Legalization of Drugs

[Hogeye]

Libertarian acid test; do you really believe in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

[Betsy]

There has to be regulations on these things, for pete's sake. Otherwise, how would we know our food was safe to eat (or as safe as possible, anyway), or we weren't be cheated or lied to about what exactly we're really buying, etc. ad nauseum. I'll agree some things are over-regulated and some things should be decriminalized, but to say there should be NO laws/regulations is nonsense.

[Hogeye]

Betsy, I call your argument "the fallacy of government solipotence." You seem to assume that only the State can determine what food is safe, or prevent fraud. In fact, there are other ways to ameliorate such problems. First of all, personal knowledge. Secondly, experts. Third, middlemen (retailers) who generally have a strong interest in giving their customers quality merchandise, and have a strong interest in not making them sick. And when fraud happens, it doesn't take a State to have a legal system that upholds compensation to the victim.

Your trust in the efficacy of government is unfounded. Special interests can and often do bias the State in both allowing unsafe products and prohibiting products that can be beneficial to many. E.g. Cannabis was originally made illegal by Wm. Randolf Hearst to protect his forest investments (hemp paper would have competed with his wood pulp paper) and G-men who were about to become unemployed due to the end of alcohol prohibition. Also, govt regulators have a strong bias for Type II error - e.g. not allowing drugs that could save lives. Finally, by becoming dependent on the State to do things (like tell you what is safe to eat), your (and society's) ability to do it yourself atrophies. You're helping the State to make you dumb and dependent.

Basically, I trust voluntary society and the market more than I trust the criminal organization we call "government."

[Dardedar]

DAR
Tamara used to be very skeptical of the FDA, thinking it was there to shill for big pharma and keep the natural remedies down (no doubt some truth to the first claim, recently). She read the following book and profoundly changed her mind:

Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation



Summer before last she gave a presentation on this at a freethinker meeting.

Summary from Amazon:

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A century ago, store shelves were filled with products that were rotten, useless or even deadly. Today, we can be relatatively confident that "no cholesterol" on a product label really means what it says, and that the terms "fresh," "beef" and "reduces fever" accurately describe a product's contents or use. These protections, now taken for granted, have been the work of what is arguably the nation's most important regulatory agency, the Food and Drug Administration. Hilts (Scientific Temperaments), a health and science reporter who's written for the Washington Post and the New York Times, wonderfully documents the history of the FDA from its start in the administration of Teddy Roosevelt through various crises and triumphs to the deregulatory climate of recent years. From the start, FDA officials battled entrenched business interests. Industry argued that regulation hurt profits, stymied research and kept potentially beneficial products from reaching markets quickly. How the FDA doggedly prevailed against this tide of opposition is a story of persistence, political maneuvering and make-it-up-as-you-go pragmatism. As Hilts shows, strong policies often emerged in the wake of tragedies or scandals: the case of thalidomide, a drug introduced in the late 1950s as a sedative and to relieve morning sickness but that caused pregnant women to give birth to severely deformed infants (the number is conservatively estimated at 8,000), shocked the world and led to congressional hearings and a strict new drug approval law. Even so, industry continues to lobby aggressively against regulation. Hilts has little sympathy for industry's point of view and has the facts to support this position. As the federal government once again starts talking about cuts, this book offers a sober reminder of the importance of maintaining vigorous protections against the dangers of profit-motivated decisions.

Another reviewer adds:

"...as an FDA employee when Reagan would not allow the regulation of unpasturized cheese, where the listeria bacteria consumed in it caused the deaths of dozens of babies and pregnant women (pro-life?), I have to agree with the author. That cheese example is just the beginning; it doesn't include the dozens children who died after it was clear that aspirin use in children with fever caused the deadly Reye syndrome and the administration refused to allow FDA to put warning instructions on the label. It does not include the dozens of children who were poisoned by pills in easy-opening containers (iron pills look like candy and overdoses not treated promptly are irreversibly fatal). This book does name courageous industry people as well as public servants. It can open your eyes to the critical role the government played in assuring the availability of penicillin during WWII and vaccines today. It is the history of germs and cures in the US in a plain-spoken format." --ibid

HOGEYE
Basically, I trust voluntary society and the market...

DAR
Rather convenient and easy to say while sitting safely in the lap of a country that has strict oversight of food and drugs.
Perhaps hogeye can point us to a country that operates in this manner so we can compare how it performs in relation to countries/goverments that maintain oversight food and drug. What's the witch doctor selling in Somalia lately? LOL.

D.

[Tamara]

My favorite horror story from the book was about "Lash Lure", a product that killed one woman, and blinded others because of unregulated cosmetics in the marketplace.

I also found this article online:

"As women began buying more cosmetics instead of using homemade concoctions in the early 20th century, the dangers of unregulated mass production gradually became apparent. Women and their advocates raised the alarm, and an act of Congress was the result.

snip

By the 1930s, women were buying beauty products that contained such harmful ingredients as lead, mercury and arsenic, Kay said. No law regulated their manufacture, and ingredients were not listed on labels.

"People were really dying to be beautiful," Kay said..."

you can read the rest here

[Dardedar]

DAR
Wal-Mart fudging their organics, here come the Feds:

***
Wal-Mart Charged with Selling Nonorganic Food as Organic

Group Asks USDA to Fully Investigate
Organic Product Misrepresentation

Cornucopia, WI: The Cornucopia Institute, the nation’s most aggressive organic farming watchdog, has filed a formal legal complaint with the USDA asking them to investigate allegations of illegal “organic” food distribution by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Cornucopia has documented cases of nonorganic food products being sold as organic in Wal-Mart’s grocery departments.

“We first noticed that Wal-Mart was using in-store signage to misidentify conventional, nonorganic food as organic in their upscale-market test store in Plano, Texas,” said Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute. Subsequently, Cornucopia staff visited a number of other Wal-Mart stores in the Midwest and documented similar improprieties in both produce and dairy sections.

...
“Our management and our employees know what organic means,” said Lindy Bannister, General Manager at The Wedge Cooperative in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “If Wal-Mart intends to get into organics, they can’t be allowed to misidentify ‘natural’ foods as organic to unsuspecting consumers.” The Wedge, the largest single store member-owned food cooperative in the nation, was one of the first retailers to go through the USDA organic certification process.
...

Cornucopia’s complaint asks the USDA to fully investigate the allegations of organic food misrepresentation. The farm policy organization has indicated that they will share their evidence, including photographs and notes, with the agency’s investigators. Fines of up to $10,000 per violation for proven incidents of organic food misrepresentation are provided for in federal organic regulations.

This past September, The Cornucopia Institute also accused Wal-Mart of cheapening the value of the organic label by sourcing products from industrial-scale factory-farms and Third World countries, such as China.

The Institute released a white paper, Wal-Mart Rolls Out Organic Products—Market Expansion or Market Delusion?, that made the argument that Wal-Mart is poised to drive down the price of organic food in the marketplace by inventing a “new” organic—food from corporate agribusiness, factory-farms, and cheap imports of questionable quality.

the rest

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

It's easy to trust the "market" when it's already regulated (although the leash has been a little too loose under the Rs). Especially when all evidence as to why industry became regulated in the first place is blown off as government propaganda. My mother knew someone who had a "thalidomide" baby. I admit I'd prefer they regulate the sanitation of the dairy industry (producers and handlers) rather than insist on pasturization of milk products (at least allow the certified, inspected, and labeled marketing of dairy products and let me make the decision), but I definitely want the industry regulated. (WI is not the combined Dairy & Beer state for nothing. The breweries used to keep dairy cattle to feed their used grain to - and as long as the cow still gave milk, didn't care if she was so ill she had to be propped upright.)

As to drugs, I'd prefer the same as I do for dairy. Legal, certified, inspected, and labeled - though as far as drugs are concerned, I want them taxed and sold in package stores and shut down any store that doesn't "card" for minors.

[Betsy]

I heard someone once say they had the solution to the marijuana problem and I thought it sounded pretty sensible. Everyone (each household) can grow their own in a plot of a certain limited size for their own personal use for whatever reason, medical or otherwise. No one can sell it or have a plot any bigger than the legal limited size.

[Doug]

I heard someone once say they had the solution to the marijuana problem and I thought it sounded pretty sensible. Everyone (each household) can grow their own in a plot of a certain limited size for their own personal use for whatever reason, medical or otherwise. No one can sell it or have a plot any bigger than the legal limited size.

DOUG
If it's OK to use it, why shouldn't it be OK to sell it too?

[Betsy]

maybe it should be okay, but it's so much simpler if you can't - because selling then would require regulating quality, price, who you can and can't sell it to, people would then need to mass produce it, taxes, licensing, etc. etc.

[Hogeye]

The examples given (in the posts about "Protecting America's Health") are all type I errors. Let's look at some type II errors of regulation:

• "The FDA found the [thrombolytic] therapy reduced heart attack fatalities by 18%, but it took two years to approve the new drug application. The result was as many as 22,000 deaths." (Noel Campbell, Dept. of Econ., Gordon College)
• In the tree years between propranolol's introduction in the UK and the US, approx. 30,000 Americans died prematurely because they couldn't get the lifesaving drug.
• In the 12 years it took for the FDA to approve of the AIDS drug ribavarin, 430,000 people died needlessly and/or prematurely.
• During the 5 year FDA delay of the AIDS home test, an estimated 10,000 American were infected.
• According to a 30 year analysis, for every American saved by the "drug lag" (delay in approval), another 64-364 were killed by it. IOW between 1950 and 1980 the drug lag saved about 33 American lives per year, while 2100-12000 died needlessly. (D.H. Gieringer, "The Safely and Efficacy of New Drug Approval")

Although most new medicines are discovered in the US, Europeans have access to them sooner due to the drug lag created by the FDA. E.g. In the mid-1980's 72% of new drugs approved by the FDA had been available elsewhere for an average of 5.5 years.

Prior to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, most drug manufacturers did appropriate safety testing before marketing a drug. Third party testing was done by the AMA and Consumers' Research among others. The government aggression resulted simply in decreasing the availability of new drugs. They ramped up the aggression after the Thalidomide scare.

"The penalties imposed by the marketplace on sellers of ineffective drugs before 1962 ... have left little room for improvement by a regulatory agency." - Sam Pelzman, "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation: The 1962 Amendments

Oh, and about Thalidomide - it has been demonstrated to be a safer sedative than barbituates for all but pregnant women. (Over 1000 people die each year from barb-alcohol interactions alone.)

Another thing that kills people is the FDA's prohibition of advertising "off-label" uses. One example: even though a study with more than 22000 physicians showed that an aspirin every other day reduced the risk of heart attack in men over 50 by 44%, aspirin firms were not allowed to advertise this fact. In the US an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 people died needlessly each year that the FDA stopped advertisers from promoting this benefit. Another example: The FDA wouldn't let folic acid manufacturers tell pregnant women that it decreased the risk of birth defects by 50-75%.

I culled this info from an excellent book called "Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression" by Dr. Mary Ruwart. Ch. 6 "Protecting Ourselves to Death." Tamara may want to read this as an antidote to the pro-regulation book she read.

The alternative to compulsory licensure is voluntary certification. Certification has all the advantages of licensure but none of the govt aggression. And it works better in terms of both quality and price. Underwriters Labratories is an excellent example. Virtually all consumer electronic equipment is certified voluntarily by UL. Few retailers would even consider selling an electronic product that wasn't certified. Yet, there is no compulsion; someone who wants a specialized product that is not certified can legally buy one.

===

Back on subject: Betsy, a "one growlight rule" has been proposed in some places, but Doug is right - outright legalization is more consistent. And of course respects people's cognitive freedom.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Part of the drug lag is caused by the US FDA's xenophobic refusal to utilize anybody else's research and part of it is caused by underfunding (a problem that could be diminished by accepting international peer-reviewed research). Bayer doesn't really want to tell people to take an aspirin a day to prevent heart attack, because then they'd also have to tell people that an aspirin a day trashes your liver. This way they get kudos for heart attack prevention without the negatives of telling people the negatives. (I personally would rather go out with a heart attack than liver disease - my mother died of the latter, admittedly assisted by holes in her lungs from smoking.) The folic acid thing is another naturals v. drug industry thing (Adele Davis pointed it out in the late 1950s) and fully funding the FDA combined with rigorously enforcing corruption laws would solve that kind of thing.

As to legalizing drugs now considered illegal - if you really want that to happen, do it in steps (1st "low priority", then "decriminalization, and finally "legalization"). Americans in general have some kind of an emotional response (some sort of 'you're not getting away with...' attitude) to making things legal that have been illegal all their lives. It took generations to decriminalize adultry - and probably 75% of Americans would have a fit if you called that "legalizing" adultry.

[Dardedar]

One example: even though a study with more than 22000 physicians showed that an aspirin every other day reduced the risk of heart attack in men over 50 by 44%, aspirin firms were not allowed to advertise this fact. In the US an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 people died needlessly each year that the FDA stopped advertisers from promoting this benefit.

DAR
Lots of claims, not much back up. I thought I would investigate just one of the claims and see if there was more to it. I found this:

***
Bayer aspirin ads mislead the public again
Healthfacts, March, 2004

The January issue of HealthFacts reported that the Bayer Corporation's petition was rejected by an FDA advisory panel. Bayer wants FDA approval so it can advertise aspirin as a heart disease preventive. Though millions of people without heart disease take daily low doses of aspirin to prevent a heart attack, Bayer is not permitted to advertise this indication until the FDA accepts convincing proof from randomized clinical trials. At this writing, the FDA has not decided whether to accept its advisory panel's recommendation; thus Bayer should not be advertising aspirin as a drug proven to prevent heart disease in all adults.

Bayer's petition was rejected in December 2003 because the cardiovascular disease experts on the FDA advisory panel came to the conclusion that the harms of aspirin therapy might outweigh the benefits for people who are at low risk of heart disease. Chief among the harms that most concerned the FDA advisory panel is the well-known risk of hemorrhagic stroke associated with chronic aspirin use--no matter how low the dose.

By early February, Bayer ads began appearing on TV. "The ads are not legitimate," according to Robert Temple, MD, of the FDA's oncologic and cardiac drug division. What's more, two of the claims made in these ads are completely false, i.e., aspirin reduces the rate of stroke and deaths from heart disease. As an over-the-counter drug, aspirin is regulated by another government agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

This is the second time that Bayer has been caught misleading the public. In 2000, the FTC determined that Bayer's ads implied that aspirin's heart attack prevention benefit is the same for all adults. The ads featured healthy young women, who as a group are at the lowest risk for a heart attack and are more likely to harmed than helped by aspirin. To settle the FTC charges, Bayer had to launch a million dollar consumer "education" campaign complete with a toll-free number. A mere slap on the wrist considering the offense.

This time around, Bayer should be required to run corrective ads, restating and then retracting as fraudulent the claims perpetuated by the current ads.

link

[Hogeye]

I'm not sure what exactly you are disputing, Darrel. That studies have indicated that aspirin is helpful in reducing the risk of heart attack? Simply googling "aspirin heart attack study" gives tons of articles to that effect. Tamara has my "Healing Our World" book, so I can't look up Ruwart's cited source right now. But the risk-reducing effect of aspirin seems uncontroversial, and doctors routinely recommend it to their heart patients. Ask anyone who's had a bypass operation.

... thus Bayer should not be advertising aspirin as a drug proven to prevent heart disease in all adults.

This is not the issue (and a good example of raising the goalposts!) The FDA would not allow aspirin companies to make mild claims like some studies have indicated that aspirin may reduce the risk of heart attack in some people. Such true statements were forbidden by the "off label" rules. IMU that changed a few years ago, but only after years of forbidding it, resulting in who knows how many deaths.

The article you cite is about some specific (apparently less mild) claims by a specific firm.

Part of the drug lag is caused by the US FDA's xenophobic refusal to utilize anybody else's research

Right. Drugs determined safe in e.g. Europe have to be totally retested and foreign research ignored, no matter how reliable. This is a good example of incompetence by government and the perverse effects of political special interests.

The folic acid thing is another naturals v. drug industry thing (Adele Davis pointed it out in the late 1950s) and fully funding the FDA combined with rigorously enforcing corruption laws would solve that kind of thing.

I never have understood the attitude, mainly associated with "liberals," that the solution to abject failure of a program or bureaucracy is to throw more money at it. CIA fails; give them more money. FEMA fails - more money. FDA kills millions - more money. What would they have to do to get defunded???

[Dardedar]

I'm not sure what exactly you are disputing, Darrel. That studies have indicated that aspirin is helpful in reducing the risk of heart attack?

DAR
See bolded text which responds directly to the comments from you I quoted in my response. It provides the rest of the story....

D.

[Hogeye]

So the FDA, in its wisdom, decides that people at risk from heart attack (such as those who have already had one) may not be told that aspirin may help because it might be a risk for some other group of people. I find such government aggression to be immoral and disgusting.

[Doug]

So the FDA, in its wisdom, decides that people at risk from heart attack (such as those who have already had one) may not be told that aspirin may help because it might be a risk for some other group of people. I find such government aggression to be immoral and disgusting.

DOUG
Isn't that the standard reasoning we use to test pretty much any drug? First, see if it has health benefits as advertised (or expected). While such testing is going on, see if it has any deleterious side effects. If it can help as expected and has no side effects, then put it on the market. If it can't help as expected, no go. If it can help as expected BUT it has bad side effects, weigh the pros and cons to see if it can still be put on the market.

This reasoning seems quite commonsensical to me.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

It is not "throwing money at" a problem to insist the agency is fully funded so it can do it's job. That would be like saying you shouldn't "throw money" by getting gasoline when your car is too low on fuel to make it to work. The combination of fully funded and enforced corruption laws would solve most of the problems we have with all our oversight agencies.

[Hogeye]

Doug, I support voluntary certification as opposed to compulsory licensure. What you describe is wonderful for Underwriters Laboratories, Consumers Union, Good Housekeeping, etc. But letting a coercive monopoly like the FDA approve or prohibit products by force is both immoral (as it constitutes aggression) and inefficient (as it sets up political favoritism and corruption, bias for type II error, etc. as discussed.) I favor the abolishment of the FDA. (...which shouldn't be any surprise since you know I'm an anarchist.)

Barbara, one can objectively determine how low a gas tank is. There is no objective measure of optimal funding for the military, or CIA, or FEMA, or whatever govt scam you're promoting. As a general heuristic, if one thing fails, then maybe you should try something else. A standard statist apologetic for more government is a perverse "win-win" power-racheting attitude that, if a program works, it deserves more money, and if it fails, then all it needs is more money.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Cherry-picking again Hogeye. I said fully fund, not over fund - and it is very possible to determine what is fully funded - enough money to hire enough trained people to do the job. I also said the corruptions laws need to be enforced. A program only "deserves" enough money to do the job. However, if a pilot program works, then of course it "deserves" more money to expand the program. (i.e., if Americorp tutors in a pilot program in one elementary school in NYC succeed in raising reading comprehension levels in 90% or more of the students tutored, then the program should be expanded to other elementary schools in urban areas, and a pilot program should be started in rural areas. On the other hand, once the USDA meat inspection program has enough inspectors to inspect every meat packing plant in America, they don't need more money for that program, however successful it is.)