Shlepper, I don't see that your friends should feel guilty about the information you gave them and their [I guess] inability to understand it. I'm not at all suggesting that people would take over from their professional advisors and make the decisions themselves. But I am saying they should be able to if they want to [for themselves though not for children or other dependants].
If people want to eat ephedrine [which I know nothing about] and it has adverse effects and kills some, then surely that is up to the people who do the eating. I don't see that the government should tell them what they can eat or not. There are a multitude of toxic plants and they will do a lot more damage than ephedrine, but people are free to try eating them or make stupid herbal soups from them.
It's fashionable in NZ [as part of the recreational drug craze] to consume datura, which causes serious psychotic effects. Also, toxic mushrooms, solvents and all sorts. Some, such as heroin and marijuana are illegal, but most plants aren't. Most plants [contrary to the rabid environmentalists' ideas] are viciously poisonous having spent a great deal of their evolutionary history fending off insects and other beasts, using spikes and chemical warfare their primary weapons.
Maybe somebody will find a plant [such as produces Vincristine], which particularly targets B-cells. One could take a regular brew of such a thing and in the same way that radiation and Vincristine preferentially kill cancer cells, perhaps this new brew would do the same for B-cells in particular. A regular dose would perhaps keep the tumour suppressed, induce apoptosis or some such.
The FDA can't possibly be given sufficient staff to supervise everything that people can think of. The costs become enormous. The treatments need to and do in some cases, get 'orphan' status, 'off label' or other ways out of the FDA quagmire.
You say that if the FDA were given the resources and authority, they could do the job. All the government departments could do their job if only they got more resources and authority. There are not enough resources to do all the jobs some people would like governments to do. Governments could consume all the resources in the world and they would not get their job done. That is the nature of bureaucracy and power.
Yes, some things are black and white. Some things are grey. Some are completely opaque and I have no idea what is going on whatsoever. Personal choice and freedom is mostly a pretty straightforward black and white job [though there are plenty of grey tones when we talk about children and other situations]. Most of life is quite grey with definite 'best' answers few and far betweeen [which job, which school, which car to buy, what to have for dinner]. Some is absurdly opaque and nobody has a clue what's going on [quarks and their friendship with gravitons and what exactly are these things anyway and just why do they have in them a rule book which says that they have to hook up in such and such a way to make the absurdly complex world we see around us and then throw us curve balls like cancer].
I think the person involved is the person best suited to find a way through the impossible maze, with their own brain, their expert advisors and sheer luck. They are the ones who have to hold their lives together and run the gauntlet. Governments and medical practitioners should have only a bit part as advisors, not controllers. They should also be protectors to defend individuals against attack and fraud. But governments should not stop individual's self-controlled attempts at looking after and enjoying themselves, whether those attempts involve great risks or not [such as mountain climbing or eating ephedrine]. Or even if it involves self-destruction to avoid a life the person no longer wants or to achieve something they want more than their own life.
Governments and medical practitioners might be kindly, intelligent, helpful and all that stuff, but it is not their life on the line and they are not as interested as the individual concerned. They might be more capable by far and almost always will be, but they should remain advisors, not controllers.
It seems quite black and white to me.
Maurice |
