Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

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.25

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,