A Naderite to be commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration? Drug industry representatives here believe that’s one of the things Ralph Nader asked for when he visited Plains. And they also believe that Carter may deliver. Although he has been making cooing sounds at business lately, going so far as to hint that there may be an advisory role in his Administration for William Simon, Carter’s views on the drug industry, as on all aspects of the health-care issue, are close to Nader’s. Also, the approximately 35 people who make up Mary King’s “health-policy group”—and who will be advising Carter on all matters concerning health—share, nearly to a man, common backgrounds: antiwar, anti-poverty, OEO, drug-abuse clinics, prepaid-medical-group practice. All agree with the positions on health-care issues taken by Dr. Sidney Wolfe, head of Nader’s public-health group, and with Dr. Peter Bourne, Mary King’s psychiatrist husband, who is the quintessential new-breed Naderite medical activist. Bourne, a British-born psychiatrist whom Carter regards as one of his best friends, did a tour in Vietnam and returned to the U.S. disillusioned. He became active in the antiwar movement in San Francisco, where he served as an organizer for the Medical Committee on Human Rights and worked with drug addicts in a Haight-Ashbury free clinic. Bourne and his colleagues will be in large part responsible for structuring Carter’s national health-insurance program and will oversee the staffing of HEW and FDA.
The prospect of a Naderite FDA commissioner, seriously discussed here in Washington, is giving the drug industry the jitters, for obvious reasons. The industry, already under steady and intense fire from congressional reformers and would-be trust-busters such as Senator Gaylord Nelson, fears that with a consumerist at the FDA helm its access to government would be totally cut off, making it impossible for industry representatives to present their case, already a difficult task. With an activist as commissioner, the FDA would be staffed with anti-business types eager to break up all large industries. Dismemberment of anything large—with the exception of the government—is very much in the air here these days. The drug industry fears it could be next.
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