Abolish the FDA… And Then What?

The FDA inaccurately dates its origin to when President Teddy Roosevelt signed the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which simply required, “truth in labeling.”

The FDA didn’t get its name until 1930 and it wasn’t until FDR signed the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that it got its preeminent power to stop new drugs from entering the market until it granted its approval.

This pre-market review has expanded over time — particularly with the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendment — where in the name of protecting consumers the review has become longer, costlier, and broader.

You see, once a government bureaucracy is born it’s hard to kill it because as it ages it can leverage your tax dollars and its proximity to power to pressure Congress to be “pragmatic.”

And Congress is pragmatic because the average voter is pragmatic, i.e. educated by government authorities into accepting that forcing people via the barrel of a gun (the means) is acceptable so long as it’s done in the name of some esoteric goal (the ends) where the next thing you know the federal government is funding studies on how cocaine affects the sexual habits of quail.

Underlying our indoctrinated neocortex is our ape amygdala where we can be sent into an irrational panic with a sprinkle of, “If we abolish the FDA then everyone will die from food poisoning and experimental drugs!”

This isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate reasons to keep the FDA, but you’d think given the reflexive poo-pooing to its abolition that 99.99999% of humans hadn’t existed without it or that 95% of humans today don’t live under its domain and where some countries don’t even have a medical regulatory process. And even in the US, there are numerous foods and drugs that don’t require FDA approval and yet you probably aren’t any the wiser: compounded drugs, cosmetics, infant formula, medical food, food additives, supplements, etc.

So there are three main reasons to abolish the FDA…

The FDA costs $8 billion per year with 18,000 employees. Some say this is such a small part of our federal budget that it isn’t even worth getting rid of, but to put it into context that’s enough money to give $1 to every human. And then all its employees who are disproportionally well-educated could do something more productive with their time like actually make life-saving drugs instead of preventing them from entering the market “for our own good.” By abolishing the FDA it’s one less department the average voter has to educate themselves on — not that they really do — which is an argument for simplifying DC in general because an institution can only be as good as its boss’s ability to hold it accountable.

The FDA is corrupt. Both businesspeople and bureaucrats are self-interested — after all, they’re human — but whereas the former are incentivized to offer so much value that you voluntarily hand them your money the latter are incentivized to offer so little value to justify confiscating even more of it, which politicians are all too happy to do in order to look like they’re trying to fix the incompetence. And if incompetence isn’t enough to persuade a politician then there’s always nepotism. Senator Manchin’s [D] daughter became the only woman to ever run a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, which the FDA just so happened to give her company a monopoly over Epipens where her pay then shot up 671%. The FDA isn’t just incentivized to look out for the well-being of politicians’ children, but also the well-being of Big Pharma because by expediting their drugs while delaying their competitors they’re more likely to get a cushier job with them, i.e. the revolving door. The FDA also bears some responsibility for our obesity epidemic where due to the lobbying of the food industry, FDA scientists indoctrinated schoolchildren into accepting that bread should make up the base of their diet. Trust the science? The FDA also bears some of the responsibility for our opioid epidemic for having approved stronger and evermore addictive opioids, which isn’t to say we should tighten the approval process, but that we should remove it altogether because “FDA approved” gives people a false sense of trust and a real sense of subservience in an area where people should be hyper-skeptical and free. This is especially true for the media where they’re pressured to bury the tragic consequences of FDA approved drugs — 2,400 people die from adverse reactions every week — whereas without the FDA then the media would be pressured to be much more skeptical of drug usage again to fear-monger the population back into accepting greater government control.

But the most important reason to abolish the FDA is it slows innovation, which means it kills an incalculable number of people every year — an eight-year delay in the FDA’s approval of Provenge was estimated to have cost 82,000 lost life years. The FDA is naturally risk-averse (except for the well-connected; and between 2004–2014, the FDA recalled more than 4,000 drugs) and so drugs that could’ve entered the market today are on average held off for 10 years therefore raising the average cost of developing a new drug to over $1 billion. Why was the COVID vaccine “fast-tracked”? There are thousands of drugs that have had just as much proof of safety but aren’t allowed to enter the market purely because there isn’t as much political pressure to do so, but in my opinion, a life is a life, and so surely if you thought forcing humanity to take multiple injections of something to stop a virus that kills about 1% of the people who get it — virtually 0% if you aren’t fat and old — then your bar should be even lower for similarly tested drugs that could save people who have much more than a 1% chance of death. And since innovation has a compounding effect then if A enters the market today then B will happen tomorrow whereas with the FDA: A will happen in a decade, B in two decades, C in three decades where D might very well be the drug that cures cancer. Couple this limitation on not just one treatment, but millions and you dramatically stunt innovation. I believe we could end aging in our lifetime if we ended the FDA so ask yourself, “How much do you value your own life?”

Unfortunately, the people who claim we have “a right to our own body,” are usually the first to argue in favor of giving up even more control over it to the body politic.

Here’s the deal: there are so many better alternatives to a federal medical regulatory monopoly.

Private businesses and non-profits would pop up to fill the demand for greater clarity, such as a Yelp, Amazon, App Store, and Rotten Tomatoes for medical providers, drug companies, and drugs. Imagine how much worse movies would be if the FDA became the Movies, Food, and Drug Administration with the power to not just review movies, but also keep them off the market for at least a decade.

And just because the federal government wouldn’t be acting as a drug kingpin doesn’t mean state and foreign governments would stop. Many states have their own version of the FDA, which blue states can respond to the FDA’s abolition by filling its void, but nonetheless, with more overall freedom consumers would be better able to leverage public and private reviews to make more informed decisions.

And then ultimately, abolishing the FDA doesn’t mean abolishing laws and courts that protect consumers from fraud and damages nor does it mean legalizing all drugs. In fact, it’d be easier to sue Big Pharma since they couldn’t hide behind the FDA’s approval. In the name of political compromise though, we could replace the FDA with a smaller federal agency where it could halt/recall a “too addictive and/or harmful” drug for 180 days, and then our elected representatives could vote for an extended or permanent prohibition. In other words, this ban would be easier to secure than a court ruling or a standalone bill, but harder than our current automatic ban.

In the end, everything has its side effects, but eradicating the FDA is a prescription that has tremendous potential to dramatically increase our lifespans. This is a life and death issue that affects far more lives than {pick your mainstream topic} and so for this reason we can expect to see it continue to get little attention as government schools pump kids full of government-approved drugs to distract them from their government-backed chains.