Doctors and pharmeceutical companies for the past several years have profited from a popular diet-pill regimen. Now it will be lawyers. But even as the lawsuits are filed and courtroom expressions of outrage are rehearsed, the pill-popping public is stuck with a larger question of what it had gotten itself into for the hope of thinner thighs.

Certainly studies linking the drugs, known as phen-fen, to heart problems also points up the congressional mischief of the last decade that made the Food and Drug Administration a regular target of budget and mission restrictions. Anti-government members of Congress charged the FDA, which oversees the safety of these drugs, with dragging out safety studies, questioning pharmaceutical company claims and generally being a dark cloud in the sunny business of chemical ingestion. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said the FDA was “the biggest job killer in America.”

Continued testing of the diet-drug combination of fenfluramine and the amphetamine-like phentermine and their use by 18 million Americans last year alone have turned up evidence to suggest that some users will experience leaky heart valves or, more rarely, pulmonary hypertension. These disturbing findings make the FDA’s caution look extremely well-placed, as was its plea last week that the drugs be taken from the shelves. In a very short while some of the guilty parties (Congress excluded) will be paying out large settlements.

No matter how the legal questions are answered, however, the fact that drugs originally prescribed for extreme cases of obsesity became a fad should cause public soul-searching. Not that the extreme desire to lose weight was a surprise, given a culture concerned with looking skinny — or skinny with a heroin hangover or skinny yet with muscles, depending on the product being sold — but that so many people so blithely gave over their bodies to these serious drugs with the idea of dropping a few pounds. There is a difference in degree between the general run of stomach fillers or devices that promise to make your rump as hard as steel and taking pills to persuade your brain into thinking you are not hungry.

Given the popularity of fen-phen and the numerous over-the-counter diet pills, the next weight-loss drug concoction will make someone a fortune. The question is what it will cost an eager public.