I was asking about the "means"? Should the argument about the enforcement "means" be different for the two cases? If so, why?

Truly I'm not trying to be difficult, but I don't understand your question, If you are speeding, you get pulled over and given a ticket. That is not how fraud is pursued. What "means" distinction are you trying to get at?

Back to my question: "Think it works?" Does it "work" in a meaningful sense?

And who should be paying for the research? Should the quacks be getting a "free ride"? Should they be allowed to overwhelm the gummint if given a "free ride" with so many "new" products as to make the gummint unable to keep up (as seems to be the case for the latest twists on diet and "manly vigour" crapola judging on telly ads....)?

Well, you can't prove they are quacks, can you, unless someone has researched it and shown the claimed cure or whatever is not efficacious. But you can require them to point out -- and really Arne, I haven't reflected on font styles and size! -- that there is no FDA approval for X.

2] Citizens should have complete and total freedom to do nearly anything, as long as it doesn't hurt someone.

Unless the someone hurt is the competent adult making an informed (meaning, whatever s/he is choosing is, say, revealed not to be approved by the FDA) choice, why on Earth would you oppose that principle? You want to be your neighbor's Daddy?

I'm old enough to remember when the religious right was still fighting to hold onto anti-sodomy laws so they could lock up gays. They said such activity hurt "the community," even if not the consenting individuals involved.

You agree that selling laetrile to rubes (assuming arguendo that it's snake-oil) is bad, and that it is the gummint's duty to discourage if not prevent it.

Ok, I think I see where we've been talking past each other. I do not think the govt properly prevents (that is, criminalizes) people from buying whatever crap "cures" they choose. But ensuring that truth in labeling goes on, is a proper function. If the laetrile vendor truthfully states that there is no FDA approval for the product, and the loon who thinks that makes laetrile even more likely to be efficacious wants to risk his cancer-ridden ass on it, that is and should be the loon's choice.

But we live in a society that subsidizes tobacco while requiring warnings that the stuff will kill you. Expecting logical consistency from a governmental agency runs contrary to experience.

That's so true, and utterly crazy. Our tax dollars go to tobacco growers while at the same time we spend god knows how much trying to prevent folks from smoking.

Show me someone supporting programs focused on market-based solutions to social and economic problems, and I'll show you an enemy of civilization.

That's just nuts. You know what liberated me, far more than any NOW marches? Maytag, Hoover vacuums, ready-to-wear perma-press clothing, contraceptive technology, industrially canned food products & etc. Do you have ANY idea how much time a woman had to spend even 150 years ago running a household that included, say, 5 kids? She had to take each carpet out to the clothesline and beat it mercilessly, might have had to go to the river to scrub the clothes, then hang them up, often had to sew clothes and/or mend them until they were rags, and spend hours tilling a garden and then canning whatever grew. No microwaves, and unless one was wealthy, no option for ordering take-out/delivery dinner at Pizza Hut. It goes on and on like that.

That woman was not going to also earn a degree. No time for it.

Get a clue.

But we know that these things don't work, Mona (by assumption above). We know that people will get hurt if they use/rely on them. Then what? Would you ban tort claims too?

If the proper releases are executed, then the seller should be immune from liability. But in any event, what you and I agree does not work, is insufficient reason for telling our religious and/or politically misguided neighbor that they MAY NOT choose laetrile [or fill in the blank]. It ain't our bodies Arne, and so not our choice.

I mean, are you going to compel a competent adult to accept the chemo that every doctor says is reasonably likely to work, but which the adult refuses? If not, why disallow their choice for laetrile?

And all of this wonderful market-based spiffiness in the service of women has produced -- wait for it -- Elizabeth Dole, Nancy Reagan, and Ann Coulter.

As well as Nancy Pelosi, and literally millions of other professional women who also had families, including me.

Relax, Mona, we're talking about two different things, as you very well fucking know. Then again, maybe you don't. Perhaps Paul Rosenberg will explain it to you. I haven't the patience.

I can only await with baited breath. My great-grandmothers had virtually none of the options I have had, and there is a reason for that beyond feminist politics -- they were working their fingers to the bone maintaining a household. It is not an accident that I am the first women on either side of the family to earn an advanced degree.