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Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

This is not really a good argument, there are many things that kill a lot of people , The manner and type of lives lost is important also the nature of impact.

People aren’t dying very young with tobacco addiction for the most part. There is cancer in youth sure , but tobacco is not the leading cause of that .

People who die of tobacco related illnesses are functioning adults and contributing members of society for the vast majority of their lives .

The disruption to the lives of drug addicts and their friends and family far exceeds those faced by tobacco addicts.

Not everything is a conspiracy or corruption people only react to what they see, the impact of drugs is far more visceral and immediate than tobacco or say obesity which kills even more, so pressure for legislation is higher

If tobacco killed because the of one wrongly cut cigarette you smoked , it would require prescription too

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Do people die from prescription opioids that often? I assumed that most of the deaths occur when people who are addicted lose access to legal sources and are forced to buy illegally (so risk of overdose and other complications is much higher)?

That is exactly why legal sources which are prescription exists, because it is easy to kill oneself by taking a illegal pill of unknown quality, such risks are not common with tobacco.

The regulation is a function of that, not how many people are killed by one item or other, it is merely just how easy is it die of OD with a poorly sourced drug, is why we have FDA and regulations etc is my point.

Interesting theory. I would guess that's rare and that more often than not, people are overdosing on prescriptions that they lied to obtain and then abused, or purchased on the street from someone who received the prescriptions but didn't need them. I'm speaking from personal experiences, but of course, it's anecdotal.

> there are many things that kill a lot of people

The FDA doesn't have jurisdiction over "many things".

I personally think the FDA shouldn't exist, or should not have power to regulate (and should be a toothless advisory/certification authority). That said, if they are to exist, they should do their job. They're not. We're paying the bill but not getting the service.

Same goes with OSHA. Every casino in Las Vegas demands their employees work in rooms filled with tobacco smoke. Why? Money. It's pure corruption.

We have the rules, they're just not enforced, because if you have enough cash flow, you get a special carve-out so that the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to you.

Big Tobacco gets it from the FDA. Big Telecom gets it from the FCC. Boeing gets it from the FAA. It's everywhere, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. We're paying billions and billions for these huge bureaucracies and they're only pretending to provide us with the service they exist to provide.

> The FDA doesn't have jurisdiction over "many things".

The FDA has jurisdiction over tobacco[2] and various food products contributing to obesity and those are the only two examples highlighted by OP or me in the thread.

> We're paying the bill but not getting the service.

Don't think we are, there is very little money for Food part of FDA, in the last 5-6 years the money for food has gone from 1,037M(2018) to 1,145(2022)[1] which in real terms considering inflation means it has gone down and last 30 years it has been similar story.

Last Week Tonight had a recent in depth segment on how little resource we have for food enforcement[3] sometimes as little as singe digit inspectors for an entire industry.

We don't really enforce food regulations, because we don't fund the regulatory body for food safety.

[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44576, compare that Drugs moved from 1,330 to 2,116M in the same time period.

[2] https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg+

You are paying for the rules, not the enforcement. They don’t have 5e budget to enforce, similar to the EPA.

Ah a very libertarian take, I don't think we should have rules, of course until you're personally affected and then you'll demand them.

How did you get “I don’t think we should have rules” from my multi-paragraph comment complaining about how the rules we have are not enforced when and where it matters?

It's the "I personally think the FDA and OSHA should not exist part" which makes me get "I don’t think we should have rules" from your comment.

Rules are critically important. We shouldn’t be paying the government to enforce them, because they aren’t, and such money is basically just being lit on fire.

Who enforces the rules if not the government?

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