Remember how the White House wanted Americans to tell it about any "fishy" health care information they heard? Well, the government's push to turn us all into informants in medicine doesn't stop there. The FDA would like your doctor to rat out those evil pharma companies as part of its new "Bad Ad" campaign. If a doctor sees a campaign that violates FDA's (vague, nonobjective) guidelines, he is supposed to play informant by calling the FDA's hotline or emailing badad@fda.gov.
In Communist East Germany, the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, destroyed the lives of untold numbers of Germans by snooping into every aspect of citizens' lives and hauling them in for punishment for the least infraction. More than one hundred thousand full-time agents (for a population of 17 million -- that's one agent for every 166 Germans, far more than the Gestapo had in Nazi Germany!) were supported by part-time citizen-informers, for a final ratio of one informer per 6.5 Germans! So imagine -- if you lived in East Germany during the Communist regime and had a simple family gathering, chances are you were hosting a Stasi rat.
We aren't there yet in America, but programs like the White House's "report fishy information" blog post and now the FDA's "Bad Ad" campaign are pushing us in that direction, and that is a scary thought indeed.
When the White House put up its "report 'fishy' information" blog post, many of us responded by "turning ourselves in" to the flag@whitehouse.gov email address. I, for one, plan to send some inbox-clogging fodder to badad@fda.gov -- perhaps reporting the FDA's own website for misleading information. Who's with me?
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