(June 4, 2025)
The Louisiana state Senate today has one last chance to stop what is surely the single worst bill of this entire legislative session and, frankly, one of the worst bills I have ever seen.
If signed into law, Senate Bill 19 would allow the dangerous drug ivermectin, designed to de-worm livestock, to be sold over the counter for human use without a prescription.
Words fail.
There is nothing remotely conservative, much less wise, about the bill. Indeed, it is a monstrosity. Doctors say ivermectin could cause lots of deaths if widely and wrongly used. The House passed the bill 67-26 despite risks so obvious that lawmakers felt the need to legally indemnify pharmacists who dispense it. The bill earlier had passed the Senate 28-8, but now must go back to the Senate because the House adopted a minor amendment specifying that the over-the-counter availability must depend on a general order from someone “with prescriptive authority in the Louisiana Department of Health.” In other words, what this really does is give the state surgeon general the authority.
The Senate should take this second chance and stop the madness.
Ivermectin first gained widespread attention when some people claimed it could help cure COVID-19. No formal medical trials ever confirmed this theory. Meanwhile, conservatives nationwide complained loudly about state health officials issuing edicts related to the pandemic. One major complaint was that no single, appointed official should make statewide health policy that would override how family doctors wanted to treat their individual patients, based on the unique symptoms of those patients.
Yet now the overwhelmingly conservative Louisiana House wants to give a single, appointed official the authority to tell patients to bypass their doctors and buy a dangerous drug to treat their own ailments, heedless of the potential side effects. How does this make sense?…. [The fuill column is at this link.]
