"To respond to grieving father by framing it in terms of blame does no one any good. Let his op ed, like his son, rest in peace." --Sandra M

While I certainly agree that civility and sensitivity are commendible, as a surgeon and an avid Scuba diver, I could not disagree more with Sandra M's comments. I assume that her comment was well meant, but this attitude - very common in our culture - is dangerous and costs lives.

The surgical staff of any hospital meets on a regular basis to review unanticipated complication and deaths. When I get my monthly dive magazine, the first feature I read is "Lesson for Life", where (often fatal) Scuba diving accidents are analyzed in minute detail. And the title of that feature says it all - obsessive inquiry will undoubtedly lead to preventing similar future tragedies. The dead feel no pain or shame, but they can teach, and their stories often save lives.

This process shouldn't only be about "the blame game" or litigation. It should be about making as many people as possible aware of things that are second nature to an experienced outdoorsman. Sure, the occasional person might be saved by herculean and probably impractical efforts to gate every backwoods road and make credit card information instantly available, but many more people will be saved by reading about this tragedy and realizing what the real problem was.

The real problem was that an inexperienced man made poor decisions and put his family directly in harm's way, along with a number of volunteer rescue workers. This is not meant as a critique of his overall life, his character or his intelligence. He could have been any one of us in circumstances out of our areas of expertise.

The most important take home message is simple. While it is commendable that James Kim was prepared to sacrifice his life to try to fix the damage that was already done, it would have been far better if he had read about one of the many similar tragedies that preceded his, and learned something from it. Maybe this conversation will save one of us someday.

Let's put it another way: if you were ill, would you go to your Uncle Murray and ask him what drugs you should take for your condition? And a uneducated and uninformed decision just might kill you.

Yup, that's the point - just like with cave diving, hang gliding and NASCAR - bad decisions can be deadly.

Glenn is right. Uncle Murry can give you legal advice, and you can follow it and go to jail, and your kids can end up homeless ... that's not against the law, and people do it all the time.

I know all too well that the point about antibiotics is absolutely true. That's why Glenn was careful to exclude them from his proposal. As far as people selling the drugs they get on the street, there wouldn't be a market for them if you could get them without a prescription.

One final point - we already have the option of acting against medical advice, people do it all the time. Many people end up sick or dead, because they weren't compliant with their insulin, heart medicine, anti-schizophrenic drugs or antibiotics. If your argument is that society has an interest in making competent adults follow a doctor's advice against their will, why not criminalize illegal drug avoidance as well as illegal drug usage? There are plenty of unmedicated psychotics, or people with active tuberculosis, who pose a real threat to society (although to be completely accurate, there are some limited legal remedies in such cases).

Comparing alcohol to prescription drugs is a fallacy in logic. You can't simply draw one-to-one comparisons. It's no different that comparing alcohol to PCP, or a bow and arrow to a rocket propelled grenade. Yes, they both have affects that could be roughly classified as similar, but one has significantly more powerful and dangerous affects that the other.

Yes, this is absolutely correct. Alcohol is far more dangerous than most prescription drugs. Half of all traffic fatalities have alcohol as a contributing factor (about 25,000 per year in the US). The rates of assault, rape, gunshot wounds, and the whole depressing range of trauma are dramatically increased when you add alcohol to the mix. Also, in addition to chronic toxicity (liver failure, etc..), you can sit down with a bottle of vodka and kill yourself in one evening (not possible to do that with most prescription drugs, or with marijuana).

If alcohol were a new drug being introduced today, I think that it would probably be schedule I. And while many many people can use it responsibly, a significant number of people can't.