Updates made to The Millenium Project in May 2017

There are laws and regulations which stipulate what I can do with and in my car, and breaches of these rules can result in swift and severe discipline. There are laws and regulations which say I can't turn my front lawn into a marijuana plantation and sell whatever I don't smoke myself at the local pub or high school, and breaches of these rules can see me looking at the sky through barred windows and razor wire

There are laws and regulations about what you can say about and sell medications to treat or prevent illnesses. Breaches of these rules can almost completely and safely be ignored. I wrote about this in Australasian Science magazine.

Irregular regulation

One of the things we expect governments to do is to make and enforce regulations that protect the health and safety of citizens. There are of course constant complaints about overregulation, but generally people accept that there have to be rules and that most of these rules are reasonable and beneficial.

An obvious area for regulation is the manufacture and distribution of medical products and services. The groups responsible for managing this are the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the various government sanctioned medical boards.

In 2013 Meryl Dorey, then president of the Australian Vaccination Network, appeared on the Internet radio station Fair Dinkum Radio and promoted Black Salve as a cure for cancer. This is an escharotic paste, that is it is a caustic preparation that effectively dissolves any tissues it comes in contact with. It is about as useful a cancer cure as burning cancer away with a blowtorch, although it works a little slower. The TGA politely asked Ms Dorey and Leon Pittard at the radio station to display a notice on their web sites admitting that they had been promoting this dangerous and useless nostrum. They refused. The notices were never displayed.

Read more about this nonsense here.