Listen The Fuck Up

John Oliver:

Try to remember that right about 100 years ago, we had very little regulatory regimen in place, and there were people dying of all kinds of nasty shit because of things like Radioactive Water.

Radithor was manufactured from 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, Inc., of East Orange, New Jersey. The owner of the company and head of the laboratories was listed as William J. A. Bailey, a dropout from Harvard College,[1] who was not a medical doctor.[2] It was advertised as "A Cure for the Living Dead"[3] as well as "Perpetual Sunshine". The expensive product was claimed to cure impotence, among other ills.[4]

Eben Byers, a wealthy American socialite, athlete, industrialist and Yale College graduate, died from Radithor radium poisoning in 1932.[5] Byers was buried in a lead-lined coffin; when exhumed in 1965 for study, his remains were still highly radioactive.[4]

Byers's death led to the strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration's powers and the demise of most radiation-based patent medicines. A Wall Street Journal article (1 Aug. 1990) describing the Byers incident was titled "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off".[6]

That regulatory approach worked pretty well. We fostered the world's greatest economy and the world's best and safest products (mostly) for a good long time.

There are always assholes willing to abandon whatever ethics they may once have had in the interest of turning a buck, so I'm gonna hafta insist on Gubmint Interference when it comes to trying to keep those assholes at bay.