Government agencies that spend massive amounts of tax dollars while accomplishing nothing and being net-negative for society. Anyone who has worked for or dealt with the government for extended periods of time will clearly know how fucked it is
The FDA costs taxpayers less than $4 billion per year.
If FDA is a net negative, next time you need a medication you're aware you can go participate in a Phase I study, and get paid to take a cutting edge drug for it? Why bother looking at the stuff on the medicine shelf that costs you money?
Can you give us all an idea of your experience working with government, and especially FDA?
My experience is in selling tech to government. Disgusting and corrupt.
This isn't some hypothetical "well, we haven't tried to see what it would look like without regulation;" this is something that is already in existence and whose effects can be measured today!
This was the case pre-FDA. IIRC, that is how heroin was sold in drug stores. See also OxyContin[0].
> Allow people to sue if they are harmed.
So you advocate a costly post-harm remediation instead of a preemptive solution provided by governmental regulations?
> Do not care about a government agency preventing access to new drugs.
See previous reference to heroin once being an over-the-counter product.
0 - https://apnews.com/article/purdue-pharma-sackler-settlement-...
Absolutely. Such solutions tend to be much cheaper and more effective. It's how we deal with the vast majority of problems for a good reason.
If we sold oxycontin over the counter we would have much less of an overdose problem than we do. Would also take a lot of stress off our emergency medical care system which spends an inordinate amount of time just dealing with addicts looking for drugs.
It's a funny example to use to justify the current regulatory framework because oxycontin got approved by the very same.
> Absolutely. Such solutions tend to be much cheaper and more effective.
This is not supported by any credible analysis I am aware of, as the cost of rectifying a problem post hoc has historically been far greater than preventing it in the first place.
> If we sold oxycontin over the counter we would have much less of an overdose problem than we do.
This assertion is demonstrably wrong and could easily be categorized as insulting to people struggling with OxyContin addiction.
Fair point.
This is a complex societal problem having no simple solution. Unfortunately, what you proposed:
Should allow pharma to sell drugs to the market. Allow
people to sue if they are harmed. Do not care about a
government agency preventing access to new drugs.
Remember, every person who dies from an overdose cannot "sue if they get harmed" as they are dead.
Class action is what I meant with the difficulty of organizing. To make a class action happen and win, the damage done must be massive enough to get enough people to notice it and take action, and must be easily and cheaply provable. A class action is not going to fund expensive scientific studies that prove their problem was caused by the company they're suing. Your solution would only prevent the absolute worst cases. Any damage that's rare, hard to notice or prove, small, long term, etc would not get compensated and would cost society much more than properly funding FDA.
This is a comical extreme vision of libertarian politics. Everything gets worse, lots of people die, but it's okay because we have a small principle of freedom. Yeah. Great.
If you're trying to persuade people you're doing a very shit job.
Spoiler alert: you cannot.
The reason clinical trials are so expensive and complicated is because it's extremely hard to isolate signal of "what is this drug doing to people."
So on what basis would you possibly sue a company?
As another commenter said, we have an entire industry of the form you desire: supplements. Go take them to treat your next illness so you can really experience the creme de la creme that FDA is apparently keeping from you. Good luck suing for lack of effectiveness or for any harms you encounter.
What about drugs that people do not buy via insurance? Just have a free for all there?
Why wouldn't pharma just release the drug to the public at very low cost to use the unwitting public as its test subjects instead of running trials to satisfy insurance companies? If a bunch of people die then welp, you know not to pursue "insurance approval?"
Can't see how we could go wrong by making it very difficult to sell a working, expensive drug, and make it extremely cheap to sell a mass-market ineffective/unsafe drug...
I’ve spent my entire career working for wasteful companies who accomplish nothing and are net-negative for society. The government at least picks up my garbage every week.
Unfortunately, they don't fail often, and we've seen the government bailing companies out so they don't fail.
But in the end, it's a moot point—even when companies fail, they are replaced with companies that either are equally wasteful, or as the replacement companies grow, their wastefulness increases.
This is only true of republican governments. Republican-led governments are truly appalling in their spending, and wasteful tax cuts. Democrat governments are far far more efficient, effective, and work for the people.
An example of this is one beautiful bill which literally increased deficits while giving nothing of value to people but the biden-led inflation reduction act literally created new energy infrastructure without increasing deficit.