Thursday is normally the day for our longer and meatier posts. However, the crush of business at the moment really is a crush. So we’re putting up something today that, frankly, doesn’t require as much work. Yesterday we provided our opinions about the latest First Amendment briefing in the Caronia off-label promotion case. We remarked that we were gratified that the industry itself – instead of just interest groups (kudos to the Washington Legal Foundation for engaging in a fairly lonely battle on this issue for years), criminal defendants, and miscellaneous bloggers like us – appeared to be getting into the game.

Our desire to see more First Amendment challenges to the FDA’s suppression of truthful commercial speech in this area is tempered by a countervailing concern not to see any newcomers screw up the law. Large companies with correspondingly large cases and large legal budgets, we don’t worry about much, but many FDA regulated entities whose free speech rights are being chilled by the threat of FDA enforcement aren’t so big.