| It doesn’t work? So no new medications are being approved? I suspect that’s not quite correct. ;) Is it possible the examples you’re thinking of simply don’t have enough backing because they’re either not effective, or they have serious side effects? What drugs specifically do you believe are being overlooked? It is true that regulating drugs and having an approval process causes new drugs to take time, causes some to be rejected, and that people who could use them don’t get them until approved. It is true that some people could die waiting for drugs to be approved that will be shown effective. I lost a friend this year to a cancer that had an experimental treatment that he wasn’t eligible for, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Yet this has been thoroughly debated for hundreds of years, and what we have is a system that is fairly effective at minimizing harm and maximizing effectiveness given the science we have at hand. Your argument so far has completely ignored: - The FDA’s Investigational Drug program. - The Right To Try Act, and all the preceding debate and legislation. - The fact that most new drugs developed are not effective and some have very serious consequences. - The fact that unscrupulous actors exist, and there are widespread and serious problem with fake medicines. You have nothing to say about the data I linked to on the distribution of fake drugs currently killing children by the hundreds of thousands??? If you can’t even acknowledge the basis on which the FDA was founded (regulating drugs was made a requirement by Congress) or the fact that they are balancing competing public health benefits, then your argument will get nowhere and is not being made in good faith. If you want to demonstrate why drugs should be unregulated and why we should suffer the harm that would cause, or make the case for relaxing the regulations more than the New Investgational Drug program allows and spell out how it would lead to more benefit than harm, I’m all ears! You might not be considering the possibility that relaxing drug testing and regulations could backfire and make it harder for effective drugs to reach the market. Maybe it’s worth researching the history of this debate a bit more? https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/59/10/1492 |