New drugs appear with bewildering frequency; combine that with the official instinct to clamp down without waiting to see how harmful a substance truly is, and high-quality evidence is often hard to come by.
A couple of years ago, when Mr Mandela's long-standing health problems suddenly became a more urgent concern, the official instinct was to clam up, say nothing, and on occasion even mislead the crowds waiting outside hospital.
Hong Kong's way has by no means been synonymous with perfect competition.Yet as state intervention grew elsewhere, especially after the second world war, Hong Kong remained free of controls on prices, wages and imports, of regulation of business and employment and, in Friedman's words, of officials' instinct "to spend other people's money and meddle in other people's affairs".
Firing Bruce Pearl on Monday was, of course, inevitable, totally expected and showed some self-awareness because Tennessee officials' first instinct was probably to can him on his way off the court Friday after losing to Michigan by 30.
Changes in both are vital if China's new "human-centred" urbanisation is to succeed and officials' rapacious instinct to grab land is to be tamed.Local governments' lack of money to cover their spending needs is a problem of the Communist Party's own making.
Tucked away in a Korean press release alongside the likes of the long ago announced Samsung Behold, Memoir, and Omnia HD was one little gem we'd yet to have seen in any official light: the Instinct S30.
It is in Bulgaria that, contrary to its bureaucratic instincts, official Europe has sided with the protesters and not with the elites.
"I think that's true," a baseball official said, speaking from instinct rather than inside information.
Just as his outburst was sinking in, Mr. Pandiya reverted to the fatalism many in India see as the reverse side of official malaise -- an instinct to accept whatever adversity providence throws up: earthquakes, cyclones, floods, droughts, catastrophic train crashes that claim victims not by the dozens but by the hundreds, a veritable biblical toll that has been India's lot down the ages.
Presumably your Korean is as rusty as mine, so apologies in advance for not taking too much away from Samsung's official reveal of the Instinct Mini, more accurately known as the S30.
He was also, of course, juggling his official duties and his instincts as a politician.
