Oregon daily emerald., July 17, 1973, Page 5, Image 5

-On the right-——
The need for more drugs
By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY
A professor at the University of
California charged last week almost
parenthetically that 10,000 deaths from
malaria in Ceylon in 1968 can be attributed
to the late Rachel Carson, whose book
“The Silent Spring” brought on the crisis
of ecology, to be distinguished from the
ecology crisis. The latter is what we all
know about. The former is what happens
when one’s concerns for the ecology
become fanatical. When this happens, for
instance, you find yourself saying that it is
better to prohibit the use of DDT, because
the chemical fallout may poison our
granchildren’s clams, than to kill the
mosquitoes who may give malaria to our
grandchildren’s grandparents like
tomorrow. The need for balance in the
ecological wars is very great.
As also in the related world of drugs. We
are, one gathers, very soon to hear that the
big scare of a few years ago about
cyclamates was exaggerated. It isn’t
known — or, more accurately, I do not
know — whether this means that further
research has discredited the research that
discredited cyclamates. Or whether a
balanced application of the cost-benefit
ratio, as the scientists call it, establishes
that whereas for everyone who drinks 50
cyclamated Tabs per day and runs the risk
of contracting cancer, there are 10,000 who
take less than 50 cyclamated drinks per
day who are scheduled to die from
whatever it is that avoirdupois does to you,
which might not have happened if you
drank Tabs rather than Cokes.
Professor Stephen de Felice wrote last
year a book called Drug Discovery — The
Pending Crisis (Medcom Press), in
which he records his dismay over the
paralysis in drug development caused
largely by the Kefauver-Harris Bill that
came in ten years ago after the
thalidomide crisis. It was then that a few
deformed children were born, as the result
of the use of that drug. What followed, Dr.
de Felice says, in his writings and
speeches, was something akin to hysteria.
Moreover, the intellectual basis of the laws
that transformed the Federal Drug Ad
ministration into an agency for sup
pressing scientific discovery, is in
coherent. Much more is known about the
deleterious effects of alcohol, say, or
tobacco, than was ever suspected about
cyclamates. “The effort now required to
evaluate a new investigational drug in
man would eliminate the Pasteurs, Jen
ners, Ehrlichs, and Domagks from our
drug discovery system,” says Dr. de
Felice, pointing out that for all the ex
plosions in drug discovery during the
forties and fifties, which should have
resulted in exponential progress during
the sixties, very little of radical
therapeutic nature was in fact discovered
during the sixties.
Professor Milton Friedman recently
called attention to a cost analysis of the
FDA’s program done by Professor Sam
Peltzman of UCLA, in which the professor
attempted by ingenious means to put a
dollar value on the net result of the harsh
anti-innovative legislation. He began by
conceding all over the place that the
human tragedy of a deformed child cannot
be measured in dollar terms. But it can be
measured in terms of a child who was
scheduled to die an awful death, but was
cured by drugs.
It is his assumption — which by the way
Dr. de Felice challenges as being too
optimistic — that the FDA cannot stop
progress for very long, that brilliant new
drugs will flow in from other quarters of
the world. But he insists that there is at
least a two year time lag directly
traceable to the FDA’s fanaticism.
Summarizing his findings, Friedman
writes, “Peltzman estimates that post
poning the introduction (of tuberculosis
drugs) two years would have meant about
45,000 additional deaths from tuberculosis,
and twice that number in additional
persons with tuberculosis out of a much
smaller population than today’s.” And
then one of those unexpected, lugubrious
developments one tends not to notice. The
drug industry, one would think, would
become a fierce lobby for ex
perimentation, and the development of
new, profitable drugs. It isn’t. The reason:
the FDA’s stodginess, impartially applied,
discourages the competition equally.
Under the circumstances, the drug
makers can plod along, primarily as
producing companies, working old for
mulae. Presumably they will awaken
when a foreign scientific firm comes in
with a patented drug that captures the
market.
Mr. Friedman permits himself, as is his
mode, to consider the wisdom of abolishing
the FDA. But he believes absolutely in the
wisdom of repealing the 1962 amendment
to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, as
should everyone who is scheduled to suffer
or die from some disease or other whose
abatement is as yet undiscovered, and that
means, for the sake of caution, everyone.
< C) 1973 Washington Star Syndicate Inc.
--Outrider
Against pornography
By GARRY WILLS
Some lawyer or other on the TV recently
attacked the Supreme Court’s decision on
pornography as an assault on the view that
sex is a natural part of life to be “ac
cepted.” Defending pornography is,
therefore, defending sex.
That’s nonsense, of course. Pornography
is not the same as sex; it is in many ways
opposed to it. For one thing, it is substitute
sex —sex not so much directly
engaged in, but spied upon. That is what
makes the euphemism “adult” books or
films so comical. Pornography resembles
the small-child prurience of those unable
to participate themselves in what tickles
their curiosity.
Everyone has met the dreary male type
who boasts of his “conquests.” These
boasts are not sex itself, but a form of
pride and competitive envy feeding af
terward on sex; degrading the object of
the conquest to puff up the boaster’s ego.
Pornography goes even farther toward
this dissociation of sex itself from op
portunistic uses of it. Pornography gives
its viewer the boast without the conquest,
the prurient after-glimpse borrowed and
passed around, the simulacrum serving
for the thing.
Since pornography is dissociative in this
way, it slides easily toward those demonic
side-elements of sex that feed perversions
— voyeurism, homosexuality, bestiality,
masochism, exhibitionism, sadism, oc
cultism, all the weirder and more twisted
mysticisms that come about when men
believe in a simple and innocent “nature.”
Those who get a borrowed kick from
pornography often need kinkier,
progressively more daring variations to
excite them. It is probably impossible to
prove that pornography actually causes
any of these things all by itself. But social
acceptance of pornography gets translated
into an increased acceptability for these
things, in varying degree.
Since pornography draws on the in
timate experiences of others, it en
courages the invasion ai privacy; and in
its more blatant forms & becomes an in
vasion of privacy, a forcing of things on
people who consider them distasteful. The
whole level of decorum and humane
civility has been lowered in New York
City, over the last ten years or so, by the
crude aggression on sensibilities that
pornography fosters. In this sense, one
does not need to prove that pornography
leads to other, further evils. It is evil itself.
It is not so much “corrupting” as
corruption.
No, it will not do to pretend you are
defending the wholesomeness of nature
when you praise pornography. Animals do
not dress up in human skin and whip each
other, or go in large audiences to watch
one species try to copulate with a different
kind. Man, when he tries to imitate the
lower animals, just manages to become
something lower than they are — it is one
of the prices he pays for being man. Sex,
since it represents the point where man
merges in some way with blind natural
drives, proves emphatically that the
burden of reason is not to be blind.
But if defending pornography is not the
same thing as defending sex, attacking
pornography is not the same thing as
agreeing with the Court. The Court’s
decision in this matter was unfortunate.
(That calls for further treatment later.)
(C) 1973, Universal Press Syndicate
Letters
Red pusher
I think it’s time everyone knew that
RED CHINA IS THE LARGEST DRUG
PUSHER IN THE WORLD! The evidence
and statistics which support this charge
are so well documented that they are
absolutely irrefutable. In particular, there
are three references which I believe your
readers will find most enlightening. These
are: The Peking Connection: Communist
China and the Narcotics Trade by Allen
Brownfeld. This was also printed up in the
Congressional Record of August 17,1972 by
D. Waggoner — Maoist China and Heroin
by Dr. Stephan Possony which is published
by the Republic of China in Taiwan — and
The Chinese Communist Plot to Drug the
World which is published by the World
Anti-Communist League with charts,
maps, lists, pictures, and statistics.
These and other similar studies
establish some rather disturbing realities
in regard to this drug trade. For one thing,
they indicate that over a million acres in
Red China are devoted to the production of
opium from which heroin is taken. This
operation is under the direct control of
Chou En Lai. Also, they show that there
are at ieast 9 heroin refineries run by the
government which produce this narcotic
hell for export. Thus about 70 percent of
the world’s opium is grown in Red China
and between 65 and 80 percent of the high
grade heroin sold on the international
market comes from Red China and
couldn’t be supplied from another source.
So, where do they send it? Well, you
name it. They set up business where ever
they can create a demand. For the last 7 or
8 years they were providing high grade
heroin for our soldiers in Vietnam at the
lowest prices so they could addict as many
as possible. But of course their main target
is the United States itself and the
enlargement of the vast trade they’ve
started here. This naturally brings us to
the question of what we are going to do
about it? Should we compliment the
Maoist regime on its “agrarian reforms”
and give them more foreign aid — ignore
the situation in the hope that it will
somehow fade away — or use some
common sense and initiative to cut the Red
China connection! Sincerely yours
Richard Paxton
Los Angelas, California
'TRUE, WE HAVE BREAD ON THE TABLE, KATRINA, BUT REMEMBER THE POOR AMERICAN
PEASANTS WHO HAD TO PAY FOR IT!'