John Hoey -- the former editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, who was fired last week -- should be reinstated to repair the damage that has been done to the journal, Donald Redelmeier, a member of the journal's editorial board, says, CanWest News/Vancouver Sun reports (Kirkey, CanWest News/Vancouver Sun, 2/23). The Canadian Medical Association, which owns the peer-reviewed CMAJ, on Feb. 20 fired Hoey and Senior Deputy Editor Anne Marie Todkill, a move that some said was tied to the deletion of part of a news report released in December 2005 that questioned the way pharmacists in Canada are handling sales of Barr Laboratories' emergency contraceptive Plan B. Canada's national health agency, Health Canada, in April 2005 approved nonprescription sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken up to 72 hours after sexual intercourse. Staff at CMAJ asked women in each province and territory in the country to attempt to buy the drug and describe their experiences. Some of the women said that pharmacists requested personal information -- including their names and addresses -- and entered the information into a database, which is not standard practice for nonprescription drugs. The CMAJ report originally was to include the women's experiences -- which news report authors said constituted investigative journalism -- but the Canadian Pharmacists Association heard about the upcoming report and complained to CMA. Publisher Graham Morris told CMAJ staff to remove the women's experiences or not run the report because it could be seen as unethical research, and the staff decided to publish an abridged version of the article in the Dec. 5, 2005, issue. An editorial published online on Dec. 13, 2005, said CMA demanded the deletion. Morris last week said that the firing of Hoey and Todkill was not related to the incident and added that he supports the editorial independence of the journal (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 2/22).

Redelmeier Statements, Next Steps
Redelmeier -- a University of Toronto professor, who sits on a special panel that Hoey created in December 2005 to review the journal's editorial autonomy -- said that while Hoey did not object as strongly as he could have when CMA pressured him to alter the report, he should not have been fired. The journal's editorial board is writing an open letter to CMA requesting that Hoey and Todkill be given their jobs back (CanWest News/Vancouver Sun, 2/23). The open letter also says that the journal "not only unjustly dismissed genuinely world class editors" but also "compromised the public interest, its own interests and the value of its core asset" (Kaufman, Washington Post, 2/27). Hoey declined to say whether he wanted to be reinstated and also declined to discuss his dismissal for legal reasons (CanWest News/Vancouver Sun, 2/23).