Olsen's thread today about big pharma's concealment of negative results and intimidation of physicians and scientists who fail to tow the drug company party line makes me wonder if the old drugs out there, approved 40+ years ago, might be better choices for us because the research/trial/approval system may not have been as corrupt back then as it seems to be now.

Anyone have any knowledge of how the drug approval process has changed since then, and do you think it is better now or was it better then? (By "better", I mean safer for patients, all results good and bad equally considered and weighed, and little to no pressure on the scientists/docs involved in the process).