We lived with the alternative, but could we judge the two properly? When someone dies due to an unsafe drug that makes for a very compelling story. When someone dies from something that could potentially have been cured with a faster drug approval process, well, those deaths show up only in faceless statistical aggregates and society had already come to accept that sort of death as natural.

All the drugs that turned out to be dangerous over the last few decades and had to be withdrawn spring easily to mind, but how many people know about the deaths of the people whose heart attacks could have been prevented if the FDA had allowed the first beta blockers at the same time as they came into use in the rest of the developed world? Not many, despite the death toll of the later dwarfing all the former combined.

"We've moved further forward, faster since these regulations were put into place."

Or perhaps we've moved further forward, faster in spite of these regulations being put into place.

Honestly, your position sounds like so much FUD to me, and I ultimately reject it because it boils down to this: "The US government has more of a right to determine what Heather Cimino's husband can do with his own body than he does, even should he die."

No thanks.

Straw man.

I'm not arguing for the "right to be defrauded."

(Aside: fraud is a violation of an individual's rights, by definition. Your phrase steals the concept of "rights" - it uses "rights" while simultaneously attempting to deny or undermine the very same concept of "rights.")

We need a government, and strong laws to ensure that fraud and other instances of force [including theft, murder, etc.] are identified objectively adjudicated justly, after it has been shown that someone's rights have been violated.

We shouldn't treat anyone - physicians, patients, businesses, etc. - as guilty before they've acted. That's what regulations do: they are based on the assumption that people are guilty, and that need to be stopped before they act.

I'm for treating everyone as innocent until specifically proven guilty. Why aren't you?

I do not recognize "the collective's" right to make this decision for me.