Murphy's medications, like those of Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith, are on the shelves of your local drugstore, available with a simple trip to the doctor -- or doctors -- whom you merely need to convince that you need the stuff. Did one doctor prescribe her those meds? Did 10? We don't yet know. But as a doctor myself, I just kept wondering (and not for the first time): What if doctors were more like librarians? Would Brittany Murphy still be alive?

Let me explain. If you go to your local library and can't find a book in the stacks, a librarian consults a computer that tells you all you need to know: If the library carries that book, when the book is due back, whether its overdue or lost. If they don't carry the book, they can tell you which branches do. And -- if you're like me, perpetually returning books late -- your local librarian can, with a hint of scorn in their voice, deny you further checkouts until you return that book and cough up your fee. In short, libraries are technologically integrated; gone are the labyrinthine card catalogs in favor of streamlined digital records. Same for banks. Same for airlines.

But not healthcare. The vast majority of doctors in this country are not integrated with each other, with the local pharmacies, or with laboratories. We work in our own silos, blind to the outside world. A patient walks in our door, we escort them to an exam room, jot down what they tell us on loose pieces of paper. We exam them, diagnose their afflictions, and send them on their way -- sometimes with a prescription, a referral to a specialist, or a lab test.

But outside of that tiny sliver of time, we know very little: We have no reliable way to know whether the patient is seeing another doctor, been to the emergency room, or even if the patient has been admitted to a hospital for emergency surgery. Sure, some emergency rooms will send a fax with a bit of information if a doctor's patient ends up in an ER, but for the most part, we rely on patients and their loved ones to be reliable narrators. And sometimes, they are not.

One of the many negative consequences of such fragmentation is how ridiculously easy it can be to get drugs. Most doctors know patients who have desperately angled to get a prescription they don't need, usually highly addictive pain medicines like Percocet or OxyContin. This is what we call "doctor shopping," hopping from one physician to the next until they find someone willing to write a script. When the supply dries up, they go to another doctor, and then another. One 53-year-old man in California visited 183 doctors and 47 pharmacies in one year to support his addiction to painkillers.

Pediatricians like me don't see drug seekers often, but when we do, it's usually parents using their children as proxy. Several years ago, I assumed care of three siblings whose mother frequently left messages that one child had a cold and needed a cough medicine called promethazine with codeine. Funnily enough, she never wanted me to see her kids, just wanted the medication. I refused her requests, which made her angry, and eventually she stopped calling altogether. But it wasn't until a year later that I really connected the dots: Her (now ex) husband brought one of the children in to see me. He explained that his former wife had a substance abuse problem, and she was drinking the cough medicine not only for the codeine, which pharmacologically is related to narcotics like morphine and Percocet, but also for the alcohol contained in the syrup. I was completely taken by surprise -- for the last time, I promise -- which leads to another important point: Without a strong index of suspicion, drug seekers are hard to spot.

Of course, doctors had better be damn sure before we deny our patients access to a medication they sorely need. That's especially true of patients with pain. The medical mantra over the past decade has been to treat pain aggressively (in 2001, Congress passed, and the president signed, a provision declaring the following 10 years as the Decade of Pain Control and Research). As a result, we've been trained to consider pain as a vital sign on par with blood pressure and heart rate. That zeal and those best intentions can sometimes confound our judgment.

But there is a solution far better than good hunches and putting doctors in a pickle between the Hippocratic oath and the Drug Enforcement Agency, and this brings us back to the library. Doctors, pharmacies and hospitals need to integrate prescribing and pharmacy data. Ditch the card catalog for a streamlined technological system.

In a few (but all too rare) instances, this integration is happening. At Kaiser Permanente here in Northern California where I practice, healthcare professionals are linked through electronic medical records. Our data is available securely to any healthcare provider in our system. Not only does that make patient care more efficient, but it also can help a physician, nurse or pharmacist spot suspicious patterns. Like a librarian with books, all we have to do is pull up the patient's history to scrutinize it. We can do this from any computer, from any office, from any hospital within our system.

There's another example here in California as well, where it is estimated that 20 percent to 30 percent of California's drug abusers primarily use prescription drugs. To help counter that trend, the state recently set up an online prescription drug database to track who is taking what. A suspicious doctor or pharmacist has access to that patient's drug-use history, cutting down considerably on all the guesswork.

Back to Hollywood and Brittany Murphy: If the drugs were hers, it's conceivable a database like this could have alerted a conscientious doctor or pharmacist to the possibility that she was being overmedicated, and that some of the drugs could have potentially dangerous interactions. That's assuming, of course, that Murphy obtained these medications from more than one doctor. A database couldn't have saved her from a pusher MD: a single doctor willing to supply multiple prescription drugs to their patients. These are kinds of doctors who allegedly contributed to the deaths of Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, the kind I would prefer not to call a colleague.

Still, as we spend our time and energy trying to shape healthcare in the next century, it's worth stressing that a computer system needs to play an integral part. Just think: One day hospitals might actually catch up ... to libraries.

The woman who shot the movie, who identified herself to CNN only as Gretchen, said she shot it in a New Jersey apartment some time in the late 1950's and has kept in her attic since. She also confirmed they were smoking pot, saying, "I got it. It was mine. It was just passed around. It was not a party. It was just a get-together. You know, come over and hang out."

What makes the clip interesting isn't that it's just another long-lost scrap from a famously fallen idol.  It's how relaxed and lovely Monroe looks, her movie star wattage in full effect but her giddy humanity equally on display. That she might be high is irrelevant. Unguarded in the company of friends, she looks so very happy.

1913: Silk mill workers in Paterson, New Jersey led by the Industrial Workers of the World go on strike seeking eight-hour days and better working conditions.

1937: The Great Flint Sit-Down Strike led to the first labor agreement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

2009: The employees of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) end a strike after convincing the bosses to increase Viagra coverage: (Found via Jim Edwards' BNET Pharma blog.)

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has agreed to cover almost all of its rising health-care costs, and to increase coverage for Pfizer's (PFE) Viagra and other erectile dysfunction treatments, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. Workers are unhappy that their health insurance plan only covers about 10 pills a month.

To be fair, there was far more at issue in the SEPTA strike than merely erectile dysfunction healthcare coverage. Wages, pension fund contributions, and the prospect of changes in healthcare costs after federal legislation passes were all part of the contested deal. But when one considers what the miners, steelworkers, railworkers and seamstresses of decades past fought and died for, the right to more than ten pills of Viagra a month signifies a peculiarly modern form of labor movement progress.

Which is not to say and sex and labor militancy haven't gone together for a long long time. In Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" the women of Athens withheld sex in an effort to stop the Peloponnesian War. In Philadelphia in 2009 transit workers withheld their labor in an effort, in part, to enhance their sex lives.

Nick Ross, chair of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, confirms that many women's fear of being drugged -- or belief that they have been -- is unfounded. "There is no evidence of widespread use of hypnotics in sexual assault, let alone Rohypnol, despite many attempts to prove the contrary," he tells the Telegraph. Researchers worry that the roofie myth is leading to the wrong kind of vigilance: Instead of watching to make sure their friends aren't becoming too intoxicated or walking home alone, a group of women at a bar may focus on keeping an eye on each other's drinks, or taking their own cocktails with them to the bathroom. Hell, we recently learned that one company is even manufacturing lip gloss that features a test kit to help you determine whether your drink has been spiked.

Of course, the University of Kent paper is already sparking some major-league victim blaming. Witness the condescending headline from the always classy folks at the Daily Mail: "Date-rape drug? No dear, you just had too much to drink."  The story's intro is even more judgmental: "Date-rape drugs are largely an urban myth used as an excuse by women who booze themselves into a stupor, it has been claimed." I can get on board with the suggestion that women (or, for that matter, men) should be more conscious of their own drunkenness. What bothers me is the implication that, just because most alcohol-related sexual assaults don't involve spiked drinks, victims are somehow implicit in their own rape.

In a blog post, Telegraph religion editor and Anglican priest George Pitcher makes an essential, if self-evident, point: "Rape is caused by rapists -- not by women who are drunk or drugged, or by other risk-factors mentioned by the researchers such as walking alone at night." Pitcher acknowledges that the study is useful but cautions against using it to displace blame. "Young women should of course be warned of the dangers of the world," he writes. "But let’s be clear: Female students, or any woman of any age, should be able to get drunk, even make the mistake of getting too drunk, or walk home alone, or for that matter wear tiny skirts, without fear of sexual assault or rape." This is not to say that binge drinking is a great idea or should carry no consequences. When we drink to excess, we deserve the next morning's stomach-churning, skull-splitting hangover or the scrapes and bruises caused by tripping over our own two feet. But no one deserves to be raped.

In fact, what seems most important about this study is that it raises the question of why young women want so desperately to believe in the prevalence of date-rape drugs. One of the researchers, Dr. Sarah Moore, raises the possibility that "the urban myth of spiking is also the result of parents feeling unable to discuss with their adult daughters how to manage drinking and sex and representing their anxieties about this through discussion of drink spiking risks." For me, this cycles back to the same prejudice that pervades the Daily Mail piece: the idea that women bear partial responsibility for being raped when they're drunk, as opposed to when they're drugged. And perhaps, in a more general way, it's this victim-blaming mentality that's causing women to believe or profess that they've been roofied. In a culture that implicates intoxicated victims in their own rape, they may simply, unconsciously be searching for a way to assuage guilt they shouldn't feel in the first place.

That's right: This is a lady who wants to legalize it. The wife of a lawyer who works with medical marijuana users, Corry doesn't just support our government's recent commitment to stop prosecuting medical marijuana patients and suppliers. This mom sees her crusade for full legalization as a way of "protecting her children should they decide to try marijuana someday." As Parker notes, "There's nothing like imagining one's own children as 'criminals' to put irrational laws in perspective." Although she's now a non-toker, Corry admits to having tried the drug in the past. In the same article, for the Colorado Daily, she aligns herself with another pro-legalization voice on the right, Ron Paul, and makes a conservative argument for reform:

If we believe that smaller government is better government, we must trust people to choose what to put into their bodies. If we support legalized access to alcohol, cigarettes, and 700-calorie cheeseburgers, we should legalize marijuana -- a far less harmful substance.

Parker adds that "when jobs and cash are in short supply, legalizing marijuana would seem both prudent and profitable." Reading the column, I had to keep pinching myself to believe that I wasn't dreaming, and this argument, which I totally agree with, was coming from a mainstream conservative pundit.

The real crux of Parker's article, another idea she picks up from Corry, is the prediction that it will be women who lead the charge for legalization. It was the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, both point out, who in 1929 spearheaded the movement to get rid of the ban on alcohol. (Thanks, ladies!) Parker also cites a  Marie Claire article on "Stiletto Stoners," high-achieving women who smoke weed, and the recent revelation that Miss New Jersey 2006 uses medical marijuana to calm her asthma. I would add the example of Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a mother who wrote in Double X about feeding her autistic nine-year-old son pot (in cookie form).

But, honestly, Parker and Corry don't entirely sell me on the idea that marijuana is becoming a women's issue. Sure, the connections between responsible parenting and attitudes toward criminalization of the drugs -- in both its recreational and medical capacities -- are growing clearer. Yet, for me, the "toking point" Parker is talking about doesn't seem particularly gender-based. That a self-described "Republican mom" advocates legalization is, more than anything, a sign that the issue is gaining mainstream support. Across the political spectrum, NORML is finally becoming more, well, normal.