Important Read: Public Health and the First Amendment

Public Health and the First Amendment

"In 2002, for example, the Supreme Court blocked an effort by the FDA intended to control the dangers of compounded medications. The agency sought to stop small compounders from advertising their wares nationally, in order to prevent them from developing a large manufacturing capacity without adequate oversight. Instead, the Court found that the companies had a right under the First Amendment to tell the world about their products.

We now know how that turned out. The New England Compounding Center advertised widely, grew to an enormous scale, and was responsible for an outbreak of fungal disease in which more than 750 people across the nation developed serious infections and 64 died. Many factors contributed to the outbreak, including failures of oversight. Nonetheless, if the FDA’s approach had been allowed to stand, the scale of human suffering would certainly have been less.

Courts are failing to acknowledge the trade-off between the emerging ideological view of commercial speech and health".