What is the free market Alternative to the FDA ?
- Thread starter raystone
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Bettawrekonize
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I think the FDA really has no business banning herbs and dietary supplements (and no one else has that right either). I think what the FDA's job should be in this case is to ensure that what's on the label is actually in the bottle (nothing more, nothing less). From that point on, citizens should choose what they want. I also think we need to eliminate most of the pharmaceutical patents that give huge pharmaceutical corporations incentive to ban natural alternatives (especially since many of these drugs were partly a result of taxpayer funding). For more on the problems with patents see
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080318/004156568.shtml
The problem is that the government almost always seems to protect the rich and the powerful. It won't let the free market do its thing, it maintains government sanctioned monopolies and it maintains the status quo via government intervention. Take the simple fact that fewer people are buying dairy milk. Instead of the government allowing the free market to handle things, they intervene
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000670_milk_dairy_prices.html
The same thing is true for the bail outs you've been seeing on the news. The free market is how these situations should be handled. But these institutions are too powerful to let the free market control things (they lobby for government intervention).
This is exactly why the FDA allowed Bayer to sell Aids tainted blood without anyone in the U.S getting punished (neither Bayer nor the FDA criminals involved got punished, but the other countries they sold it to got punished).
http://www.naturalnews.com/024754.html
At the same time, these criminals oppress law abiding citizens for selling products that compete with big pharmaceutical corporations.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025347.html
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the FDA members and Bayer be arrested while the law abiding citizens be allowed to operate?
Yet, the mainstream media censors much of this and now we're starting to see an effort to censor this over the Internet.
Comcast Censoring NaturalNews by Blocking Subscriber Emails
We should never assume the Internet is immune to the censorship of important information (such censorship prevails on mainstream television and 30+ years ago no one would have imagined such a thing is/would be true).
The FDA has been oppressing small businesses who were selling Stevia (or even who had cook books with it as an ingredient) as a sweetener for many years because it competed with the patented aspartame. Now the patent for aspartame is expired and, due to popular demand, Coca Cola decided to use Stevia as their sweetener. As soon as a rich and powerful entity decides to use it, the FDA allows it (and Coca - Cola has a patent on it, which isn't supposed to happen with things that occur naturally), but before that, they didn't. Now Pepsi is even allowed to use it. During the time that Stevia was illegal for everyone as a sweetener, the FDA still allowed it to be sold as a dietary supplement. The reason for this is because, as a dietary supplement, it doesn't compete with patented sweeteners, and since people know it only as a sweetener (and not something that actually helps with any health problems), as a dietary supplement, it doesn't really compete with pharmaceutical drugs.
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000616_stevia_Coca-Cola_GRAS.html
The fact is that if we don't stand up for our freedoms, our rights, our health, our well being, no one will, and these things will be taken away from us. We need to stand up against the FDA and the government. The criminals who work for the FDA and other governmental institutions need to be held accountable for their actions (instead of having them arrest law abiding citizens for simply selling products that compete with the rich and the powerful). We need to stop hoping that someone else is going to stand up for us, that's a lie, no one is going to stand up for us if we don't do it ourselves (and this is something that will ALWAYS be true. Just like in your daily experience, if you don't stand up for yourself, do you expect others to stand up for you? The same thing is true with government, if we don't stand up for ourselves, no one will. Pharmaceutical corporations aren't going to stand up for us, they're interested in their own profits. We shouldn't rely on governmental institutions to stand up for us, government institutions are composed of people (not angels) and, as people, they are probably just as self interested as anyone else). We need to stand up for ourselves and stop waiting for someone else to stand up for us. It's NOT going to happen. No one else is going to stand up for us and if we don't do it, it won't be done.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080318/004156568.shtml
The problem is that the government almost always seems to protect the rich and the powerful. It won't let the free market do its thing, it maintains government sanctioned monopolies and it maintains the status quo via government intervention. Take the simple fact that fewer people are buying dairy milk. Instead of the government allowing the free market to handle things, they intervene
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000670_milk_dairy_prices.html
The same thing is true for the bail outs you've been seeing on the news. The free market is how these situations should be handled. But these institutions are too powerful to let the free market control things (they lobby for government intervention).
This is exactly why the FDA allowed Bayer to sell Aids tainted blood without anyone in the U.S getting punished (neither Bayer nor the FDA criminals involved got punished, but the other countries they sold it to got punished).
http://www.naturalnews.com/024754.html
At the same time, these criminals oppress law abiding citizens for selling products that compete with big pharmaceutical corporations.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025347.html
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the FDA members and Bayer be arrested while the law abiding citizens be allowed to operate?
Yet, the mainstream media censors much of this and now we're starting to see an effort to censor this over the Internet.
Comcast Censoring NaturalNews by Blocking Subscriber Emails
We should never assume the Internet is immune to the censorship of important information (such censorship prevails on mainstream television and 30+ years ago no one would have imagined such a thing is/would be true).
The FDA has been oppressing small businesses who were selling Stevia (or even who had cook books with it as an ingredient) as a sweetener for many years because it competed with the patented aspartame. Now the patent for aspartame is expired and, due to popular demand, Coca Cola decided to use Stevia as their sweetener. As soon as a rich and powerful entity decides to use it, the FDA allows it (and Coca - Cola has a patent on it, which isn't supposed to happen with things that occur naturally), but before that, they didn't. Now Pepsi is even allowed to use it. During the time that Stevia was illegal for everyone as a sweetener, the FDA still allowed it to be sold as a dietary supplement. The reason for this is because, as a dietary supplement, it doesn't compete with patented sweeteners, and since people know it only as a sweetener (and not something that actually helps with any health problems), as a dietary supplement, it doesn't really compete with pharmaceutical drugs.
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000616_stevia_Coca-Cola_GRAS.html
The fact is that if we don't stand up for our freedoms, our rights, our health, our well being, no one will, and these things will be taken away from us. We need to stand up against the FDA and the government. The criminals who work for the FDA and other governmental institutions need to be held accountable for their actions (instead of having them arrest law abiding citizens for simply selling products that compete with the rich and the powerful). We need to stop hoping that someone else is going to stand up for us, that's a lie, no one is going to stand up for us if we don't do it ourselves (and this is something that will ALWAYS be true. Just like in your daily experience, if you don't stand up for yourself, do you expect others to stand up for you? The same thing is true with government, if we don't stand up for ourselves, no one will. Pharmaceutical corporations aren't going to stand up for us, they're interested in their own profits. We shouldn't rely on governmental institutions to stand up for us, government institutions are composed of people (not angels) and, as people, they are probably just as self interested as anyone else). We need to stand up for ourselves and stop waiting for someone else to stand up for us. It's NOT going to happen. No one else is going to stand up for us and if we don't do it, it won't be done.
Last edited:
Bettawrekonize
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That's not true. For example, see my thread on red yeast rice and the FDA
http://forums.christianity.com/m_3777330/mpage_1/tm.htm#4047459
We also have one here
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=144725&page=2
The FDA is also responsible for banning the most used variants of Ephedra and they're also responsible for banning Stevia for many years until Coca Cola decided they want to use it. The FDA does regulate dietary supplements and herbs, perhaps they're not supposed to, but they have banned many such substances simply because they compete with pharmaceutical drugs.
As far as restricting ones that were to be found harmful, most of the dietary supplements aren't harmful and that's not the reason they restrict them. Red yeast rice has been found to save lives, it has been shown to be safer and more effective than drugs out there, but the FDA tried to ban it altogether and they ended up banning one of its important ingredients. Ephedra has been known, by many studies, to be safer than many drugs out there, and the only people that were harmed by it were people who misused it (which is true of any drug), less than a hand full of people were harmed by Ephedra (compared to pharmaceutical drugs, which claims thousands), yet 2 million people have used the banned version of Ephedra (before it was banned). That's why the initial court threw the case out, but eventually the FDA kept on pursuing the issue and managed to ban it due to a single case of someone abusing it. For years the FDA oppressed people who sold stevia as a sweetener, they even took away cook books that contained stevia as an ingredient. Now the patent for aspartame (its competitor) is expired, and many people didn't want to use it. Due to popular demand, Coca Cola and Pepsi decided to use it and the FDA did NOTHING. Yet, during the time it was banned as a sweetener, the FDA didn't think it harmful enough to ban as a dietary supplement. None of the FDA's regulation has much to do with what's best for the American people or with banning harmful substances, it has much more to do with what's best for the profit margins of the rich and the powerful. We need to stand up against this tyranny.
If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny.
-- Thomas Jefferson
This is something you should take seriously, don't defend the FDA, they are tyrants and many of their members (along with members of the big corporations that control them) should be jailed.
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Zippyjuan
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Well I personally like the fact that there is an agenecy out there which makes sure that medicines are safe and effective and contain what they are supposed to and that harmful things like contaminated foods are kept out of the food supply. I see much good from the FDA which to me outweighs the negatives you see. But that is your opinion and mine. I do not think it would be a better idea to have a voluntary organization comprised of food manufacturers and drug companies trying to regulate the same thigns. I would have much less faith in them. I think that what scares some people is the idea that it is a government agency and some people feel that anything governemnt is evil. There are also those who disagree with any sort of restrictions on anything at all and want to do whatever they want to whenever they want with no consequences for themselves.
Fox McCloud
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so the statist finally crawls from his crypt...
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Me too, but please answer the following questions:
1. Who pays for this agency? Taxes as mentioned?
2. Are you going to force this agencies will on all other people and interfere with their personal rights to act in disagreement with the agency?
3. What do you do if people who do not want this agency and do not use it refuse to pay for it? Can you end up sending in federal troops to collect? If they use weapons to defend their property is it OK to kill them if they will not pay?
4. What do you do if every person in an entire state does not want this agency, do you force it on them anyway?
5. If people reject the "authority" of this agency and sell things that are not approved can you end up sending in federal troops to shut them down? What if they use weapons to defend their liberty, is it OK to kill them to prevent violations of this agency?
6. Why would it not be acceptable for items to be on the market that do not meet the FDA (or whomever's) guidelines to just add a "Not FDA approved" message?
Bettawrekonize
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I agree that we need an agency that ensures that bottles are properly labeled (ie: what's on the label is in the bottle; nothing more, nothing less); however, any good that the FDA does do does not justify its harm. The members of the FDA responsible for its atrocities should be arrested and we need to ensure that the FDA is void of conflicts of interest with big pharmaceutical corporations (or even dietary supplement manufacturers or any others) and that its decisions are independent of all such conflicts. At the moment, this isn't even close to being true and this should not be tolerated.
Bettawrekonize
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I understand the need for an FDA but if we're going to have an FDA ran by criminals (which currently seems to be the case) then we're better off without an FDA. Either the FDA is ran by honest people without conflicts of interest or we just abolish the FDA altogether. When FDA members perform atrocities they should be held accountable for their actions. This nonsense where FDA authorities allow Bayer to sell Aids tainted blood and no one in the U.S. is held accountable can not be tolerated.
Bettawrekonize
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At the moment, the FDA is not making sure that medicines are safe and effective, what they are making sure is that nothing competes with the profit margins of large pharmaceutical corporations.
Good for whom, big pharmaceutical corporations?
What scares people is that they are taking away our rights and our freedoms, not for the benefit of the American people, but for the benefit of the rich and the powerful.
I think regulations should ensure that bottles are properly labeled, but if people find red yeast rice safer and more effective at lowering their cholesterol than the drugs out there, they should be allowed to take the product without having to face any negative legal consequences just because the product competes with big pharmaceutical corporations. If the stuff helps someone more than it harms them and the only consequences are legal, I think we are better off removing those legal consequences. Why should anyone face legal consequences for taking something they feel helps them more than the drugs out there (with fewer side effects)? Just because the product they are taking competes with the profit margins of the rich and the powerful? Nonsense, this should not be tolerated. It's not the governments job to maintain the status quo and we don't need consequences for exercising our health freedoms just because doing so is harmful to rich and powerful entities.
HonestyInMedicine
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.......
I think the incidence of sick patients not being able to get drugs that haven't been approved by the FDA are few and far between. A far WORSE problem is that the FDA approves far too many drugs too soon. Hundreds of thousands of deaths occur every year from just taking prescription drugs as prescribed. This is because the testing of the drugs done before hand is paid for by the companies who want to market them and obviously the results, since the tests are not independently done, are going to show that the drugs are "safe" so the FDA will approve them.
People have to begin to realize that the FDA is an organization designed to support the food and drug industry ----not protect consumers.
Truth Warrior
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Not some agency that's in the pocket of Big Pharma. 
amy31416
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I know I posted words to this effect a long time ago, but I used to work in the medical devices industry (very much like big pharma, we made items that big pharma used and also tons of the devices that doctors and hospitals use. Everything from syringes, to veterinary diagnostic mediums.
I was audited twice by the FDA, once for my environmental lab and once on a large project that I'd completed. My conclusion? These guys are BUFFOONS who have a "cop with a quota" mentality that ends up costing both the company and the consumer.
Want to know why many of your medical bills are so outrageous? When I was in the enviro lab (I tested and refined clean rooms for acceptable levels of cleanliness in the manufacturing/production areas. So, I had to base all my standard operating procedures on the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Good Laboratory Practices (GLP), Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), specifically 21 CFR part 820. (I still have nightmares about 21 CFR part 11.)
Most of these documents are so vague that you can have as many interpretations of them as you can of the bible. I wrote my SOP's precisely and made sure they covered everything in the CFR and then some. Not only did the agents not really understand the purpose, they didn't understand the statistics. I ended up having to re-write all the SOP's to be less effective for our purposes, at the whim of the agent. I bitched, I argued (to my boss, because you aren't allowed to argue with an agent, we were coached prior to the FDA inspection to answer only a specific question and say no more or no less--sound familiar?) And with good reason, they are looking to find something, anything, even if it has nothing to do with the quality or efficacy of the end product. I spent an entire week putting bullshit practices in to place and implementing a procedure that did absolutely nothing to reassure that the product was safe.
Of course, after the audit was completely over, I spent another several days re-writing the SOP's (again) and scientifically and statistically showing why the new procedure was BS--but I couldn't do that until the inspection was over and I had officially re-written the procedures recommended.
How's that for a waste of time and money? If the FDA were reasonable or rational I might cut them some slack. But it's apparent to me that they look the other way with the big players in Pharma, but overall increase the cost and the BS red tape where it isn't necessary.
So, yeah, I'm a huge fan of getting rid of the FDA and replacing it with an independent quality organization or a complete sensible revamp.
I was audited twice by the FDA, once for my environmental lab and once on a large project that I'd completed. My conclusion? These guys are BUFFOONS who have a "cop with a quota" mentality that ends up costing both the company and the consumer.
Want to know why many of your medical bills are so outrageous? When I was in the enviro lab (I tested and refined clean rooms for acceptable levels of cleanliness in the manufacturing/production areas. So, I had to base all my standard operating procedures on the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Good Laboratory Practices (GLP), Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), specifically 21 CFR part 820. (I still have nightmares about 21 CFR part 11.)
Most of these documents are so vague that you can have as many interpretations of them as you can of the bible. I wrote my SOP's precisely and made sure they covered everything in the CFR and then some. Not only did the agents not really understand the purpose, they didn't understand the statistics. I ended up having to re-write all the SOP's to be less effective for our purposes, at the whim of the agent. I bitched, I argued (to my boss, because you aren't allowed to argue with an agent, we were coached prior to the FDA inspection to answer only a specific question and say no more or no less--sound familiar?) And with good reason, they are looking to find something, anything, even if it has nothing to do with the quality or efficacy of the end product. I spent an entire week putting bullshit practices in to place and implementing a procedure that did absolutely nothing to reassure that the product was safe.
Of course, after the audit was completely over, I spent another several days re-writing the SOP's (again) and scientifically and statistically showing why the new procedure was BS--but I couldn't do that until the inspection was over and I had officially re-written the procedures recommended.
How's that for a waste of time and money? If the FDA were reasonable or rational I might cut them some slack. But it's apparent to me that they look the other way with the big players in Pharma, but overall increase the cost and the BS red tape where it isn't necessary.
So, yeah, I'm a huge fan of getting rid of the FDA and replacing it with an independent quality organization or a complete sensible revamp.
raystone
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The_Orlonater
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Wouldn't that group then lose credibility and a new group(s) will take over? Economic democracy can be brutal.
The_Orlonater
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Wow, my mother has a friend who works in an industry that deals with the FDA a lot too. I should talk to him about it some more.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
"A far WORSE problem is that the FDA approves far too many drugs too soon."
This is a complete fallacy. The FDA approves less and less drugs each year. Any deaths that result from their incompetence is simply a function of them not doing their job.
It is also not true about the proper testing not being done. In fact, plenty of universities do the testing on the drugs with no profit motive involved prior to their release or human trials. I would encourage you to study the stages that drugs need to go through in order to gain FDA approval. I don't think you have a full understanding of the process.
The FDA's job is to verify that drugs are safe. They've made the approval process so expensive (billions of dollars) that no drug without a large target audience will ever get approved. Furthermore, the FDA doesn't even do it's job properly, which I can point to Vioxx and Bextra as the most recent examples. The FDA creates a false safety net for the consumer because the consumer assumes they did their job properly to evaluate the safety of a drug. The deaths you refer to is the fault of the FDA and would not have happened had the FDA not had their hand in the matter in the first place.
If you want to monitor drug safety, then you should require the studies to be published in a journal where the members of the journal in the scientific community can critique the studies. Make all the information available to the scientific community. By leaving the entire task up to a bureaucratic organization, you are doomed to fail. Plenty of scientists in Academia review literature every single day. There is no reason you cannot form independent panels of hundreds of scientists to verify if a drug is safe or not. In fact, this stuff is pretty easy to do.
Pay attention to this post. It was spot on and describes every regulatory industry in this country.
I'm a chemist, and Department of Homeland Security is now trying to monitor what solvents every lab in my building is using. I can no longer go to a general stock room to fill up on my solvents and I must place the order for my specific lab in order to obtain a certain solvent. They are trying to monitor specific chemicals because a lot of them can be used to make bombs. These regulations are nothing but a pain in the ass that gets in the way of my daily activities because it causes nothing but delays. Furthermore, my coworkers and I already devised a system to circumvent their monitoring in under a week. You, the taxpayer are paying billions of dollars for an organization that will fail miserably. They are powerless to limit the chemicals I obtain and they are powerless to monitor what I do with them. Now, the reality is, I only need certain chemicals to wash glassware. So, there's no harm in me obtaining those chemicals. Yet, a large portion of America now feels like they are much safer because there is someone looking over my shoulder.
Regardless, these types of policies are beyond ridiculous because any chemist can go to home depot and make a bomb. You don't see Department of Homeland Security monitoring their store (and I'm not suggesting they should). It's just all pointless and the sooner people realize these false safety nets provide no safety at all, the better off they would be.
amy31416
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Amen brother.
All you folks who don't know what we're talking about, take it to heart. I'm a chemist as well and I don't even need Home Depot to make a bomb if I'm so inclined.
In addition to what I said before about the FDA, they require something called "traceability". Here's another way they waste taxpayer money: I also ran occasional validations on autoclaves. You had to hook up a recording device to about 6-12 thermocouples and record a cycle to ensure that you attained a specific Fo (read F sub oh). What it means is that you have to prove that your autoclave doesn't have cold spots and can kill geobacillus stearothermophilus (a bacteria found in geysers), it's a worst-case scenario for sterilization studies.
We had to replace our Kaye Digi's (the recording devices) because the code in them was not "traceable." This cost my department over $100k. It is SO easy to fabricate the data, whether the code is traceable or not! In fact, I showed two sets of data to my boss, one from the old "untraceable" and one from the new traceable equipment. Both sets were fabricated and there was no way to tell because I simply entered data that implied it was on one autoclave when in fact, it was on a completely different one. If I had other equipment, I wouldn't have even needed to have an autoclave at all to produce the data for a validation.
Oh, and I feel your pain on obtaining chemicals. When I worked for a college, one of the profs there actually abandoned some cancer-cell research because I couldn't get the chemical for them. They couldn't afford the licenses and inspections we would have had to have in order to get it.
Nice to see another chemist around. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
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