While the FDA loves to give Americans the illusion of independence and impartiality, the truth is that the so-called objective science they use to approve drugs is conducted by Big Pharma cronies -- which leaves the door to data manipulation and other deceitful acts wide open.
But the FDA's approval rigmarole isn't just designed to favor Big Pharma; their absurd testing requirements also make it nearly impossible for natural medicines to be designated as such.
FDA regulations keep natural medicines under wraps
As Sayer Ji of Green Med Info explains, the cost of getting a new drug approved by the FDA averages out to around $2.6 billion -- not exactly pocket change. The expenses of proving that a herb or spice that can't be patented is medicinal are quite prohibitive.
Ji points to the FDA's definition of a drug, which is anything that "diagnoses, cures, mitigates, treats, or prevents a disease." But in order to be considered a "drug" and used for the prevention or treatment of disease, substances must first be approved by the FDA. And this, Ji contends, is a serious problem.
"The FDA's legal-regulatory control therefore is totalitarian and Napoleonic in construct; what it does not explicitly permit as a medicine is implicitly forbidden," Ji writes.
As Ji contends, Congress declared that natural substances were "God's gift to mankind" some time after the Declaration of Independence was drafted -- and as such, these "gifts" from nature should be subject to only a limited amount of patent protection. While the intent here was to protect health freedom, a loophole was inadvertently created.
The notion of limited patenting on natural products has, in effect, been used against us, thanks to the FDA and their costly regulatory processes. The profit-driven medical system would collapse if natural medicines, which cannot be patented and profited from, were allowed to be used as "drugs."
Ji explains the phenomenon further
As a result, instead of choosing prospective medicines logically: because they work, are easily accessible, and safe, billions of dollars flow in the exact opposite direction, capitalizing only those substances which are unnatural, and therefore while proprietary are almost invariably unsafe and less effective, and whose access and administration can be intensively controlled.
Does that sound like "medicine" to you?
FDA and Big Pharma abuse natural medicines
The absurdity of the FDA's stance on natural medicines and the federal government's reluctance to acknowledge the healing capacity of plant medicines is growing more and more evident by the day. This rings especially true when it comes to cannabis -- a medicinal plant that's been outlawed by the DEA, yet is also being used by the pharmaceutical industry to create medication. Which is it: a dangerous drug, or a medicine?
Based on the FDA's fast-tracking of a new, synthetic CBD-inspired drug named Epidiolex, the answer is clear: Cannabis is a medicine -- but only after their masters within the pharma industry have synthesized the plant and turned it into something they can profit from.
If industry big-wigs can't patent something, it remains off-the-table for everyday Americans. That's why cannabis is illegal, but the drugs Big Pharma has synthesized from it aren't. Isn't this supposed to be the "land of the free?"
Read more stories about the FDA's failures at FDA.news.
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