It is not just the Puritan line that says that often diet and exercise is preferable to taking a pill. Pills will not always substitute for the benefits of diet and exercise. (It might be the Puritan line to argue as someone did above to claim that all problems are due to people failing to diet and exercise enough).

Still, you do show that we will still need the pharmaceutical industry. Even if it were the case that diet and exercise would solve all medical problems, plenty of people will still require medications as they will not follow diets and exercise programs.

I never said pharmaceutical companies should be legally barred from advertising. The point is that this leaves the pharmaceutical companies a place to cut costs if government programs pay them less without having to give up research and development.

Of course I would like fewer drugs to be perscription only — that should be restricted IMO to those drugs that cause community damage when misused (perhaps antibiotics).

Pharmaceutical companies will still perform research in order to remain in business. There is plenty of room to cut drug costs while still leaving plenty of money for research. They spend far more on marketing than research, with the best estimates showing they spend about almost twice as much on promotion as they do on research and development. It would be a good thing if drug companies had less to spend to try to influence physicians, and a good thing if they stopped direct to consumer marketing of prescription drugs. They could even survive and continue research with less profits than they now make if necessary.

Or from the perspective of discussing the issue, the problem is adhering to ideological positions and talking points without looking at the specifics. Libertarians generalize with talking points (always anti-government) such as that the problem with the FDA is keeping drugs from market as they are more likely to be blamed for problems while nobody knows about those who suffer from drugs not being approved.

Like many libertarian talking points on government and the economy it has a grain of truth which get people to continue to repeat it but the line is a gross over-simplification. Sometimes drugs are kept off the market too long. Other times drugs get on the market which should not. Fritz’s take on the talking point that “People who die because a new drug is still in testing are just, well, dead” misses the fact that the FDA cannot just keep drugs off the market without anyone realizing that drug might have been used as we do have information on drugs which are in the pipeline and we do have information about drugs which have been approved in other countries.