Hmm. Although I think the nanny state is real and I hate it as much as anyone, I think this is more about people in FDA-like organizations facing perverse ince

Hmm. Although I think the nanny state is real and I hate it as much as anyone, I think this is more about people in FDA-like organizations facing perverse incentives: if they recommend doing a thing and that thing kills people, then they suffer, but if they recommend doing nothing—that is, they use the force of the law to stop people from doing something—and that leads to people dying, then they do not suffer. As a result, they are heavily biased towards obstructionism. There has been some effort to estimate the net impact of the FDA, and, for example, to compare the number of people who have died due to delays of livesaving drugs vs the worst cases of bad drugs getting into the market. https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-examples-of-fda-harm/ https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-example... cites a bunch of studies—many of whose links have rotted, so you'll want the Internet Archive, e.g.: http://web.archive.org/web/20100603223422/http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj5n1/cj5n1-10.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20100603223422/http://www.cato.or... . The second link makes a case that the first number is significantly higher. FDA kills. Remember that.