Difference between revisions of "Does the FDA's regulatory monopoly kill large numbers of people? No."
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
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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. | 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. | ||
| − | Third, we DO have examples of unregulated drugs in the US, and they are not good. The entire supplements | + | Third, we DO have examples of unregulated drugs in the US, and they are not good. The entire [Alternative Medicine and nutritional supplements industries consist of generally ineffective treatments and products 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." |
