FDA Launches App Competition for Opioid Addiction

I’m not normally a big fan of the Food and Drug Administration. If you’re an FDA bureaucrat and you’re told there’s a promising new drug that might cure a disease, but there’s a small chance people will die from side effects, you have more personal incentive to veto it than approve it. (No one is going to give you a medal for letting a successful drug onto the market, but you will definitely hear from your boss if people die.) That slows medical progress down. But the FDA is onto a good idea with this drug app competition. Government research is by nature slow and incremental, for much the same reasons. If you blow twenty million dollars on a half-crazy attempt to cure cancer using jazz therapy, Congress is going to drag you into an inquest and scream at you for a few days for misuse of funding. But great leaps forward usually come from out-of-the-box ideas, not incremental ones. That’s why, when the government is involved in research, I’d rather it offer prize money than research grants. Set a quantifiable goal, and if someone develops a solution, hand them a sweaty wad of bills in exchange for public ownership of the patent.

A view shows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland August 14, 2012. Picture taken August 14, 2012. To match Special Report CHINA-PHARMACEUTICALS/ REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES – Tags: HEALTH SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) – RTR376YK

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