If not for the noble efforts of federal Judge Philip S. Gutierrez, I may have accidentally watched “Age of the Hobbits” online instead. Luckily for all of us planning to trek to Middle-earth this weekend, Judge Gutierrez agreed with producers Warner Bros., MGM and Saul Zaentz Co. that the $500K straight-to-Internet-and-DVD “Age of the Hobbits” starring Bai Ling would confuse consumers and cause the big studios “irreparable injury.”  On Tuesday, the federal district court in L.A. issued a temporary restraining order against the release of the straight-to-the-Internet knockoff by “mockbuster” production company Global Asylum (the studio behind such well-known and critically acclaimed films as "Transmorphers" and "Snakes on a Train"), stopping it  from releasing its movie, conveniently scheduled to make its debut the same weekend as "The Hobbit" hits American theaters.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, the Framingham, Mass., center made as many as “17,676 potentially tainted steroid injections, which were then shipped to 75 clinics in 23 states.”  So far 14 people have died and 170 have fallen ill from the contaminated shots.  The questions on everybody’s mind now are: How could this happen? And where was the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that's supposed to oversee the pharmaceutical industry?

How could it happen? Simple: There are almost no laws regulating pharmaceutical compounding, the process of making made-to-order prescriptions tailored to the unique needs of individual clients. This process used to take place on a small scale. But in the past 20 years, changes in the pharmaceuticals market allowed compounding to explode into a new industry of below-the-radar, unregulated mass drug production.

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