Time to Get Rid of the FDA
Last week I came across this at blogger ShrinkWrapped:
Healthcare "Reform" and the Precautionary Principle
Yesterday, John Stossel discussed how our regulatory process deprives desperate patients of the admittedly slim chance for cure or remission, by denying experimental treatments, based on the precautionary principle:
Whose Body Is It?People suffer and die because the government "protects" us. It should protect us less and respect our liberty more.
The most basic questions are: Who owns you, and who should control what you put into your body? In what sense are you free if you can't decide what medicines you will take?
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We'll hear from people like Bruce Tower. Tower has prostate cancer. He wanted to take a drug that showed promise against his cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration would not allow it. One bureaucrat told him the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects. Tower's outraged response was: "Side effects -- who cares? Every treatment I've had I've suffered from side effects. If I'm terminal, it should be my option to endure any side effects."
Of course it should be his option. Why, in our "free" country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?
The only thing worse than having idiot bureaucrats deciding what drugs should make it to market, is idiot bureaucrats deciding what kind of insurance you must carry and so we already have a hint of what ObamaCare would like like if passed into law.
As I wrote back in March of 2007: "You can have the cure for cancer, but unless you know people in the FDA and pharmaceutical business you will get nowhere. Believe it."
While the FDA has no problem allowing Horny Goat Weed to be consumed, if you need real medicine than you have to get it illegally. This is what we as a nation have been reduced to, buying medicine in back alleys.
The FDA no longer protects us, and just as a faulty Carbon Monoxide Alarm is more dangerous than no alarm at all, it is time we simply got rid of the FDA.
