genetically engineer fish so
they grow faster. We say that, well, the economy is in trouble.
We've got to pump out more greenhouse gases and forget all those
emission controls that we put on. They cost too much.

We always ask nature to pay the price for our economic downturn
and we forget that we're animals and we still depend on nature
for clean air, clean water, clean soil that gives us our food,
clean energy that comes from the sun. Nature gives us that, not
the human economy. So I think we've got pumped up and we're so
smart, we're in control and that's a very dangerous thing.

Val>> And in the end, we both lose.

David Suzuki>> Of course, of course. You know, we've got to be
much more humble and realize how dependent we remain on the
natural world.

Val>> David Suzuki, thank you for spending some time with us
and thank you for another wonderful book, "Tree: A Life Story".

David Suzuki>> Thanks for having me.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm
Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is a remake
of a very popular film from the 1960's. "Alfie" of that era
starred Michael Caine. The new version of "Alfie" stars Jude
Law.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by film critics Jean
Oppenheimer of New Times and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com.
Well, Henry, what did you think of the new version of "Alfie"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, what do you think of Jude Law? That's
the important question to ask yourself before you go to this
movie because this is the supreme vehicle for an actor. This
movie is almost entirely direct-addressed from Jude Law to the
camera and he plays what should be kind of an unpleasant
character, like a compulsive womanizer who just goes from woman
to woman, you know, unapologetically. So in order to bring that
off, unless you're doing some kind of neurotic drama, you have
to have all the charm in the world. I think Jude Law does, but
I think he has so much charm that it hurts the picture.

This is a remake of a forty year old picture with Michael Caine.
Caine had that charm, but he could also leave some of the
ugliness in at the bottom. Even though you liked him, you
understood that you could be a little ambivalent about the
character. That's not the case here. The movie expects you to
fall in love with Jude Law.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Jean Oppenheimer?

Jean Oppenheimer>> Well, I don't think the problem is Jude Law
because I think he's actually terrific in it and I do think it's
a slightly different character, as Henry was saying, to the one
that Michael Caine portrayed. The problem for me is that you
just can't take something that is so of its time and place as
"Alfie" was and basically just take the same type of story, the
same type of character, with a few modifications, and plop it,
you know, forty years ahead in a contemporary time period.
That, I think, is what didn't work.

Also, I agree with Henry what he says about the Jude Law
character as somebody that you like. Well, in a way, you almost
like him more. You don't want to think of anything negative
about him. But I felt that, in the original "Alfie", you don't
like Michael Caine, but you get a real feel for the women. The
women are developed in it. In this one, the women aren't and
they're just passed over as quickly as he is.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film would seem to be almost a sure
thing at the box office. It's from Pixar with the longest
string of hits of any production entity in Hollywood. "The
Incredibles" is the new Pixar animated feature directed by Brad
Bird.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Jean Oppenheimer, what did you think of Brad
Bird and Pixar's "The Incredibles"?

Jean Oppenheimer>> Oh, boy, is Disney going to miss Pixar. I
thought it was really a wonderfully, wonderfully entertaining
movie. It's a kind of animated "Spy Kids" in that it looks at
this family of superheroes, the mom, the dad, the son, the
daughter and actually this little baby who's not there for the
whole time, and they have to band together to sort of save the
world and to do it all together. Apparently, it turns out that
fifteen years ago every superhero in the country was forced to
retire after the public got fed up with the financial costs
incurred when they did these fantastic rescues.

The film has a wonderful story and wonderful characters. I
think this is why Pixar excels so much. It's not really just
the animation, which is very good. It's the story and it's the
characters. Brad Bird is the same writer-director who did "The
Iron Giant" and it has that same heart-warming sense to it. I
also think the voices were great. Holly Hunter is a wonderful
addition with her southern accent, her sort of maternal but no-
nonsense voice.

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think of "The Incredibles"?

Henry Sheehan>> It's just a marvelous piece of entertainment.
You know, there have been Pixar movies where they're kind of
pushing that human look, you know, to get more flesh tones and
stuff. But Brad Bird, who comes kind of from outside the Pixar
culture, embraces the nature of caricature and the result is
just a movie that's incredibly funny just to look at, I mean,
just to look at the characters.

You know, the father was this huge, muscular guy and he's still
huge and muscular, but he's gone to pot, so he's living in a
world where nothing fits. I mean, not his office cubicle, not
his car, nothing. That, in and of itself, which persists
through the whole movie is funny and that's just typical of the
way this movie is just seeded with cleverness and wit and just a
marvelous control of animation.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, the Art House film,
"Callas Forever", directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a fictionalized
account of the last few months of opera singer, Maria Callas's,
life. Fannie Ardant stars as Callas.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think of "Callas Forever"?

Henry Sheehan>> Not much at all. This is one of those famous
people bios that really just enact certain episodes, real or
fictionalize, you know, maybe from the myth of the person under
examination. In this case, it's the opera singer, Maria Callas,
and I suppose if you're a Callas fan, this is an opportunity to
hear some of her singing, although you probably have the records
and CDs anyway (laughter).

It's a Franco Zeffirelli film. Franco Zeffirelli's movies are
basically monuments to his own ego and here the movie is really
about his standing character played by Jeremy Irons, an
impresario manager who takes Callas out of the doldrums in the
mid-1970's. You know, she's locked up in her Paris apartment.
He puts her into a lip-syncing production of "Carmen". There's
nothing really interesting to it. They try to get a romance
going through the "Carmen" story, but it's a pretty dismal
failure, I thought.

Larry Mantle>> Jean?

Jean Oppenheimer>> I disagree. I think it was quite
entertaining and enjoyable. It's in the vein of "Being Julia",
which has Annette Benning as this theatrical diva, only here is
an operatic diva. I have a basic problem with films that take
real-life characters and then create fictional events for them.
This is supposed to be how Zeffirelli sort of imagined Callas's
last few months of her life. So going in, I have a problem with
that. But I think if "Being Julia" is your kind of film, this
is. I thought that Fannie Ardant was wonderful in it and I
thought that Jeremy Irons was great in it.

Larry Mantle>> Well, thank you so much for joining us for
another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle
of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com
and Jean Oppenheimer of New Times. Please join us again next
week for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val>> And, of course, you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek
every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. on KPCC 89.3. And that's our
program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times,
thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Reverend Cecil Murray steps down after years of steering Los
Angeles through turbulent times. His influence reached beyond
the pulpit into politics.

Reverend Cecil Murray>> And the haves and the have-nots can no
longer peacefully coexist. The middle class is disappearing in
America. Haves and have-nots. We're just begging for an
explosion.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.