[philwelch]

Gatekeeping is one of the central aspects of modern medicine. Maybe a hundred years ago, when we had a free country and you could buy heroin over the counter, there was nobody gatekeeping what you did to your own body. But now we’ve corrected a pretty long way in the other direction.

In principle I think consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies, but consent needs to be informed and the person needs to be mentally capable of consent. You need some degree of gatekeeping just to reach that bar. And this is going to be an even bigger concern with children.

[landemva]

> heroin over the counter, there was nobody gatekeeping

I wasn't there, though I have learned that generally the local pharmacy would do the gate-keeping. Now the local pharmacy does what the computer says to do based on whatever regulations were input by the back office.

[tomnipotent]

The local pharmacy at that time didn't look anything like its current counterpart. Let's not forget that the 1920s was the start of the "Soda Fountain Pharmacy" thanks to prohibition, so I wouldn't put much stock into the quality of professional pharmacology at the time. It would be decades before regulation caught up.

[nitwit005]

The local pharmacists, unfortunately, used to be perfectly happy to make addicts of people.

There was a huge decline in morphine addiction simply by requiring that products containing morphine be labeled as such.

[red-iron-pine]

The local pharmacy has very, very strong financial incentives to sell you morphine all the time -- just not enough to kill you.

I don't know why you'd trust them any more than a drug dealer, and historical anecdotes about opium addicts suggest it's a valid comparison.