The WSJ is a strange beast. Its news reporting is well respected, especially in the financial domain. Its opinion pages are the worst partisan hogwash.<p>This article was written by the right-wing think tank The Competitive Enterprise Institute. It has nothing to do with doctors, and everything to do with pharmaceutical companies wanting to sell products that they have not proven to be effective for some conditions.<p>It's literal snake-oil. If a pharma company has a product for lubricating your snakes, doctors can prescribe it for cancer, deafness, and a bad case of lovin' you. Pharma company product reps aren't allowed to tell doctors to do that, but it's not like the FDA has a hotline for reporting misbehaving pharma reps.<p>In the worst cases, people who need the drug can't lay their hands on it, because it's being mostly prescribed off-label. That's the core of the story here: there's a diabetes drug that diabetics can't get because it's all going to people off-label for weight loss. Often, just cosmetic weight loss.<p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/people-diabetes-struggle-find-ozempic-soars-popularity-weight-loss-aid-rcna64916" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/people-diabetes-s...</a><p>I don't want to let the FDA off the hook here. The approval process is maddening. They make a lot of bad choices, driven by a combination of political pressure, public pressure, and a haphazard bureacracy. It's slow, inconsistent, and frequently just plain wrong.<p>But you don't fix that with pearl-clutching from the same industry that brought you Oxycontin. They have absolutely no interest in "freedom for doctors", and they'd cheerfully constrain doctors if they thought it would sell more drugs.