Killing Us Softly
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Apr 20, 2009 in Commentary • 5 commentsOver the years it’s become fashionable, on or about each April 19th, for “anti-government” writers to commemorate the murders of 76 innocent men, women and children near Waco, Texas on that day in 1993 by the federal government.
Such commemorations are certainly worthwhile. The massacre of the Branch Davidians was a particularly public and gruesome spectacle: A 51-day siege culminating in a fiery assault, complete with snipers positioned to gun down any who might escape the flames.
The massacre evokes the memory of the Nazis’ assault on the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, the British army’s attempt to disarm unruly colonists in 1775, and the Crusaders’ firing of the Cathedral of St. Nazaire in Beziers in 1019 (the proximate event cited as inspiration for papal legate Arnaud Amalric’s dictate: “Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” (“Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His”).
The unfortunate truth, however, is that the Waco massacre was small potatoes in the scheme of things. It was distinguished by its raw brutality, by the fact that it took place in the glare of media attention, and by the fact that its perpetrators found themselves publicly accused of their crimes and compelled to attempt to justify their actions.
In fact, the state kills far more than 76 innocent men, women and children every day, day in and day out, year after year — and those killings go, for the most part, not only unpunished but for all practical purposes unnoticed.
One single US government agency — the Food and Drug Administration — has certainly killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and more likely millions.
The FDA kills with its power to keep lifesaving drugs off the market for years through its bureaucratic approval process, and with the higher prices resulting from the costs of putting a drug through that process.
Americans die when they’re not allowed to use a drug they need because FDA says “no.” Americans die when they can’t afford a drug they need because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to get FDA to say “yes,” and that cost is passed on to the consumer. Americans die when drugs which would save their lives never make it out of the lab because the figures say that the costs of securing FDA approval would make it unprofitable to bring to market.
The FDA’s delays in approving — or, to put it a different way, the FDA’s prohibition against prescribing until they had approved — a single drug, propranolol, were responsible for at least 30,000, and possibly as many as 100,000, avoidable deaths from heart attack and stroke.
We’ll probably never know exactly how many Americans died unnecessarily of traumatic bleeds, ulcers and other treatable conditions during the 30-year period that FDA sat on approval of cyanoacrylates — “human body glues” — which had proven safe and effective on the battlefields of Vietnam, in numerous trials, in veterinary use in the US, and in general medical use in other countries.
The FDA, of course, is only one government agency. Take any three or four letters of the alphabet and you’ve got another such agency — and another raft of corpses to that agency’s credit.
Hundreds die each year (more than 500 in 2005) attempting to cross an imaginary line drawn on the ground — the US-Mexico border. They die by drowning. They die of heat stroke. They die of hypothermia. They die of dehydration. But these “causes of death” are really only symptoms. The real cause is death by government: Laws which prevent people from peacefully crossing the border in populated areas and force them instead into the wilderness where they are not only vulnerable to the environment, but hunted by armed government gangs.
Hundreds or thousands more die every year due to laws which prevent them from owning (or delay their acquisition of) the means of self-defense. Every time a mugger or rapist kills an unarmed victim, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is an accessory. A policy that says it’s better for a woman to die in an alley, strangled with her own pantyhose by her rapist, than for that woman to draw a pistol from her purse to defend her life is a policy of state-approved homicide.
The state kills millions, many of them “softly,” in ways that are noticed little or not at all. But those millions it kills are just as dead as the victims of the more spectacular massacre at Waco, just as worthy of mourning, and just as entitled to redress. The state kills. Don’t doubt it, and don’t forget it.
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
Don’t forget the PSYOPS, either. Whether it’s zombifying via pharmaceuticals, kidnapping children into wards of the State, confining adults for arbitrary “crimes” to be raped and commit to slave-labor, it’s in the interest of modifying behavior “or else”. I’d say that the significance of Waco is the domestic “or else” displayed internationally in the form of genocidal sanctions, transferring one dictator for another, creating groups like Hamas or the mujahideen to ensure that secular nationalism doesn’t exist, or just blatantly dropping bombs on a horde of civilians and blaming those civilian deaths on the one “terrorist” hiding amongst them.
It’s the PSYOPS like these that lead to people not only accepting blocs like the FDA, but begging for its existence, maintenance, and growth. Totalitarian regimes of old would be jealous of this obedience.
Also, let us not forget that, according to Newsweek, over 100,000 die each year from prescription drugs that are properly prescribed and properly administered. http://www.worldfreeinternet.net/news/nws115.htm
Mike
There was an element of mass suicide and mass murder from within on Waco, so it is not the best analogy.
The speed or lack thereof in the system may or may not be conscious – but due to inertia. The answer may very well be throwing more money at the problem so that approvals can come faster. There is also the inherent problem of capture by big Pharma. Drugs that they really want approved move quickly – especially if big Pharama pays for the studies. Small drug makers don't have as much luck.
The whole issue is a response to someone who said that there oughta be a law, mostly because in the late 19th century there really were some bad operators.
I am not sure scrapping the system is the answer. Useful reforms could be relying on good faith submissions to other governments – so if an EU country has approved a drug it is allowed here without additional study on an expedited basis, with a graduated fee structure – which is higher for bigger companies and for using research that was funded in the first place by NIH. In that way you could make both approval and medical research self-funding. That has to be good for getting more done in a positive feedback loop. It also gets Congress out of the medical research business, which limits opportunities for pork barrel spending.
Also, one should consider the tremendous damage that the FDA has done to our health care system through its antagonism toward alternative medicine. By harassing providers who have made breakthroughs that are safer, more effective, and more affordable than the state-sanctioned brand of medicine, the FDA has done incalculable harm.
We will see where alternative medicine comes out in health care reform. If there are provisions for consumers to use either direct benefits or options benefits for these services, they will have a chance of going more main stream. It's all about the money.