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September 02, 2001 at 08:00 PM
The Cure May Be Worse Than The Disease
Lately, I have noticed a spate of TV and print ads by drug companies touting their latest miracle drug for a variety of diseases or conditions. Invariably, the list of virtues of the drug is followed by a litany of side effects, which leaves you wondering whether the cure is better than the side effects.
I am sure that drug companies going direct to the public in this manner would prefer not to have to mention such drawbacks, but at least the public has a chance beforehand to weigh the odds between the cure and the disease.
Such is not always the case when well-intentioned lawmakers attempt to mandate a cure for a perceived problem. A case that immediately comes to mind is the required use of so-called “child-proof” medicine containers that was initiated by the federal government some years ago.
These pesky containers were particularly vexing to the elderly who had a problem opening them. I recall my mother being so frustrated by one particular bottle cap that she put it on the floor and stomped on it to get at her medication. Before the availability of an option for non-conforming tops, there were horror stories of people who collapsed before they could get to their medicine.
Several years after the introduction of child-proof bottles, I met an employee of the federal agency overseeing this law at a party in Washington. In a discussion regarding these bottles, he stated that more children had actually died from ingesting prescription drugs after the enactment of the “cure” than in the period prior to its passage. He further said that with “child-proof” medicine bottles, people became careless and no longer stored their medicine out of the reach of children.
Moreover, children, unlike their grandparents, had no trouble opening the bottles.
More recently, at a local level, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, reacting to an incident of racial turmoil, imposed stringent controls upon their police activities. As a consequence, crime has had a spectacular rise in that city, with murders up something like 600%. Prior to the riot that precipitated the change in police activities, Cincinnati had a better record than many of the neighboring cities of comparable size.
Ironically, the people who were expected to benefit most from this cure are the ones now suffering the most. Again I believe the “cure” here is worse than the original disease and many observers of the scene tend to agree, based on the articles written about the present situation.
Comes now another government cure, in the form of the convoluted Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, aimed at the lack of privacy Americans have today. For the past several months, I have been inundated with declarations and forms from all sorts of companies. I guess the common denominator of all these companies is that they all have information about me for which there may be a market.
