[cousin_it]

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?

[ErrantX]

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).

[cousin_it]

Nobody's endangering you. You're free to take only drugs approved by the newly private FDA Corp.

[ErrantX]

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.

[esspem]

You will decide it because of mark "FDA approved" (or any other drug testing agency you trust) on the drug.

[mikepurvis]

Can I interest you in some mortgage-backed securities from three years ago? They're AAA-rated!

[ErrantX]

And how do you trust those commercial, unregulated, agencies?

[jerf]

I measure "trust" by actions, not words. When you buy a product, you aren't just saying you trust it, you are trusting it. Trust is a verb, not a state of being.

Unless you are very unusual and are completely off the grid, you've probably solved the question of how you personally decide how to trust a wide variety of commercial agencies of highly varying degrees of regulation and highly varying degrees of life-threateningness. Possibly without realizing it. In theory it may be unsolvable, in practice it doesn't seem to be.

It should be pointed out that this isn't theoretical, either. People die because the FDA forces them to not take drugs, even when death is essentially assured in the short-term anyhow. It's a well-known problem. If the FDA was more advisory, I suspect it would be a net good. I really can't imagine people en masse running down to WalMart and buying Dangerousol (now with twice the danger!) any more than they manage to now. (Which you can't ignore either, the FDA is not perfect.)

[tedunangst]

Thalidomide didn't endanger the people who actually took it, but it wasn't exactly harmless either.

[nooneelse]

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.

[hugh3]

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?

[esspem]

Do not use inadequately tested drugs, buy only FDA approved drugs. Why do you want to forbid other people to buy drugs not approved by FDA?

[dantheman]

The FDA also tests for effectiveness so if a drug isn't effective enough then it doesn't get through.