이화여자대학교 법학전문대학원

6기 박유미 (You Mi Park)

Advertising that passes false information as common sense instills a wrongful attitude towards diet supplementary products that actually provides no benefit. Economic deadweights are generated by persistence belief in useless products, and the law has an imperative to disincentivize the false advertising practices. But more important than consumer protection, the practice of false advertising of health products should be regulated for their impact on the general health of the populace.

There is also an unseen harm in chemical consumption, because human liver necessarily performs oxidizing detoxification on the otherwise harmless chemicals that result in urine containing environmental pollutants Much as microplastics litter the ocean, metabolic human waste has been shown to persist under intense conditions of the ocean and sunlight exposure. Past experience provides a guide for what to expect, and any time a new variable is introduced to the environment, the adjustment period demands negative consequences on part of the introducer: namely, us humans. Law has famously stayed blind to the rapid rise in science and technology, because it is more concerned with individual claims to healthcare or intellectual property rights, but seldom to a systematic failure to account for the general decline in the environment, and thus, the general decline in a population’s health.

The current Korean medical regulation is a dismal one, with rampant reuse of old equipment that routinely threaten the health of the vulnerable, the sick, and the poor. Systematic improvements in the outreaching jurisdiction of the environmental protection agencies must be coupled with a corresponding legislation that requires stricter scientific control, validation, and proof of burden squarely on the firms responsible. Surely, these advances in the legal system need not be mentioned at all, if the country were to improve its sense of morality in the government.

References

Barnes, David K: “Accumulation and fragmentation of plastic debris in global environments”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 364, pp. 1985–1998, 2002

Schnackenberg LK, Beger RD: Monitoring the health to disease continuum with global metabolic profiling and systems biology. Pharmacogenomics. 2006, 7: 1077-1086. 10.2217/14622416.7.7.1077.