The latest Leverage episode, the Double-Blind Job, featured a plotline in which a drug company executive was planning to release a new drug and make billions. There was only one problem- they knew that it caused liver damage and would kill people. Not so fictional, it seems:
In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.
Avandia’s success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study’s results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.
But instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up, according to documents recently obtained by The New York Times. The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law.
“This was done for the U.S. business, way under the radar,” Dr. Martin I. Freed, a SmithKline executive, wrote in an e-mail message dated March 29, 2001, about the study results that was obtained by The Times. “Per Sr. Mgmt request, these data should not see the light of day to anyone outside of GSK,” the corporate successor to SmithKline.
If only we had de-regulated the pharmaceutical market and got rid of the heavy hand of the FDA, the free market would have discovered this well in advance and SmithKline would be punished by consumers.
Punchy
Um….isn’t this a complete ripoff of the theme of the movie, “The Fugative”? Even the liver damage bit is the same….
thomas
‘an informed consumer’
Better not let that happen.
NonyNony
The thing that free-market worshipers always forget is that the particular market models they worship always assume perfect information for all actors in the market.
Unlike the real world where in the absence of regulation and legal challenges, corporations would be pouring lead into the water supply and selling clocks powered by uranium. While insisting that the lead makes the water taste sweeter and that uranium gives the skin a healthy glow.
4tehlulz
Obviously, this means that we must cap liability as soon as possible.
John Cole
@Punchy: There are no completely new ideas in Hollywood, and when there are, they win an Oscar. See also, the Hurt Locker.
bkny
read about pfizer:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a4yV1nYxCGoA&pos=10
Pixie
As someone who works in this industry, I think you’ll be happy to know that the FDA is tightening and enforcing new regulations. My company received a FDA form 483 under these new regulations and more of this is expected over the next few years. I applaud the higher levels of oversight and think that the warning letter was a great opportunity to make sure that the greatest emphasis is placed on patient safety and thorough documentation rather than obtaining quick and easy data.
Zifnab
I’m just grateful that pharmaceutical development and production remain in the hands of reliable and truth worthy profit driven multi-billion dollar transnational corporations. I know I feel a lot safer paying 10x to 50x a drug’s market value because a domestic patent keeps life-saving generic drugs off the shelves for 20 years. Because the drug companies need that extra money for
obscene salaries and stockholder payoutsresearch and development of new drugs.Seriously, is there ANYTHING we can’t learn to love about the modern pharmaceutical industry?
Frank Chow
Um this is the plot line to the Fugitive…
Randy Ann
You only think you’re being sarcastic.
The fact is, as you see from the story above, the FDA (like most government agencies) can’t do anything itself. It relies on the producers of each drug to test that drug according to FDA regulations. Of course the producers skimp on the tests and lie about the results. They want to sell their drugs! All the FDA does – all the FDA has ever done – is give consumers a false sense of security by granting government authority to the (often rigged and biased) tests run by the people selling the drug being tested.
Now, imagine a genuinely free market where there’s no government nanny telling consumers that the government stands behind the safety of each drug on the market. In such a situation, drug testing would be done by private third parties, entities whose financial interest is not in selling the drug but in keeping their reputation as a fair and trustworthy arbiter. Because, in such a situation, consumers wouldn’t be lulled into a sense of false safety by the government, but would be suspicious and active in seeking out and punishing fraud, any drug company and any third-party testing service that was revealed to have faked or concealed test results would quickly be driven out of the market. Overall drug safety would improve considerably, and, because of the efficiency of the free market, genuinely safe and effective drugs would become available for sale years – even decades – sooner than they do under FDA supervision. Everybody benefits except the government looters and leeches.
EdTheRed
@Frank Chow: Yep, I was just going to note that Dr. Richard Kimble was poised to blow the lid off this whole conspiracy, but then his wife was murdered, and his attempts to blame the crime on a mysterious one-armed man fell on a jury’s deaf ears…those bastards at Devlin-MacGregor, pushing Provasic to market when they *knew* it would cause liver damage…
batgirl
@thomas: There is a book just out by AEI by the title Thwarting Consumer Choice: The Case Against Mandatory Labeling for Genetically Modified Foods. How the frak can a consumer choose if they don’t know if their food has been genetically modified?! Assholes. Even their book titles are irrational.
New Yorker
Damn, everyone beat me to it, but I was going to ask if SmithKline had also hired a one-armed man to kill a surgeon who had figured out the dangers of the drug.
Sheila
And they are allowed to push their products on primetime television, more often than not setting up a desire for a product that is not only unnecessary, but often harmful. Perhaps surgeons can begin advertising their specialties also, so that our healthcare costs will rise even higher and most of the population will be in a state of recovery at all times.
PurpleGirl
@Randy Ann: Yeah, that third-party thing really worked in the financial sector, didn’t it. Have you heard of Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and a few other names not remembered right now? They rate stocks, bonds, financial instruments so people can tell which instruments to buy and invest in, tell which ones are safe and trustworthy, etc.
PurpleGirl
@Sheila: For years, drug companies and lawyers could not advertise directly to the public. I forget when this changed.
Shalimar
@Randy Ann: Yeah, that is the way it would work. Or we could give the FDA more money and let them do the testing directly so it would be much harder to falsify and cover up. Among many other reforms of the agency. We learned how letting “private third parties” do the testing worked with the credit ratings agencies during the financial meltdown. Impartial, my ass.
numbskull
@PurpleGirl: EXACTLY.
Randy Ann, if your approach of a magic free market actually worked, you’d have at least ONE example, right? In fact, if it’s so great, there’s got to be hundreds through history.
Please provide three.
gnomedad
@Randy Ann: So, why are these third-party testers waiting for the abolition of the FDA to offer this wonderful service? Seems like a big opportunity to me.
In fairness, I wish the left would take your point more seriously, but question whether people are rational enough for it to work.
Jeff
Sadly, it really isn’t that hard to pull the wool over the eyes of even trained professionals, and I oughta know, being one. In my 20 odd years in the profession I’ve seen a lot of new drugs come on bhe market, some good, some bad, some so-so.But they all come on the scene as “game-changers” , “wonderdrugs”.
I started out being all starry eyed about our progress in treatment of disease and illness — now I am much more jaded, having seen the Vioxx, Bextra, Omniflox, Avandia,
etc… disasters
D. Mason
@batgirl:
Only if you ignorantly think they reason from the consumers point of view. If you hang up the dunce cap and realize they don’t give a fuck about the consumer, everything they do makes perfect sense. The only goal corporatist like that have is to fleece the public, thoroughly. The only kind of people who can make it to the upper echelons of trans-national mega corps are driven by a need to subjugate and blinded by hubris. No amount of arm twisting will every get sociopaths of that magnitude to do the “right” thing because from the only viewpoint they can comprehend – they ARE doing the right thing.
El Cid
Don’t forget, the main writer behind “Leverage” is a clever, insightful, former liberal blogger, to whom your page still links: John Rogers, aka, Kung Fu Monkey. (Or at least that’s the name of the blog.)
In addition John gives a tip to John Cole for this post.
Many episodes of the show — as well as, increasingly, “Lie to Me” — takes on real world and undercovered topics as central plotlines.
A recent Lie to Me, for example, had as its major plotline a PTSD suffering Iraq vet who has a vengeance obsession with his former superior officer he can’t explain, and it has to do with the officer’s role in an assault on an Iraqi market. (I’d say more, but it would be a spoiler.)
cleek
@PurpleGirl:
early 80s
David Hunt
@Punchy:
Unfortunately, no. Both were inspired by the reality that big drug companies will do horrible shit that that with out batting an eye.
estamm
I do (and have done) contract work for many major pharms/biotechs for nearly 20 years. It has been my impression for all companies I’ve worked with that they are very very concerned about making sure that all ‘adverse events’ are properly reported and are properly analyzed. I’ve seen many drug lines pulled (that is, no further development would be done on them) when it started to look like they were not safe. I worked with one company who went out of business overnight because the only drug they were working on was found to be ineffective and not terribly safe. I really believe that 95% of the drug makers in this country are very responsible in this regard. It is those stupid 5%’s that pull crap like SKB and warrant all the regulations that have been put into place (and will be put into place).
Steeplejack
@Randy Ann:
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. You almost lost me there, because I had to stop and wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes. Good one.
And how would these “private third parties” derive their income?
Again, what would be the method by which (a) consumers would punish fraud–other than by not buying the product–and (b) the malfeasant companies “would quickly be driven out of the market”?
Can you give a single real-world example of the existence of this marvelous free-market mechanism at work?
I would think that, say, the stock market is a perfect place for something like this to spring up. You have a lot of money flying around, people want to make sure they are putting that money in solid investments, and they need reliable information. It would seem like a perfect situation for the invisible hand to foster the creation of independent third-party ratings agencies acting as “fair and trustworthy” arbiters.
Instead, we have ratings agencies that are paid by the companies whose products they are rating, with predictably dismal results. How is this the result of nasty government regulation and interference in the free market, which I assume is your answer. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
PurpleGirl
@cleek: Thanks. I thought so but wasn’t sure and I’m supposed to be typing a client’s memoir, not blog reading or googling.
El Cid
If anyone gave a shit about the actual free market, they’d demand that pharmaceutical companies be barred from being transferred all their basic research from public universities, and we would be able to buy much, much cheaper and yet equivalent pharmaceuticals from major manufacturers like India — who hold a competitive advantage in lower cost manufacturing and don’t fetishize intellectual property rights as American corporations demand.
But since this is once again about protectionism for the rich, and subsidies for the rich, you don’t hear about this, and instead just the trillion dollar Big Pharma industry whining about how oppressed they are.
As ever, the people who blather most about free market entrepreneurial capitalism care about no such thing, just like the anti-capitalist, anti-entrepreneurial hypocrites who support the most productivity-destroying concept against which any entrepreneurially motivated principled capitalist advocate of self-made individuals would fight, inherited wealth leading to generations of lazy parasites who form a pseudo-aristocracy of anti-entrepreneurial sloth.
ThatPirateGuy
Homeopathy
The one word refutation of the idea that the market will promote legitimate medicine in the absence of regulations. Quackery is real and would overtake the market.
Mnemosyne
@Randy Ann:
Oh, sweetie. You are so adorable. Yes, I’m sure the companies who, in your construction, are paid by the pharmaceutical companies for their services will be eager to tank expensive products made by the people who sign their paychecks. I’m sure there’s absolutely no way those third parties would want to please the people who pay them and let a few things slide by.
It took 10 years to figure out that Vioxx was killing people. It took almost as long to figure out that Oxycontin is, in fact, addictive despite the fact that Purdue reps were going around to doctors’ offices and claiming it wasn’t as part of the corporate marketing strategy.
Do you know how much money these third-party companies could make until the market figured out that drugs were killing them? They’d be fools not to take the money and run.
Randy Ann
I never claimed the free market would be perfect, just better. And keep in mind: (1) Moody’s, etc., generally work well, (2) government regulators failed just as badly as they did in the recent unpleasantness, and (3) in a genuinely free market AIG, etc, would no longer exist. It’s because of government intervention and government bailouts that the banksters have been insulated from the consequences of their fraud, and are poised to repeat it in another generation or so.
The British East India Company.
The United States in the age of the so-called ‘robber barons’.
China now.
What do you mean ‘would’? Quackery is real and does, even now, with all the regulations and FDA supervision and so forth, command a substantial share of the market. In a truly free market, homeopathy would have no larger a share of the medical market than it does today, because homeopathy is already free to market itself (that whole messy ‘free speech’ issue). The problem is not insufficient regulation; the problem is that human beings are stupid.
El Cid
@Randy Ann: The British East India Company could hardly be considered a free market institution; it was among the most subsidized and state-favored non-state organizations to have ever existed outside the Catholic Church.
Pangloss
Why don’t American corporations just cut to the chase and kill us all and loot our possessions?
D. Mason
@Randy Ann:
You’re trying to scale principles which would work splendidly in a very small population of reasonably aware people – a tactic I consider to be the great libertarian failure. As was mentioned up-thread, libertarian ideas like that would only work with a completely open flow of information – like you would get in a small town where the products being produced are going to be used locally (and everyone knows someone who works there). The employees are the community so they will police the company internally – execs must be community minded to stay afloat – everyone is a de facto whistle-blower.
One cannot sensibly extrapolate that out to a population of 300 million plus where the whole citizenry is hypnotized by American Idol.
ThatPirateGuy
@Randy Ann:
It is an example of insufficient regulation. Fraud isn’t free speech. Selling products that do not do what they advertise is fraud.
Medicines need to show that they actually have an effect before people can make claims about them.
El Cid
@Pangloss: The same reason that pathogens which too quickly kill their hosts have a harder likelihood of propagating widely.
ET
@Randy Ann: Instead of being lulled by an FDA OK, they will be lulled or baited by carefully calibrated messages devised by pr/advertising gurus getting paid extremely large amounts of cash.
What you say would be more correct if all actors were created equal but they aren’t. Consumers are at a severe disadvantage especially with the technical areas like pharma.
You are assuming most people pay attention to the fine print on anything much less drugs. Obviously many don’t. And even if they did pay attention, you know how fine print is written – basically so no one knows what the fine print says. And even if you assume a significant level of knowledge in pharma and/or law, I would bet most people would be hard pressed to understand all the fine print and see through the messaging much less know what to do if they perceive a problem and seek redress.
I don’t want to jump down your throat, and I am not saying the free market is bad and something else is better, I am just saying that it has never ever been that monied interested from the Roman Empire to the Robber Barons wouldn’t have taken advantage of every legal avenue, loophole, or blind spot that they could at all levels of selling a product/service. This is what they do all in the name of making a profit – often an obscene profit – for themselves, or in modern free market parlance – increasing shareholder value. I just don’t have much faith that the magical forces of the free market will operate like it does on paper and in people heads to fix problems.
EvolutionaryDesign
And the Perpetual Shit Machine continues unabated…
Catsy
@Randy Ann:
A claim not only unsupported by evidence, but flatly contradicted by nearly every real-world example of a self-regulating industry that has ever existed.
In what way is the EIC even remotely comparable to any “over-regulated” industry that exists today?
Compare the EIC to any company, any industry, that now exists. The primary thing they will have in common is that they exist to produce profit; beyond that any attempt at comparison is so laughably inapt that even suggesting it is deeply unserious.
If anything, the historical record of the East India Company’s practices are a powerful rebuttal to the thing you’re trying to call an argument. The EIC is one of the most exploitative merchant organizations that ever existed. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to gain by bringing them up.
“So-called”? Have you ever actually touched a history book, or are you just throwing out terms you heard on Schoolhouse Rock?
The fact that you cite this era approvingly as an example of how an absence of regulation produces better outcomes than the presence of regulation really tells any thinking person just how seriously to take this nonsense.
…is an example of something you want to emulate?
I give up. You’re either an extremely talented spoof, or so profoundly and self-evidently ignorant that your arguments refute themselves.
mpowell
The British East India Company.
The United States in the age of the so-called ‘robber barons’.
China now.
Wow. What a complete concession of defeat. This is the worst set of ‘examples’ that I have ever seen to defend a position.
ProfessorTom
So what we really have is a case of the FDA not doing its job to begin with and allowing these products on the market.
If regulation works so well, why do these stories exist? Who was paid off at the FDA to perpetrate the coverup?
sven
If seems pretty likely that there will be a massive civil lawsuit and very large damages as a result of this new information. Could there also be criminal charges? If there are any lawyers in comments today I would love a short explanation of the standards for criminal liability in a case like this!
@Randy Ann: Libertarians seem to have an enormous blind-spot when it comes to private corruption. It is true that a public watchdog may be corrupted by private influence but why should this be any less true of a private watchdog? Every form of influence drug companies use on the FDA and its employees could be easily applied to a hypothetical private authority.
The libertarian response is usually that the market will punish corruption. Well, the market doesn’t actually care about corruption, the market cares whether a company is maximizing profits. If I have a 10 billion dollar company whose job it is to monitor five 100 billion dollar companies how likely is it that the most profitable option is absolute vigilance?
Steeplejack
@Catsy:
And wasn’t the British East India Company specifically created as a monopoly?
Wikipedia is a bit ambiguous, but it seems the company quickly devolved into a de facto monopoly. But in any case pretty much the exact opposite of a shining example of free-market purity.
On further reflection, I think Randy Ann might be trolling or leg-pulling. Wanker.
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
What we need to do is re-impose the ban on DTCA (direct to consumer advertising) that President Jeeter Lester signed into law in the 90’s.
It used to be illegal to advertise prescription medications on TV, unless the ad included all the fine print consumers needed to make an informed decision. Because this stuff ran two pages of small print (all the stuff they run after the print ads in magazines) drug companies couldn’t advertise– it was prohibitively expensive.
The wingnuts passed a bill saying “including an 800 number they can call or a web address is enough” and President Lester decided to triangulate with people’s lives and sign it.
It was even worse than his repeal of Glass-Steagall, because this repeal has a body count. The ads say “talk to your doctor”– and every study shows that doctors who get asked about a drug feel pressured to comply– and will do so, even if the drug isn’t part of their normal course of treatment.
One study (in Canada) found that nearly 90% of the people who mentioned a medication received either that medication or a similar one– even though doctors felt the prescription was unnecessary 50% of the time.
Reviewing case records by age/symptoms showed that people who “talked to their doctor” were 17 times more likely to get medications than people who had the same issues, but didn’t ask.
It means millions of dollars wasted– and when the drug is unsafe (and those tend to be the ones that get advertised most heavily), it’s dangerous.
A great example of a DTCA drug is Celebrex– which isn’t any more effective for the treatment of arthritis than iboprofen. It has value– it will cause less stomach problems if you need to take it daily– but only 6% of all people suffering from arthritis do need daily meds.
So a lot of people got a medication that wasn’t necessary and cost, at the time, 3,800% more than Motrin. The unlucky ones got Vioxx, which killed them.
Randy Ann’s notion that people can trust drug companies is glibertarian nonsense. These people use fear, uncertainty and doubt to hype consumers into asking, and old-fashioned pressure techniques to bulldoze doctors into prescribing.
It’s really a shame that the Emanuel administration cut a deal with them to preserve their profits– they should be trying to bleed them.
Slugger
What we need to deregulate is the justice system. Then a well-informed citizen could take care of drug company executives without waiting for some invisible hand. Suppose that hurting one of theirs for having hurt one of yours would be legal.
The market won’t be free till vendettas are free.
Randy Ann
and
Why would the third-party testing companies compromise their neutrality by allowing pharmaceutical companies to fund them? That sort of thing invokes immediate rage on the part of consumers – look at ScienceBlogs and the reaction to a single Pepsi-sponsored blog on that site. The only reason Big Pharma can get away with buying test results now, and the only reason consumers won’t fund private testing companies, is because the FDA lulls consumers into thinking the government ensures the safety of drugs that go on the market. Without the FDA, the demand for a provably neutral testing facility would be enormous, and that facility wouldn’t dare to compromise its reputation by taking money from the companies whose drugs it tests.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you.
Socialists write the history books on that era. Its evils have been greatly exaggerated; the Gilded Age was, in fact, home to the greatest engine of progress and the most rapid rise in overall quality of life in history. It was also home to the greatest acts of private charity in history (Carnegie, etc.) , in case you’re worried about those who fell through the cracks.
Jeff
@estamm:
I agree that 95% of the pharmaceutic industry taken as a whole is
honest and genuinely interested in our well-being. That other 5% though are rat-f@#kers .
I watched that episode of Leverage last night, and I found it fascinating — if totally wrong headed in how it depicted clinical research. For instance, STARTING with human trials? I would think in the real world they would have done years of testing on rats and mice first and if there were no liver damage noted there, then and only then move on to human trials.
Secondly, the formula for the drug would have been submitted to the FDA far in advance, and there would have been no surprise that the experimental drug that caused liver failure was the same as the drug going to market. But that would have been less dramatic, so I would give them dramatic license to fudge.
Finally, I think if a drug company had tried to market a truly toxic drug that there would have been a revolt at the company.(Let me say that even with the drug disasters like Vioxx , I wonder if in the company circles the dominant mood was less greed and more wishful thinking– like ‘maybe the studies were wrong, and it won’t be that bad…, or maybe those people who got sick were outliers….,or maybe the benefits of the drug will out weigh the risks…..’)
Or maybe I am fantasizing again,
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
@Jeff: Well, I don’t have any idea what percentage of the people in the industry are saints or satans or misguided or what and I don’t know why you and estamm want to debate it.
You can’t answer the question– all you can do is meta-talk.
It’s possible, when they ask a large hospital chain to pressure every physician with admitting privileges to use a specific drug, that they honestly believe they have the greatest thing since sliced bread. Or that one or two evil people have concealed the terrible truth from the good decent people. And there are cases where a wonderful new technology needs to be evangelized so more people can get their benefits.
All one can really do is look at is the results and their impact on people. Which suggest that they’re just in this for the money, whatever their true motives might be.
thomas
@Randy Ann:
Well, of course!
It would work just like the bond rating agencies that were paid by the banks to give all their bonds AAA+++ ratings so they could sell them at enormous profits, whether they were any good or not.
well, I see I’ve been repeatedly beaten to this comment. So it goes.
You must be a F*ing idiot.
sven
@Slugger: What we need to deregulate are the roads.
The government issued ‘license’ just gives all drivers a false sense of security. Knowing that no driver has a license will lead everyone to drive more cautiously. Removing the requirement for a license will mean much safer drivers on all of our roads.
Likewise the so-called ‘highway-patrol’. This kind of top-down enforcement is never effective; speeding tickets haven’t stopped speeding. Get rid of the police and the drivers will regulate themselves.
Also, auto-insurance means a driver does not bear the full consequence of their actions. This prevents the road-market from pricing drivers correctly. Without insurance, responsible drivers, and wealthy irresponsible drivers, will be the only ones could afford to drive. (The market will create an enforcement mechanism)
So, I believe I have shown that if there were no driver’s license, police, or auto-insurance the roads would be safer for everyone.
Catsy
@Randy Ann:
Alright, you had a valiant run, but this paragraph pretty much outed you as a spoof. I don’t want to claim that nobody is this stupid, because a distressing number of people are–but you went a bit too far with the “socialists write the history books” bit. Most people who are this pig-ignorant usually blame the Jews or the Illuminati for the inconvenient parts of the history books; actual socialists could only dream of having that kind of power.
So, nice try, but next time try to rein it in a bit.
Catsy
Oh, and FYWP.
Seriously: when your blog’s word filter is so shitty that it becomes an internet meme, you’re probably better off without the fucking word filter.
Dr. Morpheus
@Randy Ann:
You mean like bond rating agencies for CDOs? Yeah, that worked out really well, didn’t it?
sven
@Randy Ann: You said:
Why would government agencies compromise their neutrality by allowing pharmaceutical companies to fund trials?
I am curious where you think the funding source for your ‘third-party testing company’ will come from. Running clinical trials for all pharmaceuticals and epidemiological studies for long-term side effects is very, very expensive. What you keep describing sounds like Consumer Reports or CNET. The reality is that you need to specify several billion dollars a year of financing or I will continue to claim that you are ‘assuming a can opener’.
Michael
@Slugger:
I’m liking it a lot. The executive can scream “it was just a business decision – you shouldn’t take it so personally” as you are cutting him up one limb at a time in a slow, methodical fashion. In that way, he can try and create a market for his free speech pleas of mercy to a disgruntled survivor of his former customer.
Barry
@Randy Ann: “market. In such a situation, drug testing would be done by private third parties, entities whose financial interest is not in selling the drug but in keeping their reputation as a fair and trustworthy arbiter”
Yea, right – there’s no way that they’d figure being a false-front fraud service would pay 1,000x better.
Randy Ann
This is simply wrong. Government regulations are what drives up the price of testing to where only the government and the biggest corporations can afford it. Funny how that works out, huh?
You mean like bond rating agencies for CDOs? Yeah, that worked out really well, didn’t it?
And government regulators did better? *Everyone* fell down on the job in the recent unpleasantness; I sincerely doubt that a government-run, government-funded bond rating agency would have done any better than the private industry, and might have done far worse.
Would you prefer ‘liberals write the history books’? There’s no doubt that ivory-tower history departments are dominated by left-wingers, liberals, and socia-lists. What flavor of leftist a given history professor happens to be, whether he belongs to the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea, doesn’t really matter that much. From an objectivist standpoint, everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan shares in socia-list values, and may as well be given the label.
Again, you only think you’re funny, but I assure you, the fact that I risk my life by driving unsafely is far more important to me than the fact that I risk my license by doing so. Besides, I, and not the government, am the person most qualified to judge whether or not I’m driving at a safe speed. Germany, for example, has no speed limit at all on the Autobahn, and driving there is *safer* than an average American highway.
Randy Ann
Also, FYWP. Also. Too.
Roger Moore
@ThatPirateGuy:
Snake oil. How many people realize that “snake oil” isn’t just a figure of speech but was a real product that was fraudulently sold as a cure all? It’s amazing that people forget exactly why the FDA was created in the first place- because the free market was an abject failure in providing safe, effective medicines.
AxelFoley
I love this show. Just got into it over the summer.
Roger Moore
@sven:
Fixt. I think this is what the “free market” people are actually after. They want to run the for-profit private authorities, take the big cash from the companies they’re supposed to be rating, and then disappear when the shit hits the fan. The free market at work, bitches.
JCT
My colleagues and I were just discussing this over lunch. Our clinic is part of a large public hospital in NYC and “new” drugs take years to reach our formulary. As such our “activation” barrier to eventually switching over to new formulations is high, as a cardiologist I can count the new drugs that I regularly prescribe on 1 hand over the past 10-odd years. Like Jeff above we have already been snakebitten repeatedly by the “all-new, much better” gambit.
Though stories like this do help when a patient asks why I am not prescribing them the “latest and greatest” drug that they didn’t know they needed until they read about it on the side of the bus.
lethargytartare
@Randy Ann:
add the German Autobahn to the list of things about which you are almost entirely ignorant.
Jeff
@Randy Ann:
More libertarian bullshit. Of course the Autobahn HAS speed limits
Roger Moore
@Randy Ann:
Fixed that for you.
El Cid
@Catsy: Teddy Roosevelt was, of course, a huge soshullist, and the people of the cities were very happy with shit running in the street and maggot-infested meat and manufacturing equipment sucking workers in and grinding them up, and so on and so forth.
asiangrrlMN
People, obviously Randy Ann is Ayn Rand reincarnated trying to see if her bullshit sounds any better now than it did back in the day. Not to rational people, honeychild.
Still, the fact that Big Pharma (even if it’s just a tiny portion of it) is doing this shit doesn’t surprise me in the least.
sven
@Randy Ann: The problem with so many of your assertions is that they fall apart under closer scrutiny. As Mr. Moore and lethargy have already noted, the German roads are actually much more tightly regulated than roads in the United States.
Getting a drivers license is more difficult in Germany. First, Germans must wait until 18 until they can get a license. Next, all drivers must attend designated Driver’s Schools (Fahrschule) which is quite lengthy and intense by U.S. standards. Finally, there is a written and road test administered by… Germans!
Driving on German roads is also more strictly regulated. On the Autobahn passing on the right is totally prohibited and failing to move right for faster traffic is also prohibited, ether activity can result in a citation. On speed limited portions of the Autobahn and other roads speed cameras are actually more common than in the united states. Also, German drivers are not allowed to make a right turn at a stop light until it turns green.
I’m a long-standing fan of the German roads scheme. I believe that the combination of better education, higher requirements for licensure, and better laws can make the roads both safer and more pleasant to use.
Catsy
Why not? It’s no less retarded than any of the other assertions you’ve made.
It is, however, demonstrably false.
What an abject fraud you are. Despite being a complete sociopath, one of Rand’s better qualities was an almost fetishistic regard for the human intellect and scientific academia. “If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”
With the kind of anti-intellectualism you’re displaying, I wouldn’t even credit you with being a glibertarian–you’re just a garden variety teabagger in Randian clothes.
While I give you props for the Monty Python reference, the rest of this is utterly without meaningful semantic content, either in or out of its context.
You seem to have confused objectivism with objectivity, and failed at both.
Others have adequately destroyed the idiocy you spewed about the autobahn, so I won’t waste bandwidth quoting it.
El Cid
There is no such thing as a philosophy called “objectivism”. There is only a shitty novel or two.
cruzking2000
El Cid, Roger Moore, Sven, Catsy: Thank you. You guys and gals were absolutely awesome to read. OMG, there’s NOTHING I enjoy more than a ruthless, total, absolute, complete beatdown of a dumbass libertardian such as Randy Ann. It was breathtaking, and so thoroughly enjoyable! You guys made my evening.
Oh, and Randy Ann: you’re a dumbass, if you haven’t figured it out by now. Actually, you probably haven’t. That’s how utterly stupid you are. Must truly suck to be you.