> If people want to take non-FDA approved stuff, I don't see why regulatory and/or law enforcement should care.
Well, among other things, if anyone makes money selling colored water, it encourages others to sell colored water. It also encourages companies that are trying to sell actual drugs to skip that expensive "testing" phase. Bad money usually chases out the good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law) so it's likely that we will devolve into a system where very few drugs are adequately tested.
I'm not saying it never happens, but if a law, policy, or agency reduces big corporation profits, then it's almost always because lots of people were dying.
If so many people were buying non-FDA approved drugs that drug-makers stopped pursuing FDA approval, I think that would be quite indicative that there are some serious issues with the FDA process. At a minimum, that would demonstrate severe system mistrust. Some pressure to improve might be good for them. If the FDA process were bad enough, there would also be a possibility of new standards bodies emerging to provide some third party system. FDA could learn from these and adapt to be better.
I just can't imagine that people would widespread start using drugs that aren't approved though. That's definitely something to watch out for though.
> If so many people were buying non-FDA approved drugs that drug-makers stopped pursuing FDA approval, I think that would be quite indicative that there are some serious issues with the FDA process. At a minimum, that would demonstrate severe system mistrust
Or, it might indicate a financial incentive to get consumers to mistrust a barrier to profit. People in the aggregate are not the most rational actors, in no small part due to information asymmetry. Self interest does not necessarily yield optimal or even good results.
For example, take the new trend of waiving inspections when purchasing homes to outcompete other buyers. This is legally allowed in some places and is getting more common in places where it's a seller's market and there's lots of potential buyers.
Now I'm not so pompous enough to think that even after reading a few articles or books that I can reliably tell structural damage from easily repairable shoddy work. At least not enough that on a million dollar home purchase, I could risk being out of a home for a while or a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
But there are some buyers for whom this is not an impediment: ones who have enough capital that a bad house or two wouldn't make a big dent in their bottom line, and ones who don't truly understand the kind of risk they're taking and think they have a decent deal on their hands.
The result is that waiving inspections to buy homes is the new standard to be able to compete as a buyer at all, meaning there is now incentive to not fix serious issues in homes or even patch over them to make them less visible. Financial incentive for selling a better product reduces because the bad ones will sell. Quality of homes on the market goes down. Meanwhile those who can compete to buy the better deals are now a smaller population, but they still need homes. Price efficiency goes down because on average people are buying worse homes for more money.
Well, among other things, if anyone makes money selling colored water, it encourages others to sell colored water. It also encourages companies that are trying to sell actual drugs to skip that expensive "testing" phase. Bad money usually chases out the good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law) so it's likely that we will devolve into a system where very few drugs are adequately tested.
I'm not saying it never happens, but if a law, policy, or agency reduces big corporation profits, then it's almost always because lots of people were dying.