By Agustin Forzani 

Milton and Rose Friedman’s lessons about the flaws of the FDA remain strikingly relevant in the 7-OH case.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is leading a campaign to ban 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), a supplement used for pain relief and to help with opioid withdrawal. The agency argues 7-OH has high abuse potential and points to its growing presence in colorful consumer products found online and in gas stations.

A complete ban, however, would be an extraordinary overreaction. Researchers at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and UCLA have urged the FDA to reconsider, presenting data showing no signs of overdose deaths or dependence. Pre-clinical studies have found no evidence of toxicity, and even the FDA’s own database shows zero deaths linked solely to 7-OH—despite roughly half a billion doses consumed in the United States so far.

Yet the FDA’s instinct to overreact is nothing new. Despite the DOGE agency’s claims that it would reform and cut wasteful jobs in the FDA, not much has changed. The problem lies much deeper than the FDA itself and has little to do with who is in charge of it.

The Institutional Problem

As Milton and Rose Friedman observed in Free to Choose, the FDA could have the best people with the best of intentions, but it will still dampen innovation and block useful drugs. A proper solution would not be limited to simply reforming the FDA from within. Rather, it must also pursue a shift in the social and political institutions involved in the agency’s decision-making process.

To understand this, as the Friedmans suggested, you must put yourself in the shoes of an FDA official charged with the decision to approve or reject the commercialization of 7-OH. Two errors are possible. You might approve it, and it could turn out to be dangerous, creating a public-health disaster which puts your name in every headline. Or you might ban it, depriving patients of what could have been a life-saving alternative, but no one will ever know.

Arguably, if 7-OH is banned, the people who might have benefited from the product—those who relapse into opioids—will probably not complain. More importantly, if they die of an overdose, their families will probably never realize an excess of bureaucratic caution cost their loved ones’ lives. When choosing between potentially causing a national overdose crisis or going unnoticed, even the most dedicated civil servant risks skewing toward banning 7-OH.

Internal Reform Isn’t Enough

The FDA holds immense power over which products are approved or rejected. With great power comes great responsibility. This dynamic creates strong social and political pressures which inevitably shape the behavior of FDA officials, who tend to favor less risky decisions.

The DOGE agency was created to restructure the FDA, but it attempted only an internal reform. Instead, it needs a shift in the balance of power and responsibility, away from the FDA and closer to those who were the ultimate decision-makers before the agency even existed: American consumers. In essence, the FDA should serve as an information provider rather than a gatekeeper, warning consumers about potential risks while allowing them to make informed choices for themselves.

Such structural changes are neither easy nor quick, but they are far more sustainable. Regardless of the outcome of the FDA’s decision on 7-OH, these issues will continue to arise as long as the agency is regarded as the final authority on new drugs. Perhaps this time the public will take it as a wake-up call to stop delegating meaningful decisions to government bureaucrats and act as the free and responsible individuals they are.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

By Robert E. Wright

As the municipal court judge rambled on, I briefly envisioned my demise: being “Andy Dufresned” to death in the local jail because my wife finally cleaned out the garage. While many Americans focus on abuses of federal power, state and local governments also pose grave threats to liberty.

My wife put the unwanted items at the curb so that trash pickers could help themselves before the garbage men hauled any leftovers to the local landfill. In my neighborhood, as in many across America, that is The Way.

Sometimes, the stuff is so good that the curb gets picked clean, leaving the garbage guys with nary an item to collect. This time, though, it rained, and rained, and rained. Most pickers stayed home and a lot of previously usable stuff got ruined anyway. So come pickup time, lots of water laden stuff sat at my curb.

A few days later, a summons arrived in the mail. I had broken a local ordinance and faced fines and possibly jail time! I looked up the ordinance and discovered that the township’s bulk trash collection rule bears no resemblance to actual practice or even the brochure that new residents receive. It is also ambiguous as all get out.

I immediately filed a motion to quash the proceedings but instead of sharing it with the judge, some clerk simply rescheduled the virtual hearing. When the judge and prosecutor (!!) finally read my motion at the hearing, and I started asking questions like if I could plead nolo contendre, they got squirrely and suddenly wanted to make a deal. I pleaded guilty and paid $25 in court costs in exchange for no fine or sodomy time.

Bully for me, but I cannot help but wonder how many fellas out there with less legal acumen than myself are right now getting bullied by The Sisters in the jail shower room for heinous crimes like not monitoring how much trash is at their curb.

This episode raises a bigger question: why are municipal governments involved in trash collection at all? I have lived in two places—Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Mount Pleasant, Michigan—with private trash pickup and, predictably, received services superior to, and at lower cost than, those provided in towns that monopolize the function.

Tellingly, the businesses directly adjacent to my current home lawfully contract with private companies to haul away their trash. But somehow households are incapable of contracting likewise? Trust me, it is much easier to hire a trash removal company than to deal with a municipal court!

But municipal government officials, just like state and federal ones, seek money and power. Municipal trash pickup means yet another budget to bilk, more union members to control, and more perks, like unlimited garbage hauling, for municipal officials.

And think of the power trip and money involved for the prosecutor and judge. I can hear them at the tavern in the evening: “We got that sum bich good today, eh! How dare his wife clean out the garage and try to help out others in the community by leaving it at the curb.”

Yes, Americans need to worry about federal government overreach, by both major parties. But they also need to worry about the petty tyrants who gorge themselves on real estate taxes and ignorance about the proper scope of government. If we do not first re-privatize garbage collection across the nation, how will we ever convince enough Americans that we can re-privatize the roads and schools, too?

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

By Taylor Lewis 

I’m old enough to have survived not one, but two Armageddons in my short but eventful lifetime.

Yes, before the pedants chirp, I am using the eschatological a-word in the biblical sense. A bloody ruction between forces light and dark enveloped my world. The violence, the great, sweeping violence, swallowed much life, leaving little but crumbled rubble, pools of blood, shattered bone, disgorged innards, patches of smoldering refuse, flayed flesh waving like pennons from bent metal pikes.

That I emerged intact from such an incardine götterdämmerung speaks well of the Lord’s blessing upon me. And upon our capital city. For both of these incendiary affrays left blasted heaths on our once-Rome, with many a spare Sperry boat shoes and split Lululemon leggings left in the immolated wake. But a three-million-member army of desk-riding bureaucrats is hard to keep down. Through sheer collective will, they banded together to fleece taxpayers a hefty one-time back payment and set about once more upon their nationally necessary vocation of compiling Excel files.

In short, like the sooted-face Londoners after the Blitz, or the stray singed survivors of Nagasaki, our tireless fed deskwarmers, through grit and determination, reflickered our imperial helm along the Potomac. America’s federal masters rehewed their concreted friezes, cornices, and crenellations, from which they can once again cast their penetrating gaze upon the nation.

What? Why the perplexed look? Your mien is positively fatootsed. You don’t recall those grimdark days when the heavens cleared and fire rained upon the earth?

Two words to jog your memory: Ted Cruz. And another lexical duo to resituate your remembrance: border wall.

Back in 2013, the exhibitionist Texas senator acted as tip spear in a Republican ploy to shutter the government over ObamaCare funding. He railroaded his fellow senators into holding out for a top-top-shelf ask, leaving the government briefly underfunded. The gambit was, in the journo retail, worthy of a Hague tribunal. Headlines about packed food kitchens in Anacostia, eviction waves in Clarendon, bread lines longer than the queue at Georgetown Cupcake, and Deloitte middle managers hanging themselves off the Key Bridge ensued. At one point, Nancy Pelosi was even considering curtailing her insider trading to just a singular six-figure selloff a week. Then-President Obama even summoned the Joint Chiefs, then going sans-paycheck, to a top-secret Situation Room meeting to discuss running ordinances on Teddy’s hometown of Calgary.

Six years later, the hanging of the “Sorry We’re Closed” sign over the Washington Monument elicited even louder howls. Donald Trump, prepping for his first reelection run, tried sandbagging Democrats into ponying up for his Brandenburg Gate along our southern partition by withholding his famous loping Hancock from a simple financing measure. The entire halt-hold lasted thirty-five grueling days, spanning Christmas and New Year’s, when the District went dark with the lone exception of Santa’s tracker. President Trump was called everything from petulant crybaby, to spoiled toddler, to bawling juvenile, to tantruming teen, to truculent manchild, to crackery doddard, with the entire contents of the “Tyrant Synonyms” handbook spliced in. So normal, mainstream Orange Autocrat coverage, but with an added distemperish twist.

Another six sequência and we’re back in the same slough of discord—except this time no Chicxulub meteors are plummeting towards Topkea. Three weeks into Washington’s siesta, as of this writing, fire-and-brimstone reporting is absent in leading papers. “On day 15, there are zero stories about the government shutdown in both the print [New York Times] and print [Wall Street Journal],” NBC analyst Brendan Buck observed. He followed with “Washington Post too,” which, if memory serves, published front-to-back tear-jerkers on infants shriveling up from a lack of EBT milk during past closures.

What accounts for the sharp duality in perception? Why is the current curtain close a sunny shutter where the chickadees still warble, the Metro still streaks the rails, and the White House’s East Wing receives a rigadoon reconstruction, while afore operational abeyances were more shitshow than shutdown?

Rather than strain my keys to make a trenchant, inviolable point, I’ll let one of the jennies speak for her party: “Shutdowns are terrible. Of course, there will be families that (sic) are going to suffer. We take the responsibility very seriously, but it is one of the few leverage times we have.”

Leverage indeed! Before, Sen. Cruz burned D.C. into an ash heap to stop the first ObamaCare bucks from flowing downriver. A decade later, Democrats wield the same flamethrower and shoot the same nihilistic glares to keep the dollars surging, yet the broadsheets are mute. No published scare-headers about Hell’s vacancy and MAGA devils walking freely.

Philosopher Brien Leiter described the press as “epistemic mediators” due to the news providers influencing how events are understood. Major-paper editors taking alike situations, framing one as cataclysm and the other as airy calm, all to plume its preferred political wing? Well, I dare wager that our pundocracy isn’t on the up and up!

Meanwhile, every morning I take my life in my hands swerving and sliding in crunch traffic on Virginia 267. Nearly a month into another Washington standstill and I still can’t tell what, if anything, has actually shut down.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.