By the mid-1980s, 72% of new drugs approved by the FDA had already been available elsewhere for an average of 5.5 years. One new drug that came late to the American market was Propranolol, the first beta-blocker to be used extensively to treat angina and hypertension. Approximately 30,000 Americans died prematurely because they couldn’t get this lifesaving drug and because their doctors did not prescribe it. Advertising Propranolol as a treatment was illegal. —Mary Ruwart
Cancer patients often die waiting for new drugs to be approved by the FDA? Abigail Burroughs had squamous cell carcinoma, diagnosed when she was only 19 years old. She tried unsuccessfully to get FDA permission to try a new drug (Erbitux) that had shown success against her type of cancer. The FDA refused, and Abigail died at age 21. Abigail’s father formed the Abigail Alliance and sued the FDA. However, the courts ruled that Americans do not have the constitutional right to save their lives with drugs not approved by the FDA. —Mary Ruwart
Public schools consume twice as many dollars in operating costs as do private ones. Increasing the public school budgets does not improve learning and may even have a negative effect. During an international competition, U.S. eighth graders were asked, “What is the average age of these chidren? 13, 8, 6, 4, 4.” The correct answer, 7, was one of the multiple choice answers, yet an embarrassing 60% of the U.S. students missed it. —Mary Ruwart
In Kenya, the elephant population dropped from 65,000 to 19,000 even though elephant hunting was forbidden. In Zimbabwe, however, natives can claim, or homestead, elephants living on their lands. Natives can legally sell permits to hunt them. Zimbabwe’s elephant population grew from 30,000 to 43,000. People will protect the environment when they own it and profit from it. —Mary J Ruwart
The FDA limits the information that drug companies can share with doctors and consumers. As many as 100,000 Americans died needlessly from heart disease each year that aspirin makers couldn’t advertise aspirin’s role in its prevention. —Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, Healing Our World
We pay 5 times as much for drugs than we should. Because the FDA is blamed when drugs affect some people adversely, the agency drags out the approval process. Drug development time and cost has increased greatly since the early 1960s without any improvement in either efficacy or safety. The true cost, however, is measured in lives, as tens of thousands of people die waiting for the FDA to approve breakthrough drugs. —Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, Healing Our World
We defer to authority figures because they are supposed to know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it’s easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure we defer to. Choosing to defer to one who urges aggression against others still puts the responsibility on us. —Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, Healing Our World
Nobody in the drug industry is going to say anything because if they do the FDA could punish them by dragging their feet on their approvals, which could destroy a company, and it has destroyed many. So no one is going to speak out. —Dr. Mary J. Ruwart
