Lies the government told you (26 page)

FDA

Medicine is prescribed primarily to make us healthy. And often it has that effect. But, sometimes prescribed or even over-the-counter drugs can go terribly wrong. Years after people have been taking them, the government goes ahead and says, “Oops!” Often, by the time it says, “Oops,” it is too late, and the American people have already paid the price.

Until the twentieth century, the federal government rarely regulated the content or sale of food and drugs. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was created in the 1920s under a climate of fear created by muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair, who exposed the disgusting and unsafe conditions inside the meatpacking industry. By the 1950s, FDA bureaucrats had begun expanding their premarket approval process, meaning that they were enlarging the part of the agency that checks drugs “for safety” before they reach consumers.

Yet, only a nation of sheep would think that the government alone can keep us safe and healthy. The Framers obviously omitted from Congress’s powers all that FEMA and the FDA have done and tried to do. Despite the apparent congressional intent of reducing to zero the risk of using pharmaceuticals, unsurprisingly, the FDA has failed to do so. Instead, the FDA began the process of dictating standards for clinical drug trials and tests and conducting a lengthy approval process that a manufacturer needed to pass before bringing a new or modified drug to market.”
²²
So, instead of bringing the risk of using drugs to zero, the FDA has created a nation of people, many of whom believe the lie that the risk of using drugs has been brought to zero. This is an extremely dangerous situation.

It seems as though the FDA’s supposed purpose is to help Americans so drugs that would hurt us never make it to the shelves. This all
sounds
well and good, but the problem is that harmful drugs
do
make it to the shelves and often stay on them for quite some time. The FDA is not helping us at all; it is giving us a false sense of security. The government lies when it presents the FDA as an organization that will keep us safe. But, we can’t push all the blame off on the FDA.

Often, there are more FDA recalls than there are days of the week; these recalls are usually reported in the media. So, we lie to ourselves when we say, “Okay” and pop any pill on which the government places its stamp of approval. We lie to ourselves when we forgo looking at labels or doing our own research about the safety of something because we trust that the government did our homework for us. The federal government can’t deliver the mail or manage Medicare or run Amtrak on time; can it really be expected to keep pharmaceuticals safe?

There is a long list of drugs that the FDA has approved and then later said were unsafe. In the summer of 2009, it was reported that pain medications Vicodin and Percocet, which combine acetaminophen (the ingredient used in Tylenol) and other painkillers, would likely be taken off the market due to the risk of liver damage. The same FDA panel also voted to limit the maximum single doses of over-the-counter acetaminophen to eight pills of a medication like Extra Strength Tylenol. A safety panel voted on these matters, and though the FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, it usually does.

Around the same time, in July 2009, the FDA decided to require Chantix and Zyban (two drugs to help people quit smoking) to issue the FDA’s strongest suicide and depression warning. The drugs come with a possibility of side effects like depression, change in behavior, or suicidal thoughts. These are serious potential side effects, and drugs like these are widely used. Chantix was only approved in 2006, and annual sales had already reached $846 million at the time of the recall.
²³

Jim Grichar argues that the FDA not only does an exceedingly poor job at fulfilling its purpose, but that it does not even have a purpose and should be abandoned because the free market will do a better job at regulating drugs than the FDA has ever done. “In the absence of the FDA,” Grichar said, “and with trial lawyers looking for multi-billion dollar settlements in lawsuits, pharmaceutical manufacturers and medical equipment manufacturers have every incentive to be cautious in bringing out new drugs and new medical devices. To this end, they would avail themselves of independent private reviews of the results of clinical trials and tests.”
²⁴

This proposed system makes a great deal of sense in that it gives the burden of being held accountable back to the pharmaceutical companies that produce these drugs. With all that liability on their hands, companies are bound to be more careful. And if they are not careful, they will cease to exist.

The free market and our own judgment are really the only legitimate entities that can keep us safe. When the government lies and tells us that it can foolproof pharmaceuticals for use, we rely on it and put ourselves and our families in danger. The government knows that it cannot handle the massive undertaking of keeping us safe, but it wants us to think it can. Private companies are far better, faster, and more accurate at rating goods and products and communicating to us, and then we can be free to choose. When a company like Underwriters Laboratories (UL) acts as our informant, we have choices. Instead, when the government prohibits, we have fewer choices. This “nanny state” that the government has created automatically leaves us with less choice, and less choice means a departure from true freedom.

You Are What You Eat

Not only drugs, but the government also deceives us into thinking that our food is safe from bacteria or disease, because federal agencies oversee and check our food for us. In recent years a vast universe of food has been recalled as unsafe by the FDA: our beef, spinach, peanut butter, eggs, tomatoes, and many more items (even dog food) have been deemed unsafe over and over again. Clearly many FDA employees are asleep at the wheel, while taxpayer money goes down the drain.

In addition to failing to keep our food from making us physically sick, the FDA has also wreaked a great deal of havoc and hysteria through its food recalls.
During the spring and summer of 2008, the FDA went on a wild goose chase in search of bacteria-laden tomatoes. While the FDA spent weeks of its employees’ time and millions in taxpayers’ dollars trying to figure out the source of the bad tomatoes, the tomato industry and consumers suffered as major companies like McDonald’s refused to use tomatoes in any of their food. In July, eleven weeks into the recall, the FDA decided that maybe people were not getting sick from tomatoes after all. Its scientists began to think that maybe the sickness was coming from peppers or cilantro that is often mixed with tomatoes in foods like salsa or guacamole.
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They were correct; correct, after terrifying the public; correct, after wasting millions in tax dollars; correct, after causing
over one hundred million dollars in losses
to the perfectly safe and utterly innocent tomato industry;
²⁶
correct, after exercising power that the Constitution does not grant to the federal government. That’s your government at work.

If you have a failing organization that already wastes tons of money, what is the best solution? Unsurprisingly, the federal government thinks that expanding it so more of our money can be wasted is the answer. The
Wall Street Journal
reported in July 2009 that the Obama administration is planning to toughen safety standards to try to prevent contamination of foods and ensure food industry compliance with federal standards. Generally, “tougher” means more expensive. So, the likely outcome is that government will get bigger, taxes will go up, and our food will be just as unsafe this year as it was last year.

Lie #11
“We Are Winning the War
on Drugs”

The “war on drugs” is a deceptive name for what has really become a war on the American people through the government’s assault on human freedom, the prison system, and all taxpayers. Despite nearly four decades of battling against the use and selling of drugs, the government’s so-called “war on drugs,” both at home and abroad, has largely been a failure. The tide of drugs imported into this country has not slowed, despite astronomical spending by the government and the imprisonment of record numbers of Americans, often for the possession of insignificant amounts of recreational drugs. Legislators, police, and prosecutors have encouraged judges to lock up more and more Americans, causing prisons to be bursting at the seams and ruining countless lives, a great many of them among racial minorities.

This government lie is hardly new; in fact, the “war on drugs” is in effect a reincarnation of prohibition. The sale of all alcoholic beverages was outlawed in 1920, with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Closing the legal market on something that consumers desire simply opened a black market, and in the 1920s, there was a great deal of corruption and violence caused by the government’s ban. It actually created the lawlessness that characterized the era. Consequently, gangs and organized crime flourished. By 1921, the murder rate in America jumped.
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After seemingly recognizing the harm that Prohibition had caused, the United States enacted the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 to allow people to drink as they pleased.
²
After Prohibition was repealed, the homicide rate began to fall.
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This is not a coincidence.

After the alcohol ban was repealed, much of the organized crime that was facilitated by Prohibition simply switched businesses and entered into the illegal drug market. Today (several decades after the “war on drugs” commenced), the black market for drugs is thriving. The parallels between today’s prohibition and yesterday’s prohibition are glaringly obvious and point to the government’s severe case of amnesia and its Victorian attitude about our bodies; except that this time, the stakes are higher. In our twenty-first-century global economy, the violence is not confined to the U.S.; it is worldwide. Ironically, in its metaphoric war on the use of drugs, the government has facilitated actual wars, actual violence, and actual death. It’s about time that the government put its weapons (and our cash) down and began to use some common sense.

The War on Taxpayers

Ethan Nadelmann has written extensively about the futile war on drugs. He is a former Princeton University professor and is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that promotes alternatives to the drug war. In one 2003 speech he stated:

We’re a wealthy nation. If we want to lock up millions of our fellow citizens, we can afford to do that. . . . On the other hand, our economy is not what it once was. In the 1990s, incarcerating millions of people was something we could afford—10, 20, 30 billion dollars: a drop in the bucket of the national economy. But now . . . we can no longer afford this failed war on drugs.
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If America could not afford a war on drugs in 2003 when Nadelmann wrote this, we
certainly
can’t afford a war on drugs now with our ailing economy paired with ever-increasing government expenditures. Yet, is the question really “Can we afford it?” Wouldn’t “Why
should
we pay for it?” be a more appropriate question?

American taxpayers are once again forced to foot the bill. And a mammoth bill it is, as the United States spends at least $40 billion a year on costs directly related to the drug war, and then several billion more in indirect costs.
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The costs—of spraying Colombian crops, of hiring numerous DEA and other government employees, of locking up more people on drug charges than all of Western Europe locks up on all charges combined
⁶
—are astronomical. And these are only the direct costs. What about the welfare dependence that comes from creating a class of people who have drug-related crimes on their records and often cannot obtain employment?

The drug war is indeed perpetuating a harrowing cycle for people with drug use or drug sales in their past. For example, let’s say you were charged with sales and then were forced to spend some time in jail. Once you served your time and were released from prison, you decide to apply for some jobs. When you fill out employment applications, you are asked whether you have had a criminal record. If you check the “yes” box, chances are that you won’t be the employer’s first choice. If you check the “no” box, you are lying and could get into further trouble if the employer does a background check or finds out that you lied. There are no great options here.

Then, because you cannot find a legitimate job, it is difficult to make a living. This makes turning to the sale of drugs an easy and almost sensible option, even if that is not the choice you wanted to make. The point is that when the government locks ordinary people away for committing nonviolent, nonvictim, harmless drug crimes, it sets people up for repeat offenses.

It also makes welfare a very plausible option. Either way, taxpayer money goes to the huge cost of filling prisons or the huge cost of supporting people and their families when the breadwinner is imprisoned or unemployable. And the cycle generally does not end with one person. Children who grow up in houses where their parents are drug dealers, in housing projects, and on welfare generally are not primed to have the brightest futures. They grow up around these things, and this lifestyle becomes normalized and passed on. Whole generations of families grow up around this, and it is unhealthy, dangerous, and expensive. This cycle is detrimental, and the government’s holier-than-thou values have been unable to stop it.

Why We Fight

Yet, the drug war keeps going, and going, and going. Regardless of who is in power, Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative, the war on drugs has been happening for four decades. Why? Is the government so arrogant and stubborn that it can’t look at the statistical information and see that these policies simply do not work? Do politicians just like squandering our money? These questions are still open, but it seems likely that the government
knows
these policies do not work. It must. Yet, politicians lie to us and wax poetic about eliminating the use of drugs because it sounds like a good thing to say from a stump. Well, it’s about time they come back down to earth.