Letters to the Editor
GlennGreenwald
Published Letters: 2221 Editor's Choice: 18
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Generally:
[Read the article: What is the rationale behind the prescription drug laws?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's no equivalent in law for the role of prescription drugs in medicine - substances that can save or ruin lives depending on whether they're used appropriately.
I'm going to add an update addressing many of these comments in a bit, but for now, I want to address this specific one.
You don't think a client's poor decisions in a legal proceeding can "save or ruin lives"? Go tell that to many people who are sitting in prison because of their refusal to take their lawyer's advice and insisting on plainly making stupid choices, or people who are bankrupt for the same reason. But that's a price we consider worthwhile in order to enable people to have control over their own destinies, rather than forcing them to submit to the lawyer's decisions because The Lawyer Knows Best (even though, given his expertise, the lawyer usually does).
Also: if someone has cancer and there is a treatment that can save their lives, they have the right not to take that treatment, preferring to die rather than undergo the treatment. That includes medicine. Do you think we should send the police to wherever they are and force them to undergo that treatment? For those of you who want to prevent people from taking medicines on the ground that doing so will harm them, shouldn't you also favor forced treatment under those circumstances?
This is what I find so odd: I'd be willing to bet that most people here supported the decision to remove Terry Schiavo's feeding tube -- on the ground that it was what she wanted and her decision about her bodily integrity and life ought to be respected, not overriden by people who thought they knew better, even though those people claimed they wanted to "protect" her from what they thought wer her stupid choices.
And yet many of the same people are arguing exactly what those who wanted to force the feeding tube into Terry Schiavo believe -- namely, that it doesn't matter what adults decide for themselves about their own bodies and lives. They need to be protected from the stupid, harmful decisions they make for themselves by those who know better.
A person's autonomy and right to be left alone are very significant values, and they shouldn't be tossed aside with such ease. Those who support the Bush administration's infringements of those rights do so by shrieking about the Terrible Dangers of Terrorism ("How can you oppose these things -- what do all these "privacy" and "rule of law" ideas matter -- when the Terrorist might blow people up"?)
I hear some similar things from some (though not all) of those here arguing that individuals should be prevented from taking the drugs they want to take - much shrieking about the Terrible Dangers of Controlled Substances and all the bad things they cause ("How can you oppose the criminalization of these drugs when these drugs are addictive and can harm people who take them"?)
There are all sorts of legal activities FAR more harmful than most of these drugs -- people who shove themselves full of unhealthy foods and live a sedentary life and are therefore obese, or people who drink themselves to sleep every night, or who smoke cigarettes every day, or people who risk their lives purely for recreation and thrill. We don't stop people from doing any of those things because part of life is being able to make choices for yourself that other people think are dumb, and that might even be dumb, even fatally dumb.
And we ought to be particularly reluctant to taking away people's freedoms to decide how they want to treat their own physical and mental problems. It's easy to casually disregard abstract notions of liberty and autonomy by playing on the Emotions of all the Horrible Things that will happen if people are free to do what they want, but restricting or eliminating those freedoms have serious costs, too.
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Kovie/LMW
[Read the article: What is the rationale behind the prescription drug laws?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kovie -
Very complex topic, clearly
LMW - When the authoritarians are defeated . . ."
I probably made a mistake in posting this because -- as Kovie says -- it is a very complex topic, inspires strong views (it certainly does for me), and I knew my particular view would provoke overwhelming objections, including from people with whom I am otherwise generally in agreement. The mistake lay in the fact that in order for this to be a constructive discussion, I would need to be able to devote a lot of time to participating in the discussion and defending my position -- yet a lack of time today is precisely why I posted this in the first place.
I thought that just by throwing up the already-existing issue from the comment section, it would prompt some interesting and off-topic issues to think about in lieu of a real post that I didn't have time to write. But because I haven't really been able to address adequately a lot of the better arguments (and have been a little more dismissive of some of the responses than I ordinarily like to be), I'm not sure any of this was actually constructive. Those who began thinking my argument was insane probably still do, and the few like-minded souls who agreed probably still do.
I do think there are important principles at stake here. And the reality is that the War on Drugs (which includes prescription drug laws) has done more than anything other than the War on Terrorism to erode the constitutional liberties we talk about here frequently.
But as LMW suggested, this is more of a luxury item to think about once the rule of law and and basic sanity are restored to our country -- particularly since the work required to get people to really think about these issues is immense, and there are more important issues requiring one's attention and energies.