[Retric]

FDA: Food and Drug Administration

By prescription only is a regulation. Without that Coca-Cola would still have coca leaves.

> drugs never developed

The way you get good data on that is to look at the actual drug discovery process and how decisions are made.

Automated in vitro testing has been used, but the number of potential compounds make that impractical even with essentially zero regulation at that point. Once you get down to some actual evidence for a drug funding is surprisingly plentiful. The often quoted 2 billion per drug includes all the failures, for any given candidate the cost is low at every individual stage until you have something with significant promise. Which makes sense as the average drug is worth vastly more than 2 billion so at every stage further investment looks viable.