[vikramkr]

You don't have a right to buy stuff that works or that you can trust, the point is that for noncontrolled nonpatented substances, nobody can stop you from buying or synthesizing active ingredients for your own use in the US, even if logically you shouldn't be trusted to have the competence to not hurt yourself, or if frankly there should be way way more regulation.

You keep bringing up antibiotics but it's the category of drugs with the most widespread use (animal agriculture) with one of the strongest cases for being drastically under-regulated - they stop working if things become resistent to them and we spray them everywhere like candy. Also you keep acting as if getting a prescription is some sort of actual barrier or burden for non-prescription drugs, which is particularly funny after the whole fiasco with wegovy off label prescriptions before the active ingredient was approved for obesity/launched for obesity. These are not real barriers, even when they probably should be.

[pdonis]

> it's the category of drugs with the most widespread use (animal agriculture) with one of the strongest cases for being drastically under-regulated

To call this area "under-regulated" is not accurate: the whole food production chain in the US, with all of its dysfunctionality, is a product of decades of regulation and government interference and mismanagement. The best way to stop antibiotic use with animals is for people to stop eating meat and other products from those animals, and if anything is going to facilitate that, it's going to be the market, which is already providing plenty of products in grocery stores that are from animals raised with no antibiotics, and will provide more the more people choose to buy them, as I do.

[pdonis]

> You don't have a right to buy stuff that works or that you can trust

We're not talking about rights here. You claimed, and I quote, "You can buy whatever you want unless the DEA has an issue with it." I am simply pointing out that that is not true. Whether it should be true as a matter of right is irrelevant to that factual question.

> you keep acting as if getting a prescription is some sort of actual barrier or burden for non-prescription drugs

Um, no, I said no such thing. Obviously having to get a prescription is not a barrier or burden for non prescription drugs. But, as you yourself have pointed out, a huge number of those non-prescription drugs, for which there is no barrier or burden, don't work. And, as you have also pointed out, routing around things like prescriptions to get, for example, antibiotics means you can't trust the product. So there are barriers and burdens in the way of getting things that do work and can be trusted. Which was my point, and which contradicts your original claim that I responded to.

The question of whether there should be all these barriers and burdens in the way of buying things that work and can be trusted is a separate question. Your argument for why there should appears to be that without such barriers more harm would be done. Of course there will always be people who make stupid choices, and giving people more freedom by removing barriers and burdens will increase that. But you are not recognizing the other side of the barriers and burdens, which is that they prevent people from making good choices, choices that could save their lives. For example, look up the harm done in preventable deaths by the FDA's slowness in permitting beta blockers.

The post you responded to that advocated a libertarian approach was saying, in effect, that, on net, the harm done by regulation is greater than the harm done by individual people making bad choices in the absence of regulation. I happen to agree. You apparently do not. But I do not see that you have given any reason to believe that the opposite is true. I certainly don't see anything in what you've posted that makes the opposite claim the slam dunk that you appear to think it is.

[vikramkr]

When i said buy whatever you want, i was referring to the ingredient in the drug, which you can buy or make with no issues.

And when i say the prescription not being a barrier, i'm not talking about not needing a prescription to get research grade antibiotics. I'm talking about how needing a prescription to get a non-controlled drug is literally a non-issue because of rampant off label prescribing and online prescription mills.

[pdonis]

At this point your use of the Humpty Dumpty principle makes further discussion highly unlikely to be fruitful.