FDA needs to review its policies on placebos and either outlaw "active placebos" or rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use.
That seems like a profoundly ignorant argument. The article doesn't account for the need to blind studies. Why does it come across as credible to you?
You should have chosen a different line to illustrate how shady the author thinks active placebos are.
This preserves all of what you can currently get, but it frames the issue so that the average individual does not assume that an on-par comparison means all side effects are placebo effect.
The idea behind this statement is similar: if the FDA actually pre-commits to a policy saying "either we're going to figure out a huge set of requirements for publishing placebo composition data [huge hassle for us, honestly] or, if we haven't done that by January 2015, no more active placebos"--well, suddenly the drug companies are breathing down the FDA's neck to get those requirements drafted so they can comply with them before it's too late.
But these are accusations made by a man who admits he had never heard of active placebos until a few days ago. He's reading reports that are summaries of the trials and apparently concluding that since the summary doesn't include the ingredients of the placebo then they're undocumented and not regulated by the FDA. How does he know that?
FDA needs to review its policies on placebos and either outlaw "active placebos" or rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use.
That's like saying "The US Govt either needs to outlaw medicines OR rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use." Which is not a statement most reasonable people would disagree with… hence the FDA. Everybody would obviously choose the second measure. It's a classic persuasion technique: give an extreme choice so the other choice will seem more reasonable. It gets attention. Nobody is going to outlaw active placebos.
As for overtly implying drug companies manipulate their results, he had a small handful of examples and one of them is a counter example where the drug company looks to be undermining its own results by using a too-good placebo (olive oil) that made its drug look useless.
Finally he raises the question: If you kick people out of the study when they improve on placebo, are you still actually testing against placebo?
How can you know, if the trials don't document what's in the placebo, and the FDA doesn't regulate it?