Slashdot Mirror
DoJ Going After Makers of Dietary Supplement (reuters.com)
schwit1 writes: Several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, have announced criminal and civil actions related to unlawful advertising and sale of dietary supplements. "Six executives with USPlabs LLC and a related company, S.K. Laboratories, face criminal charges related to the sale of unlawful dietary supplements. Four were arrested on Tuesday and two are expected to surrender, the Justice department said. The indictment says that USPlabs used a synthetic stimulant manufactured in China to make Jack3d and OxyElite Pro but told retailers that the supplements were made from plant extracts." The FTC is working on this as well, and their press release has more details. The DoJ's case involves "more than 100 makers and marketers" of these supplements. It's about time.
There's nothing more squirmy than listening to a Religious Libertarian explain why medicine regulations are evil and somehow there'd magically be fewer deaths or organ damage caused if the Invisible Hand were left unhindered.
I'd like to draw a line between Religious Libertarians and smug physicians and point out that *both* ends of the line cause unnecessary medical suffering.
The themes "do no harm regardless of cost" and "federal agency takes the blame for safety, but not the costs" have driven medical research to a standstill for the last 40 years.
There can be no medicines for afflictions that affect less than a billion people, simply because it takes $1.5 billion to bring a drug to market.
We're running out of antibiotics(*), we've already got diseases which are impervious to *all* antibiotics, and there are no new ones in the horizon.
Someone here (on slashdot) put this into perspective: peanuts would not be allowed under FDA rules.
Let's take peanuts as an example for discussion. Considering that they are easy to grow, and can be nourishing, can we outline an FDA procedure that costs less than $1.5 billion, and yet addresses the issues in a sane manner?
Let's divide this by a factor of 1,000: Can we get good safety regulations for peanuts for under $1.5 million?
I think we could. I'm not a Religious Libertarian, but from a purely mathematical standpoint it's obvious that letting people die because the treatment isn't known safe (absence of evidence is evidence of absence) is less efficient than the middle ground.
Probably more - I think more people die because we don't have working antibiotics than die from complications of supplements.
(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock, but because it's too expensive to make new ones. If we had 25 separate antibiotics and used them in a staggered pattern 5 years each (5 years of use, followed by 20 years of abstinence) we would never lack for working antibiotics.