Many of us who live near state borders can relate to the legislative oddities that make a seemingly innocuous action either legal or a crime depending on your longitude and latitude. Over in the badlands of New Jersey, legislation outlaws such wildness as pumping your own gasoline. Here in the protected enclave of Pennsylvania, we gas up unattended when and where we please. Of course, if you want to buy a bottle of wine on Sunday, you better head for Springsteen country.

Our cover story this month looks at contact lenses, specifically the (somewhat) distant future, when wavefront imaging may revolutionize that technology. Contact lens expert Craig Norman outlines the challenges attendant in bringing wavefront-guided contact lens wear to reality. See p. 52 for that report.

Of more direct and immediate concern to contact lens wearers and prescribers today, however, are regulatory issues. You can make the argument that states have a legitimate regulatory role in issues like scope of practice. That's not the case with contact lens prescription release and expiration dates.

Last month, federal legislation moved forward that would not only standardize rules on the release of contact lenses, but reportedly finally provide the Federal Trade Commission with the enforcement capabilities needed to pursue and prosecute contact lens providers who fill on-line and telephone orders without verifying prescriptions. Also on the federal legislative docket is a bill that would finally end the ludicrous definition of plano contact lenses as cosmetic devices, requiring that they be treated as the medical devices that they are.

Finally, expanding on the issues of contact lenses and borders, we offer a guest editorial from Contributing Editor Mark Abelson, MD. In his editorial and in more detail in Therapeutic Topics (pages 20 and 56), Dr. Abelson raises the alarm about the erosion of the physician's and government's proper place as learned intermediaries in both the prescribing and monitoring of medical devices and pharmaceutical products. These are complex and serious issues and situations where more informed involvement—not decreased regulation—leads to improved consumer protection.