When you measure only the costs of one side and only the benefits of the other, the conclusion is predetermined, and of no value.
How about you engage the question of whether the costs and benefits of our current policy outweigh the costs and benefits of a looser policy directly, instead of just tossing a rhetorical hand grenade into the debate ("look! mangled babies!") and running away? It would look something like this:
"The number of thalidomide birth defects estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000 according to Wikipedia. Given the rate of cancer death in this country, a net one year delay applied across all effective therapies compounded across many years almost certainly outweighs your one example. Excessively liberal medicine policy may kill and maim, but so does excessively conservative policy; it's not a pure win by any means. Are you so sure that our policy is really the best policy?"
This isn't a question you can actually determine the best answer to with a series of anecdotes. You have to actually do a statistical analysis. I have not done this statistical analysis, so all I can say is something like "I'd bet money we're being too conservative", or "My libertarian leanings lead me to say we should have a more liberal acceptance policy on the grounds of personal freedom", but just screaming about deformed babies with no other analysis like this is an emotional tactic that should be replaced with something better. Too many people's lives are on the line for this debate to be shut down with "won't someone please think of the babies?"
It's also effectively a non-issue. Why not slap a big "THIS IS NOT TESTED TO BE SAFE FOR PREGNANT WOMEN" label on the thing? I mean doctors don't recommend ibuprofen for pregnant women, but mostly because there are no studies on the effects of ibuprofen on unborn babies. We don't out-right ban ibuprofen just because we don't know how it will effect women/babies during pregnancy.
If there was no FDA, you'd basically need to slap a label on that said - "This is not tested to be safe for anything", since it's the FDA that mandates all the safety testing.
No, it's not, but your point definitely is irrelevant. You see, it's my body, so I can put whatever I want in it, be it aspirin, heroin, thalidomide or cyanide. And yeah, I may wish to make an educated choice about that, but then again, I don't have to.
True, but when you're talking medicines, you may not have a choice in the matter. e.g. You come into the emergency room unconscious, what medicines should the doctors be allowed to use?
Basically, if someone is going to make a decision affecting my body while I'm unconscious, I'd rather have someone I picked for that job to do it (like, I don't know, my doctor or my wife or my dad or my friend or even my insurance company) than some bureaucrat in FDA.
But that's not quite the issue in question, eh? My understanding is, you can't get the unapproved anti-venom even if you are conscious and you are about to die without it anyway, by doctors opinion.
I realize that you still can't get it when you are conscious. I'm just saying that 'personal choice' isn't the only weighing factor here. If you come into the emergency room and you are unconscious, who says that you are with someone (wife,friend,etc) or that there is enough time to try and get in touch with your doctor?
I personally think that the FDA approval process is bogus too. I'm just trying to expand the discussion a bit.
I was just trying not to drift too much into complicated parts of the problem, since the society is obviously unable to fix even the most obvious and simple parts of it.
Yeah, maybe there should be some rules about corner cases like that (what to do with you if you are unconscious and there is nobody to ask about what you'd want to be done to you). And maybe one way to get those rules written and enforced is to have people on government payroll for that. Or maybe we should just leave it to the ER folks. But, frankly, I think it would be nice to fix the obvious big wrongs first, and worry about all this stuff later.
Since you include heroin and cyanide, would you have some kind of provision that prohibits people from taking certain substances if they've demonstrated by their behavior that those substances would cause them to harm other members of society? In other words, should we allow susceptible people to become junkies if they end up doing something really really bad while they're under the influence?
I'm not sure there is a one-size-fits-all solution to that. But, in general, I think that what matters is the real damage done. I mean, if you do harm others, you should be punished/restricted, and if you do harm others repeatedly under the influence of some substance (be it snorted cocaine or internally produced adrenaline), you should perhaps be punished/restricted more.
But the punishment/restriction should always be a response to the harm done to others, not to whatever the person does to her own body.
Millions of people have died because the government has banned certain drugs. Whereas the number of people who have died because of a drug not being banned is zero. It seems like a clear tradeoff to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fen-phen had a body count before it was banned. Such cases are rare, but that means the system is doing at least part of its job.
People died because they took a dangerous drug. They didn't die because the drug wasn't illegal.
If you want to cut down the number of people taking dangerous drugs, ban doctors from prescribing non FDA-approved drugs and ban companies from marketing them. However, I have only contempt for people who want to put their fellow citizens in jail for making their own medical decisions.
