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Lisa:

The fact is that in this situation, thanks to the FDA, you have only undesirable options to choose from. The decision of whether a drug is beneficial for a particular patient isn’t up to that patient and his physician. The FDA won’t approve a drug unless it can show benefit in clinical trials, and so far the only benefit that the drug company has been able to demonstrate for BiDil is in African Americans.

The FDA approves lots of drugs that work well for some groups of people but not for others. Sometimes contraindicators are known and sometimes they aren’t. This includes everything from oral contraceptives to mood stabilizers.

So why not come out for “approving” BiDil for everybody, without regard to race? If questions about race and medicine need to be mooted, let them be mooted in the doctor’s office instead of the regulatory agencies.

“Race-specific approval” means restricting the liberty of a race of people to choose their own medications. The best solution is to abolish the FDA, but until that happens, why dicker about race politics when the obvious solution is more permissiveness rather than selective permissiveness?