Hamilton Morris recently did a podcast that touched on some of this, I think it was https://www.patreon.com/posts/pod-78-legal-84786504 https://www.patreon.com/

Hamilton Morris recently did a podcast that touched on some of this, I think it was https://www.patreon.com/posts/pod-78-legal-84786504 https://www.patreon.com/posts/pod-78-legal-84786504 An interesting point he made was that in the wake of the Thalidomide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide) scandal, the FDA started requiring drugs to be both safe _and effective_ https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/histories-product-regulation/promoting-safe-effective-drugs-100-years https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/histories-product-regulation/p... The 'effective' part has proven to be a big source of complexity in the following years, because while it's relatively easy to prove a drug is relatively safe, it's much more difficult and subjective to prove a drug is effective. That closes off a lot of areas of research and development. The kicker is that Thalidomide was never sold in the USA to begin with. Anyway, as any reader can imagine, there would be a lot of negative social outcomes to allowing the sale of ineffective drugs. There's a lot of trouble now with medical devices and drugs not being effective, even though we have the rule. I'm not against regulation, I think medical sales are a really complex issue and I don't know how to even judge where the right balance of safety/effectiveness and innovation/freedom could be.