Difference between revisions of "Does the FDA's regulatory monopoly kill large numbers of people? No."
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
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[[Category:Mike Huben]] | [[Category:Mike Huben]] | ||
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{{DES | des = Libertarians and other [[The Drug Industry|drug industry]] shills have long accused the FDA of causing deaths through slow approval and overregulation. That's an illusion due to a trolley problem, 20-20 hindsight, and ignoring the deaths that would be due to ineffective drugs. Imagine if the FDA was allowed to regulate [[The Tobacco Industry]], with 300,000 or more US deaths per year. | show=}} | {{DES | des = Libertarians and other [[The Drug Industry|drug industry]] shills have long accused the FDA of causing deaths through slow approval and overregulation. That's an illusion due to a trolley problem, 20-20 hindsight, and ignoring the deaths that would be due to ineffective drugs. Imagine if the FDA was allowed to regulate [[The Tobacco Industry]], with 300,000 or more US deaths per year. | show=}} | ||
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| − | + | First, drugs approval for a disease is a trolley problem. Both action and inaction result in deaths. But until safety and efficacy are known, you cannot know how many lives would be saved or lost, and you cannot make a reasoned choice of which track to choose. Unless you know and choose the wrong track deliberately, you cannot be said to have killed people. Until then, the responsibly for the deaths is due to the situation that creates the trolley problem. | |
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| − | + | Second, AFTER safety and efficacy are known, you can assign blame with 20-20 hindsight for that one case. But no approval strategy can be perfect: there will always be cases where the strategy is wrong, and cherry-picking a few cases does not make a good argument. The question is whether the strategy is overall better than none: and the long history of fraudulent and harmful medications shows that requiring safety and efficacy is a good strategy. We need only look at the example of [[The Tobacco Industry]] to see that vastly more lives could be saved by regulation than the FDA has ever been accused of killing. | |
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| + | Third, we DO have examples of unregulated drugs in the US, and they are not good. The entire supplements industry consists of generally ineffective treatments that are often harmful. For example: [[FDA ban nearly wiped out deaths, poisonings from ephedra]]. "Using data from the National Poison Data System, the researchers found that ephedra poisonings peaked at 10,326 in 2002 and then began a significant decline to 180 by 2013." | ||
