From Holden:

If you must take any drug, make it something natural like it marijuana, peyote or mushrooms. The fermentaion process is natural as well, so drink up! But be very cautious around any drug your doctor prescribes. Make sure it has been on the market for a long time, twenty years should be enough. The FDA is not doing it’s job, hasn’t been for years.

Hell, the agency doesn’t even have a commissioner, and hasn’t for most of Bush’s term. Meanwhile they are rubber-stamping drugs that are then mass-marketed to unwary consumers who have been taught to trust their physicians and view any substance prescribed for them as magic. And those consumers are dying by the thousands.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said the agency is doing a “spectacular” job and should “continue to do the job they do.”

[snip]

Card made his comments about the FDA during ABC’s “This Week,” when he was asked whether he supported last week’s call by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, for an investigation of the federal drug agency similar in scale to the Sept. 11 commission.

Card responded that “I don’t know that we need a commission” and that “I’ve got great confidence in the FDA.” He said news coming out about previously unaddressed safety risks associated with popular drugs on the market is “a testament to the FDA in how they do their job.”

In the cases of Vioxx and Celebrex, the agency had little to do with the studies that identified the additional heart attack and stroke risks. According to FDA drug safety officer and whistle-blower David Graham, his research showing apparent dangers in Vioxx was suppressed by the agency.

[snip]

Graham, who also appeared on “This Week,” said he wouldn’t prescribe Celebrex “to my mother-in-law.”

“The FDA wasn’t concerned about Vioxx, and would not have removed it from the market if Merck hadn’t, yet 100,000 patients had heart attacks because of Vioxx,” Graham said. “The fact that the FDA now says that it’s concerned about Celebrex to me is a very serious signal.”

The FDA has lacked a permanent commissioner since March, and has had an acting leader for about two-thirds of President Bush’s first term. Yesterday, [Sen. Ted] Kennedy called for the quick nomination of a reform-minded commissioner while Card said acting Commissioner Crawford “is doing a very good job.”