Furthermore, even if Obama were ardently in favor of capital punishment, you've still got the foot-dragging liberal bureaucrats of the FDA to contend with. This is truly an agency run amok:
1. In real life, one of the things I do is invest in startup biotech companies. One in which I have a small position is Titan Pharmaceuticals. Titan has an excellent, implantable treatment for opioid addiction. It's been proven in phase III trials to be superior to standard-of-care and, unlike standard-of-care, it's impossible to cheat out the drugs and sell them on the street. But the FDA has this "quit or die" attitude toward addictions of all sorts, and to almost everyone's surprise — though not mine — the FDA rejected it. The smart money is that this treatment hasn't a chance of getting through the FDA until 2017 or later. It's sad: if Phillip Seymour Hoffman had been on Probuphine treatment for his addiction, he certainly wouldn't have overdosed on heroin. There have been a bunch of other inexplicable FDA rejections with other, unrelated drugs or treatments during the course of this administration. It's also reached the point that, it seems, if your biotech isn't big enough to make massive donations to Democrat campaign coffers, your drug or treatment won't get approved.
2. Another matter with which I'm concerned is e-cigarettes. For those who don't know, these constitute nicotine replacement therapy via nicotine enmisced in propylene glycol and/or glycerine with optional flavorings. By a lot of research done worldwide, these are effective in getting intractibly addicted smokers to quit smoking, they have not served as a gateway to cigarette addiction, they are at least 99 percent less dangerous to vapers [people who puff on these devices] than cigarettes, and have zero second-hand health effects. But the FDA is in the process of regulating these out of existence, all except those inferior products manufactured by Big Tobacco. Aside from denying the intractibly nicotine addicted [about 16-20 percent of the population carries a genetic quirk which makes nicotine irresistably addictive, which is why the smoking rate has remained steady for decades] the health benefits of quitting cigarettes, and thus condemning to needless illness and premature death, there's the question of taxes. Nobody can figure out how to tax these devices or supplies for them. And, if all smokers switched to vaping, the federal, state and local governments wouldn't be able to collect close to half a trillion dollars of taxes per year. And the head of the Tobacco Division at the FDA was a highly paid lobbyist for Johnson and Johnson [maker of gums, patches and inhalers] and Pfizer [maker of the FDA-approved Chantix quit-smoking drug, which reserves a quarter of a billion dollars each year to deal with all the lawsuits -- it doesn't work, and it results in many suicides, assaults and murders each year].
It's a sad state of affairs . . .
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