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kilobug comments on Blue or Green on Regulation? - Less Wrong
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There is something which is very hard to estimate about drug regulation.
It's relatively easy to estimate how much the regulation costs in added delay, and the amount of lives that could be saved if the (finally found to be efficient) drug was available earlier.
It's a bit harder, but still possible, to estimate how much the regulation protects by looking at the drugs that were finally found to be dangerous, and estimating how much people they would have killed or damaged if they would have been released.
But it's almost impossible to estimate how much the existing regulation will make the drug corporations to change their own internal practice. That's the most efficient kind of regulations : regulation that, most of the time, aren't enforced by cops and courts, but by people directly. Drug companies taking more care about preventing side-effects in the drugs in the whole process, just because they know that at the end the FDA will veto a drug that's too dangerous.
Like with traffic regulation : the real effect of speed limits and red light is not measured by the number of people who end up being without a drivers' license because they got caught too many times, and can't endanger others anymore. But about the people who respect the red light and speed limits because of the law, but wouldn't without it. And it's very hard to estimate those.
So the reason relatively few lives are saved by banning drugs is because, as a consequence of the regulation, not many dangerous drugs are being produced. Interesting.
There is one more factor, but in opposite direction: would you be more careful if there was nobody banning the medications? Do you read about medications now before you use them, and would you do that if there was no government doing tests? Your argument sounds to me like pro-minimal-wage argument, with the similar mistake: there are always two sides defining product/price, and one cannot think only about one of them and have good predictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamina_therapy
Read and weep.
This is a creepy story, but not a contra-argument for my point: these people were thinking that government ban bad medications, so they were not careful at all. I would like to see some study which tests how careful people are when they know someone else is taking care of them.
If there were no government to regulate medications, I think that people would make companies which would test these medications and which would give them scores, or something like that.