Regulation for dummies: is the FDA necessary?

• Author: Seavey, Todd
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book - Book Review

Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation, by Philip J.. Hilts, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 397 pages, $26.95

SHOULD THE LAW be fashioned for stupid people?

That's not a question Protecting America's Health asks explicitly--and the author, New York Times science writer Philip J. Hilts, no doubt would object to characterizing millions of American consumers as stupid. But it is a question that must be mulled by free market advocates, against whom Hilts explicitly directs his polemic in defense of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the regulations it issues.

It is tempting for free market advocates to say that the FDA could be eliminated outright--replaced by nothing at all--so that customers could work out for themselves, or with the help of advice columns and ratings services, which products were dangerous or ineffective. A few idiots might opt for deadly medicine or adulterated food on the rare occasions when businesses were short-sighted enough to sell such things, but that possibility should not stand in the way of experimentation by the rest of us. Of so the argument goes.

In contrast to this position--which we might sum up as "Buyer beware, bonehead!"--Hilts makes the case that whether it seems like wise business practice of not, completely unregulated food and drug companies will tend, if history is any guide, to get away with any corner cutting and exaggeration they can and even the occasional negligent homicide. No one sets out to kill the customer, of course, but there is a powerful temptation to downplay the likelihood that your product will kill people once you've invested a fortune in putting it on the market, especially if it takes close attention to statistics to notice the deaths.

If it is only uninformed morons who are at risk in a laissez-faire environment, one must conclude that there were an awful lot of morons in the 19th century (and that we may not be that much wiser today). As Hilts describes it, the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time when the newfound ease of production, transportation, and advertising made it possible to deceive masses of anonymous consumers who would not long have tolerated such lies from their relatives and neighbors. "In chocolate, chemists found ground-up soap, beans, and peas," he writes. "To flour was added chalk, clay, or plaster of paris ... In examining brown sugar, researchers often found that a substantial portion of it was the carcasses of lice, together with some living ones."

Hilts calls the period "the grand era of the quack remedy" and describes the highly profitable sale of patent medicines that did nothing at all--or, in some cases, did serious harm--with their ingredients kept secret from both doctors and patients. Fines for mislabeling were small. In 1906 the maker of a lethal potion touted as a headache cure, called Cuforhedake Brane-Fude, was one of the first to be prosecuted under new laws requiring honest labeling of foods and drugs. After making about $2 million on the product, killing scores of customers, and being fined $700, the maker of Brane-Fude was, in the words of the chief of the government's Bureau of Chemistry, "just $1,999,300 ahead." Advertising of that day routinely described opiates and colored water as elixirs capable of curing cancer, syphilis, arthritis, and other ailments.

As if subconsciously influenced by the muckraking journalists of that era, Hilts rails against the greed of the trusts and combinations that foisted their shoddy wares on a duped populace. One almost expects to find plutocrats and fat cats in the index. Hilts describes the Progressive attitudes of Teddy Roosevelt with approval and fawningly portrays modern-day anti-corporate activists such as Ralph Nader and Sidney Wolfe as "people who work to solve public problems with fact-gathering and no motive of personal gain." But even if you...