shut down health canada

Where would we be without our omniscient state to watch over us like a guardian angle, ever ready to swoop in at the last moment and save us from ourselves? Far better off no doubt. What an infantile view of themselves most Canadians must have to welcome the ever present oversight of the regulatory state. Here's an idea : if you think a drug is too dangerous, how about you just don't take it? When did we all become so incompetent that we require the guidance of bureaucrats to control our treatment options? And what of those who languish needlessly while some blithering bureaucrat decides whether or not medicine can go to market?

It takes an especially shallow view of other people (or an excessively generous perspective on one's own wisdom) to assume that you know better than a stranger how they should live their life.  That anyone could know better than anyone else how that person should conduct their affairs and manage their health. The truth is we are all profoundly different people with disparate ends and varied means. It is nothing short of hubris to imagine that without the benefit of having lived a person's life in it's totality that you are better informed on their decisions than they themselves are. Instead of dictating to others, or having the state do so by proxy, why don't we just all live our own lives, mind our own business and let others go about theirs?

To be sure drugs can be extremely dangerous. They can also be rather benign, like caffeine. Either way the decision on whether or not to take a drug should be up to an individual, ideally with the aid of a physician or some other expert. What we don't need is to insert an officious and narrow minded bureaucracy into the process. There is a dangerous incentive in the regulatory process, whereby if a drug is released and people die then heads will roll and the bureaucrat who rejected the drug is liable to lose their job. On the other hand, if a drug is not released, which would have saved people, then nobody is really any the wiser. The people best suited to weigh the risks and benefits of a particular drug are the individual at risk and the physician who is treating them not some far removed central planner. What we need to do is scrap the regulatory process altogether. It's unfortunate that when considering this problem people seem to only consider the risk of a dangerous drug being brought to market but not the equally appreciable risk of life saving medicine being delayed or denied entirely.