First UCSF Leg Day ever!

APhA-ASP held its first ever whole day event to increase UCSF student political involvement by exposing them to legislative issues pertaining to their profession. We called it Leg Day. Dr. Lorie Rice, who taught Law and ethics last quarter, was able to get Assemblyman and 2008 State Senate Candidate Mark Leno to speak on Universal Health care. A group of class leaders from the pharmacy school was able to explain to Leno about what pharmacists can do for the community: medication therapy management, taking medications correctly, avoiding adverse drug reactions, clinical pharmacy, and be involved in clinical research especially through the research projects in the Health policy and management/ Pharmaceutical sciences pathway.

During his talk, Leno rightly stated that as the baby boomer population ages and live longer, they will develop more diseases and increase health insurance costs for everyone. He argued that the costs of health care are astronomical and the privatized insurance system is only becoming more complicated to understand and often standing in the way of physicians trying to give their patients the proper care that they need. By throwing out the privatized insurance system and rebuilding a socialized health care system, the government could administer health care more economically and efficiently. The debate is still ongoing about whether single payer vs. employee based health care is the way to go.

He also addressed how families in low income neighborhoods are surrounded by liquor and convenience stores. How is it that we cannot give many of these communities access to healthy foods despite our nation's wealth and status as an industrialized superpower? Well, the fast food and snack industry have been expanding their low-cost products into every street corner and successively hooked Americans at a young age to foods concentrated with sugar and fat. Leno boldly linked the inaccessibility to unprocessed natural foods rich in antioxidants, high in fiber, and slowly absorbed complex sugars to the obesity and diabetes epidemic in this nation. In the pre-meeting that we had with Leno, he quoted a staggering 1 in 5 ratio of the population have diabetes, which will jump alarmingly to 1 in 3 by 2020.

If the source of the problem is in fact access since we as Americans are embracing fast food culture as part of our busy lives, then we need to increase access of fresh, healthy foods especially to children so they adopt healthy eating habits early. Leno's plan to combat juvenile obesity/diabetes is his healthy fruits initiative. The bill would provide the training and equipment that would allow storeowners to store and sell fresh fruits and vegetables. in low-income neighborhoods to maintain refrigerated systems to store and sell issues relating to politics and health care. Afterwards, he invited us to visit his office any time.

The city hall health fair was pretty awesome. A lot of us P1's took the muni to city hall and donned our white coats. I got to counsel a few city employees on sources of calcium for osteoporosis. It was pretty slow but we got a large class turnout.

I had to rush back in order to prep for the Leg Dinner. Kieran Flaherty, a former Leno staff member, along with some pharmacy faculty members gathered to facilitate discussions on some key legislative issues. Basically, 25 pharmacy students helped to draft their stances in breakout sessions on medical marijuana, Universal health care, and Medicare Part D. We all generally supported Universal health care, medication therapy managment, and thought that greater research was needed to substantiate a bill to legalize medical marijuana and industrial hemp. We decided to hand them over to Lori Rice, who would forward them to Leno so he can better represent UCSF in the assembly.