The Biggest Bang for Your Bribe

Montesinos also fled the country but was arrested in Venezuela and faces multiple charges of corruption, drug trafficking, arms dealing and human rights abuses. Last month, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for paying television station owners millions of dollars to broadcast favorable news about Fujimori.

Alcoholic-Enablers Anonymous?

Hey, where can a falling-down drunken fella buy a drink around here? Sadly, the answer appears to be just about anywhere.

At least that's what researchers at the University of Minnesota found when they tested the willingness of bartenders and store clerks to sell alcohol to patrons who clearly appeared to be three sheets to the wind.

Traci L. Toomey, an associate professor of epidemiology, and her colleagues hired actors to impersonate drunks and then sent them to 355 liquor stores, bars and restaurants in and around Minneapolis to try to buy a drink or a six-pack of beer. Observers were present at each locale to witness the attempted transaction.

The buyers put on Oscar-worthy performances -- staggering, stumbling into things, slurring their speech and showing other signs of acute inebriation. No matter. They were sold alcohol in 76 percent of the bars and 83 percent of the stores. (Minnesota and other states outlaw the sale of alcohol to people who are obviously drunk.) Even when sellers clearly noticed the drunken behavior, they sold alcohol to the phony customers 61 percent of the time, with younger clerks and barkeeps far more willing to make the sale than older ones, Toomey reported in a recent issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Breakthrough Breakdown

There's a dark side to the recent good news about breakthroughs in the campaign against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS: Receiving treatment with the anti-retroviral drug "cocktail" designed to delay the onset of the disease seems to produce "more sexual risk-taking by HIV-positive adults and possibly more of other risky behaviors like drug abuse," reported three researchers from the Rand Corp. in a recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

They based their conclusions on three monitoring surveys of 1,396 HIV-positive men conducted between March 1996 and January 1998, a time when the three- or four-drug cocktail was becoming widely used. They found that receiving anti-retroviral treatments "reduces the probability of having no new sex partners by 39 percentage points and increases the probability of having two or more partners by 33 percentage points," wrote Rand researchers Dana Goldman, Darius Lakdawalla and Neeraj Sood.

They said their findings may help explain this puzzling pattern: The AIDS death rate and the rate of HIV incidence fell significantly between 1995 and 1998, but then the infection rate started rising while the death rate continued to drop.

morinr@washpost.com