Ripped from the headlines

Dick Wolf, the producer of Law & Order, must be grinning from ear to ear.

The day after Merck is forced to yank the painkiller Vioxx off pharmacy shelves after a report links the popular drug to "thousands of deaths," Wolf pulls an L&O episode out of his hip pocket that could have been based on that very same late-breaking story.

How does he do that? And where does he get those wonderful toys?

(For the record, the episode was actually based on the link between the antidepressant Paxil and teen suicide, but who's nitpicky?)