New Drug Safety Office Needed, Grassley Says
The Food and Drug Administration needs an independent drug safety office with the power to order warning labels on dangerous medicines and suspend television ads while potential side effects are under investigation, a top Senate Republican said yesterday.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he was preparing legislation to establish such an office in response to controversies surrounding Merck & Co.'s withdrawn Vioxx arthritis pill and other drugs.
 
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"We need reforms, both administrative and legislative, to bring greater responsiveness and transparency to the FDA," Grassley said in a speech to a Consumer Federation of America conference.
The new drug safety office would have an independent director and the regulatory authority to require label changes, the senator said.
Grassley and other lawmakers are probing the FDA's monitoring of side effects, which came into question after two agency scientists said their warnings about drug dangers were ignored or suppressed.
Intelligence Panel To Discuss Detainees
The Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said yesterday that he sees no need to launch an independent investigation into the CIA's practices of turning suspected terrorists over to other countries for interrogation. But the seven Democrats on the committee are using Senate rules to force the committee to discuss the issue next week.
"Some have called for a congressional investigation into these allegations," said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the committee's chairman, according to the text of the speech from his office. "My response is that Congress created the CIA's Office of Inspector General and the Department of Justice to conduct these types of investigations in the first place. Let's allow them to do their work." If the committee finds any shortcomings in the IG's work, "only then . . . would there be any cause for us to conduct our own inquiry."
The office of Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) announced yesterday that he had sent a letter to Roberts, signed by the seven Democratic committee members, calling for a meeting next week "to authorize an investigation into the collection of intelligence using detention, interrogation and rendition." Under Senate rules, Roberts is now required to allow the topic to be discussed at a business meeting, which would be held behind closed doors.
Roberts, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said the committee "is well aware of what the CIA is doing overseas in the defense of our nation, and they are not torturing detainees."
For the Record
• Assistant Attorney General Thomas Sansonetti is resigning after more than three years as head of the Justice Department's environment and natural resources division. Sansonetti, 55, will depart on April 8, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said in a statement. Gonzales said Sansonetti, who served as solicitor for the Interior Department from 1990 to 1993, "vigorously enforced our nation's environmental laws during his tenure."
• Two senators, a Republican and a Democrat, said they will seek to more than double the Bush administration's proposed contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria next year. Sens. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) want the United States to give $800 million to the Global Fund in fiscal year 2006, not the $300 million the administration proposes. Since late 2002, the fund has provided $3.1 billion to 313 programs in 127 countries.
-- Compiled from reports by
staff writers David Brown and Dana Priest and news services
