Sarah DeFelice
November 10, 2009
The Health Effects of Mandatory Prescriptions Summary
In this article Peltzman attempts to investigate the health benefits of prescription medication. He decides to use mortality statistics to represent the health benefits of mandatory prescriptions, collecting his data from the United States as well as twenty-two other countries. His analyses of domestic and international regressions lead him to conclude that prescription requirements do not have beneficial effects on the consumer.
The first FDA mandate towards improving the safety of medicinal drugs was in 1938 with the intention of improving consumer information about the drugs that they were taking; including a thorough description of warnings and adequate directions for proper usage. By 1941 the FDA had a complete list of drugs that could only be sold with doctor’s prescriptions. The history of compulsory prescriptions is important to Peltzman’s study because he uses time series to organize most…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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