essay about the FDA's role   (link)

http://www.reason.com/0404/cr.ts.regulation.shtml
"The FDA could be radically improved or even supplanted, but it would be wrong to think that the agency’s inefficiency or its inherently coercive nature prove it is performing no useful functions or providing no useful scientific information. The FDA, for complex historical reasons, has become a locus of scientific standards and a repository of expertise that should not be discarded. It has helped shape the achievements of pharmaceutical companies and by extension mainstream medicine in a process of give and take as important as the shaping of business by laws against theft."