He won’t tell you this, though. In fact, he wants you to believe he’s here to help you, as part of the “other” America. But in fact, when he fights against advertising for drugs that have passed FDA certification on “safety” grounds, he’s implicitly telling you that he doesn’t believe the FDA is certifying drug safety:

Can we give John Edwards a taste of his own medicine? One of the nostrums the Edwards presidential campaign proposes is a two-year ban on advertising for prescription drugs. Even if a drug makes it through the FDA’s hurdles, Edwards wants to prohibit the drug company from telling you about it for two more years. Why this assault on First Amendment rights? Edwards says it’s to “prevent television ads from driving consumers to drugs that haven’t been proven safe.”

I’m sure my fellow libertarian bloggers will attack Edwards as being an opponent of freedom of speech, and generally willing to substitute his own opinion for ours. In fact, I assume that if the healthcare plan Kevin posted about were to get passed, Edwards would personally determine what drugs you need to take and then hire federal marshals to forcibly administer them. But that’s just the kind-hearted sort of guy he is.

What I’d rather focus on is his implicit acknowledgment of a fact that we are all painfully aware: the FDA is not exactly a foolproof gateway certifying drug safety. Of course, expecting them to be foolproof is something only a fool would do. Prescription drugs are all unsafe to various degrees. But the FDA assumes that the power to determine exactly what level of danger is acceptable resides within their walls.

John Edwards is suggesting that drugs should be available to patients before they’re proven safe, and those patients should be the guinea pigs of testing before the manufacturers are allowed to advertise the drugs. If that’s the case, what use is the FDA? If John Edwards believes the FDA doesn’t do an adequate job of certifying drug safety, why don’t we allow individuals to choose what level of danger they find personally acceptable?

If taking away our freedom through the FDA isn’t actually keeping us safe, Edwards would never give us the freedom to determine for ourselves what is safe. After all, he thinks we’re simply sheep, being “driven” to pharmaceuticals because we saw them on TV. You really want to know what Edwards thinks of you?

I love the ads,” a sarcastic Edwards told voters at a town hall meeting at Rundlett Middle School in Concord. “Buy their medicine, take it and the next day you and your spouse will be skipping through the fields.”

The message is: “you’re too dumb to think for yourself, so let me do it for you”. It’s a sad day when the candidate who actually has principles and ideas languishes in the polls, while the charlatans like Edwards who unabashedly pander to the lowest common denominator are polling at 23% in Iowa.