An opioid pill (Opana ER) that successfully relieves pain is being removed from the market by the FDA—not because of any claims of unsafety or inefficacy, but because people have found a way to pulverize the drug and inject it to get “high.” Since such people risk contracting HIV or hepatitis C through the sharing of needles, no one—the FDA declares—should be allowed to take the medication: “We will continue to take regulatory steps when we see situations where an opioid product’s risks outweigh its benefits, not only for its intended patient population but also in regard to its potential for misuse and abuse.”
Obviously, this action is another demonstration that the purpose of the government’s regulatory apparatus is not to keep people from being defrauded, but to prevent them from exercising their own judgment about what is good for them.
More broadly, though, this is a demonstration of the power of the altruist creed. When the desperate sufferer of pain is to be sacrificed to the mindless drug addict—when a productive pharmaceutical manufacturer is to be sacrificed in order to keep people from indulging in self-destructive behavior—when the rational are to be sacrificed for the sake of the irrational—what could possibly underlie such injustice except a code that preaches self-sacrifice as everyone’s moral duty?
As I wrote in IN DEFENSE OF SELFISHNESS:
“If the FDA were worried that people lacked accurate information about a drug, it would simply publicize its own findings and allow patients and their doctors to make an informed judgment about whether to use the medicine. But the doctrine of altruism does not permit this. After all, if people are merely provided with medical information, the demands of the needy are not being fully met. The FDA can describe what a particular drug is and isn’t supposed to do, it can present the consequences of misuse, it can explain the need to consult a physician—but what if people refuse to listen? What if they ignore the evidence? . . . As long as people are allowed any freedom to make their own choices, there will always be some unmet needs—i.e., the needs of those who do not wish to make rational choices. . . .
“This argument can be made, of course, not just about medications but about everything—which is precisely what the collectivist does. Any product, from mousetraps to mutual funds, can be improperly used, particularly by those who do not care to acquire the requisite knowledge. Nothing, therefore, is exempt from the tentacles of the regulatory state. To protect the ‘needy,’ the government must control everyone’s actions.”♦♦