It's official. Certain members of the top brass at the Food and Drug Administration -- those who haven't already resigned in protest of the agency's fishy foot-dragging on approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B emergency contraception -- have, forswearing science altogether, locked themselves in a room with back issues of the Weekly World News and worn VHS copies of 1953's "Girls in the Night" ("The rooftop is their lovers' lane ... the sidewalk their finishing school!") and the original "Reefer Madness." That, plus a Batphone to the White House.
Where am I getting my information? Well, the Center for Reproductive Rights has -- huzzah! -- filed a lawsuit seeking to force the FDA to quit ignoring the recommendations of its own medical panels, scale back its trumped-up and bass-ackwards "concerns" about teen access and, for God's sake, approve over-the-counter sales of Plan B already. Today through Friday, three once-or-current senior FDA officials (former FDA commissioner Lester Crawford, deputy operations commissioner Janet Woodcock and FDA drug evaluation center director Steven Galson) are expected to give court-ordered depositions on the matter.
Newsday reports that CRR attorneys intend to question Woodcock in particular about a 2004 memo released by the FDA in which she suggested that OTC Plan B could basically put us at teen-sex DefCon1. In the memo, as an FDA medical officer describes it, Woodcock stated that "we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B."
Urban legend? Sex cults? Kind of like the explosion of after-school "Eyes Wide Shut"-style orgies caused by drugstore sales of condoms? Anyway, look. If you do think about it this way, Dr. Woodcock, why worry? We all know that promiscuous teens learn their lesson from the guy with the hook.
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