Why the Ephedra Ban is a Joke

Jacob Sullivan, of Reason Mag, opines on the banning of ephedra.

They say that it is not a serious threat in Feb. and no additional info to discredit this claim is found.

Last February, Mark McClellan, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, conceded that "serious adverse events from ephedra appear to be infrequent." Yet at the end of December, he announced that the FDA planned to ban all dietary supplements containing the herbal stimulant, saying they pose "an unreasonable risk."

Now let me run the math....12m-17m users and 155 deaths??? So using 10m users, you have a .00000015% chance of death. Hmm...I think if I like the product, I'll take those odds.

According to Public Citizen's Sidney Wolfe, for instance, there have been 155 ephedra-related deaths.

But even this number is remarkably low given how many people have used ephedra. Until the recent bad publicity cut into sales, the industry estimated that 12 million to 17 million Americans were taking around 3 billion doses a year.

His ending is classic....

In this light, it's not hard to see why someone might conclude that ephedra's benefits outweigh its risks. If the FDA worries that consumers are not sufficiently informed about those risks (hard to believe given the plunge in sales that followed all the talk about ephedra's potentially lethal effects), a warning label should suffice.

But the FDA rejected that approach, since even a well-informed consumer could make what the government considers to be the wrong decision. By choosing prohibition rather than education, the FDA followed the course long favored by activists like Sidney Wolfe, who consider it their duty as "consumer advocates" to make sure that consumers cannot buy the products they want.

Marginal Revolution: Are there libertarian heroes?

Ron Paul leads the list and yeah there aren't that many libertarian heroes in politics. Thankfully there are a plethora of them that publish blogs, articles and write books. Hopefully people are paying attention.

More ESPN-Wake Forest Hoops Love

ACC: Jamaal Levy, Wake Forest
Levy reminds me of a young James Posey. He is a long and athletic inside-outside performer. Levy averages 12.3 points, 9.3 rebounds and 1.7 steals, making him among the most versatile performers in the league, and he slips in using his length and quickness to rank among the league's best offensive rebounders. The junior is very capable defensively, and still learning the game, so he will get better. With scorers like Justin Gray, Eric Williams and Chris Paul around him, Levy can sneak around and be a dangerous player.

I know I've been silent (other than my post from someone else yesterday) about the latest ephedra ban, but as long time readers know I think the supplement is safe and effective. Currently, I am reading Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell, a work that does an excellent job conveying the importance of secondary factors of economic (or all) decisions. Sowell eloquently pens a tail of all of us driving tanks b/c that is the safest means of transportation. He also ridicules the common phrase "If it saves just one life" for being the joke that it is. Every decision and action has trade-offs and as Sowell also writes, exercising can kill you and not exercising can kill you. As free people we have the right to rationalize which risks we are willing to take and which risks we would not like to take. Yeah ephedra doesn't work for everyone and if you have a heart problem or want to use 3x the suggested max you might run into some problems and maybe even die! That is reality, just as you might die if you decide to drive 90 mph on the highway or eat McDonald's everyday (no...I don't want those to banned also!). Life is about choices and as Sowell would say, "what is the secondary cause of this action." Will we end up with more obese people who will now develop disease b/c they were unable to lose weight b/c just 100 some people died from ephedra (not to mention the fact that ephedra was LOOSELY connected to their deaths mind you)? We won't even get into the effects of ephedra's ban, which successfully helped people lose loads of weight, on people who psychologically need it to feel better about themselves and stop some self destructive behavior. This is just one more example of the ridiculousness of the police state acting as if it CARES.

Here is my main man Ron Harris' take on the ban from his daily pump email....

In other news, I just learned that ephedra will be officially banned in the United States by March of 2004. As someone who has used it safely for many years and known many others who have as well, I can't say this is much more than a publicity stunt by our government to make us feel like they really care about our health and well-being. If that were true, tobacco products would have been outlawed 25 years ago. Yes, in America we can legally drink and smoke ourselves to death, but soon using a fat-burner containing ephedrine will be against the law.

Funny take on the ridiculous ephedra ban

The entire post from night in the big city is below.... (via gawker)

No more OTC trucker speed.
Ash forwarded me a text message from his friend (and my co-contributor) Jill, allerting me to this breaking news story. Turns out that the FDA has banned (is banning, will ban) Ephedra, everyone's second favorite appetite surpressingest, weight losingest, up peppingest, heart condition causingest substance.

No longer will young, upwardly mobile professionals be able to go to the corner GNC for their "herbal" fix. The age of easy access to slightly enhanced awareness and questionable other vaguely health related effects is over. I guess.

Honestly, I don't know what is the most surprising part of this story. Is it the FDA banning something that has been pulled from most shelves for a year or so now? Is it the fact that anyone is surprised by the fact that something with the "positive" effects (think truckers bobming down I-90 at 89MPH, 6 hours of sleep in the last 60, with slightly shaky hands) of Ephedra is bad for you? Is it the fact that this warrants a top of the page banner on nytimes.com?

But I can see it now! As I pop my last couple of Ephedra, the ones that have been sititng at the back of my desk drawer for the last three years, I have a vision of the future: Ephedra's newfound illegality, its accruing illicitness is going to give NYC just what it needs: another subculture.

Picture it: slightly jittery i-bankers and truckers with deep dark bags under their eyes getting together, calling their delivery guys, who sneak the substance over from Canada daily, popping their pills with a protein shake and conversing at a slightly accelerated rate, all the while losing weight while they stand around and sweat.

Oh, wait. Replace truckers with models, and protein shake with cosmo, and I think I was already at that party last night.

ProfessorBainbridge.com: Mad Like a Cow


The only one that should be mad (aka crazy) about mad cow are people who are well MAD.


(via professorbainbridge via wsj)

The WSJ put it in perspective with these statistics:
In the U.K., tens of millions of people were exposed to contaminated beef and so far there have only been 143 human cases linked to cattle. By comparison it's estimated that 5,000 people in the U.S. die each year from other food-borne illness, including salmonella poisoning.

ESPN.com - NCB - Vega: Well-rested Wake

ESPN is finally giving the 7-0, best team in the country, Wake Forest Demon Deacons some love. If you haven't watched us play yet then you need to start tuning in. This team has got it going on, plus Skip Prosser is from the Burgh.

ESPN.com - NCB - Vega: Well-rested Wake

ESPN is finally giving the 7-0, best team in the country, Wake Forest Demon Deacons some love. If you haven't watched us play yet then you need to start tuning in. This team has got it going on, plus Skip Prosser is from the Burgh.

Economist.com | Climate change and civilisation

Interesting. Just one more reason to love the hunter-gather lifestyle.

Natural climate change may have started civilisation. And the spread of farming may have caused as much global warming as industry is causing now.

So climate change helped to intensify agriculture, and thus start civilisation. But an equally intriguing idea put forward at the meeting is that the spread of agriculture caused climate change.

In this case, the presumed culprit is forest clearance. Most of the land cultivated by early farmers in the Middle East, Europe and southern China would have been forested. When the trees that grew there were cleared, the carbon they contained ended up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Moreover, one form of farming—the cultivation of rice in waterlogged fields—generates methane, another greenhouse gas, in large quantities. William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia, explained to delegates his theory that, in combination, these two phenomena had warmed the atmosphere prior to the start of the industrial era by as much as all the greenhouse gases emitted since.

Dr Ruddiman's hypothesis is grounded on recent deviations from the regular climatic pattern of the past 400,000 years. This pattern is controlled by what are known as the Milankovitch cycles, which are in turn caused by periodic changes in the Earth's orbit and angle of tilt toward the sun. One effect of the Milankovitch cycles is to cause regular and predictable changes in the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. These changes can be followed by studying ice cores taken in Antarctica.

aaronfallon.com

My college roommate's website. Give him a shout if you need some photos taken or know anyone in LA who does.

ProfessorBainbridge.com: Dean v. Bush in '04: It'll be Ugly but Boring

This blog posting pretty much sums up my thoughts on what the election will look like.

Dean v. Bush in '04: It'll be Ugly but Boring
Back before the shot clock was introduced, then-UNC head basketball coach Dean Smith was famous for running the four corners offense to control the ball while waiting for the opposition to self-destruct. After watching Howard Dean's latest open mounth-insert foot moment - re Osama - I had a vision of what the '04 election will look like. Bush will run a ball control, low risk four corners waiting for Dean to self-destruct. Just like UNC basketball, it'll be really ugly and really boring. And, just like UNC basketball back in those days, it'll probably work.

(via Professor Brain Bridge)