Kill the FDA (Before It Kills Again!): Dallas Buyers Club

If you haven’t seen The
Dallas Buyers Club, which took home three Oscars last Sunday,
you should. It’s the most flat-out libertarian movie since
Ghostbusters and one of the best message movies I can
think of (of course, like all quality message movies, it’s first
and foremost a powerful piece of art).

Specifically, it shines a harsh light on the Food and Drug
Administration’s obstructionist role in approving life-saving
medicines.

From my Daily Beast column
on the topic:

During a good chunk of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the
federal government, in the guise of the Federal Drug Administration
(FDA) did just about everything it could to keep dying patients and
their caregivers from responding quickly and effectively to
terminal illness. It was only after massive, coordinated
pressure applied by gay-rights groups that the FDA made
partial and selective exceptions to its lengthy and widely
criticized drug-approval processes.

Worse still, the FDA continues to choke down
the supply of life-saving and life-enhancing drugs that will
everyone agrees will play a massive role not just in reducing
future health care costs but in improving the quality of all our
lives (in 2000, Columbia University’s economist Frank
Lichtenberg estimated that”increased drug approvals and health
expenditure per person jointly explain just about 100 percent” of
the seven-year increase in life expectancy at birth between 1960
and 1997). Little wonder, then, that the movie is “the
libertarian favorite of the year,” in the words of film critic
Kyle Smith….

…the FDA’s often arbitrary but always time-intensive
requirements have created a system in which new drugs take
somewhere around 10 to 15 years to come to market, at a
typical cost of $800 million or more. As my Reason colleague Ronald
Bailey has written, this means the FDA’s caution “may be
killing more people than it saves.” How’s that? “If it takes the
FDA ten years to approve a drug that saves 20,000 lives per year
that means that 200,000 people died in the meantime.”