It can be argued both ways. Another option without FDA would be people will self-regulate: determine who they trust - individuals, organizations, or networks -

It can be argued both ways. Another option without FDA would be people will self-regulate: determine who they trust - individuals, organizations, or networks - and who they don't trust based on hearing word of mouth experiences being spread vs. people being manipulated via bombardment of shallow, cheap advertisements - allowing a functional mechanism of Darwinism while preventing regulatory capture and squashing of drugs that were known to provide great benefit - but couldn't be patented so were controlled - like marijuana, MDMA, psychocybin, etc; presumably anything that kept in circulation in the black market was providing individuals with benefit, and arguably things like opiates kept and pumped into the public market did far more harm than even perhaps the total of harm caused by the black market drugs. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not arguing for or against here, I just stated another option - so thanks for that downvote whoever the lazy person was did it.