The Freedom Bulletin

Yet another example of someone who did nothing wrong and hurt no one being punished by government: Dan Allgyer, owner of a small dairy farm that sold raw milk across state lines, was forced to shut down his business after a federal judge granted the FDA’s motion for summary judgment and issued an injunction to force him to stop selling milk.

Karine Bouis-Towe, who helped open grassfedonthehill, the suburban D.C. buyers club that bought Allgyer’s milk, requiring that it be transported across state lines, issued this statement: “Dan and Rachel Allgyer have determined that they will discontinue service to our group and close down the farm. Dan has served many of us for more than six years and he is very saddened to have to make this decision but the stress and strain that his family has been under for the past few years due to the case and now the decision has given them no other choice.”

It should be noted that the entire federal effort was based on allegations of “mislabeling” and transportation across state lines. The feds never alleged that Allgyer’s milk was tainted and it was never found to be so.

Read the rest at the Houston Chronicle.

Google agreed today to pay $500 million to the federal government because it allowed Canadian pharmacies to use its advertising services. The problem, according to the government, is that the drugs from Canada sold on these websites are not subject to FDA approval and might even be available without a prescription.

But in a truly free society, this should not be a problem. Companies should not be able to deceive their customers by exaggerating the benefits or hiding the risks of their products. But this doesn’t mean that people should only be allowed to have the medications that the government has determined are safe. People have a right to buy medications from other countries if they want to, including those that are risky or unproven, and people certainly have a right to make their own decisions about what medications to put into their bodies, with or without a doctor’s input.

The investigation into Google is just another example of how the FDA – in particular the Durham-Humphrey Amendment, which made it illegal to obtain many medicines without a doctor’s permission – unjustly takes away people’s liberties.

Remember when the FDA decided to require all cigarette packages to display graphic warning labels? Five tobacco companies  - R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Commonwealth Brands, Ligget Group, and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co – are suing in federal court to stop this. Although tobacco companies are far from sympathy-evoking, and although they are almost certainly motivated at least in part by financial gain in this lawsuit, the fact is that they are right. These warning labels are paternalistic and are an affront to individual liberty.

The lawsuit reads,

“Never before in the United States have producers of a lawful product been required to use their own packaging and advertising to convey an emotionally-charged government message urging adult consumers to shun their products.”

It continues,

“This is precisely the type of compelled speech the 1st Amendment prohibits.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Manufacturers should not be allowed to put lies or deceptive statements on packages. It even makes sense to require companies to provide factual information about their products, such as ingredients, risks, and benefits, on packages. But these labels – graphic pictures of diseased lungs, caskets, and dead bodies – go far beyond providing information. They are propaganda designed to disgust people and make them avoid smoking. They are also paternalistic because by requiring them, the FDA has decided against giving people the facts and allowing them to make their own decisions, and decided instead that people should be emotionally manipulated into doing what the FDA thinks is best for them.

It would be bad enough if the FDA displayed this insulting propaganda on government property or purchased advertisements with its own resources. But the new policy requires private companies – in fact the very companies that the warnings are targeted against – to use their resources to display the FDA’s propaganda. Requiring cigarette companies to speak the government’s message – an insulting, paternalistic, and anti-liberty message at that – is a violation of free speech rights.

The FDA decided on Wednesday to ban “Four Loko” and other alcoholic drinks with caffeine in them, saying that such drinks dangerously mask the effects of alcohol, appeal to young people because of their cheap prices and colorful containers, and have been linked to various hospitalizations. Manufacturers of such drinks now have to remove the caffeine within 15 days or their products will be pulled from the market.

Last week, the FDA announced that it would begin requiring cigarettes to have warning labels that cover half the package. They are trying to decide between 36 condescending, sometimes gruesome images including diseased lungs and teeth, screaming babies, dead bodies, and people having heart attacks.

What do these two things have in common?

They are both infringements by the FDA upon people’s liberty. Banning caffeinated alcoholic drinks forcibly takes that option away from people, but putting graphic images on cigarettes also violates people’s right to smoke by punishing them for that choice with social stigma and disgusting images. By banning some drinks and punishing people for smoking, the FDA violates people’s rights to live their lives however they wish, as long as they do not infringe upon others’ rights to do the same.

People have the right to choose what goes into their bodies, including things that are dangerous and unhealthy. You don’t have the right to assault someone or destroy property while drunk on Four Loko, but that doesn’t mean it should be illegal to drink Four Loko; it just means that it should be (and is) illegal to assault people and destroy property. Similarly, you don’t have the right to make other people pick up the tab for medical services that result from your smoking and drinking, but that doesn’t mean people should be punished for smoking or drinking; it just means that we should create a system where people have to pay for their own medical services.

Some experts are criticizing the FDA’s decisions, saying, for example, “It’s just one more example of the FDA reaching into a practice that people can, and often do, do safely and trying to eliminate it.” And as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe writes, ”Smoking is unhealthy, no question about it. The loss of freedom and self-respect is more hazardous by far.”

The medical system in America is in crisis and needs reform. But the problem isn’t that 47 million people are uninsured, or that people don’t have access to health services. There are three main problems, listed below in order of importance:

1. People have no freedom. In today’s society, people do not have control over their health decisions; doctors do. People can’t get medications without a doctor’s prescription, thanks to the Durham-Humphrey Amendment. Doctors think it’s their job to take notes on people and tell people what procedures they should get, what they should eat, and how their should live their lives. The FDA bans many medications that would benefit people. Instead, a doctor’s job should be to serve customers and give advice when asked for, and the FDA’s job should be to protect the public from deception by drug companies.
2. Payment methods are too complicated. You never see signs in doctors’ offices listing how much each procedure costs. Instead we have a huge mess of insurance companies paying doctors for some procedures and not others, insurance companies paying for some medications at the pharmacy and not others, the government paying for some people’s insurance but not others, employers paying for some of your insurance, you paying for some of your insurance, you paying a co-pay or a deductible or co-insurance…the confusion never ends.  Plus, the insurance companies won’t tell you up front what’s covered and what’s not. They have the power to refuse to cover you altogether, to refuse to cover any procedure they say isn’t medically necessary, to require proof that you’re a student, to require all sorts of incomprehensible paperwork, et cetera. This system is disorderly, messy, ugly, and intuitively displeasing, and it rips people off and sometimes even kills people.
3. The government spends too much money on health services. It’s wrong for the government to take money from the rich and use it to pay for Medicaid, SCHIP, and other health programs for the poor. It’s also wrong for them to take from the young and give to the old, like they do with Medicare. The only things that tax money should pay for are the military, roads, and the legal system.

Unfortunately, all three of these things are deeply entrenched in our society, and anyone who questions them is considered a radical. In my next post, I’ll go more into detail about problem #1 and show some examples that I’ve noticed in the news recently that really epitomize what is wrong with our medical system.

I never really thought the FDA should be abolished. The Durham-Humphrey Amendment for sure, but I wasn’t so sure about the FDA in its entirety. Now I think I may have changed my mind. The FDA looks like it’s really going too far this time. A federal advisory panel has voted to ban the painkillers Vicodin and Percocet, as well as banning Tylenol in sizes larger than 325 mg.

The FDA is not required to follow the advice of the panel, but it usually does. In this case, I really hope it doesn’t. There is absolutely no reason to ban these medicines.

The purpose of the FDA is to protect people from fraudulent businesses, not to protect people from themselves. Claiming a drug is perfectly safe when it isn’t, or claiming a drug works when it doesn’t, those things should be banned by the government. But making a drug that has some risks, which are clearly explained on the package, should not be banned by the government. The FDA should ban drug makers from lying to customers. It shouldn’t ban people from obtaining the drugs that they want. It is each person’s right to evaluate the risks of medicines and decide whether they want to take them. The FDA cannot tell people what tradeoffs between risks and benefits are acceptable and which aren’t.

This brilliant article says it better than I probably ever could, so here are two quotes from it:

The proper function of government is to protect individual rights and guard against fraud, not to restrict freedom of choice to protect people from their own ignorance. 

Regulation advocates may protest: “What about the guy who consumes a drug without reading the package insert, consulting a medical professional, or looking at consumer websites or reference books? Shouldn’t he be protected?” In short, no. Forcing all consumers to live by rules that cater to the least responsible individuals imposes huge costs on everyone else and ultimately fails to protect even the willfully ignorant.

Additionally, banning Vicodin, Percocet, and 500 mg Tylenol would harm many innocent people. These medicines are all very effective at treating pain. Vicodin is prescribed over 100 million times each year in the USA. Many of these people probably need it to treat chronic pain, or temporary pain caused by surgery. There don’t seem to be any good alternatives to the medicines that the FDA’s advisory panel wants to ban. 500 mg Tylenol is useful to people who need a higher dose to treat their pain, and Vicodin and Percocet are the only way for many people to avoid constant, agonizing pain. It seems like a very reasonable decision to risk liver damage in order to be free from pain and able to enjoy life. Yet the FDA might take that option away from people and condemn them to lives of misery.

Not for nothing, but think about the fact that the FDA apparently has no problem with Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis, but might ban Vicodin and Percocet. What does that say about the FDA’s values? Apparently they think it’s more important to have satisfying sex than to be free from debilitating pain. How ridiculous.

If the FDA followed the panel’s recommendations, it would not only be taking away people’s rights and treating us like we don’t know what’s best for ourselves, but it would inflict pain and suffering on millions of innocent people. The government should not have the ability to do that, and that’s why I now think the FDA should be abolished.

Have you ever heard of the Durham-Humphrey Amendment? Until a week or two ago, I hadn’t.

It seems to be simply a fact of life that you need a prescription to get certain medications. If you need medicine, you go to a doctor, and the doctor writes a prescription, which gives you permission to get the medicine. If you get the medicine without a prescription, it’s illegal. One day, I wondered exactly when this became the case. Certainly there weren’t such things as prescriptions in Washington and Jefferson’s time.

I went to the FDA’s website, looked at their timeline of FDA history, and found the answer: October 26, 1951. On this date, Congress passed the Durham-Humphrey Amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The Amendment divided drugs into two categories: over the counter and prescription, and gave the FDA the power to put drugs in one category or the other. Prescription drugs are considered unsafe, and therefore illegal, to use without direct medical supervision, and it is illegal to give them out to anyone who does not have a prescription from a doctor. Senator and former vice president Hubert Humphrey co-sponsored the Amendment.

I believe that the Durham-Humphrey Amendment is immoral and unconstitutional. First, it is unconstitutional because nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given the power to decide what medications are safe, control what medications people use, or force people to go to a doctor in order to get medications.

Second, the Durham-Humphrey Amendment is immoral because it treats people as if they are unable to take care of themselves. By telling people that they are incapable of making their own decisions about medicines, the government is treating its citizens like parents treat their children. This is demeaning, disrespectful, and completely unacceptable in a supposedly free country like America.

Choosing to take medicine without seeing a doctor is not immoral, and it does not hurt anyone (unless you count the poor, starving doctors, who are deprived of revenue). Therefore, it shouldn’t be illegal. Of course, there will always be some people who make decisions that they later regret, but people have the right to make their own choices about their lives. The fact that some people make bad decisions does not change this. The government has no right to force people to gain a doctor’s approval for their actions, thereby depriving them of their independence and often their dignity.

Doctors have far too much power in today’s society, and the government is the main reason why. The feds need to give people more credit by recognizing that we have the right to take care of ourselves. The American people need their liberty back, and the Durham-Humphrey Amendment needs to be repealed.