[bitL]

Your points are valid, people are irresponsible with antibiotics, however consider that e.g. 1 hour drive to emergency would cost you an arm, literally, whereas quickly eating 5 pills of wide-spectrum antibiotics would keep the infection at bay and give you time to drive to ER without any adversarial effects on your future life. What would be your choice?

[majewsky]

The dichotomy is wrong. If you allow people to have antibiotics at home, enough of them are gonna chew them like vitamins to spread antibiotics resistance even faster. Then when you have your emergency, sure you can eat your pills, but it's not gonna do shit.

The only remotely viable solution is improving access to ERs.

[SkyBelow]

What about an alternative where any usages have to be reported and measured and incorrect usage has an increasing penalty. It starts small and only ramps up with repeated abuse.

If you don't consent to the rules, that is fine, you aren't allowed the drugs at home (same as today).

[spookthesunset]

That is impossible to enforce.

Like the parent said, lots of people will pop those things like candy. In very short order they won’t work at all.

[dragonwriter]

> The only remotely viable solution is improving access to ERs.

Telemedicine plus improving 24-hour pharmacy distribution and equipping them for rapid door-to-door delivery of critical meds (possibly by drone) might work, and might soon be more viable than ERs for the particular use case.

ER access addresses a lot more problems and probably wins aggregate cost/benefit analysis for the foreseeable future.

[PhasmaFelis]

If that was allowed, it might save hundreds in the short term and doom millions in the long term.

Of course I'd do whatever it took to save myself or my loved ones. Anyone would. That's not a good basis for government policy.

(Also, being honest, the number of situations where powerful antibiotics now vs. at the hospital would make a difference and the people involve realize that and administer them has got to be tiny. We can't make policy based on low-probability hypotheticals.)

[dragonwriter]

> If that was allowed, it might save hundreds in the short term and doom millions in the long term.

It might save hundreds and but also kill thousands in the short-term, too: powerful broad spectrum antibiotics aren't without adverse effects, perhaps especially if taken in a genuine emergency that just isn't the kind of emergency the user thinks it is.

[flr03]

My choice would be to take the antibiotics. And that's all the problem. Because maybe I wouldn't need them, because well, you don't lose an arm from infection everyday. And I'd like to say that all the people who would have access to antibiotics would be better than me at knowing when to take or not to take them, but I guess not.