Although I don't disagree with your point, that wasn't my point. My point is that these things have different aspects (some of which are arguably useful, some perhaps in your eyes less so or not) but removing them has serious consequences. It is easy to be against something (for example, paying taxes) but removing taxation has serious consequences which have to be accounted for.
Keeping them as they are also has serious consequences that are rarely examined, or even raised for consideration.
The public interest is for medical treatments to have the following qualities: safe, effective, affordable. The business interest for healthcare providers is for medical treatments to have the following property: profitable. Those interests only partially overlap.
It is possible to imagine many different institutional architectures that cater to the public's interests, and a large number of them are theoretically better than the actual results yielded from the FDA and the rest of the modern American health care system.
Thus, one of the consequences of maintaining the status quo is the foregone advantage of moving to a different and wholly incompatible system. That's the kind of argument only an economist could love, because it ties your brain up in knots trying to figure it out, and you can plausibly justify any prejudicial opinion you might care to support.
> Keeping them as they are also has serious consequences that are rarely examined, or even raised for consideration.
Yes, but the burden of proof lies with those who prefer an alternative. If you want to demonstrate an alternative is better, you need an honest and in depth comparison with the current. Just saying "the current sucks" isn't an argument.
I do agree it is difficult for drugs like ketamine, psilocybin, and MDMA(/MDA/MDE/etc) to get research funding, but that doesn't mean the current options are useless; we know they are useful, just not in every case. Nor does it mean that those mentioned drugs are better; we do not know.
> Yes, but the burden of proof lies with those who prefer an alternative. If you want to demonstrate an alternative is better, you need an honest and in depth comparison with the current. Just saying "the current sucks" isn't an argument.
That burden of proof lay originally with those that introduced, e.g., the FDA. We could go back to investigate whether we find that proof sufficient, if any was even provided, but your interpretation of the proof would perhaps be different than mine.
But decisions like creating an FDA are not based on proof, I would argue. It is based on other factors, especially on what can give government more power and what people will vote for. The average voter does not investigate any proof on the matter, but instead rely solely on gut feeling, for instance the feeling that drug companies are greedy enough to deliberately release drugs they know will harm people.
US government is not set up to A/B test the efficacy of its own agencies.
You can't set up an alternative to the FDA in order to test it, because the FDA is the supreme dictator over the regulatory domain, and you can't get around Mom saying "no" by asking Dad behind her back.
You can, however, look at the European pharmaceuticals regime, and note that an identical drug costs three times in the US the amount it costs in France.
Clearly, the FDA is not optimal. Equally clearly, we do not demand meta-studies proving that the FDA itself is safe and effective for its stated purpose.
