Letters to the Editor
GlennGreenwald
Published Letters: 2095 Editor's Choice: 18
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Redhatmandan:
[Read the article: What is the rationale behind the prescription drug laws?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I haven't read some of the other comments yet, but this is why I believe there is a vast difference between the lawyer example and the doctor example. In the case of a lawyer advising his client not to pursue a legal course of action that ends up being detrimental to himself and his case, that detriment is his own. Who, outside of the client suffers for it? Most often the case is that no one but the client will suffer.
Clients who make terrible decisions and lose their life savings, or their ability to be compensated for things they have lost, or their personal liberty by being sent to jail, often have families who are harmed terribly by their bad choices.
In the case of drugs, if someone abuses a drug, he will most likely lose control of his mind and go off and do really terrible things to himself, but most importantly to OTHERS. This is where the difference lies.
Like alcohol?
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Gonnabechef:
[Read the article: What is the rationale behind the prescription drug laws?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe it would be better if restaurant health inspections resulted only in posted warnings, which consumers could feel free to ignore. And product safety could be a voluntary thing, too -- people should be able to make informed choices about whether their kids' cheap pajamas can easily catch fire or not.
That "reasoning" works both ways. I could just as easily say to people who favor prescription drug laws the converse of what you said:
Maybe it would be better if we criminalized everything that could harm people - alcohol and cigarettes and junk food and a sedentary lifestyle and risky sport, and shut down restaurants which served food that causes strokes and heart attacks, and made exercise mandatory, etc. etc.
Each case is different. I think there is a particular injustice in preventing people from deciding for themselves what medication they want, or forcing them to run around begging doctors to give permission. That does not mean that I am against all regulations, any more than those who favor presecription drugs laws are in favor of a full-blown nanny state.
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Rex Luscas:
[Read the article: What is the rationale behind the prescription drug laws?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Antibiotic resistance
Can you imagine the superbugs we'd have after a few years' of people buying their own penicillin (which is quite cheap) every time they have the sniffles? And it wouldn't even help them.
I excluded antibiotics from the argument for exactly this reason. There are good reasons to restrict antibiotic use.
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erithtotl:
[Read the article: What is the rationale behind the prescription drug laws?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To counter my argument that a self-medicated bus driver who makes a poorly informed decision on drug interaction (who has the potential to kill or injure dozens if not hundreds of people) is equivelent to someone who gets lung cancer from smoking is a pretty poor comparison.
Actually, that isn't how the argument went at all, but leave that aside.
So your concern is an intoxicated bus driver -- how about the drunk bus driver? Does that bother you? Or bus drivers who consume too much of the drugs they obtain through prescription?
Pilots can't drink when flying. That doesn't mean we ban alcohol.
Again, I respect this blog a lot for the careful, structured and thorough reasoning of Glenn on political issues. But this post has none of those qualities, and it's disappointing. If you want to really make a good case for removing drug regulation, I would suggest being a lot more careful and well reasoned about the benefits and consequences.
Declaring your own argument to be so clear and compelling that you don't need to defend it, and then asserting without explanation that an argument lacks rationale and analysis or that you're "disappointed" by it, is not itself an argument.