 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. We're joined by a great friend of ours, Dr. Mary Ruert. I'm sure many of you know her, are familiar with her work. She is a PhD in biophysics, not an econ or something on the social science side. She has been involved for years with the Libertarian Party and once ran for their nomination for president. She spent, I think, a couple of decades in the business of pharmaceutical research at Upjohn, a company I'm sure many of you know. And for our purposes today, she is the author of several books, but also most recently, Death by Regulation, how we were robbed of a golden age of health and how we can reclaim it. You can find that on Amazon under her name. So with that mouthful, Mary, welcome, good morning. Well, thanks, it's great to be here. Mary, we tend to think that all of the funding for science comes from government, either from universities or CDC or NIH or something. Is that actually the case? Well, actually, that's probably no longer true. Most of the research is actually happening. At least the research that leads to treatment for disease is actually funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And NIH and the other government agencies mostly fund academic research. And I think what the ratio is is about 90% of the funding that the drug companies put in actually end up resulting to a product. And yet, if you look at the government-funded grants that come out, maybe 10% go that direction. So I guess it just depends. Obviously, basic research helps fund the treatment research as well. But I've sat on the boards that decide who gets a grant from some of these funding agencies. And I can tell you that there's some gamemanship involved. And if your theory is very new and different, it's very unlikely to get funded. So that's unfortunate. Whereas in the pharmaceutical industry, especially with the startup biotechs, they usually have a truly new idea. So that's the difference in how the funding goes. Right, but I think we aren't necessarily sure of how much research is sort of mainstream. In other words, if you want to get the money, you don't necessarily want to come up with a proposal that is totally outside the bounds of the research as it currently exists. That's right, that's right. And you don't get to champion your ideas necessarily in front of a granting agency board. Whereas in a pharmaceutical company, you're there and you can actually do hands-on persuasion, so to speak. So it really helps. But within the world of scientific research, that's pretty broad. There are sort of the Alex Joneses of scientific research, right? I'm sure some of our listeners remember there is the Linus Pauling Institute, and they, for example, have come up with some theories about what mega doses of vitamin C might do, even intravenous. Those theories may be crazy, I don't know. I'm not equipped to say. But I don't want to live in a world where they can't come out and talk about their theories. And I feel like we do live in that world. We do, because the FDA, which really controls what you can say about your product, has said that if you make a health claim for a food or a nutrient, that it becomes a drug. And then it has to go through the 12 to 14 years of regulatory hoop jumping if you actually want to make that claim. So give us your quick and short definition or view of regulatory capture, what it is and how it happens. Sure, well, what happens is, especially in highly regulated industry, the industry is survival, and I'm using the pharmaceutical example here, often depends on capturing the goodwill or maybe the funding of the regulatory agency itself. And that's happened by the prescription drug user fee act that was passed in 1992. It started out as a user fee that the drug companies could pay about $100,000 to speed up the approval process. The FDA's review of this 12 to 14 years of data. And the FDA generally takes a year or two to do that. It was about two years and 92. But it's morphed into funding most of the FDA's section that approves new drugs. The numbers I've seen say as much as 70% of the salaries of the people who approve drugs now come from these user fees, which at the last time I saw them were $2 million, which is huge. So they've captured the, getting back to your definition. So they've captured the regulators to such an extent that when Vioxx was being debated at the FDA, whether they should approve it or not, one of the persons, David Graham, who objected to its approval was told that the FDA's client was the pharmaceutical industry, not the American people, not Congress, but the pharmaceutical industry. So that's a great example of regulatory capture. Well, we tend to think, or most people tend to think that the FDA, for example, helps keep us safe from dangerous drugs. That's a joke among us, but here's the thing is it's not just a safety issue. When the FDA, let's say tests and bans a certain drug because it causes heart seizures or something like that, people can see that, that seems tangible, and they can say, well, thank goodness for the FDA protecting me. But it calls to mind, you know, Bastiat's idea of the seen and the unseen. What we can't see is all the things that might have been, all the innovative treatments and procedures that might have been if the FDA were not in the way. Yes, but with the pharmaceutical industry, we have studies that actually show that impact to a large degree. In 1962, the Keith Hoffer Harris amendments to the Food and Drug Act were passed. And this really gave FDA almost unlimited power over the pharmaceutical industry. And the time it took to get a drug from the lab bench to the marketplace went from four years to 14 years by the 1980s because the FDA didn't want Congress to come down on them if there was a side effect for a drug and all drugs have side effects. So they would keep asking for more and more studies. And because we know roughly how many lives each drug that's on the market today saves, you can actually calculate the number of people who have died waiting for new drugs because of these amendments. It's about 15 million people through 2009, I believe the number is. And then we also have studies that show loss of innovation in late stage development. So for example, after the companies maybe spent 10 years working on a drug, about 50% of them are dropped not because they don't work, not because they aren't safe but they're dropped for what we call economic reasons that the manufacturer realizes that it probably won't recover its cost or make enough profit for it to be worthwhile to continue. If we're only losing half of our innovations and we estimate that maybe either 25% is effective as the drugs we have on the market today, that's another 26.7 million people who have lost their lives to loss of innovation. And a lot of innovation actually gets lost before development even begins. I had the FDA actually call me up one day and say, Dr. Ruart, we understand you have this patent now that you've applied for for the treatment of liver disease with prostaglandins, which by the way are a natural substance and every cell in our body makes. And I said, yes, that's true. And the examiner said, well, we're very excited at the FDA about this. 100,000 people die every year from liver disease and we can only recommend bed rest. So we want to let you know that we're here to help you get this drug to market. But the problem is when you have a truly new drug, you don't know how many times a day you have to give it. You don't know what dose you need to give. And for a long-term disease like liver disease, you don't know how long you need to treat. So you don't know how many people you need in your study. And if you guess wrong on any of this and you do an effectiveness study, which takes years and you don't get the statistical significance that the FDA wants, you have to start over. And up John management figured out that if we did have to start over, our patent would be gone and we would never be able to recover costs. And I'm not a big believer in patents, but when you have this much regulation, there's no hope for recovering your costs unless of course you have some type of monopoly protection in this case, patents. So I suspect that many, many drugs, probably just as many as drop out in late stage are never developed because the company can estimate that it's just not going to make them any money. So there's a lot of innovation that's lost. So my numbers are very conservative. And if you crank through these numbers, what you realize is that probably every one of us has lost five years of our lives to these regulations that were passed in 62. The good news on that is the regulators are losing five years too. And so is Congress. So maybe, maybe we get this changed. But when you talk about a drug taking 15 years perhaps to get to market, what you're essentially saying is that small or startup pharmaceutical companies almost can't exist. You have to be big and rich. That's right. What happens is today, a lot of small companies start up and they just do the initial studies of what we call maybe phase one safety testing in people to get to that stage so then they can hand off their product to one of the big pharma companies that has enough money and to take a big hit. Because it costs about $2.5 billion these days to get a drug to market. So if it's the last moment you pull the drug or the FDA won't approve it, obviously you lose a lot of money and small companies can't take that hit. When they hand it off to a pharmaceutical firm, a big firm that can take the hit, of course they lose a lot of their potential profit. Sometimes the drugs that don't make it for economic reasons as you point out, aren't they sometimes sold to companies in other countries who are not under the FDA's jurisdiction who can use them for off-label uses or continue the research and they can be prescribed immediately because in a sense some of these other countries are freer. Yes and that used to be even much more common than it is today. We used to actually do our initial studies overseas and probably market the drug overseas first but what's happening is there is a drive towards what they call harmonization which means that they want to make all the countries the same and the standard they use of course is our FDA. This is done through Codex Alimentarius and if you go to the National Health Federation's website which I believe is nhf.org you can learn more about that. Well that's interesting because when I worked for Dr. Paul in the early 2000s he was very involved in the health freedom issue and in supplements freedom and trying to keep duchet as the law of the land. Talk a little bit about though how as Americans we actually have a fair bit more freedom than people in some countries. Yes well one of the things that Codex wants to do is limit how much you know the amount of vitamins you can get over the counter. So for example in Germany when they pass this initially you could only get like 100 milligrams of vitamin C. I mean I take about 2,000 milligrams a day so that kind of gives you an idea of how horrible that is if you want to take large quantities of vitamin C. My understanding is the Germans have relaxed that requirement they probably got a lot of complaints so that's good but there is definitely a move to limit the amount of supplements you can take and there's a lot of little twists in the law for example if a drug company decides it wants to develop either the nutrient or an analog of the nutrient then the FDA claims that it cannot be sold here in the US as a supplement. So there's a big there's a lot of big fighting going on around that. The FDA does not believe that commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment and that's why you'll see that there's a big difference in what different supplement companies can say. The Life Extension Foundation LEF.org is a really great company was founded by a couple libertarians and when the FDA tried to prosecute them the attorneys that the Life Extension Foundation founders had said you better settle and you better go to prison because you know you really can't beat the FDA. Well they said no way and they did beat the FDA so the Life Extension Foundation I think has a little bit more liberty than some of the other ones because the FDA won't take them on again and unfortunately the FDA tends to go after the little guy the ones that don't have enough money to really fight them and that's very sad. Well it is sad and this false designation of so-called commercial speech as a subset of less than free speech is troubling and we saw this sort of thing with Irwin Schiff talking about the Internal Revenue Code now we see it with alternative health providers talking about the FDA so but I wanted to go a little farther here this definition is so critical to the freedom of supplement companies if the FDA sort of upgrades what they sell to a food or nutrient all of a sudden it becomes a drug of sorts that they can regulate versus a health food supplement so it can be the end the death knelt now for a supplement company. Exactly, exactly in fact Jonathan Emoid who was the attorney in many of the cases landmark cases really against the FDA has basically written in his blog on his website that the way everything's been structured now and the regulations that the FDA has put out because it actually keeps putting out more and more regulations he said that at any time the supplement industry probably could be shut down and that's very scary because the studies show that supplements can really really help people and in some cases they substitute for drugs in some cases if you have to take a drug they protect you from the side effects so you know that's a big big problem. But I just I want to get back to this though Deshae is still good law in the United States correct and that and as a result there is a pretty broad range of supplements you and I can go by freely right now. That's right right now we're in pretty good shape. And I don't think people understand the extent to which a lot of European countries of course they've tried to have harmonization among the EU under the rubric of Codex alimentaries that the supplements are really limited and regulated in Europe more than they are here you can't just go by the same let's say milligram of vitamin C. In some countries and other countries it's a little freer it just depends on the country. And you know that goes for herbal medicines too. You know there are some things we can't get here that they have and vice versa. You know I wonder though whether just the size and scope of the baby boom generation we're so into health and vitality in the U.S. in our later years that they don't have some generational pull to keep supplements free simply because seniors or baby boomers are taking so many of them. Well yes and it's not just baby boomers Congress had two instances when it was trying to pass the D'Shea Act where it got more male from the American people than on any other issue. So you know people are very feel very strongly about having access to their supplements and again when you think about it and all the information that's coming out that's how helpful they are. I think maybe Congress would see things a little differently today if they're in the group to take supplements and I think more and more of them are. Right. Well the other thing I wonder since we've had a couple of decades now since D'Shea was implemented people get used to taking the supplements they become maybe physically or mentally dependent on them. I think there'd be a black market. Yes I'm sure there would be. Imagine bodybuilders buying creatine you know covertly at the gym like they purchase steroids now not unthinkable. That's very true. I think if they tried to shut down the supplement industry today Congress would again get more male or in this case emails than it ever has before. Well so I wanna talk a little bit more about pharmaceutical companies themselves. You worked up John for a long time. Yes. There's an inertia in other words they tend to want to treat diseases rather than cure them. There's a lot of diabetics in America who take insulin every day of their lives and it becomes a self perpetuating industry. This doesn't mean that they're evil people or bad people. I don't believe that but it means they have a self interest in sort of perpetuating the status quo instead of radically coming along and let's say curing diabetes. Well you see that's I don't think they are against curing diabetes by any means. I think it's that they because of the regulations they need to do it in a certain way. It has to justify that two and a half billion dollars. And that really ties their hands. Let me kind of give you an example from real life here. I was on the airplane with someone who had heard that the up John company was developing a series of compounds that we called the Lazaroids after Lazarus rising from the dead because it did so much. And so he wanted some of these. I went to the project manager and said is there any chance that this gentleman could get some. And he said no not at this point in the development process. He said but just tell him to take a lot of vitamin E it'll do the same thing. So why are we developing. And up John actually was one of the companies that had a special process for making vitamin E right. So I mean we would love to have sold it and marketed for some of these indications but we can't without jumping through all these hoops. So if we're going to jump through 12 to 14 years of regulatory hoops and put up two and a half billion dollars you know obviously we need to be able to have a patent protection of some sort. And this is why it's rare for a natural substance to actually be developed by a company. Now there were two companies that said hey fish oil is so great we want to develop it. So what they did is they put an extra chemical group on the active ingredient of fish oil that your body would take off when she ingested it. And so those companies can go to doctors and say hey you know our fish oil is great you know get it by prescription does this that and the other thing but of course it costs a lot of money. My sister you know would be eligible for a prescription fish oil. So she went and checked out the pricing. Well it turned out that she was getting the highest quality over the counter fish oil that there was for about the same price that her copay would have been. So you know we're paying a lot of money for this. It's just ridiculous. And the person who has the highest grade fish oil that I'm aware of has it's a high grade because they've taken out many more of the PCBs which are toxic chemical that's found in fish oil that it's actually I think I'm not sure I'm gonna give you exactly the right number but I think it's only 20% of what's in the prescription fish oil. But it's against the law for him to go to doctors and say you know my fish oil is better because of this. Well one of the thing about any regulatory agency but the FDA in particular is it gives us sort of this false sense of security. Just like the SEC makes you think if you're dabbling in Fortune 500 public stocks you're probably not gonna lose your shirt. People tend to think that FDA approved drugs are safe and we become over reliant on other people's judgment and the judgment of our doctors. That's right in fact I actually have a screenshot from a 2005 FDA website that said drugs have to be proven safe and effective before we'll approve them. Well that's simply wrong because no drug is perfectly safe. Every single one has a side effect and no drug is completely ineffective because there's always the placebo effect. So every drug is effective to some extent. So you know when you think about it that way you realize that you really can't call drugs safe and effective. In fact if a drug company tried to advertise that their drug was safe and effective the FDA would probably sent you them. So it's really crazy. But would you agree that we're over medicated as a society in other words we have this regulatory landscape now that approves drugs but we tend to take a lot more prescription medicines than let's say our grandparents did. And it's not only that we take them for a lifetime. You see this is what's happening now because it's getting more and more expensive every year. It's exponential to develop a drug. What's happening is that pharmaceutical companies are finding that the only way they can hopefully recover their cost is to have a drug that you're going to take for years, decades or a lifetime. Well you know your body's pretty clever. It can detoxify these things to be taken for two weeks but if you're taking them for decades you deplete really essential minerals and essential vitamins, cofactors, things like this. And so it makes you much more susceptible to adding that one more drug to your system because the drugs interact too. So there's all kinds of problems with the way we have it set up today. I think if we hadn't passed those 1962 amendments we would still be looking for and able to get to the market drugs that you take for a short time. And what's happening for example now that we have a lot of bacteria and viruses that are resistant to our antibiotics. What's happening is manufacturers aren't working on those anymore. They can't recover costs. So more and more companies are dropping out of making antibiotics and this could be very serious because if we don't get new antibiotics then I'm sorry pathogens that are resistant our current antibiotics can really spread quickly and kill a lot of people. And we're not just talking about the elderly. High schoolers are dying from infections that they get because the bugs are totally resistant to everything we have. So this is really a distortion of the market of what would have happened had we not had these amendments. So do you think MRSA and other super germs are a result of government failure? Could very well be. Because one of the things they did when they passed the amendments is they turned over to the National Science Academy the chore of looking at all the drugs that were currently on the market and trying to figure out if they worked or not. And that group actually added another group a combination antibiotics. They didn't like them. And so they wanted to get rid of them unless putting those two antibiotics together would give you a much greater effect than simply combining them would be expected to. And the problem with that was that when you give combination antibiotics it's much harder for bugs to actually become resistant. And that's what we're seeing in HIV treatments. You don't just give one drug, you give a cocktail. That way the virus can't adapt and can't become resistant as easily. So in 1962, by really taking the combination antibiotics off the market, they gave a signal to healthcare providers that hey, it might be unethical to give multiple antibiotics at one time. And that certainly didn't help. And in fact, the Uptjahn company was the one who fought this in court and lost unfortunately. Because they had already seen in the laboratory that they could prevent a lot of resistance by using two drugs in the same capsule. And of course, if a doctor would prescribe two drugs it would cost the patient so much more money. And there would be a compliance problem because now they have to swallow two capsules instead of one. So for some people that would be a real deterrent. Here's the thing though disease in our body since there's so many factors, diet, environment, genetics, it's so multifaceted. And of course holistic and alternative practitioners naturopaths, homeopathic, et cetera have attempted to go at things from a multifaceted approach. But since they don't have that FDA stamp of approval on their work or their methods, that's kind of viewed as quackery. And as a result, I think libertarians have gotten some pushback and saying, oh, you guys are promoting health supplement quackery. You're promoting homeopathic quackery, whatever it might be. And there's no science there. But we're not talking about science, we're talking about freedom. That's right. But you know, there is quite a bit of science to back up alternative methods. I remember it used to be the AMA fought acupuncture coming in, fought chiropractic. Really? Yes, chiropractic groups actually sued the American Medical Association under the antitrust laws in one. And that's the only reason we have chiropractic today because what would happen is the AMA, which controls the licensing boards, basically said it's unethical to associate with chiropractors will gank your license if you do. If you recommend them, if you refer patients to them, even if you practice in the same building sometimes. So they really rock to destroy chiropractic, which for me would have been a real problem because I've really needed chiropractic care and I'm so grateful to have gotten it. Well, you mentioned patents earlier, given this sort of regulatory stranglehold we're in, do you think we're stuck with pharmaceutical patents? Is there any way we could ever imagine a more libertarian approach to drug development? If the costs are so high, a skeptic would say, well, no one's gonna develop these drugs if they can't recoup their investment over 20 years with a patent. Well, when I joined the Upjohn Company in the mid-70s, we were still developing some drugs that didn't have patents because the full force of this 12 to 14 years hadn't quite kicked in yet. That wasn't until the 80s. But a couple of years after I joined, management said no more drugs will be developed without patents and that's because of course the costs were rising and they could easily see that there were gonna be problems and costs recovered. So I think if we didn't have all these regulations, we'd see a lot more drug development of natural products or things that didn't have patents. So Upjohn, when you were in the process of developing a drug, were you going back and forth on the phone frequently with the FDA or would you do several years work and then sort of present it and see what they had to say? Well, when I started, we weren't as in touch with the FDA as we were down the road because we had to sort of second guess the FDA. I remember one pathologist told us that he was recommending that we do these special studies that the FDA wanted for the amount of drug that we were giving them. Now, when you do these types of studies in animals, normally you're giving them huge, huge doses. So if you're off by 2%, it's not a big deal, right? Because you're giving horrendously high doses. But the FDA wanted us to have what they call a validated assay or they were starting to propose it and what the pathologist was telling us is we should repeat all of our toxicology because by the time we actually were trying to get our drugs and people, the FDA would probably be demanding this. Now, when you have a quote validated assay in each step of the way, you have to make sure your instruments are calibrated correctly. You have to take extensive notes on this to make sure everything's perfect. Now, when you're giving a drug to people, obviously you wanna make sure you do that because you wanna make sure people are getting the exact dose that they're supposed to. But when you're overdosing the animals by a factor of 10 or even 100, that really doesn't make much difference. But because only one out of 50 drugs will actually ever be given to people. We have to pay for those 49 validated assays that are never going to be used for people. And that's part of the 2 1⁄2 billion dollars because most drugs don't make it. So I think the rule of thumb is something like a third of that cost is due to failures, drugs that we tried to work on and they didn't pan out. So there's a big failure cost there in that price tag. And you can see how that price tag keeps growing if the FDA keeps demanding all of this extra work up front. Did you find FDA people to be technically competent, reasonable human beings? Do you think the FDA is inherently evil? I think most of the people there are trying to do the job that the American people expect them to do, which is try to make sure that safe and effective drugs are the only ones that get to market. But there are some people that truly don't belong there. I remember one time we got a letter from the FDA saying we had sent in our protocol to test to see if our prostaglandins could heal ulcers. So obviously we wanted to do studies and people with ulcers. They wrote back and said that they wanted us to do the study in normal people. So we had to write back very carefully and say, well, it's kind of hard to find out if our drug will treat ulcers if we don't do it and ulcer patients. So you get the whole spectrum. So did you have libertarian instincts as a young person getting a hard science PhD or did you develop those instincts as a result of seeing what you've seen? No, in college I became a libertarian. So I was cognizant of the fact that regulations were growing. What I didn't realize even back then is how much they were growing because we didn't really have the studies back then. We had instincts, we knew we were having to do more work for the regulators than ever before. In fact, a joke we had in my lab and it was kind of gallows humor was, we spent so much time fulfilling the requirements that the FDA had that we didn't have any time to discover new drugs. Well, that sounds about right. What would you say to a young person today who asked you if they should get a PhD in some scientific domain and because they're interested in research and clinical work? Well, again, it depends where they wanna go. A lot of young people want to do research in academia because they think they can do what they want, but that isn't how it works because you have to get grant money to do it. And again, even if you have really novel ideas, in fact, if you have novel ideas, they might not be funded just because they're different. Remember the people who are deciding if you get a grant are the very people who have developed the current theories. So they're not going to take kindly to funding something that would discredit all their work. So that needs to be considered. Of course, on the other end, if you go into the pharmaceutical industry, it can be tough because again, you have to do a lot of regulatory work. I was very fortunate. I had a lot of freedom in my position to work on what I wanted and that was very good. That was not true throughout the entire company. So it's really a difficult choice. It's a very hard choice because in addition to having these artificial barriers that I just talked about, you also have a lot of competition from people who are coming in from overseas. And we have really, if you're a gifted life here, we can have a lot of leisure time over there. They work hard every day. And so they come in to the labs and in many cases, they're going to outperform their American counterparts. So there's also competition from people who are willing to work a lot harder than most American students. You have to really love your work. And if you do love your work, you're willing to put that time in. And that's kind of the position I was in. So I was very fortunate. I'm going to take that as a maybe you should get a PhD. We'll talk that up. Yeah, depends on the person. It really depends how much passion you have. If you're passionate about it and that's all you want out of your life, of course you should go for it. Okay, okay. Well, talk a little bit about your book. It does have a happy subtitle how we can reclaim it. So what was the genesis of your book? What were you trying to accomplish? Well, I used to give talks about the regulations and how they were, you know, how they were harming people. And I'm not the first one to have done that. After the amendments were passed, Sam Petzelman and Dalek Greninger, they both did some studies which showed these amendments were probably maybe four times as deadly in terms of comparing the number of people the amendments saved and the number of people the amendments killed. But today we have so much more information. You know, I could actually get an estimate of how many people were actually killed by these regulations, for example. And that's why I wrote the book. There's not, just because of my experience and because of my libertarian leanings and my knowledge about how regulations really work in real life, I was able to put something together that probably, oh, you know, a small group of people might have been able to write this book. I mean, there's not many people in the world who could have written it. So I decided I would take it on. And I have to say it was a challenge. But the good news about it, the good news about it is we're all affected because before we're regulators, pharmaceutical executives, congressional representatives, before we're a patient or a doctor, you know, we are human beings and we're all affected by this. And in most cases, regulations don't really affect everybody in the same way. Most people who are wealthy, for example, can, they're happy to pay for the extra regulation. It doesn't bother them. Whereas the people on the low end of the totem pole, when they pay that extra for the regulation, they're really hurt. In this case, we're all affected. And that's why I have hope that we can reverse this because I think once it becomes apparent that the amendments are so deadly, I think that there will be a big drive to get rid of them. But don't you notice how much more emotional people get in the debate over, let's say, single payer healthcare? Because they feel it so viscerally that it really touches their lives on a personal level. How are they're going to go to the doctor and pay for it if they get sick? Whereas things like a war in Syria seem amorphous and far off to us. So maybe that should give us hope for that there's a more libertarian approach to health freedom just because people want it for themselves. Oh yes, oh yes. Well, and you saw this with right to try. When I talked to the Goldwater Institute, the people who were pushing right to try, they said they really didn't do much lobbying for right to try because what happened as soon as they put it out there, the people wanted it. So they actually did most of the lobbying and the radio shows and things like that. And right to try passed, I think most of the states that it passed, it was 90 to 95% of the legislatures passed it. Everybody wanted it. The thing that they don't realize about right to try, which allows a terminally ill patients to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical company to get drugs that have safety testing in humans but not effectiveness testing is that most companies are gonna be afraid of the FDA. They're going to think, oh, if I go around the FDA and negotiate directly with a patient, the FDA is gonna punish me. And the FDA can punish companies very severely without any repercussions really. And they can do it subtly or they can do it overtly. It doesn't matter. The courts have ruled that a drug company cannot sue the FDA because it refuses to approve a drug. Well, tell us about how people can follow you and keep up with you on social media or otherwise. Okay, well, you can go to my website at ruart.com, R-U-W-A-R-T.com. And there you can find links to my Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. So that's probably the best way to do it. And you can sign up for my newsletter. And when you do that, you get access to my free library. And I've got a lot of my work in the free library as well as other things that people would be interested in. So it's really a good deal. Well, we appreciate that. We thank you for your time. Thank you for writing this book. If we don't have our physical and mental health, we really don't have anything as liberty-minded people. So it's great talking to you. And ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on mises.org and YouTube.