Life Extension Society 990 N. Powhatan St. Arlington VA 22205 703-534-7277 1996 No. 1 LIFE EXTENSION SOCIETY NEWS Jan 1996 LES To Hold Open House, Annual Members' Meeting LES will hold an open house in conjunction with its annual members' meeting at LES President Mark Mugler's house on February 4, 1996. Mark is at 990 N. Powhatan St., Arlington, VA 22205, (703) 534-7277, muglermen@aol.com. The open house will be from 2:00 to 4:00, and both members and non-members are welcome. The members' meeting and annual election of the Board of Directors will begin at 4:00. Immediately after the election, the members will vote on the method of procuring food. Attention members: To facilitate the election, any member who can't participate in person should mail in a signed proxy authorizing Mark or another member to vote on his or her behalf. We'll see you on February 4! Stabilization Members Contribute Funds for Cryonics Equipment In late 1995, LES received $760 in contributions toward the acquisition of cryonic stabilization equipment and supplies. As this issue goes to press, $420 more has been contributed in 1996, and $280 more has been pledged. Seven individuals have contributed enough to qualify as "stabilization members," and four more are on the way to stabilization membership. The LES Board spent much of 1995 developing its stabilization equipment financing and service plan (see October, 1995 issue of LES News). The goal of the service plan is to improve the quality of each cryonic stabilization (the first phases of a cryogenic preservation) that takes place in the mid-Atlantic region. Acquisition of equipment and supplies using the contributed funds will begin in 1996. Under the service plan, LES will make its equipment and supplies available to a cryonics organization, or its contractor, for a "standby" or a rapid-response cryonic stabilization of an individual who has donated his or her human remains to the cryonics organization. A stabilization member is an LES member who contributes a minimum amount (currently $140) to LES for the acquisition of cryonic stabilization equipment and supplies. Cryonic preservations involving the remains of stabilization members will receive priority over those involving the remains of non-members. CryoCare Suspends Its First Patient On Tuesday, December 12, 1995, a team from BioPreservation, Inc. (BPI) cryopreserved CryoCare Foundation member James Leslie Gallagher of Huntington Beach, California. Jim is CryoCare's first patient since CryoCare's formation two years ago. CryoSpan, Inc. will be responsible for Jim's long-term care under contract to CryoCare. Jim followed developments in cryonics and nanotechnology for many years, and may be best known to readers of Cryonet as the founder of the CryoSociety. He decided to join CryoCare earlier this year while undergoing therapy for colon cancer. In the days ahead, BPI will be posting a full case history and detailed technical report of this cryopreservation. According to CryoCare, lab results indicate that this may the highest quality human cryopreservation achieved to date, despite many logistical and technical problems during the case. Final Tally for 1995 1995 LES members: 18 1995 paid LES News subscribers: 8 1995 LES stabilization members: 4 Balance, operating account: $628 Balance, acquisition account: $760 Upcoming Events January 21, 1996: Cryonics Society of New York bi-monthly meeting, 2:00-4:00, at 131 W. 72nd St., New York, NY. Contact Janet Pinkney, 201-444-7493. February 4, 1996: Life Extension Society open house and annual members' meeting. See article in this issue. February 19-23, 1996: Transport (cryonic stabilization) training class (following the Alcor Cryonics Technology Festival), Scottsdale/ Phoenix, AZ. Contact Alcor Foundation, 7895 E. Acoma Drive #110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260-6916, (800) 367-2228, steve@alcor.org. March 10, 1996: Life Extension Society Board of Directors meeting, 2:00, at Exhibits, Inc., 4929 Wyaconda Rd., Rockville, MD. Contact Mark Mugler, 703-534-7277. March 17, 1996: Cryonics Society of New York bi-monthly meeting, 2:00-4:00, at 131 W. 72nd St., New York, NY. Contact Janet Pinkney, 201-444-7493. April 16, 1996: Dr. Michael Fossel lectures on "Reversing Human Aging," 6:00, at a location in Montgomery County, Maryland. Contact the Smithsonian, 202-357-2700. CryoCare, Alcor Home Pages The Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the CryoCare Foundation each maintain a World Wide Web home page that provides information on cryonics, life extension, nanotechnology, and related topics. The CryoCare home page is at http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/. The site includes: * An overview of the CryoCare organization and philosophy * A description of services offered to CryoCare members by the Cryonics Institute, CryoSpan, Inc., and BioPreservation, Inc. * A library section with introductions to cryonics * CryoCare signup documents and bylaws A section listing events of interest. The events listing is independent of organizational affiliation. To have an event included (please check whether it's there already!), e-mail ken_wolfe@mbnet.mb.ca. The Alcor home page is at http://www.webcom.com/~alcor. The site includes: * Information on cryonics and on Alcor * Biographical information on the Alcor staff * A directory of cryonics organizations * Electronic links to documents on venturism, extropianism, life extension, and nanotechnology * An information packet and a signup packet that may be downloaded Special Supplement: Our Enemy the FDA (Protecting Us to Death) Part One in a Series c Mark W. Mugler 1996 Introduction In 1906, at the height of the Progressive Era, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act to protect Americans from being poisoned by tainted or adulterated food. Following the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, Congress enacted the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which created the FDA. Thereafter, in a process that Robert Higgs calls "punctuated politics" (Introduction, in Higgs, Hazardous to Our Health?), occasional public health ragedies prompted Congress to enact quantum enlargements of FDA's powers. The FDA has creatively interpreted its powers and aggressively enforced them, creating media controversies that prompted Congress to enact "clarifying" legislation that simply codified even broader powers. Like many other Progressive initiatives (such as the income tax) and the initiatives of the New Deal to follow, this initiative has gone badly awry. The Congress of 1938 would scarcely recognize the system of centralized health care decision making that the Nation experiences today. The principal mandate given the Department of Agriculture in the 1906 legislation was to protect the populace from unsafe food and drugs. Producers and distributors were required to "brand," or label, products (such as by identifying ingredients, recommended use and dosage, and necessary precautions) so that consumers could make informed choices about their use. The initial impetus may be seen as facilitating the operation of the market. After the 1938 Act, the FDA decided that consumers could not be trusted to make decisions on their own behalf, and it began its step-wise journey to the regulatory totalitarianism we see today. Use of a wide variety of drugs was prohibited except by prescription. Rigorous and costly testing and approval was required for each new drug or food additive before it could be marketed, and approval was limited only to uses for which the drug or additive was tested. Health claims for unapproved uses were banned, products being sold on the basis of such claims were seized without just compensation, and the distributors of the products faced fines and imprisonment. Toxic drugs were approved for use in part because information on safer alternatives was suppressed. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, hormones, herbs, and other health products were seized as unapproved drugs whenever health claims were made for them. Importation of unapproved substances was limited to amounts needed for personal use or, in the case of possible prescription drugs, prohibited outright. The FDA surely has protected the American people from poisons, but in its zeal it has assumed command and control of human health and nutrition under an oppressive regulatory regime. It has betrayed the people it professes to protect. It has stifled life-saving information, it has deprived the people of life-saving health products that have reached the market too late or not at all, it has permitted them to die unnecessarily from toxic drugs, and it has deprived them of their livelihoods, property, and freedom of speech. Can the cure be called a success when the patient has died? Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. (Justice Louis Brandeis, 1928) This issue of the LES News will discuss how the "political market" crowds out the free market. Future issues will discuss: * Congestion and Abuse of Power in the Political Market * A Brief History of the FDA * The Government-Operated Drug Cartel * The Ministry of Truth * The Reign of Terror Growth of the Political Market Regulatory and enforcement power, once granted, tends to continue to accrue to the regulatory agency. Furthermore, decisions made under a regulatory regime quite explicitly benefit certain segments of society at the expense of others. These closely related phenomena may be understood as the operation of a "political market." In these respects the FDA is typical. The principal reason that regulatory power, including FDA's power, enlarges over time is that the conferral of regulatory power converts private resources to common property, subjecting them to a political decision making apparatus. Resources allocated in the political market are "up for grabs," with the result that the number of political interests with a stake proliferates and the politically powerful prevail where the objectives of the different political interests are opposed. Government's two mighty weapons are taxation and regulation. Taxation under the threat of imprisonment shifts income from the control of the individual to the control of politicians and bureaucrats. Regulation redirects human action through coercion. Once the government has asserted its power in a manner that restricts free decision-making in the market (either by redistributing income or commandeering private activity), it displaces the market as the locus of decision-making, and a political market arises. In the political market, the relative political power of the affected interests, including the regulators, the regulated, the purported beneficiaries of regulation, the taxed, the recipients of subsidies and largesse, the media, "public interest"groups, and other affected interests, determines the outcomes of decisions. On a particular political decision or issue, an interest group whose vital interests are affected will organize and mobilize its resources to protect and enlarge those vital interests. Others whose interests are less affected will, by comparison, be less well organized, less mobilized, and less effective with respect to that decision. In sum, each special interest struggles to prevail, in the decisions it cares most about, against the remainder of society. As more people, groups, and interests discern that they are advantaged or disadvantaged by decisions in the political market compared to other groups, they are forced to organize and mobilize to protect their interests. Soon, everyone is represented by politically active interest groups and heavily invested in the outcome of political decisions. The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. (John Stuart Mill, 1859) An almost irresistible impetus for the enlargement of taxation and regulation results from the pressure from all groups in the political marketplace to enlarge their "take" and to "rig" the rules in their interest. In this manner, incredible power is ceded to the political market through the organization of interest groups, the building of coalitions, and the enactment of special-interest legislation. The political market grows as a cancer on the market economy, individual choice, and freedom. Life Extension Society 990 N. Powhatan St. Arlington VA 22205 703-534-7277