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Comment by howhireable3141 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed but the government is to blame for a lot of this. People are super thirsty for CBD, it is very effective for many people. Especially elderly people that have been anti-pot most of their lives.

These people don't have any good ways of making good buying decisions, let a lone having a regulatory body to rely on to test this stuff. So they just choose stuff with good marketing and high concentrations.

Not to say your article isn't making a good point -- just that these nasty companies being successful is due to a vacuum created by decades of complete head-up-our-own-ass marijuana policy.

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There’s no regulatory body testing most things, especially chemicals. It’s tragic.

I find the premise that consumers need ahead-of-time protection insulting and limiting. If wrongs are made, we have a system for remedy: tort. The FDA is an adjacent regulatory body. Through its risk adverse behavior, the FDA causes unseen deaths: https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/fda-poli... Also, the FDA performs poor data collection and sharing. When I analyzed one of the FDA'S most important datasets, I was surprised to find such low quality: https://github.com/statwonk/FDA-adverse-drug-reactions/blob/... What's tragic to me is that so often folks feel safety or wealth comes from the government rather than our own minds. Maybe if there's no safety facade they'll demand private labs certify safety?

What do you think about Thalidomide then? http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/them...

A back pat for a function the market would have provided immediately. Drugs can definitely be poison. I'd much prefer safety analyses have a GitHub sha1 publicly accessible than secretively behind the FDA's closed doors.

> a function the market would have provided immediately.

This opinion would seem to be at odds with reality at large.

The reason the Food, Drug and Cosmetic act was passed in the first place is because of all the harm that the (then unregulated) pharmaceutical industry was doing. The market had centuries' worth of time to correct for people taking all sorts of drugs that actively kill people, and it didn't. It was only regulation that started to get the mess under control.

And it's the loopholes in regulation where things are worst. The supplement industry continues to do far more harm than good.

It's just possible that, despite the best efforts of some economists to argue that everyone is perfectly knowledgeable, rational, and emotionless in order to simplify their models, people continue to be merely human.

What? The FDA openly publishes stuff. From long before GitHub was around.

Here's a good overview of how they go about making sure that approved drugs are GRASE (Generally Recognized As Safe and Effective): https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm14353...

Even more than that, the FDA requires openness in a way that I'm not sure would be accomplishable without.

Publication bias is a real thing, and drug companies do know how to use it to their advantage. Take a look at what drug trial results looked like before and after the FDA started requiring pre-registration. The difference is, to put it mildly, staggering.

I'm pretty hard pressed to come up with a market equivalent to drug trial pre-registration. Given everything I've seen of Adam Smith's writings, I'm pretty sure that, were he alive today, he'd probably say something like, "Duh, of course. Do that. That is some excellent regulation, and obviously in the service of the public good."

Tangentially, I'm guessing that, if CBD had to go through pre-registered drug trials, it wouldn't be such a big deal. The funny thing about things that are widely believed to help with every last ailment is, they tend to all be about equally good at treating pretty much everything.

Your Freedom Markets™ position doesn't account for information asymmetry, aka power imbalance.

The views above share a similarity to the anti-vaccine crowd. Basically the FDA does such a great job at keeping our drug supply safe that people fail to properly understand the risks, just like vaccinations have done such a great job of preventing devistating illnesses.

The most telling clue is he said the remedy for bad drugs is tort... Showing he clearly doesn’t understand the severity of the problem.

Sorry our drugs killed your kid, but now you can sue us so everything is ok.

They did have one good point, which is what is the opportunity cost of slowing down drug development with regulation and which way does the least harm. I don’t have the data to back up either side, but I’m not seeing a ton (there are some though) of medical breakthroughs in less regulated countries.

If they're great, why not publish the work to GitHub?

Diffuse or latent injury is hard to protect against with tort. And afaik a judge can’t declare some chemical illegal. Moreover, forced arbitration has destroyed tort in the US. The only source of broad accountability is government. An individual case in arbitration is insufficient deterrence and arbitrators tend to lowball plaintiffs relative to juries and public courts. There is virtually no ability to appeal.

Most of the claims about CBD are, to put it mildly, bogus.

This is why the FDA is stepping in.

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