I think the FDA has evolved into the world's gold-*plated* standard of regulatory excellence; there's less there than meets the eye. For instance, as I understand it, the FDA speeded up its drug approval process (originally in response to the demand for better AIDS treatment) and reduced the need for clinical testing in exchange for pharmas' agreement to conduct more-intensive surveillance of drugs' safety and effectiveness after their introduction to the marketplace. I believe that few of the post-marketing surveillance studies that the industry agreed to were actually done. So, relative to the past, there would seem to be less data backing the safety and efficacy of drugs recently intoduced to the market.
> > It's no wonder that the technocratic society shows
> > so many signs of
> > imploding and that so many people are reverting to
> > the (also
> > unsatisfactory!) world explanations offered by
> > history's great know-it-alls,
> > established religion.
>
>I don't follow this reasoning.
It's not terribly complex. When there are no (understandable) facts available to explain how the world works, people fall back on magic thinking, the easy answers furnished by the sacralized folklore of the world's great -- or, IMO, grating -- religions.
Carl