Aug. 16, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:42
3381 How Government Can Kill You | Mary Ruwart and Stefan Molyneux
Why is healthcare so expensive? Dr. Mary Ruwart joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the human death toll of government intervention in medicine and the hidden costs that over-burdensome regulation has on the healthcare market. Dr. Mary Ruwart is a research scientist, ethicist, and a libertarian activist. She is the author of “Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression” and the updated version “Healing Our World: The Compassion of Libertarianism.” For more from Dr. Ruwart, please go to: http://www.ruwart.comOrder "Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression" here: http://www.fdrurl.com/Healing-Our-WorldFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, back with Dr.
Mary Ruart, who I first interviewed seven years ago.
Ah!
Seven years ago, back when healthcare was a bit more theoretical, because I was a lot younger.
But trust me, young people who are listening to this, there will come a time where healthcare will be very important to you, and we'd like to have you forewarned and forearmed with some principles.
Dr.
Ruart is a research scientist, ethicist, and a libertarian activist.
She is the author of Healing Our World.
And there's an updated version, Healing Our World, The Compassion of Libertarianism, coming out in its fourth edition.
And you can find that.
We'll put the link below at www.ruart.com.
Dr.
Roth, thanks of course for taking the time.
Hey, it's great to be here.
So, the golden age of medicine.
I'm sort of afraid that it's falling down the memory hole and young people look at some of the struggles and prices and slowness and unresponsiveness of the U.S. medical system.
And think that it needs to be fixed by government without realizing that the government has been trying to fix it for about 50 years and this is more the result of the government trying to fix it than the market itself.
What do you mean when you talk about the golden age of medicine in America?
Well, you know, when I was starting out, I got very interested in science in high school in the 60s.
And we were just in an incredible place.
You know, before that time, you really couldn't get enough vitamins.
Now the pharmaceutical companies were making vitamins.
They had figured out how to make them in large quantities.
So now we had supplements.
It was the beginning of the supplement industry.
We had just discovered that DNA was the code.
for our genetics and you know there was a lot of excitement about that so molecular biology of the gene was just getting started that was very exciting and of course there was a lot of money to be put into the sciences people were very excited about all the possibilities we had a lot of new pharmaceuticals that were saving lives we really were poised on this brink of a golden age of health but in 1962 We're
good to go.
Bring to fruition all of these promises that we had in the sciences because the government has been in the way.
Let's talk about the defining moment of, I guess, starting the ball rolling towards hyperregulation, which was something I was, of course, familiar with as a kid, but which may have fallen down again the memory hole for some other people.
The thalidomide, more than a scare, as you pointed out, thousands of babies were born without limbs or with other birth defects.
Was that the big spark that started the ball rolling?
Yes, you know, these 1962 amendments had been languishing in Congress for several years, but Congress passed them very quickly to reassure the American public that the thalidomide incident would never happen here.
And what they actually did was created an even worse American thalidomide incident that most people are not aware of.
You know, the folic acid, which is a B vitamin, can prevent spina bifida and a lot of the birth defects that kids are institutionalized for or die from.
And we knew about this in the early 80s, those of us in the sciences.
Folic acid manufacturers were forbidden by the FDA to tell the American public about this because it hadn't gone through the whole regulatory process that the FDA wanted to go through.
So it wasn't until the 90s when the Center for Disease Control, another government agency, started encouraging young women to take folic acid All the time because you had to have it really early in the pregnancy that, you know, that the word was getting out.
But even then the FDA forbade the folic acid manufacturers from telling women about this.
And so as a consequence, there were probably about 25,000 American babies born with birth defects that they didn't have to be born with.
And many more were aborted because you could test for this in utero.
So it's very sad.
And the original, of course, the thalidomide, which was a medicine designed to help counter morning sickness, which was perfectly safe for adults, there didn't seem to be the detailed knowledge about the vulnerability of the fetus to particular medicines.
So when, of course, the women took thalidomide to combat morning sickness and had the birth defects, As far as I understand, it didn't arise out of any greed or malice on the part of the providers of thalidomide.
They just didn't know the degree to which the fetus was susceptible or vulnerable to different doses.
Well, that's right.
And actually, thalidomide probably saved a lot of lives because what it really was was it was a substitute for barbiturates.
You know, for going to sleep at night.
And a lot of people died of overdose from barbiturates.
So when thalidomide came out, it was hailed as a safe sleeping drug.
And then women found it was good for morning sickness.
And back then, we didn't really appreciate that the fetus can be affected by things that the mother is not affected by.
And actually, even after we knew there were problems in women, There were a lot of difficulties reproducing it in animals for a variety of reasons that I won't go into at the moment.
But actually, as late as a decade later, textbooks were saying that this effect only happened in primates and rabbits, which actually turned out not to be true.
But that's how hard it was to get the information at that point in time.
So it's just...
It was just an unfortunate thing.
But this is the message, really.
If you take drugs, they're powerful things.
And there's always going to be things we aren't aware of.
As scientists, we don't know enough.
So we're going to have problems like this if we take drugs.
So obviously, one should only take drugs if you need them, if you think that the benefit outweighs the risk.
Well, and this is one of the great challenges of having a hyper-powerful statist apparatus is that the women or the families whose children were born with birth defects, I mean, unbelievably heartbreaking.
There's no amount of empathy that would be enough to cover that kind of spiritual wound.
But of course, the amount of emotional backlash that occurs and the running to the state and the desire to have the state, quote, make everything safe.
And as you've pointed out repeatedly, who even knows what that word actually means?
That kind of overreaction and overreach where people who have justifiably...
And then the state embraces them and says, don't worry, we're going to keep you safe from all negative things.
The law of unintended consequences seems to kick in there and leaves people far worse off than they were before they ran to the government.
Well, that's right.
According to my research, probably a conservative estimate is that one out of five Americans who have died since 1962 had their life shortened by these amendments.
That means we all know somebody, some family member of ours, or maybe even ourselves, have had their lives shortened.
And that's pretty scary.
That number is something when I – because I saw you give a speech in the States a couple of years ago, and I've been holding that number close to my heart, and I give it out as often as possible.
People simply can't fathom it.
They can't fathom it, as you say, 4.7 million or 5 million people have died.
As the result of limitations on medical care imposed by the FDA. And these are for drugs which are considered to be safe in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, which also has stringent requirements.
Can you help people understand the hidden death toll, the mountain of skulls behind the FDA? Sure.
Well, you know, before the amendments were passed, it took about four years to get a drug from the lab bench to the marketplace.
Now it takes about 14 years.
It's added 10 years.
Now, when we were working with AIDS drugs, of course, the AIDS patients realized they were going to die waiting for these drugs.
So what they did is they hired black market chemists to make them.
By the time the FDA finally gave us permission to put them in people, every AIDS patient in the country already had had our drugs and was resistant to them, so we had to wait for people to be diagnosed, naive people is how we call them in the industry, to be diagnosed so that we could treat them with a drug and do the FDA protocol.
And in some cases, there were several AIDS drugs available in other countries that were being brought in by these people who were so unfortunate.
And the FDA, thankfully, there was...
A commissioner that said, okay, that's all right.
But as time went on, other commissioners did not allow people to bring those in.
And the problem is that because people were bringing them in, the FDA got kind of upset with these drug companies, and they never really did approve those drugs for AIDS. One of them is available, but it's not easily gotten, so it's very sad.
So there's a big political component, too.
Just before we get into that, I just really want people to sort of stew on this particular thing, that you would imagine, of course, that when people are operating outside the law, trying struggling as hard as they can to stay under the radar of regulators and the state, that this would be a situation you've got desperate patients who are dying, who are hiring black market chemists, you've got people smuggling goods in, and you've got a whole distribution network that is illegal.
You would expect, of course, under the general status theory, for the drugs to be poor quality, mixed with baby food, dangerous, killing people.
This is about a perfect storm for every kind of corruption that you can imagine.
But as far as I understand it, the drugs were remarkably safe.
Yes, and that's partly because they got them, the AIDS activists got them directly from the pharmaceutical companies overseas, and they were very careful with who they hired as chemists and things of this nature.
Now, that isn't to say there weren't any problems.
Obviously, there's always going to be some, but they did a remarkable job.
In fact...
It's amazing because they knew way ahead of FDA approvals, of course, which drugs were working and which weren't.
And it was too bad that it was underground because that information was incredibly valuable.
And in fact, even some of the...
Thank you.
help prevent them from going blind from some of the side effects of the disease itself.
And eventually, the FDA did approve those drugs, basically based on the fact that the AIDS patients were taking them anyhow.
I mean, everyone knew they worked, but they hadn't gone through the regulatory hoops, And that's another thing.
The FDA is requiring a very high standard of proof before it will let any drug be marketed.
And, you know, that's a wonderful thing in general.
But if you've got people dying and you know the drug works, it's really unethical to prevent them from getting it.
And that's basically what the FDA is doing in a number of cases today.
If you're a small drug company or an individual physician trying to get through the process, it is so, so difficult.
The big companies have difficulty too, but at least they have the money that they can keep throwing at the project to bring it to the marketplace eventually.
But a lot of these biotech companies are going bankrupt trying to get...
Drugs to people that they know work, and it's very sad.
And then the other thing is people don't even start the process.
I'll tell you a little story that'll help your listeners understand why we don't have the drugs we should have.
You know, I actually got a call from the FDA one day, and they said, Dr.
Ruart, we understand you have a patent for prostaglandins and liver disease, and we want to encourage you to develop these drugs because there isn't anything for liver disease.
Now, this should have been good news, right?
But still having to jump through all the regulatory hoops.
When you have a new disease and you think you're curing it, you don't know how many people you need in your study to get the statistical significance that the FDA wants to see.
You don't know what dose to use.
You don't know how many times a day you have to dose.
You don't know how long the study has to go.
And if you don't get all of that right the first time, And these studies take years.
So if you don't get all that right the first time and you don't get the statistical significance that the FDA wants, you have to start over, which means your path is expired.
How do you even track the progress?
Are you going to take liver biopsies every week?
That's not such a great idea.
Are you going to take blood samples?
What exactly are you going to be looking for?
It is like trying to shoot an arrow over a house and hit a bullseye.
It does seem remarkable that anyone would even try.
Yeah.
And, of course, the Upjohn Company decided they wouldn't try because they basically saw that this was going to be a no-win situation for them.
Now, that's so sad.
Before the amendments, they would have been able to give samples to physicians.
The physicians were excited, which they probably would have been because some physicians in Canada were using it.
You know, then it could have been on the market.
People could have tried it.
If it didn't work well, the patients weren't all that worse off because nothing was working.
So...
And 100,000 people at the time, as you pointed out, a year were dying of these liver ailments.
Yes.
So this is how a lot of compounds don't even get started that should.
And then once they get started, half of them fall down, not because they aren't safe or not because they aren't effective, but because the drug company realizes, oops, we've had so many regulatory setbacks that this drug isn't going to make enough money.
For us to recoup the cost, we're going to drop it.
Fifty percent of the drugs that have gotten all this money put into them get dropped late stage.
So this is why we don't have more innovation and innovation is what saves lives.
So this is part of why we have such a problem and have this one out of five Americans dying Unnecessarily.
And this ripples out into the world because we are the biggest drug producer.
So if it doesn't get started here, it generally isn't going to be overseas either.
Well, that's what I really want people to understand, that when you add...
You know, 500 billion, it's now 500 million, sorry, to develop a new drug or about a billion in real costs.
And when you extend the regulatory window to get the drug passed from four years to 14 years, you raise the price that much, you don't get the same medicines, just more expensive, you get a small percentage of the medicines you otherwise would have gotten.
Exactly.
And your numbers actually are slightly out of date.
A new study was just published a little while ago.
And it's showing now that the costs are what we call the capitalized cost, which takes into account the time frame.
It's about $2.6 billion and half of that if you just want to count out-of-pocket costs.
So it's huge.
It's huge.
And these numbers may be conservative.
Other people have made the calculation and come out with bigger numbers.
$2.6 billion to bring a drug to market.
And now, just to update my numbers furthermore, you've remarked previously that 80% to 85% of the cost of developing the drugs is regulatory compliance.
Is that still in the ballpark?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
Yes.
The amendments, specifically.
So, the amendments are the ones that have caused most of this cost.
Obviously, there was FDA regulation before the amendments, but it was basically safety-based as opposed to effectiveness-based.
Yes.
The 62 amendments gave the FDA such great power that drug companies really have no recourse.
They can't take the FDA to court when they've tried that.
The courts have basically said that the FDA has carte blanche.
It's a horrible situation because I wouldn't be able to talk about these things as I'm doing with you right now if I were still employed in the industry.
Well, there is that chilling effect, right?
It's why all the movies portray the judges and all the television shows portray the judges in a positive light because all these media companies are constantly being dragged to court and they don't want to annoy judges as a whole.
There is this chilling effect where you don't want to criticize the process that you're so subjected to.
Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, I wouldn't be able to speak out like this if I were still employed in the industry.
Now, Let's also talk about the degree to which information is kept from the public, which is well known within the industry, which is also well vetted in other countries, in particular around nutrition and supplements.
Yes.
Well, you know, because the FDA says if anything is used to treat or prevent disease, it's a drug.
Then it thinks that has to go through the regulatory process.
For example, if bottled water, sellers wanted to say, this bottle of water will help you prevent dehydration, that's a medical claim.
They would have to go through the regulatory process.
Yeah, I know, it's nuts.
So something that a rhino well understands in the Serengeti, go to the water hole and drink if you're thirsty, that rhino would have to go through an FDA process to get the right stamp on its butt.
Okay, good to know where the regulatory money is going.
So when we say vitamins prevent disease, which they do, I mean, that's how we know they're vitamins.
If we don't have them, we get certain types of disease.
So if we say that, then the FDA wants to have the vitamin run through all these different hoops.
Now, it does allow the ones that were...
You know, for vitamin D for rickets.
In other words, the way vitamin D was discovered was because of the problem with rickets.
So if you say that, that's okay.
But if you say anything more than that, it's not okay.
Well, I'm just trying to think of the British Navy a couple of hundred years ago where they lost...
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
With the limeys, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so hundreds of years ago, the British Navy actually lost more sailors to scurvy than they did to enemy Navy ships.
And it wasn't until they figured out that vitamin C prevented scurvy.
So it's a good thing they didn't have to have FDA approval or the Spanish Armada might have won.
That's right.
That's right.
So anyhow, one of the problems, we discussed the folic acid problem a little while ago.
You know, that was a B vitamin.
It prevented disease.
So the FDA wouldn't let the folic acid manufacturers spread the word.
And this is such a cheap way to avoid a problem.
And the same thing happened with aspirin.
Shortly after the amendments were passed, So Squibb wanted to put together this one-a-day pack of a low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attack, but when the FDA told them, you know, what studies they'd have to do for this off-patent drug in order to make that claim, they just backed down.
And even in 1988 when the first really big study was published showing that aspirin was preventing heart attacks, and it was stopped early because it was so obvious it was preventing heart attacks, they considered it unethical to keep giving placebos to half the group.
What happened was the FDA still told aspirin manufacturers they couldn't talk about this.
And that's really too bad because until this aspirin benefit kind of percolated through society and people started taking more of it, there were a lot of heart attacks.
Number one cause of disease and aspirin, I think, It's close to the number one, if not the number one, preventer of heart attacks.
So that was a biggie.
A lot of people died just from not having that little piece of information.
And that has nothing to do with putting a drug on the market.
So you can see my estimate of one out of five people is based on the drugs in the market, not even considering this information problem, not even considering the nutrition problem.
I've just calculated what I've calculated based on the delays in getting the drugs in the system and the loss of innovation that we've experienced.
And I've been very conservative.
Most likely, all of us have been affected by the FDA. You also...
I'd like to have you mention a story about...
Liver disease and alcohol and how, again, the FDA or the regulations impeded a simple addition to alcohol that could have helped a lot of people who may be alcoholics.
Yes, yes.
Well, again, certain types of B vitamins really protect the liver against alcohol.
When I first joined the Upjohn Company, I was very interested in this and I was very naive and I said, well, why don't we just add these B vitamins to alcohol or add our prostaglandins, which actually protect the liver as well.
And I was told by my supervisor that one of the brewers had actually wanted to add B vitamins to their alcoholic beverages and was told, and not by the FDA, but I think it was the Alcohol and Tobacco Agency that if they did that, the ATF, if they put that in there, their alcoholic drinks would be considered adulterated.
And so they couldn't do that.
So instead of preventing problems, You know, the regulations actually created them.
So let's put the scales of mortality together so people can get a sense where the balance is.
And again, the last time I had read up on your stuff, you had calculated through to the late 90s.
And if I remember right, 7,000 or so people had been saved according to FDA regulations.
And of course, everyone looks at those 7,000 people and says, Great job, FDA. But they don't see, of course, the hidden costs.
The whole point of economic analysis is not to look at the visible benefits, but the hidden costs of things.
So let's just say, you know, 7,000 or so saved compared to what?
Well, the delay is now through 2009.
It's about 6 million people.
And if you look at the abandonment, in other words, the drugs we've lost, the loss of innovation, it depends, of course, how you calculate it, what assumptions you make.
Are these drugs that were lost as good as the ones that we have now?
And how many were there?
It's not clear exactly how many, but we know we're losing at least 50% in the You know, late stage development.
We know that at least.
So I would conservatively estimate that to be at about 20 million.
So we're talking 26 million people.
And about 100 million people have died since 1962 through 2009 from disease.
So, you know, we're talking, well, one in four, but I'm conservatively saying one in five.
And that's just from the delays and the loss of innovation.
Note that I haven't counted information, like this information about aspirin or folic acid.
I haven't counted all of the problems in getting information out about nutrition because of the FDA. And that's not trivial.
The information is probably even bigger than the drugs.
We're essentially, you can easily see how just about everybody who has died since 1962 has been affected negatively by the FDA. I mean, probably we all have been affected negatively.
But if we want a conservative estimate, I would say one out of five.
And if we start to talk about tens of millions of people, we're starting to talk about a death count that starts to match the entire Second World War.
That's The sort of hidden epidemic of hyperregulation.
And it's a very soft kind of netting that's really, really hard to see.
You really only see it in the endless rows of graves and weeping families and heartbroken families.
Husbands and children and so on and lost economic productivity, people dying in their prime.
It is a very soft kind of acidic or poisonous fog that rolls across the landscape and people have a very tough time seeing where it's coming from because all they see is, oh well, they don't see the drug that's not present.
The doctor just says there's no treatment and they say, oh well, that's terrible.
But they don't know that there could have been a treatment if there had been a different system.
And so what they don't see, or they say, well, the price of the drugs is so high.
Why?
Well, because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy.
Well, of course, pharmaceutical companies are greedy.
Everyone's greedy.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But the point is, how did they get to raise, or why do they need to raise the cost so much?
And that, of course, brings us to the next point I wanted to talk about, which is the degree to which patents are affected by the lengthy process it takes, or the interminable process it seems to take to get a drug to market.
Well, you know, when I first joined the Upjohn Company, we were still proposing drugs for development that did not have patents.
Now, granted, most did have patents because we knew that was preferred, but we could still develop a drug without a patent and be okay.
But a few years after I joined, management decided they would no longer consider developing drugs without patents.
They couldn't because the costs of these amendments have increased every year.
You know, basically it's carte blanche.
So the FDA protects itself from criticism by demanding more and more tests.
So if you look at the costs, they go up exponentially.
And, you know, there's no way that you can do that and still have a lot of time to invent new drugs.
One of the things we talked about in the lab was, hey, we're so busy trying to get these regulations taken care of, we don't have time to invent new cures.
And we joked about it, but it's not really a laughing matter because it's a matter of life and death.
Now, the good news is that people are realizing this because with the Internet, they can see what drugs are available in other countries, for example, that might not be available here.
We have some situations, especially in rare diseases, where children are going from being crippled and wheelchair-bound to walking again.
That's how powerful some of these new drugs are.
And what's happened is because the FDA won't approve these drugs or won't give the encouragement of saying, okay, well, just one more study and we'll accept you, there's not enough investment for these small biotech companies to jump through all these hoops.
And so parents are being told, well, we don't have enough drug to give both of your children.
You'll have to choose.
Yeah.
So people are finding out about this, and this is a good thing.
In fact, what's happened now is there was a lawsuit by cancer patients.
They wanted to be able to have access to drugs that have been safety tested in humans, but not effectiveness testing.
The court ruled that the Constitution's right to life did not allow them to save their lives with unapproved drugs.
So it has gone to a state level now.
There's something called Right to Try, which is essentially the same bill, which is being passed.
I think 34 states have passed it so far.
And basically it says, if you want to try one of these new drugs, you can go right to the pharmaceutical company and negotiate with them directly and bypass the FDA, which is good.
Because before, you had to go through the FDA. Your doctor had to spend 100 hours filling out the paperwork.
Who's going to do that, right?
Now, of course, the problem the companies have is the FDA is not going to be pleased if they give these drugs out.
So there's still an issue.
But it's showing that the American public wants this.
And part of what's showing it is these bills are passing with 95% of the legislature, right?
It's not even debated, basically.
Everybody's on board.
So you can see times are changing.
People are becoming aware of these hidden problems with regulation.
And so maybe, you know, maybe things are going to turn around, but it'll still be a while.
Let's talk about this whole question of safety, which of course the FDA is supposed to be the moat that keeps all bad and dangerous and nasty medicines away from the innocent people who otherwise would just, I don't know, drink porcupine juice and pray for cures.
What does it even mean for a medicine to be safe?
That's one of these things, like I can't puzzle it out in my head what it means.
Every medicine has side effects, every medicine has risks.
What does it mean to be safe?
Well, see, no drug is safe for everyone.
I mean, penicillin saved a lot of lives, but it killed a lot of people with allergic reactions, too.
It's just what happens.
So no drug is perfectly safe, and no drug is perfectly effective either.
But all drugs are effective in some people, and that's because of the placebo effect.
So there's no such thing as a drug that isn't effective, and there's also no such thing as a drug that is totally safe.
So, you know, when you realize that, then you realize there isn't, you know, when the FDA says the drug is safe and effective, you realize that that just...
It's a joke.
And, of course, now, let's take the FDA's side for a minute.
It's between a rock and a hard place.
If it approves a drug that has a side effect, and all drugs have side effects, right?
So, I mean, they know what's going to happen.
There's going to be a side effect.
It's going to come to the attention of the public, and Congress is going to get on top of the FDA and criticize them for approving an unsafe drug.
Well, the only way they can avoid that is to approve no drugs at all.
So they're in a bad place.
So what they do is they demand more and more studies.
So if they do have to be in front of Congress, they could say, well, we did all ask for all these studies.
We did everything we think of.
And that's what's driving everything.
You know, the fact that the FDA has been put by the amendments in this very bad position, because now, instead of just accepting the application, And letting the time expire for the FDA to complain about it.
They have to take a pen and they've got a sign on the dotted line, we want this drug approved.
And so guess what happens if the drug has side effects?
That person, you know, is in trouble.
So that's what happens.
Well, and even if we accept that a particular drug in a controlled experimental situation is effective and relatively safe and so on, people take a lot of pills these days.
They take a lot of drugs.
And how on earth can you possibly test I mean, there are racial differences in biology.
There are gender differences in biology and how drugs are processed.
Some people are very overweight.
Some people are underweight.
Some people are taking one pill.
Some people are taking 20 pills.
How can you possibly test for every situation and give any kind of stamp of approval for safety?
Well, you can't.
And this is another problem that the amendments have created.
All right, so the drug companies spent all their money jumping through the regulatory hoops.
They can't invent new drugs easily, right?
So if they want to stay in business, their only option is to get people to take more of what they already have.
So now what they're doing is they're encouraging people to take drugs that they take for a whole lifetime, which makes them more dangerous because your body can cope with a week's worth of insult, but a decade worth of insult, that's another story.
And now they're asking them to take, and if they have a side effect, then they're asking them to take another drug to alleviate that side effect.
And pretty soon, you know, we have people on dozens, literally dozens of drugs, and they interact.
And this is a problem.
In fact, depending on whose numbers you look at, I think it's the fifth largest cause of death is from pharmaceuticals that are properly prescribed.
That's a lot of people.
And it's not because, again, it's not so much because the individual drug is unsafe when it's taken for a week.
It's because we are taking it for a decade or two decades and we are adding other drugs that we're doing the same thing with.
And that's a prescription for disaster.
But it's the only way the companies can stay in business.
They don't have enough money anymore.
It used to be about 50% of the R&D budget went into finding new drugs.
Now it's about 15%.
Yeah.
So what's happening is the small biotech companies are taking the big chances.
Somebody invents something in a university, for example.
They decide to put their own company up.
They get investors.
They go through the first few clinical studies to show the drug works, and then their hope is that a big pharmaceutical firm will take them and develop, because if it doesn't, they're really in a bad place, because they don't have the money They don't have this $2.6 billion to put in the drug, and it's hard to raise it.
So this is what's happening.
So now drug companies are depending on us taking drugs for a lifetime, and that just isn't the best idea.
Isn't the best idea.
Well, I could take a big detour into one of my pet peeves, which is the degree to which these psychotropic drugs, SSRIs, how they've been approved with these giant black box warnings saying suicidality, homicidality, murderous thoughts, rageous.
I mean...
I don't know how that stuff even remotely gets approved.
But let's let's talk.
Let's give you the imaginary libertarian magic wand of fairy dust.
And let's try and help people to understand how medicine or how these kinds of developments and what health care would look like in a free society.
And I've made the case for years that right now we have a medical system.
This is more true, even more true in Canada than it is in the States.
We have a medical system that makes money from cure rather than prevention, which is the exact opposite of what is economically efficient and basically moral.
So what would it look like to have a more free market healthcare system?
What could people expect?
What could they wake up every day and look forward to?
Well, we're talking about medical licensing here as well, I take it.
Let me just give an example from my own life.
The medical licensing system was put into place to put competitors to medical doctors out of business.
The AMA was very blunt about this.
It's in the journals.
I'm not making anything up.
One of the modalities they tried to get rid of was chiropractic.
And chiropractic fought back with an antitrust suit and won.
Thank goodness for me, because I have issues that require chiropractic treatment.
And chiropractic physicians generally are very good on prevention, you know, and they use herbs and things of this nature.
And there are obviously much gentler ways to get the job done.
Now, obviously, I'm not against pharmaceuticals either.
There are times when you need those.
I went and stepped out in the fire ant pile a little while ago, and I happened to be pretty sensitive.
And I took my Benadryl, which normally works, but it had been so long since I stepped in an ant pile that it was expired.
It didn't do any good.
I had to go to the hospital and get solumedrol, which...
It was good because otherwise I would have been in bad shape.
I might have died.
This is good.
Drugs are good when you need them.
They're very helpful, but the best thing is prevention.
If you can do that, which you can if you have the information, this is one of the big problems with the FDA. Nutritional prevention information away from people.
So if we had a system where this wasn't happening, we would learn these things so much quicker.
We would have learned about aspirin's effect.
We would have learned about folic acid.
We would be learning about how valuable it is to have vitamin D. There's only 10% of the people in the US that can have enough vitamin D in their system if they aren't supplemented.
It's a very important vitamin.
8% of those are just people who are roofers who are getting the sun.
Because they told us to stay out of the sun, stay out of the sun, it'll kill you.
It's like, oh, wait, we actually need the sun because we're kind of plants.
We need the sun, and if you're not going to get the sun because you have some kind of skin condition or something, well, then you better be taking a vitamin D supplement because vitamin D does so much more than prevent rickets, for example.
This is becoming a big thing.
The whole fish oil thing is something that's big, and just another little quirk of the FDA here.
Fish oil, if you don't get distilled fish oil, it has a lot of PCBs in it, which are, you know, Toxic!
And the prescription fish oil actually has more toxins in it than an over-the-counter fish oil because the person who markets this over-the-counter fish oil is recommending high doses of fish oil and he didn't feel he could ethically do that unless it was pure.
So he spent a lot of money making sure his product was pure.
But if he goes to doctors and tells them, my fish oil If he has less PCBs, he's going to get in trouble with the FDA. In fact, if he goes to doctors and tries to sell his fish oil, he's going to get in trouble because the only people who are allowed to talk to doctors about any kind of prevention or treatment of disease are people who have drugs that have gone through the FDA process.
So, okay, so information would be the biggie that we would really get, and it would be available to everyone.
And so we wouldn't need to go to the doctors so much.
We wouldn't need the same type of drugs that we have today.
You know, we would be emphasizing more lifestyle changes, which, again, people do today to a large extent, but we would know so much more.
A lot of this research has been placed on the back burner because there were no funds for it, and part of that is the funds are being sucked out And put into this drug development process.
They would have been put into research.
And, you know, people think drug companies don't do much for the supplements, but, you know, drug companies were the ones who invented the ways to make large quantities of these supplements.
And if you're taking supplements, you're probably taking supplements that are coming from a big pharma company.
It's just the way it is.
They specialize in certain nutrients, and they were the ones that first put, you know, one-a-day multiple vitamins on the market.
So they were the beginning of the supplement industry, but in 1962, when these regulations passed, they had to make a choice, basically, to focus on nutritionals or focus on drugs, and it became pretty apparent if they focused on nutritionals, they got a business.
So that's what happened.
Right, right.
Well, I really, really appreciate your time.
I strongly urge people, given the rather dangerous medical environment that we all have to kind of struggle through in the world, to eat right, exercise, you know, do as much prevention as humanly possible.
Because it's one of the things that makes it so tough to fix the healthcare system, is when you're not using it, you don't really notice it.
it.
But when you really need it, you're kind of busy not dying, rather than being an activist to fix it.
So it is one of these things that is really hard to fix.
And of course, the FDA, their entire incentive is to minimize the risks to the FDA, not to the consumer.
Minimizing the risks to the consumer means that we always have to balance the costs and benefits.
The idea that there's some perfect solution to medicine and safety and so on is a fantasy.
It is an individual It is based upon personal circumstances, the level of risk that we have to be That you're willing to accept versus the rewards are all very different.
And the idea that that's one giant coercive regulatory framework that can make the best decisions for everyone is so fundamentally Soviet that it's staggering to me.
And we spend all this time, blood, energy, fighting communism throughout the 20th century and then allow various communist structures to be entrenched in our healthcare and our educational system and a wide variety of other things.
It is incredibly frustrating.
On the plus side, as you say, the regulators are being...
Battled by the people who actually need the medicine and the politicians, as you say, one in five, so pretty much all the politicians who are generally older probably know someone who couldn't get treatment or who couldn't get the medicine even though it was available elsewhere.
Maybe saw them spiral into grim disease or mortality as a result of just The regulator is keeping the giant Berlin Wall between the medicine and the sick people.
So maybe there is that movement as people age, as the boomers age, there is this movement towards, it's my damn body.
It's my damn health.
Let me choose the medicine with the information, especially now the information is available on the internet.
That's right.
Let me make the choice for myself.
The idea that you're going to be slid into some filing cabinet of bureaucratic indifference and expire slowly in the dust, I think is becoming more real to people.
And hopefully, you know, with the information that you're putting out and information that other people are putting out, there will be a pushback and a desire to reclaim the sovereignty of the individual and wrestle it back from the indifference of the bureaucrats.
Actually, I think this is the issue on which People are going to be very excited because it's a matter of life and death.
And when you think about it, everybody wins by the free market.
I mean, the politicians, the FDA, you know, before they're regulators or politicians, they're people that will one day face death by disease.
Ninety percent of us face death by disease.
And you're going to want, at that point in time, some type of help.
And if you If you're doing things and promoting things that are preventing us from moving forward in our knowledge then You know, karma doesn't wait till the next lifetime.
You may be surprised when, you know, you're in that situation.
So it's in all of our best interest to fix this, because we're all human beings before we're anything else.
And that's why I have hope that it will be fixed.
I think that's a big wake-up call.
Well, I appreciate all the work that you're doing.
I'm going to link below and strongly urge people.
You've got a great book, you've got a great series of talks, some fabulous interviews even on this channel.
So people can go to R-U-W-A-R-T, ruart.com, for more information about you.
And you have a book coming out on the FDA. Do we have a timeframe on that?
When's that going to drop?
I was hoping it'd be before the end of the year, but it looks like it'll probably be beginning of next year.
Are you saying it needs FDA approval?
Is that why it's taking so long?
No, it needs my approval.
Oh, right.
Okay.
And perfectionists, so the ultimate delayers.
But, of course, keep us posted about that.
I will.
And we'll certainly help get the word out when that book comes out because these are facts that...
People really, really need to know.
This is one of the areas of government that is going to affect you.
I guess, first, income tax, although that probably won't kill you.
But secondly, it is around health care and regulations.
It's going to where it's going to have the most impact on you and where you can have the most impact.
Because as you point out, we're all human beings before we're professionals.
And this is one place where the people are aligned with the interests of the politicians.
