EDITORIAL - GMA signs into law RA 9711

President Arroyo signed into law last Tuesday the Food and Drugs Administration Act of 2009 or Republic Act 9711. The new law not only renamed the Bureau of Food and Drugs into the Food and Drugs Administration, it also gave the agency more regulatory muscle.

On the surface this is good. Or it may even be better, coming as it did on the heels of the Cheaper Medicines Law which the president also signed only a few days earlier. In effect, RA 9711 complements the law regulating the prices of medicine.

But as with any other law, its real merit will not be known until after implementation. For it is in implementation that a measure rises or falls. A good law improperly implemented is better off dead.

As the say, the road to hell is often paved with the best of intentions. Thus it has to be conceded that all our laws have been conceived with nothing but public interest in mind. But why are we still in this rut? Because their implementation has for the most part been hijacked.

In a corrupt country like the Philippines, implementors of the law are almost always getting greased. Laws, being essentially regulatory and restrictive, never cease to be a burden or at least an inconvenience.

Such an inconvenience, on the other hand, necessarily goes against the grain of every human, who is essentially free-spirited. In the ensuing clash, the path of least resistance is often that which bends the law a little to afford some means of a shortcut.

It is a situation like this that makes us naturally pessimistic about new laws despite the obvious promise they bring with them at creation. In the absence of much to the contrary, the natural expectation is for the new law to be hijacked along the way.

Is it any surprise therefore that an energy regulating body would sound like an energy producing company? Or that a food and drugs regulatory agency may give the impression it is taking up the cudgels for the industries it is supposed to regulate?