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.