Do you really want the market flooded with new software, whose effects aren't well understood?
You can find effective software despite almost no government regulation, why do you think it won't work for drugs? I'm sure a lot of private rating agencies evolve in the such free market of drugs.
There's a lot of totally crappy software on the market. The key difference is that you can try a better application after getting burned by a bad one. Not necessarily so with drugs - they can do unrecoverable damage.
I think this shift in policy would require an enormous cultural shift. Currently, our society mostly trusts the drugs available on our store shelves. A deregulated market would require consumers to be much more critical in order to continue to function.
That depends on whether you prefer to die from taking an untested drug or die because the drug isn't invented yet. A severely ill person would probably prefer a chance of the former to the certainty of the latter. Also you have to account for the odds of both these events: which one do you think will happen more?
That's something of a straw man though. Because the vast majority of people taking drugs aren't dying. If new drugs created in the deregulated industry were only given to terminal cases as a last resort it might work; otherwise it is just endangering everyone else (taking drugs).
And how do you objectively decide which ones are safe and which have been tested sufficiently to your requirements?
As an individual deciding a drug is safe to use should not require you to read all the relevant research etc. - you need a safe, objective marker. i.e. law and regulation.
Your mistaken presupposition: all drugs only ever impact just the person taking them, they are all completely metabolized into totally harmless chemicals in the first body they enter.
Quite right. My statement was based on my judgement that I (or perhaps other individuals less circumspect than myself) am more likely to die from an inadequately tested drug than from the lack of a drug which would have been invented in an FDAless free-for-all.
Or another scenario: maybe the drug to treat my disease has been invented, but nobody knows about it because it hasn't been properly tested and is competing with thirty other startup drugs (mostly useless, some harmful) which claim to treat the same disease. How is my doctor supposed to magically know which one to prescribe me?
You can find effective software despite almost no government regulation, why do you think it won't work for drugs? I'm sure a lot of private rating agencies evolve in the such free market of drugs.