Subject: (Editorial) -- Asides:  FDA Under Siege
Date: Published: 10/12/88 26 lines
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial) -- Asides:  
    FDA Under Siege

    Advocates for AIDS patients seem to have decided that the
 only way they are going to get the FDA to change its
 drug-approval procedures permanently is by laying siege to
 the agency.  Yesterday they blocked entrances to the FDA's
 admittedly fortresslike building outside Washington.  The
 demonstrators railed against Commissioner Frank Young and
 Ronald Reagan.  If they ever got inside the most hidebound
 agency in the federal government, they might discover that
 their real problem is career bureaucrats, supported by
 powerful Members of Congress, who prefer the drug-approval
 status quo.  Victims of cancer, Alzheimer's and other diseases
 have all vainly sought the same relief from the bureaucrats
 who watch administrations come and go from inside the FDA
 fortress.

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