Milford chronicle., 1961-08-04
TRACTOR DEAL FINS

IhAClOh DEAL F1NIS
The naive neutrality-suspicious. farce,
which sucked in some of the country's fam
Gus names, such as Roosevelt and Eisenhow-
err has now apparently gone down the drain
where it should have gone when it was
first mentioned.
This ridiculous proposition attracted
some of the country's most famous people,
and even President Kennedy endorsed the
asinine project. In light of all the examples
of Castro's unreliability, it is hard to see
how responsible people proposed to deal with
Castro on the subject of these prisoners
freedom, aand expect an honorable bargain
to be reached.
Instead, Castro played the do-gooder Am
orleans for suckers, utilized the scheme to
gain valuable propaganda for Cuba and the
Cuban government. Castro played the role
of magnanimouS and powerful leader, so
magnanimous that he was willing to free
the prisoners if he got tractors to raise the
living standard in Cuba, in return, and so
powerful that he didn't fear the release of
over a thousand bitter enemies.
The contention of Americans that the
proposed deal reflected credit on the United
States, and the people who pushed it, is alb
surd. To deal with renegade, and lend him
this respect and official recognition-and to
have him demanding that Americans come
to Cuba to work out terms with him, is grist
for the communist propaganda mill.
The committee, after much silly talk and
publicity, finally gave up the ghost and
announced nothing could be accomplished.
The great majority of the American people,
from every strata of society, could have told
the highly-publicized committee this from
the very start of the comedy.
5000
ULTIMATE IN AUTHORITARIANISM
Few have heard about it-but legisla-
ton is being considered by Congress which
can have a profound effect on the public
health.
One of the bills major provisions would
prohibit the patenting of many pharmaceu-
tical products unless the newly discovered
compound could be proven significantly
more effective than all chemically related
drugs already on the market. In other
words, proving that drug is safe and good
matters which are covered by long-estab-
lished law-would no longer be enough. A
government agency would have to agree that
it was better.
If this sounds plausible to you, think
again. A preparation which is effective with
one patient may fail entirely with another.
Only the practicing physician is competent
to decide which particular drug is best in
any given case. Patients, after all, are indi-
viduals, with individual idiosyncracies. And
as the old saying has it, one mans meat
may be another mans poison.
Moreover, authoritarian bodies - and
any government agency with the power to
decide which of group of related drugs is
best must be authoritarian-have often been
guardians of orthodoxy rather than cham
pions of progress. In the past, medical tex
perts" rejected Jenners smallpox vaccine,
Pasteur's anthrax vaccine, Listers theory
of antisepsis, and Semmelweis' discovery of
the cause of childbed fever. All of these in
novations have proven to be milestOnes in
medical history.
American medicine is the best in the
world, and the pharmaceutical industry has
made an important contribution to that end.
The proposed legislation would amount to
roadbIock in the way of further progress
the ultimate in rule by decree.
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