> Companies will put whichever labels they feel are required because they are still liable for the problems their products cause. This is basic and standard tort law, no change
Are we sure about this?
On instagram I’m getting blasted with GPL-1 weight loss prescriptions and testosterone prescriptions (even though I’m in my 30’s, athletic, not overweight… I think? But these ads make me question even that…)
If it weren’t for the “talk to a doctor” barrier and you could just click “get free sample” for wegovy or testosterone or whatever other drug, there will be a lot of abuse.
Companies, especially startups, will skirt the law. They already do it and they don’t get in trouble.
But the advertising industry + prescription drugs is a deadly combo. 1) convince people they have ailments that require treatment, 2) sell them an unneeded treatment.
Maybe I would benefit from Wegovy / GPL-1? According to these instagram ads I will. And add in testosterone because, why not.
If your plan for abolishing the FDA is “and also abolish every other relevant arm of government at the same time”, you don't have a plan.
“Full abolition of the FDA would have domino effects on every other part of healthcare. You would have to reform the insurance system, the War on Drugs, the medical evidence system, the malpractice system, and the entire role of doctors. All of these other things are terrible and should probably be reformed anyway. But you’d have to do it all at the same time, and get it all exactly right.”
The libertarian fantasy is that they'll be the heroes of their own rugged individualism story, not the victim of contaminated drinking water and counterfeit medication.
You're acting like consumers of medication have a choice. They _need_ certain medication and if the only option doesn't include safety inspections then they can't exactly just pick a different medication, they have to put their trust in a profit-driven company's hands or suffer and maybe die.
Healthcare isn't something that should be sold as people are forced to buy it to survive. That allows crazy levels of exploitation, leading to insane prices like the U.S already has for medication, treatments, and medical insurance.
> put their trust in a profit-driven company's hands
Every single company making products and services we all use is profit-driven.
> Healthcare isn't something that should be sold as people are forced to buy it to survive
Healthcare is far from being the only essential good that I have to buy to survive. It's a merchandise like any other - the market rules still apply. Maybe emergency care is different (since I could be unconscious when buying it) but that's what insurance is for. That's what I use in countless other domains as well: car emergency assistance, travel emergency, etc.
>Maybe emergency care is different (since I could be unconscious when buying it) but that's what insurance is for.
Hope the hospital your unconscious self is taken to happens to be in your insurance network, and that your insurance provider doesn't decide that what you went in for wasn't really an emergency.
Also hope I will not lose my consciousness in the middle of the desert where there is no hospital. Yes, there are risks in life and you cannot protect yourself from every possible danger. Life is harsh.
As intelligent beings we have the capacity to reduce that harshness. Not being able to eliminate all danger and risk is not an argument against limiting and controlling the dangers and risks we we have the ability to affect.
Cost. Cost is what you are forgetting. Yes - we try to reduce risk as much as we can but the more we protect ourselves the more expensive that is until the last little part it's costs everything.
How many resources are you willing to allocate to limit and control dangers and risks instead of using them for your kids, education or maybe simple enjoyment of life? What percent of your income are you willing to give those who promise that risk-reduction and how can you measure that they lived up to their promise?
> Every single company making products and services we all use is profit-driven.
And it's all getting shittier and shittier every year. The profit motive does not select for high quality products, it selects for the products that are as cheap as possible to manufacture, which includes lying about the contents and capabilities of the product in the absence of sufficient legal incentive to be honest. And for markets to work, consumers need accurate information. Thus, regulatory agencies are necessary in practice for efficient markets.
> The profit motive does not select for high quality products
Simply not true. Under communism, where the profit motive was outlawed, we had the absolut crappiest and worst products. While in the west, capitalism and free markets were spoiling people for choice.
This is a fallacy. Pointing out the flaws of unregulated markets is unrelated to either capitalism or communism, let alone an endorsement of communism. Market economies are better than command economies, but the utility of a market is its efficiency, and completely unregulated markets are demonstrably subject to effects that make them massively inefficient, and therefore useless. (Which, to clarify, is not to suggest that all regulations are useful.)
And as far as "spoiling people for choice", this is irrelevant as a refutation. A choice between a hundred shitty products is a shitty choice nonetheless.
Have you driven a Lada car? Drunk a Soviet pop soda? Worn some commie clothes? I did and I can tell you that until you do, you have no idea what “shitty” is.
You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.
Please point out the “better” not profit-driven computer, website and network you find less “shitty”.
The problem with full communism is the same as full libertarianism; it fails miserably to account for human behavior. In both cases, advocates will tell you "well that doesn't count, they didn't do it right!"
> You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.
Agreed - the only system I know of that takes human behavior into consideration is capitalism and free markets.
> ARPANET [...] CERN
You do realize that the Internet is not just a set of protocols, right? It's people, services and companies all coming together in this amazing web. How do you think that happened? Who brought them here?
There is a long distance from Arpanet and Cern to Johnny getting his Tiktok fix on his smartphone. And it took a lot of private money and initiative for this to happen. Nobody's denying DoD's role in funding the basic protocols Internet relies on, but compared to what was added on top of that since then - it's a tiny contribution, to be honest.
> Companies sell products which literally kills their customers and you think without any control that would get better
The FDA is killing people on a daily basis by being so slow and bureaucratic to review life saving drugs. But its the dog that does not bark so people are completely oblivious to it.
The trouble with libertarianism is that it assumes everyone has perfect knowledge. Right now I don't need to do a ton of research about what drugs I'm taking, or the food I'm eating, come to that, because there are agencies making sure that things I buy which are labeled as such will nearly never kill me. I don't want to spend my evenings reading about esoteric stuff that I don't have to care about now, I want to watch streaming or play computer games.
Even if I did, Covid has already shown us how bad most people are at recognising good research from propaganda. I just don't feel like it would end well.
Nobody says that. Free markets are actually the best mechanism to deal with situations in which participants have partial/imperfect knowledge.
> I don't need to do a ton of research about what drugs I'm taking
I do, and I recommend all do. Just the other week my ear doctor gave me a prescription for an antibiotic that had as a side effect a significant chance of ligament fracture. I went back and he changed it to a milder, less aggressive medicine.
You don't generally have to check if your food is made with lead or carcinogens though right? And if inspections aren't compulsory some people are going to get lead poisoning before word gets around, or get cancer decades later and never know. Better to have someone qualified to check it before it gets to the shelves. Granted I'm using lead as a hyperbolic example, but I'm sure you get the point I'm trying to make.
Why are free markets better at dealing with partial knowledge?
Watch as they come to downvote you for not welcoming more regulation and nanny state culture, while contributing nothing.
There's a reason I leave dead comments on. It's where all the interesting things are. This place is the perfect hybrid between 4chan and reddit, but sadly the reddit side is obsessed with censoring dissenting thought into oblivion.
Though I don't need to say that, that's the thing everyone will keep regurgitating as prime reason to stay here.
What I don't understand is why we don't just colour code the opinions instead of hiding them.
Simply make the thoughts of people that are considered alternative red and everything else green or something. Use an llm to assign the colours.
I also don't understand why arguing in bad faith is unsupported. Bad faith actors are the people you need to convince, why would you need to convince the borg, you are already among them.
> Companies will put whichever labels they feel are required because they are still liable for the problems their products cause. This is basic and standard tort law, no change required here.
Company gets sued because warning is missing, adds warning back, go back to square one (warnings are legally mandated).
Mind that a lot of those warnings come about after drug testing and subsequent pharmacovigilance work.
> Companies are welcome to have inspectors come in and certify that the drugs are safe, just like they do when ratings agencies rate their debts.
Yes, because that works wonderfully. I'm sure all AAA bonds are solid (and that even with the SEC). Oh wait
>Companies will put whichever labels they feel are required because they are still liable for the problems their products cause. This is basic and standard tort law, no change required here.
A few problems here...
It's hard to sue if you're dead. Yeah, your family can sue, but now they're dealing with that on top of you being dead. And there is nothing the court can do to un-dead you.
In addition to not being able to un-dead you, the court can't fix the disability or other permanent issues you're now dealing with.
Sure, the court can award you damages. While there are probably exceptions, most people would probably rather have their health and quality of life.
Dealing with it through tort law alone means that the damage must go all the way through to occurring. That damage can often not be undone to any real degree, only kinda covered up with cash. That presumes the poison peddler hasn't protected themselves with an army of shell companies, or siphoned the funds off into another country, etc.
Waiting until the damage happens for every single instance is sticking fingers in ears at societal scale.
Also, who investigates wrongdoing? Police, FBI, FTC? Why would unenforced and rampant corruption not be the norm? Sure, you sue, and the pharma produces doctored evidence. How do you find out, and how do you confirm it, and how do you make sure they are punished? The FBI has a lot of other shit going on.
>Don’t all reasonable people ignore labels because they’re useless?
Sounds like once you're no longer obligated to put them in, the only ones left will be the useful ones.
Come on this the very reason we have an FDA and its origin story - false labels were rampant before that and caused real harm.
we did 'caveat emptor'. we created the FDA because it was awful for everyone.
no customer individually has the capacity or resources to figure out which of a hundred companies are the ones selling adulterated foods or simply lying about medicines working and throwing narcotics in all of them.
I don't know if you're trolling or if you just don't care about anyone and would happily see millions poisoned for the sake of profits for liars and cheats.
Just watch a chain of pharmacies emerge from the ashes with advertised regulation that will eventually become a role model for competitors and they will all try to band together and establish a "neutral" administer of said regulation. Consumers will demand it.
> Are we also eliminating factory inspections to make sure drugs aren’t contaminated?
> Right now the FDA does this too
Not really. They come and check and confirm your procedures are in line with a bunch of paper standards. In no way they can guarantee the lack of contamination.
In Australia at least, you need to maintain records showing testing of each batch and equipment calibration. Government auditors can come at anytime to review the records, and will shut things down if records are missing/altered/or lacking. Pharmaceutical manufacturers aren't constantly shutting down, so we can assume contamination is fairly low.
Just because people write a very low or zero value in the records doesn't mean that's actually true for the product that physically is consumed.
At best it can be said to imply what's likely the case in physical reality. But even assuming a very low corruption rate of 0.1%, that's still hundreds of bad record writers putting out bogus records.
You clearly have never participated in an FDA audit as the party under scrutiny.
They look into a lot of things, and their auditors have a lot of experience and know where to look for mistakes.
Their m.o. is to keep digging: if they find something that is not quite right they start asking about who did it, who supervised it, what else that person has worked on... so on and so forth until they find something.
Much of that post fails to adress the fact we lived thousands of years fine without the FDA and that the FDA commits some of the most egregious crimes by being wholly corrupt with a sliding door between corps and administrators and delaying life saying drugs for no reason. They have a huge amount of blood on their hands.
Look around where you are. Unless you're in the middle of a forest, pretty much every single thing you see is the result of scientific and technological advancements of the last 150 years. Half of it probably owes its existence to the oft forgotten chemical and petrochemical revolutions that started about 100 years ago.
Before that? Before the tail end of 19th century, we knew fuck all about anything. Medicine, in particular, graduated from voodoo and aforementioned "ground up unicorn toe" into a proper science and profession, also about 100 years ago.
It's really hard to overstate how different 20th century science and technology is from anything that came before. We've crossed a qualitative threshold there.
> Before that? Before the tail end of 19th century, we knew fuck all about anything. Medicine, in particular, graduated from voodoo and aforementioned "ground up unicorn toe" into a proper science and profession, also about 100 years ago.
Nevermind the thousands of plants with verified therapeutical effects across the world for centuries.
But yeah, old societies were completely clueless and a bunch of idiots and surely we have learnt nothing from them.
Yes we should absolutely go back to keeping our humors balanced, bleeding people, treating syphilis with mercury, dying of an infection from a minor injury and insane level of mother and infant mortality.
> But yeah, old societies were completely clueless and a bunch of idiots and surely we have learnt nothing from them.
Yes, they were, in comparison. They had neither predictive theoretical models, nor the tools to confirm and refine them - hell, for most history, they didn't even understand they need those things in the first place. Please appreciate that the period starting in late 19th century brought all the pieces together - the theoretical foundations, the observations, communications, precision manufacturing, the philosophy of science - they all added up to exponential growth across all scientific disciplines, and all occupations.
That's not to say we didn't learn anything from them. They did accumulate knowledge. But the sum of all knowledge humanity accumulated since beginning of recorded history is just a rounding error compared to what humanity accumulated in the last 100 years. That's the exponential growth at work.
You're setting up a false equivalence when you imply that our position is that older societies were completely clueless.
Nobody is saying that. What we're saying is that the application of science to medicine and nutrition had an absolutely enormous effect, and before that, we didn't really have explanations- just empirical observations- of the effect of medicines.
As late as 1899, taking out a living person's heart couldn't be anything besides a gruesome execution. There wasn't the understanding to allow it to be survivable, and even the anaesthesia at the time was not really good enough for anything like that.
Now? Though still rare, it's just another thing you can have transplanted if you need it.
I guess this is sarcastic? But yes, things have gotten a lot better since we invented antibiotics, modern surgery, routine childbirth, and other lifesaving medical techniques...
We've lived for thousands of years without the National Transportation Safety Board. Why do we need it? What it do? Planes not falling out of the sky? Meh. Boring.
This libertarian "burn the government down" bullshit is exhausting. REALLY itching to eat some bad meat and croak? Because this is what happened before. Then the responsible people said "maybe we should have someone checking that so that our citizens don't get sick and die".
It's called a Civilization. Welcome.
Maybe the answer is to fix it, not destroy it? Is the FDA a revolving door? Yes. Many regulatory agencies are.
The politicians who complain the most are the ones most ok with the government being a corrupt dumpster fire. Helps the narrative, and the rubes are eating it all up.
> Are we also eliminating the concept of prescription medication? [...] Do you also want all medications to be available without a prescription?
A few years ago I watched a video of a debate among people seeking the Libertarian Party presidential nomination [1] where I learned that Libertarians honestly and earnestly believe you shouldn't need a license to drive a car.
I am pretty sure a Libertarian would see no problem with offering cocaine, fentanyl and warfarin off the shelf in corner stores.
Of course, how this intersects with the Ivermectin lovers of the Republican party I'm not sure.
> Or rather, there will be studies, but they’ll be much smaller. And the pharma companies will figure out ways to manipulate them. The only reason we have big, less-than-completely-manipulated studies is that the FDA demands it, and employs lots of experts to figure out which studies have been manipulated or not.
LOL the blind trust that the author has for the seriousness of the FDA when it comes to clinical studies is absolutely laughable. The same FDA approved Vioxx and let Oxycontin ravage the US for years before moving any finger, and because of public pressure rather than anything else. Its failures speak volumes on how useless that agency is.
Besides it is very easy to design clinical trials to make your drug look better than it actually is, and p hacking is still a thing.
Of the thousands of drugs on market and thousands more the FDA has kept from market let's blow the whole thing up over a few anecdotes. Disregard that the true problem is not properly separating capital from scientific regulation. Instead propose a solution that turns the entire system of to capital. Great plan.
Another important question: how will pharma companies even know whether their drugs work?
It’s ridiculously, ridiculously hard to figure this out even if you’re not a bad actor and you do have a drug that works. The only reason to go through that effort is for FDA’s stamp.
Why would drug manufacturers do that (instead of just using a limited corp per drug, for example)? Why would insurers take on some massive tail risk (and how would they get the capital for that)?
I think insurers would just put pressure on the companies. They would just not pay for the medication unless it was proven to not put their customers at risk, lest they have to pay for the treatment of the treatment.
Libertarianism is a two-part ideology that holds that first, despite all the clear signs around us, the world is simple. In a simple world, what is the point of regulation, policy, or any other collective action, for that matter? Why not abolish everything?
On its face, this isn't an insane point of view. It's natural to look at the scope and complexity of government and as yourself "is all this really necessary?" While it'll never achieve mainstream status, some tinges of libertarianism contribute meaningfully as a counterweight to the tendency of government to grow beyond the point of diminishing returns to society.
The problem is, the ideology has a second, usually unspoken tenet: anyone who suffers brought it upon themselves. Hacker stole your bitcoins? Should have used a hardware wallet. Hospital bills driving you to bankruptcy? This is what you get for not saving for a rainy day. Poisoned by shoddily produced medicine? Hey, you get what you pay for.
It's an ideology of arrogance. Both intellectual arrogance, as its dunning-kruger afflicted adherents look over the vast and complex world and say "how hard could it possibly be?" to every challenge they perceive, and also of moral arrogance, as those same people cast their eyes over the depth of human suffering and inexplicably think "I've got mine, you all are on your own."
The reason why libertarians always lose is because anyone who isn't a billionaire would spend their entire existence looking over their shoulder in terror at the infinite ways life can screw you. And even then they would probably fail. Any reasonable person would gladly hand over the right to sell medicine they mixed in their own basement in exchange for knowing they won't be poisoned when they need help themselves.
Obligatory pointer to how libertarians were defeated by bears [1].
Libertarians and neoliberals at this point are essentially indistinguishable. Neoliberalism is just a thinly-veiled wealth transfer to the already-rich through deregulation and tax cuts, masquerading as "market-based reforms" at the altar of the "free market". The "free market" itself is a myth because a well-functioning market requires strong government. It requires regulation.
So when you see something like regulatory capture, which is a real problem, and companies bypassing the very regulation that limits their excesses and thinking the solution is less regulation. It's nonsencial.
> … are all medications freely available at the corner store? Does this include warfarin, where getting the dose slightly wrong makes you bleed to death? Does it include MAOIs, where eating cheese after use makes your blood vessels explode? Obviously you put these things on the label …
Who puts these things on the label and why? I don’t understand what’s obvious about this in a laissez-faire system. The author seems to argue for the removal of medication safety regulation in one area (FDA) but imply that there would still be safety regulations in regards to labeling? This seems like a huge contradiction to me.
Congrats, you just speared the stupidity of the libertarian dream in a sentence. As a pharmacist, it's terrifying that anyone is even broaching the idea of ending the FDA and putting all medications OTC.
There's echoes of the "defund the police" controversy in "abolish the FDA". I doubt abolishing the FDA will happen, and I'm not sure many people who argue for it really literally mean to completely abolish it. What they mean is something closer to "radically overhaul the FDA" or "abolish it in its current form and rebuild it in a different way".
These types of political positions happen because serious problems get dismissed by the status quo and nothing changes. There's a kind of false equivalence that's implicit — "arguing that X is a problem with agency B means you want all these other horrible consequences of getting rid of B" so nothing happens. After awhile, with nothing changing, it seems like the only option is to argue against eliminating the agency because valid criticisms just get spun away politically, and opponents of real change seem to frame the choices that way.
Even now, I suspect discussions like this about the FDA only exist in a small bubble like Scott's readership. Most of the US doesn't have these ideas in their consciousness probably, so the problems get swept aside, and only bubble up if calls for dramatic changes like abolishment are discussed as a kind of intellectual punching bag for entertainment, and as a distraction from making real, serious reform.
I would have been more impressed with this post if it had offered solutions to the problems involved. What it offers as proposals aren't bad, but sidestep the real problems and in one case just obfuscate things more.
I don't think the FDA should be abolished, but I do think its role should be restricted to labeling fraud, product purity testing, and enforcing transparency in product efficacy evidence.
For me, the FDA is just one problem in a litany of problems with healthcare related to regulatory capture. The US desperately needs medical deregulation — or at least reregulation. Arguments against this in the form of fear mongering without offering reform proposala are starting to feel to me like they really mean the status quo is fine and nothing really needs to change.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadAre we sure about this?
On instagram I’m getting blasted with GPL-1 weight loss prescriptions and testosterone prescriptions (even though I’m in my 30’s, athletic, not overweight… I think? But these ads make me question even that…)
If it weren’t for the “talk to a doctor” barrier and you could just click “get free sample” for wegovy or testosterone or whatever other drug, there will be a lot of abuse.
Companies, especially startups, will skirt the law. They already do it and they don’t get in trouble.
But the advertising industry + prescription drugs is a deadly combo. 1) convince people they have ailments that require treatment, 2) sell them an unneeded treatment.
Maybe I would benefit from Wegovy / GPL-1? According to these instagram ads I will. And add in testosterone because, why not.
“Full abolition of the FDA would have domino effects on every other part of healthcare. You would have to reform the insurance system, the War on Drugs, the medical evidence system, the malpractice system, and the entire role of doctors. All of these other things are terrible and should probably be reformed anyway. But you’d have to do it all at the same time, and get it all exactly right.”
You're acting like consumers of medication have a choice. They _need_ certain medication and if the only option doesn't include safety inspections then they can't exactly just pick a different medication, they have to put their trust in a profit-driven company's hands or suffer and maybe die.
Healthcare isn't something that should be sold as people are forced to buy it to survive. That allows crazy levels of exploitation, leading to insane prices like the U.S already has for medication, treatments, and medical insurance.
Every single company making products and services we all use is profit-driven.
> Healthcare isn't something that should be sold as people are forced to buy it to survive
Healthcare is far from being the only essential good that I have to buy to survive. It's a merchandise like any other - the market rules still apply. Maybe emergency care is different (since I could be unconscious when buying it) but that's what insurance is for. That's what I use in countless other domains as well: car emergency assistance, travel emergency, etc.
Hope the hospital your unconscious self is taken to happens to be in your insurance network, and that your insurance provider doesn't decide that what you went in for wasn't really an emergency.
How many resources are you willing to allocate to limit and control dangers and risks instead of using them for your kids, education or maybe simple enjoyment of life? What percent of your income are you willing to give those who promise that risk-reduction and how can you measure that they lived up to their promise?
And it's all getting shittier and shittier every year. The profit motive does not select for high quality products, it selects for the products that are as cheap as possible to manufacture, which includes lying about the contents and capabilities of the product in the absence of sufficient legal incentive to be honest. And for markets to work, consumers need accurate information. Thus, regulatory agencies are necessary in practice for efficient markets.
Simply not true. Under communism, where the profit motive was outlawed, we had the absolut crappiest and worst products. While in the west, capitalism and free markets were spoiling people for choice.
And as far as "spoiling people for choice", this is irrelevant as a refutation. A choice between a hundred shitty products is a shitty choice nonetheless.
You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.
Please point out the “better” not profit-driven computer, website and network you find less “shitty”.
> You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.
Yeah, no. The government and publicly-funded universities invented the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History) and publicly funded CERN invented HTML and the Web.
Agreed - the only system I know of that takes human behavior into consideration is capitalism and free markets.
> ARPANET [...] CERN
You do realize that the Internet is not just a set of protocols, right? It's people, services and companies all coming together in this amazing web. How do you think that happened? Who brought them here?
There is a long distance from Arpanet and Cern to Johnny getting his Tiktok fix on his smartphone. And it took a lot of private money and initiative for this to happen. Nobody's denying DoD's role in funding the basic protocols Internet relies on, but compared to what was added on top of that since then - it's a tiny contribution, to be honest.
You won't find effective medication in the mass of snake oil that would hit the market.
The FDA is killing people on a daily basis by being so slow and bureaucratic to review life saving drugs. But its the dog that does not bark so people are completely oblivious to it.
Nobody says that. Free markets are actually the best mechanism to deal with situations in which participants have partial/imperfect knowledge.
> I don't need to do a ton of research about what drugs I'm taking
I do, and I recommend all do. Just the other week my ear doctor gave me a prescription for an antibiotic that had as a side effect a significant chance of ligament fracture. I went back and he changed it to a milder, less aggressive medicine.
Why are free markets better at dealing with partial knowledge?
There's a reason I leave dead comments on. It's where all the interesting things are. This place is the perfect hybrid between 4chan and reddit, but sadly the reddit side is obsessed with censoring dissenting thought into oblivion.
Though I don't need to say that, that's the thing everyone will keep regurgitating as prime reason to stay here.
What I don't understand is why we don't just colour code the opinions instead of hiding them.
Simply make the thoughts of people that are considered alternative red and everything else green or something. Use an llm to assign the colours.
I also don't understand why arguing in bad faith is unsupported. Bad faith actors are the people you need to convince, why would you need to convince the borg, you are already among them.
Company gets sued because warning is missing, adds warning back, go back to square one (warnings are legally mandated).
Mind that a lot of those warnings come about after drug testing and subsequent pharmacovigilance work.
> Companies are welcome to have inspectors come in and certify that the drugs are safe, just like they do when ratings agencies rate their debts.
Yes, because that works wonderfully. I'm sure all AAA bonds are solid (and that even with the SEC). Oh wait
A few problems here...
It's hard to sue if you're dead. Yeah, your family can sue, but now they're dealing with that on top of you being dead. And there is nothing the court can do to un-dead you.
In addition to not being able to un-dead you, the court can't fix the disability or other permanent issues you're now dealing with.
Sure, the court can award you damages. While there are probably exceptions, most people would probably rather have their health and quality of life.
Dealing with it through tort law alone means that the damage must go all the way through to occurring. That damage can often not be undone to any real degree, only kinda covered up with cash. That presumes the poison peddler hasn't protected themselves with an army of shell companies, or siphoned the funds off into another country, etc.
Waiting until the damage happens for every single instance is sticking fingers in ears at societal scale.
Come on this the very reason we have an FDA and its origin story - false labels were rampant before that and caused real harm.
no customer individually has the capacity or resources to figure out which of a hundred companies are the ones selling adulterated foods or simply lying about medicines working and throwing narcotics in all of them.
I don't know if you're trolling or if you just don't care about anyone and would happily see millions poisoned for the sake of profits for liars and cheats.
> Right now the FDA does this too
Not really. They come and check and confirm your procedures are in line with a bunch of paper standards. In no way they can guarantee the lack of contamination.
At best it can be said to imply what's likely the case in physical reality. But even assuming a very low corruption rate of 0.1%, that's still hundreds of bad record writers putting out bogus records.
Their m.o. is to keep digging: if they find something that is not quite right they start asking about who did it, who supervised it, what else that person has worked on... so on and so forth until they find something.
It's pretty terrifying to witness..
...
For those thousands of years our only medicine was "ground up unicorn toe".
Look around where you are. Unless you're in the middle of a forest, pretty much every single thing you see is the result of scientific and technological advancements of the last 150 years. Half of it probably owes its existence to the oft forgotten chemical and petrochemical revolutions that started about 100 years ago.
Before that? Before the tail end of 19th century, we knew fuck all about anything. Medicine, in particular, graduated from voodoo and aforementioned "ground up unicorn toe" into a proper science and profession, also about 100 years ago.
It's really hard to overstate how different 20th century science and technology is from anything that came before. We've crossed a qualitative threshold there.
Nevermind the thousands of plants with verified therapeutical effects across the world for centuries.
But yeah, old societies were completely clueless and a bunch of idiots and surely we have learnt nothing from them.
Yes, they were, in comparison. They had neither predictive theoretical models, nor the tools to confirm and refine them - hell, for most history, they didn't even understand they need those things in the first place. Please appreciate that the period starting in late 19th century brought all the pieces together - the theoretical foundations, the observations, communications, precision manufacturing, the philosophy of science - they all added up to exponential growth across all scientific disciplines, and all occupations.
That's not to say we didn't learn anything from them. They did accumulate knowledge. But the sum of all knowledge humanity accumulated since beginning of recorded history is just a rounding error compared to what humanity accumulated in the last 100 years. That's the exponential growth at work.
Nobody is saying that. What we're saying is that the application of science to medicine and nutrition had an absolutely enormous effect, and before that, we didn't really have explanations- just empirical observations- of the effect of medicines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
Now? Though still rare, it's just another thing you can have transplanted if you need it.
This libertarian "burn the government down" bullshit is exhausting. REALLY itching to eat some bad meat and croak? Because this is what happened before. Then the responsible people said "maybe we should have someone checking that so that our citizens don't get sick and die".
It's called a Civilization. Welcome.
Maybe the answer is to fix it, not destroy it? Is the FDA a revolving door? Yes. Many regulatory agencies are.
The politicians who complain the most are the ones most ok with the government being a corrupt dumpster fire. Helps the narrative, and the rubes are eating it all up.
A few years ago I watched a video of a debate among people seeking the Libertarian Party presidential nomination [1] where I learned that Libertarians honestly and earnestly believe you shouldn't need a license to drive a car.
I am pretty sure a Libertarian would see no problem with offering cocaine, fentanyl and warfarin off the shelf in corner stores.
Of course, how this intersects with the Ivermectin lovers of the Republican party I'm not sure.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcllE7fx8-I
LOL the blind trust that the author has for the seriousness of the FDA when it comes to clinical studies is absolutely laughable. The same FDA approved Vioxx and let Oxycontin ravage the US for years before moving any finger, and because of public pressure rather than anything else. Its failures speak volumes on how useless that agency is.
Besides it is very easy to design clinical trials to make your drug look better than it actually is, and p hacking is still a thing.
The FDA is the cargo cult of clinical science.
Replace X with government agency if you are from the right. Capitalism if you are from the left.
1. X has huge positive impact overall.
2. Something bad related to X
3. Emotional rage quit. X is bullshit.
Alternative. Try to think what is the total effect overall. Don't be emotional.
It’s ridiculously, ridiculously hard to figure this out even if you’re not a bad actor and you do have a drug that works. The only reason to go through that effort is for FDA’s stamp.
On its face, this isn't an insane point of view. It's natural to look at the scope and complexity of government and as yourself "is all this really necessary?" While it'll never achieve mainstream status, some tinges of libertarianism contribute meaningfully as a counterweight to the tendency of government to grow beyond the point of diminishing returns to society.
The problem is, the ideology has a second, usually unspoken tenet: anyone who suffers brought it upon themselves. Hacker stole your bitcoins? Should have used a hardware wallet. Hospital bills driving you to bankruptcy? This is what you get for not saving for a rainy day. Poisoned by shoddily produced medicine? Hey, you get what you pay for.
It's an ideology of arrogance. Both intellectual arrogance, as its dunning-kruger afflicted adherents look over the vast and complex world and say "how hard could it possibly be?" to every challenge they perceive, and also of moral arrogance, as those same people cast their eyes over the depth of human suffering and inexplicably think "I've got mine, you all are on your own."
The reason why libertarians always lose is because anyone who isn't a billionaire would spend their entire existence looking over their shoulder in terror at the infinite ways life can screw you. And even then they would probably fail. Any reasonable person would gladly hand over the right to sell medicine they mixed in their own basement in exchange for knowing they won't be poisoned when they need help themselves.
Libertarians and neoliberals at this point are essentially indistinguishable. Neoliberalism is just a thinly-veiled wealth transfer to the already-rich through deregulation and tax cuts, masquerading as "market-based reforms" at the altar of the "free market". The "free market" itself is a myth because a well-functioning market requires strong government. It requires regulation.
So when you see something like regulatory capture, which is a real problem, and companies bypassing the very regulation that limits their excesses and thinking the solution is less regulation. It's nonsencial.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
Who puts these things on the label and why? I don’t understand what’s obvious about this in a laissez-faire system. The author seems to argue for the removal of medication safety regulation in one area (FDA) but imply that there would still be safety regulations in regards to labeling? This seems like a huge contradiction to me.
I guess because otherwise you could be sued? Not that it makes this any more viable.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
These types of political positions happen because serious problems get dismissed by the status quo and nothing changes. There's a kind of false equivalence that's implicit — "arguing that X is a problem with agency B means you want all these other horrible consequences of getting rid of B" so nothing happens. After awhile, with nothing changing, it seems like the only option is to argue against eliminating the agency because valid criticisms just get spun away politically, and opponents of real change seem to frame the choices that way.
Even now, I suspect discussions like this about the FDA only exist in a small bubble like Scott's readership. Most of the US doesn't have these ideas in their consciousness probably, so the problems get swept aside, and only bubble up if calls for dramatic changes like abolishment are discussed as a kind of intellectual punching bag for entertainment, and as a distraction from making real, serious reform.
I would have been more impressed with this post if it had offered solutions to the problems involved. What it offers as proposals aren't bad, but sidestep the real problems and in one case just obfuscate things more.
I don't think the FDA should be abolished, but I do think its role should be restricted to labeling fraud, product purity testing, and enforcing transparency in product efficacy evidence.
For me, the FDA is just one problem in a litany of problems with healthcare related to regulatory capture. The US desperately needs medical deregulation — or at least reregulation. Arguments against this in the form of fear mongering without offering reform proposala are starting to feel to me like they really mean the status quo is fine and nothing really needs to change.