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From: nrh@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Emigration vs. withdrawing from a gr
Message-ID: <1996@inmet.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Feb-85 02:33:51 EST
Article-I.D.: inmet.1996
Posted: Sun Feb 24 02:33:51 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Feb-85 06:09:02 EST
Lines: 34
Nf-ID: #R:whuxl:-48700:inmet:7800312:000:1586
Nf-From: inmet!nrh    Feb 22 16:14:00 1985

The reason why the FDA will prohibit drugs whose ABSENCE will kill more
people than their AVAILABILITY has been succinctly pointed out by Milton
and Rose Friedman in "Free to Choose":  If you're an FDA member, you
have two possible risks when you make a decision about a drug in the
face of real-world imperfect knowledge:

	A) You can approve the drug, knowing that you'll look
	like a dangerous fool if the drug turns out to be another thalidomide
	(a drug which turned out to cause severe birth defects).

	B) You can prohibit the drug, knowing that it may be safe, and
	thus you may have killed people who needed it, but this is 
	a relatively safe thing for you to do -- the people who die
	will probably never know.

It seems to me that the FDA should content itself with stamping
things "approved" and "not approved", and then letting people
buy them or not.

As for the contention that the FDA is a net good:

	.... [M]ay these costs not be justified by the advantage of
	keeping dangerous drugs off the market, of preventing a series
	of thalidomide disasters?  The most careful empirical study of
	this question that has been made, by Sam Peltzman, concludes
	that the evidence is unambiguous: that the harm has greatly
	outweighed the good.  He explains his conclusion partly by
	noting that "the penalties imposed by the marketplace on sellers
	of ineffective drugs before 1962 seems to have been sufficient
	to have left little room for improvement by a regulatory
	agency."

Friedman credits this quote as being from Peltzman's "Regulation of 
Pharmaceutical Innovation".