Hacker News Reader

Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

How many people have died because of FDA gatekeeping delaying the release of life-saving treatment?

What could possibly go wrong

> Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[91] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

It's perfectly legal to buy drain cleaner at any department store and if you drink it you are likely to die. But you are under no obligation to drink it. Or do heroin. So that has an obvious solution.

Whereas if you have cancer and cannabis can prevent your nausea but the federal government maintains a prohibition on it for three generations, what are your options?

For something more recent, I'd recommend any of the books or documentaries on oxycontin sparking a more recent opium epidemic. As badly as the FDA failed, we'd be worse off if we didn't have one. There's good reasons people want more effective regulation instead of none.

Part of the ban on cannabis, psychedelics, etc has been to ban research on their effects as well. I think there's some clear lines that can be drawn on good laws vs bad laws here.

> For something more recent, I'd recommend any of the books or documentaries on oxycontin sparking a more recent opium epidemic. As badly as the FDA failed, we'd be worse off if we didn't have one.

I feel like the problem we have is that we've utterly failed at informed consent.

You go to the doctor for a minor surgery and come home with a prescription for opioids. You take them even if you're not in any real discomfort, because your doctor prescribed them. Or maybe you could have done with half as much, but then there's a chance it wouldn't have been enough, and having the patient rely on their own judgment is discouraged. So now you're addicted to opioids.

Then we get a backlash where the people who are actually in severe pain can't get their medication because doctors used to over-prescribe it.

This entire system is asinine. The problem is not that people have access to opioids. Anybody can get them by going to a doctor and lying about their symptoms, therefore anybody should be able to just get them from the pharmacy. Stop rewarding mendacity. But the process of getting them from the pharmacy should require being informed of the risks so you can be responsible -- not being handed a bottle with a bunch of papers you're not going to read and then taking them whether you really need them or not.

We need to stop banning everything and start better informing people so they can make reasonable choices.

We disagree on how human nature works and the ability for normal people to become educated on every topic that can harm them. People trust their doctor and don't have the medical training to know if something is riskier than they're told. Addiction is dangerous precisely because it overrides someone's ability to change their mind later.

Purdue and our system of insurance created monetary incentives for doctors to overprescribe and misled them about the side effects. Normal people died even when they followed instructions because of the cycle of withdrawal symptoms.

History has repeated waves of addictive drugs because there's alway someone with an incentive to sell them. This is not a place where market outcomes work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com