You may not have heard of him, though he’s been a contributor to National Review for years. He is currently the Chief Counsel of the FDA. He also happens to be a very old friend of mine going back to my first days in Washington. Also, my brother-in-law happens to work with him at the FDA.

Anyway, I haven’t talked to Dan about any of this — apparently he’s not commenting to the press — but it sounds like the trial lawyers are trying to screw him through their representatives in Congress. Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) has launched a broadside against Dan for his efforts to keep the trial lawyers from writing the prescription drug laws. According to Federal law, the FDA is supposed to have final jurisdiction over prescription drug labelling. But the trial lawyers want it to be an issue for state courts so that they can bring suits at the state level. So, as Chief Counsel Dan has filed amicus briefs to these courts arguing that this is a federal issue. This is precisely the position the Clinton administration took, by the way. But Hinchey and his friends are trying to demonize Dan, particularly in an election year. In a news conference yesterday Hinchey brought out the families of some people who are suing Zoloft. They sound like terrible cases and you can’t blame the families for being upset. One father declared, “Having Daniel Troy as chief legal counsel of the FDA,” he said, “is like placing John Gotti in charge of the Justice Department.” The thin reed they’re standing on is that Dan’s old law firm represented Pfizer before Dan went to the FDA while Dan did little direct work for them. Indeed, as I understand it, Dan overreported the amount of money he made from that work, just to be on the safe side. Of course, Dan obeyed all the ethics rules and completely recused himself from all issues pertaining to Pfizer for the first year of his tenure at the FDA. Which gets me to my point.

I wouldn’t normally write about stuff like this — ain’t exactly my beat. But I’ve known Dan for a very long time. I know his family and one of his brothers is a very close friend of mine. Dan is without a doubt one of the most ethical and intellectually honest people I’ve ever met in my life. He’s the sort of straight arrow it’s fun to make fun of precisely because he’s such a straight arrow. He is one of the only people I know who would have become a lawyer if lawyers didn’t make much money. As a successful lawyer and Chief Counsel for the FDA, Dan’s going to do just fine no matter what. The idea that he’s doing anything not based on the law and on principle is absurd.

I don’t know if this will be a big deal or not, but when you see a friend in the crosshairs of the trial lawyers in an election year, you get nervous.