Strategies of Influence: How Corporate Power Directs and Constrains the FDA

Abstract

This paper is about the Food and Drug Administration, and the tactics that regulated – and sometimes unregulated – industries use to influence that agency’s decision-making process. Many of these tactics are legal; others are illegal, but difficult to recognize and police. In virtually every case, the purpose of these tactics is to undermine the neutral and detached scientific processes to which the FDA aspires, in order to advance the financial interests of regulated industries. While some of the details recounted herein are gravely disturbing, even outrageous, the purpose of this paper is not to moralize, but to identify these tactics and assess them in a neutral fashion, in order that they may offer some lesson about the systemic structures that created them