Yet another example of government regulations hindering medical progress

The title of this video bashes "big pharma" for dragging its feet on bringing "DCA," a potentially very important and inexpensive anti-cancer drug, to market. The accusation against big pharma is true, but it is only half the truth. The video makes clear that the more ultimate cause of their reluctance to promote this drug is the huge cost of government-required drug testing -- said to run to $100 million -- on a compound that cannot be patented.

A simple solution to problems like this -- similarly orphaned drugs (either naturally-occurring compounds or compounds that have been around too long to be patentable) are by no means rare -- would be to eliminate the morass of government regulations that put a huge hurdle in front of anyone who would bring a new treatment to market. Why not give potential users of such treatments the freedom to make informed decisions about whether to test new treatments on themselves? In this case, people with advanced cancer -- people who feel that they have nothing to lose anyway -- could be allowed to serve as guinea pigs. It would not even be necessary to do double blind clinical tests where some people are given the drugs and some people are given placebos. Rather, as anecdotal evidence accumulated the overall picture of the drug's actual efficacy and safety would emerge soon enough.

We can see from this example how government regulations ostensibly put in place to protect consumers of medicines and health care services often have the unintended consequence of protecting big pharma from competition. If it costs $100 million and many years to bring a new treatment to market, the government has rigged the rules of the game so that ONLY big pharma can play. Meanwhile, sick people suffer because orphaned drugs never reach them, and the treatments that do reach them cost much more than they might have if the morass of government red tape had not existed.

It is a well-known fact that huge corporations HATE more than anything the morass of regulations that government bureaucracies establish. You can hear their constant, terrified refrain --

Oh please, please! Don't throw us into that briar patch! Anything but the briar patch!

Remember, today's huge corporations were born and raised in the briar patch of complex, expensive, onerous government regulations. They are the only ones with the resources necessary to navigate there and thus a great deal of potential competition is effectively eliminated. Government regulatory bureaucracies tend to create monopolistic situations that are contrary to consumers' interests.

In fact, the revolving door between government and industry is such that serious conflicts of interests and "unholy alliances" between the "regulators" and the "regulated" are endemic. That's just another reason why I don't trust State-based solutions to just about anything. Murray Rothbard was right to describe the State as a bandit gang writ large.