Unfortunately, drug companies are businesses, and so won't go spending money on stuff they don't need to do to get their product to market.
Therefore it wasn't a failing of science, more a failing of the framework surrounding the testing necessary for commercial pharmaceuticals.
Interesting points dr - thank you for most eruditely illustrating my point which is that science is, at best, an entirely incomplete belief system. You have illustrated concisely that science is incapable of self regulation, careless in its impacts on others and, without an imposed framework within in which it is forced to operate, extremely damaging.
Were it not so, science would not have allowed its products to be used without rigorous research and highly qualified application. Neither were in fact the case. If it was "mis prescribed" then either one accepts that doctors (as scientists) acted poorly or one accepts that medicine is not science.
My view is that any belief system requires three dimensions
Ethical (or religious if you will)
Permissive (or legal if you like)
Capability (or scientific if you prefer) and
These cover
"Should I ?"
A moral or philosophical dimension on whether it is acceptable to even consider certain research. The Nazi "scientific" experiments in concentration camps are an example of where the answer to "should I" is "NO". This is the ethical dimensionof belief.
"May I?"
Whilst it is ethically acceptable to do certain things, who may do them or how they do them must be regulated. The research of the drug industry (in which I worked for many years) has proved itself incapable of deciding for itself where acceptable risks lie in both research and patient care. Therefore a regulatory framework MUST be imposed upon it to ensure that there is no marketing (or indeed prescribing) of dangerous drugs.
"Can I"
A scientific approach concerns itself with logic and capability. Even if something is both both ethically sound and legally permissable it may be logically or practically impossible - this is for science to determine.
Sadly science generally concerns itself with determining what is practically possible and believes it should not be confined by either moral or legal frameworks. The notion of unfettered "pure research" is clearly preposterous to all but scientists. Self proclaimed "scientists" have claimed the scientific merits of horrific vivisection (for such spurious needs as cosmetics onwards), human experimentation (from the "scientific" experiments conducted on serving service personnel to POWs and internees including the onset of hypothermia to cranial trauma inflicted by rpeated blows).
In my view any rounded and considered system of belief must consider moral, regulatory and scientific dimensions. Religion without science is the tooth fairy. Science without regulation is lives destroyed. Science without ethics is weapons of mass destruction.
All should be balanced and tempered by one another. I am equally horrified by the stake burnings of religion as I am by science that deliberately designs weapons to kill as many people as possible. Both are filled with their own righteousness and both need to be restrained from their excesses by a legal framework within which they are forced to operate - whether they wish to, or not, since they have proved themselves unable to operate without such rules and of being stunningly arrogant in their inability to acknowledge their own failings.
Red