Death By Regulation - With Special Guest Mary Ruwart
Today we are joined by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, a biomedical researcher, ethicist and author of a new book called Death by Regulation -- How We Were Robbed of a Golden Age of Health and How We Can Reclaim It. Please visit: https://www.deathbyregulation.us
Today we are joined by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, a biomedical researcher, ethicist and author of a new book called Death by Regulation -- How We Were Robbed of a Golden Age of Health and How We Can Reclaim It. Please visit: https://www.deathbyregulation.us
Today we are joined by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, a biomedical researcher, ethicist and author of a new book called Death by Regulation -- How We Were Robbed of a Golden Age of Health and How We Can Reclaim It. Please visit: https://www.deathbyregulation.us
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing fine, and we have a special guest today.
She's been with us once before, and she has another book, so we're going to talk with her today.
The name of our guest is Mary Ruart, and Mary, welcome to the program.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much, Ron, and thank you for providing the foreword for the book.
I really appreciate it.
Very good.
And I want to just mention a few things that brings, you know, I want to bring to attention to our viewers.
Because last time we talked to you, you had a book I was calling Healing Our World.
And I think you started and had it published in 92, but I think you had four editions of it.
So you did a lot of work on that.
And I think this is the one that you've had since then.
And the one we're going to be talking about today is Death by Regulations.
That sounds like a very serious title.
So we'll reveal to the viewers exactly what's going on.
But your background has been more in science than in journalism, even though you've done a lot of writing and you've written these several books.
But the journalism that you've done has a lot of times been biological and biopharmacy.
I thought it was interesting, your background, that you worked for 19 years as a pharmaceutical researcher for Upjohn.
So that is interesting, and I'm sure that has influenced your writing and your ability to talk about this subject.
But I want to welcome you to the program.
And the first thing we'll start off with is why don't you give us a brief update on what is in the book and then we'll follow up with some more questions.
Yes, well basically the book talks about the 1962 amendments to the Food and Drug Act and it's living law.
Basically it was open-ended so it allows the FDA to increase the number of regulations every year and that's what's responsible for the soaring pharmaceutical prices because we have soaring regulatory costs.
And I was working at Upjohn during the time these regulations were metastasizing throughout the system.
So I learned a lot about them and I need to share that in the book because the subtitle of the book is How We Were Robbed of a Golden Age of Health and How We Can Reclaim It.
And basically these amendments really took away our opportunity to have that golden age of health.
They shifted the medical paradigm from inexpensive prevention to expensive treatment.
You know, they really suppressed information about nutritional prevention.
And I know you're very aware of that because you introduced some bills in Congress to stop that.
And then of course they also increased the development time of new drugs from 4 to 14 years, adding a decade from the time it takes for a drug to get from the lab bench to the market.
And they squelched innovation somewhere between 50 and 80 percent.
And all of that adds up to a death toll of about equivalent, I should say, to having each of us losing five years of our lives to the amendments, or half the people who have died from disease since 1962 have lost 10 years, depending on how you want to look at it.
Sounds like another example of legislation by regulation.
You know, Congress falling down on the job and then they go and write these regulations.
Yeah.
Mary, I'm wondering, this is, I'm asking, I guess, for speculation, but looking across the board at where the FDA's regulations have set us back, what disease area would you say they set us back the most?
And how might it have been different?
Which disease might have been different?
Treatments might have been different if they hadn't done this.
Well, of course, they did set back cardiovascular disease quite a bit just by suppressing information about how aspirin can save lives for people who have had a heart attack.
And that information was suppressed for almost 20, 25 years.
So that was a biggie.
And then cancer, of course.
We haven't had really as many big breakthroughs in cancer as we have had in cardiovascular disease.
And part of that is because the FDA tends to persecute and prosecute doctors who have new ideas about cancer treatments.
And so, you know, they've really squelched innovation in that area.
Mary, I want to ask a question about the direction of medicine right now.
And I want to emphasize to the viewers that not only do you have this background in writing books and also in bioresearch, but you've been very active in the Libertarian Party and libertarianism.
You've written about that.
And this is why I think what you write and do, you're coming from the viewpoint of a libertarian.
I know you endorse the non-aggressive principle.
So that's quite a bit different than what happens in Washington.
Everything there is done through aggression.
But what I would like to ask is, you know, there's been some token changes, and even Rand has been a little bit involved with the president trying to change some of these regulations, changing the mandate.
Do you know of anything has happened with the Trump administration that has helped us in any way whatsoever, especially in regulations or any other way, since he's been in office?
Well, I was glad to hear that he supported Right to Try, which is basically legislation that has passed state by state and has now come to the attention of the national government.
And it allows terminally ill patients to negotiate directly with a pharmaceutical firm in order to get drugs that haven't quite jumped through all the regulatory hoops yet.
And this is something terminal patients have wanted for a long time.
For example, when we were working on AIDS drugs, the AIDS community realized it couldn't wait an extra 10 years for us to come up with some new drugs.
So they hired black market chemists to make these drugs.
And by the time the FDA gave us permission to test in people, every AIDS patient in the country who wanted them had already had them and were resistant.
So we had to wait for new diagnoses in order to test our drugs the way the FDA wanted.
So, you know, the Dallas Buyers Club movie showed how the FDA went after some of these people who were distributing drugs in the black market.
And it was very sad because the buyers clubs actually seem to have brought in a lot of nutritional things that help the AIDS patients and also drugs from other countries that we didn't have here.
So it was very sad to see them prosecuted.
And this is the type of thing, so right to try is a step in the right direction, but the problem is you still have to stay in FDA's good graces.
And the FDA can punish companies that do things they don't want by dragging their feet on their approval.
So I'm not sure how effective right to try is going to be.
Free to choose medicine, which is another plan that is being put forth by the Heartland Institute, is actually a two-track system.
And I think that might actually work because they have made it so that they don't have to stay in FDA's good graces once they go on the free-to-choose medicine track.
Okay, Daniel?
It's interesting.
Well, you know, I like your title because your subtitle seems like it gives us some hope.
And I know you don't want to give away too much from the book, but what can the reader take away about how we can get this golden age back?
Well, one of the things, of course, is we have to do away with the amendments, but that's not enough because the FDA has gone to court and gotten some favorable rulings that basically put the amendments in the legal department, so to speak.
So if we just repealed the amendments, we'd still have these court rulings.
So what we really need to do is make it so that FDA approval is not required for marketing.
We really need to stop that because as long as the FDA has that power, it will control the pharmaceutical industry and it will not control it in a way that's positive to the American public, even though people think the FDA is protecting them.
If you look before the amendments were passed and after the amendments were passed, you see that there was no decrease in the rate of withdrawal of drugs from the market after they were approved.
And there's just a few drugs that'll get through because we just don't know enough.
That's the truth of the matter.
So every time you take a new drug, you have to be careful because all the side effects aren't known.
You know, there's an issue going on right now in the government, and it's getting a lot of attention.
That is the opioid epidemic.
And, of course, this is getting a lot of attention, and people are rushing.
We need more government.
I want to give you a chance to talk about a libertarian answer to this.
But from my experience in medicine, I do know that when they even, you know, crack down a little bit, and there are a lot of, you know, with the drug war, within my own family and other doctors' families, people who were, you know, dying critically ill and in a lot of pain were denied medication because doctors and nurses and others were fearful of prescribing these drugs and getting put on a list.
And that's one of the consequences of this.
But could you give us a brief update on what the advice would be if somebody from the administration say, well, what is the libertarian approach of this?
Don't we need more rules?
No, the rules, the regulations generally backfire because as you said earlier, they're all based on aggression.
And aggression just backfires every time.
So, you know, the thing is we've criminalized people who want to be pain-free or who want to feel better.
And it's crazy.
So what we're doing is instead of changing the things that make people dissatisfied with life, we are coming after what they do to cope.
And one of the things I think that's really a problem is the whole idea that aggression serves us.
That's what the government is telling us because that's what the government does.
And it doesn't serve us.
What it does is it creates a lot of poverty.
It destroys jobs.
And when a person can't get a job, I mean, that's a pretty depressing thing.
Or if they have to limit their choices to jobs they don't want because the market is suppressed by the rules and regulations.
And the Institute for Justice has done a really good job of knocking some of those down, as I'm sure you're aware.
And I hope your listeners are too, if they aren't, it's ij.org, a great organization.
So I think what we really need to do is focus on why are people feeling like they have to take all these painkillers and these happy pills.
And I think if that's where we put our focus, what we'd find is we need less government so that we have more opportunity.
Right.
I think another perfect example is I think that the whole thing is political, not medical, because a lot of people, a lot of things that I've read said people who have tried cannabis oil have been able to treat the problems that the opioids, which are far more damaging, would have treated.
Because that's out of favor with the politicians.
They can't have access to that.
Well, that's right.
And actually, in states where cannabis has been legalized, the incidence of traffic fatalities has gone down because people who drink alcohol now switch to cannabis, which is a much safer drug.
Yes, and I would like to remind the viewers that this book is now available.
And Mary, why don't you just mention that you're looking right now to get people to go and sign up and see if we can boost your name a little bit on that New York Times list?
I guess the book is coming out in the first week in April.
Why don't you just give a little encouragement there?
Sure.
For those who order the book before April 9th, there are $60 of free gifts that you get with it, including coupons for my website, coupons for life extension, which has a lot of supplements and preventative things out there for you, and a number of other bonuses.
And the reason we're doing this is we're going to collect all the orders, and then on April 10th, we're going to submit them all to Amazon.com in a big lump.
And that will hopefully push the book up to the Amazon bestseller list.
And that Amazon will promote it and get us some notoriety for the idea that, you know, death by regulation is a real thing and that bad regulations are just as deadly as bad drugs.
Right.
And I want to encourage our viewers certainly to look at this because I find it fascinating because Mary's an expert in the bioscience and the pharmaceutical industry as well as she approaches this from a libertarian viewpoint.
So Mary, thank you very much for being with us today and we wish you well with your book.
Well thank you very much and thank you for having me and good day to all your listeners.
Very good.
And to our viewers, thank you for tuning in today.