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The Editorial Board of Economy and Society has assembled a virtual collection of 12 free access papers to mark a very significant anniversary – Volume 50 of the journal is being published during 2021. This overview explains the rationale for the collection in the context of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and briefly details why we want to encourage the re-reading of these particular papers. Each paper has the potential to contribute to critical understandings and progressive political engagements with economy and society in COVID times. Read together, the collection also signals the kind of work which is likely to shape the immediate future of the journal. Economy and Society has long been a key venue for the publication of social science research into public health, disease and the life sciences, and this is at the core of the collection. But the global pandemic has wrought severe disruptions throughout economy and society, forcing a host of latent tendencies, tensions and divisions to the surface of public consciousness and political debate. Around half of the papers have therefore been selected because they cast a revealing light on some of the wider-ranging dynamics of economy and society that have become all too apparent in COVID times.

In a previous commentary in INNOVATIONS in Pharmacy, the case was made that a major oversight in approving the establishment of medical marijuana programs through commercially and not-for-profit operated dispensaries is the failure to put in place standards for the monitoring and reporting of outcomes. It was pointed out that the evidence base is limited for the range of dosing options, administrative routes and conditions treated. The concern is that the ease that patients have in obtaining medical marijuana certification in many states means that a medical marijuana program is, in effect, little different from a recreational program. Dispensaries understandably focus on sales and returns to investors with scant attention given to tracking and reporting outcomes across the range of conditions and symptoms presented. While this no doubt appeals to investors in reducing administration costs, it makes it virtually impossible to deliver the appropriate and coordinated level of care that patients should expect if a medical marijuana dispensary is to meet it responsibilities in its duty of care. This places dispensaries at malpractice risk. Given this, this commentary focuses on the questions that legislators should ask in licensing medical marijuana dispensaries to ensure they meet a defensible duty of care to their patients. Article Type: Commentary

The acceptance by a large number of state governments of medical marijuana dispensaries and the regulatory framework to support their licensing has put to one side the issue of monitoring and reporting outcomes. This is a major oversight. It is an untenable situation given the limited evidence base for the clinical benefits and risks associated with dispensed botanical marijuana. The purpose of this commentary is to propose that, as a condition of licensing, marijuana dispensaries should be required to establish a registry to support ongoing monitoring of patient response associated with botanical cannabis formulations. Patients should be monitored over the course of their treatment to assess, in the case of severe non-cancer pain as an example, pain intensity and functional status by pain location. The dispensary, in meeting required audit standards, should be in a position to report on patient response over baseline to the provider who has recommended botanical cannabis. As well, registries should be in a position to report to state licensing agencies response to therapy by target patient groups. Establishing site-specific registries should go some way to meeting the present evidence deficit for botanical marijuana, reducing barriers to its acceptance by providers, patients and health agencies. Article Type: Commentary

What is the contemporary relation between finance and security? This essay
encourages further research into the securitization of finance by developing the
notion of 'finance/security/life'. A focus on the intersections of
finance/security/life will be shown to prompt a broadened range of critical,
cross-disciplinary concerns with the various ways in which financial markets are
positioned as vital to securing wealth, welfare and wellbeing.

Focusing on a highly significant governmental intervention in the global financial market crisis – the US Treasury Department's Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) of autumn 2008 – this article makes a threefold contribution to the growing literature concerned with the interstices of finance and security. First, the TARP is shown to have attempted to govern the turbulence not simply as a crisis of the markets, the banks and Wall Street, but as a problem of the biopolitical security of the US population. US$700 billion worth of toxic assets were to be purchased by the TARP in order to restore the opportunities afforded by uncertain global financial circulations for individual wealth and well-being. Second, by conceptualizing and exploring the TARP in Foucauldian terms as an 'apparatus of security', the article demonstrates how this concept can hold together analytical concerns with the biopolitical rationality of power, on the one hand, and the contingent, processual and lively forms taken by specific governmental orderings, on the other. The TARP apparatus certainly amounted to a biopolitical intervention in the crisis, but it only emerged from the relation between the discursive, material and institutional elements that made it possible. Third, the unplanned transformation of the TARP into an apparatus that targeted bank solvency and recapitalization rather than toxic assets is held, in effect, to have been a key moment that heralded a move towards techniques of preparedness and resilience designed to mitigate the dangers of uncertain global financial circulations.