In January the New York Times profiled the controversy over the withdrawal of GlaxoSmithKline drug Lotronex. Lotronex had been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug administration in February 2000 as a treatment for women who suffered from chronic diarrhea brought on by irritable bowel syndrome. Doctors quickly began writing off-label prescriptions for men as well. The drug was withdrawn after there were 70 reported cases of patients suffering from severe constipation or ischemic colitis which can require surgery — at least one woman had to have her entire colon removed. There were also five deaths involving people taking Lotronex, three of which The Times reported were “possibly linked” with the drug.

In this case the FDA acted completely irrationally, spurred on in part by the wannabe nanny’s at Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen. After the side effects and deaths began to be reported, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, began campaigning to have Lotronex pulled from the market saying it was just too dangerous. As The New York Times summarizes Public Citizen’s views about Lotronex, “The group sough tot have Lotronex banned, arguing that it made no sense to use a drug with potentially life-threatening side effects for a disease like irritable bowel syndrome, which is debilitating but does not kill people.”

If that is the standard, then Public Citizen should begin a campaign to ban driving. Approximately 300,000 people took Lotronex in the 10 months it was available, with 70 patients reportedly suffering side effects, and 3 deaths possibly linked to the disease. Assuming that distribution of side effects and deaths would hold for the population as a whole, if every man woman and child in the United States began taking Lotronex we could expect that every year 61,000 people would suffer some form of side effect and 2,600 people would die as a result of taking the drug. In other words taking Lotronex is roughly 20 times safer than driving a car.

And we really don’t need to drive cars to save our lives. Most of us drive cars to improve our quality of life. Isn’t it time the FDA clamped down on those of us who believe that it is okay to risk our lives everyday by driving to work just for a little convenience?

Not surprisingly a lot of irritable bowel syndrome sufferers are not exactly rushing to thank Wolfe. In fact they believe Wolfe and Public Citizen helped force the FDA to remove a drug that had transformed their livs.Richard Fireman, a Lotronex user, told The Times, “Somebody online said they wished they could give Dr. Wolfe irritable bowel syndrome, so he’d know what he was talking about. If eel the same way. I’ve never been so angry.”

This is the problem with nanny agencies such as the FDA and groups such as Public Citizen — rather than letting individuals decide for themselves whether the benefits of a drug such as Lotronex outweigh the risks, they arbitrarily apply a one size fits all risk analysis that is ludicrous. If I had a condition that caused intense abdominal pains and severe diarrhea, would I be willing to take a drug that posed a 1 in 100,000 risk of death from taking it? Yes, for the same reason that I don’t plan to take up walking to work anytime soon.

All of us balance life and death risks every day. Lets keep that choice to ourselves rather than turning it over to bureaucrats and would-be big brothers.

Source:

F.D.A. Pulls a Drug, and Patients Despair. Denise Grady, The New York Times, January 30, 2001.

The American economy is slowing and there’s been some doom and gloom reports, though for the most part it doesn’t look like the coming recession will be very deep or very long. That said, lets put the news into perspective.

Across the waters, France’s Prime Minister Lionel Jospin is practically jumping with joy over the incredibly good economic news in that nation. According to the latest figures, unemployment in France is only 9 percent! That’s the lowest level it’s been in ten years (as recently as 1997, unemployment in France was at 12.6 percent).

I guess if you can handle the good news in France, not much else is likely to phase you.

The last couple days, Steve Jackson has been posting links to parodies of The Dark Dungeons Chick tract.

The MS3TK takeoff is hilarious, and this spoof making fun of complaints about the 3rd edition D&D rules is pretty good too (though the latter is a lot funnier if you’re familiar with the new rules and their detractors).

Reuters reports that a private U.S. group is preparing to launch into space what would be the first spacecraft using solar sails.

Basically, the sails reflect light and the action of photons hitting it causes the vehicle to accelerate. It sounds very sci-fi, but there is no reason in principle that it shouldn’t work. On the other hand, it probably will never be a viable method of space travel.

The problem with solar sails is that they just don’t scale very well. If you want to move even modest payloads at significant speeds the sails end up having to be enormous or you have to use an auxiliary source of light. A lot of futuristic solar sail plans, for example, speculate on building laser arrays on the moon or an asteroid — the laser would be aimed at the solar sails and give it much more acceleration than sunlight.

Unfortunately by the time you’re done working out the kinks from that sort of system — not to mention finding a way to pay for such an elaborate system — it’s a lot cheaper and more efficient to go with other equally exotic but definitely workable propulsion systems such as fusion reactors or matter/anti-matter engines.

For the near term, nuclear power plants will be the main source of long range, fast spacecraft although viable fusion reactors are a lot closer than most people think.

To make space exploration and colonization viable we will have to develop craft capable of speeds approaching 5 to 10 percent of the speed of light which is certainly doable but not with solar sails.

One of the components of George W. Bush’s tax relief plan was a repeal of the estate tax. While it initially looked to be an easy early victory, a campaign started a couple weeks ago by billionaires in favor of the estate tax gave Democrats and other opponents of the tax a temporary boost. The basic argument of the billionaires was that a) without the tax, rich people will leave their inheritance to their children which gives them an unfair advantage, and b) without the tax charitable giving will decline.

Perhaps in their next paid advertisements the billionaires will cite the plight of The Chicago Defender as the sort of thing that proves the wonders that can be had by the estate tax.

Earlier in the century, The Defender was the most popular black newspaper, period. Started in 1905 by RObert Abbott with a 25 cent investment and a 300 copy print run, The Defender was the premier black newspaper by World War I with a total readership of upwards of 500,000. For twenty years, Langston Hughes wrote a weekly column for the paper and it played an instrumental role in many of the social and political movements of its day. The paper was, for example, one of the primary advocates of the northern migration of blacks that occurred after World War I.

Abbott didn’t achieve that level of success without some powerful enemies. Because of its coverage of lynchings and other racially tinged issues, white distributors in the South refused to carry the newspaper. The KKK threatened anyone who dared cell the paper and occasionally tried to confiscate copies of the paper that made their way south.

Although the Defender doesn’t have the national impact it once did, today it does have a paid daily circulation of 230,000, making it the fourth largest daily paper in Chicago. Unfortunately it’s run into an enemy that might finally be able to do what the KKK couldn’t: shut The Defender down. The latest enemy is the Internal Revenue Service.

Abbott’s nephew, John Sengstacke, took over publication of the paper. Sengstacke expanded the reach of his uncle’s news empire by buying several other black newspapers. In addition Sengstacke founded the National Negro Publishers Association which is now known as the National Newspaper Publishers Association. But despite all his good works Sengstacke committed the one unforgivable sin in the eyes of the IRS — he died.

Because he died and because The Defender was completely privately owned. At his death Sengstacke’s estate was worth about $10 million, and the IRS wants his heirs to pay a $4 million inheritance tax. Sengstacke’s family would like to keep the newspaper business within the family, but the only way it could meet the $4 million bill the IRS has socked it with would be to sell the paper.

Conservative News Service reports that the family has tried to reach a compromise with the IRS for a deferred tax payment plan which would allow the family to keep the paper and pay the taxes gradually, but the IRS is insisting that they pay the full amount.

This is the reality of the death tax. People who started with nothing and build up relatively modest estates compared to the billionaires who so love the tax end up being unable to keep the small business they created within their families. Instead privately owned papers end up in the hands of large corporations who have the advantage of never dying.

The billionaires in favor of the death tax are essentially arguing that at death every successful small businessman such as Sengstacke should be required to liquidate his assets or else waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers who can set up foundations and other arrangements that avoid the estate tax penalty but still leave heirs in control of their wealth (this is how, for example, the heirs to Henry Ford maintained control over the Ford Motor Company without having to pay exorbitant death taxes).

It is simply not the government’s role to determine how the wealth of dead people could be best allocated. That role is best left to those who actually earned said wealth. The estate tax should be repealed.

Source:

Legendary black-owned newspaper threatened by death tax. Gene J. Koprowski, Conservative News Service, February 22, 2001.

The Chicago Defender. PBS, No Date Given.