Pretend that you wake up tomorrow and ALL drugs, from pot to PCP to antibiotics to Viagra, have been legalized. You can go to your corner drugstore and buy anything you want, no questions asked. No more going to a doctor and paying to have them write you a prescription.
Would crime increase?
Would the streets be full of people under the influence?
Would drugstores jack up the prices to milk addicts for every penny they have, or would they compete with each other for the most customers?
Second, what would you fill your medicine cabinet with?
Well, with antibiotics not under control of at least semi-educated dispensers, resistance would run rampant, and people would start dying of infections which were formerly curable.
People would mix and match unmixable drugs, and suffer morbidity and mortality (nitrates and viagra for one, warfarin and indocin for another).
I think “bloody mess” describes it well, even before figuring in the mood-altering drugs.
Perfect world, this could be great. People could probably save alot of money if they took the time to get some basic medical training and learned a little more about how thier body worked, allowiong them to make some basic decisions on how to treat themselves if they chose to. Medical insurance would most likely not cover medications not prescribed by a doctor (they foot the bill, do it their way).
Nah, in fact alot of it would probably decrease from the lack of drug dealing/selling arrests.
might be a little more experimentation than today but I doubt you would see much of a difference in actual addicts.
Lets do both!
If Walmart has the best price on “SuperMeth” the junkies are going to flock there so its probably a straight inelastic goods competion scenario.
Some heavier versions of what is already out there
[ul]
[li] Antihistamines[/li][li] Anti-Diarrheal[/li][li] Hi Opal![/li][li] Couple heavier Pain killers (Darvocet or the like)[/li][li] Valium or some other kind of sleep assist[/li][li] Anti-Emetics[/li][li] Couple broad spectrum antibiotics[/li][/ul]
Of course all of this is based on the fact that I do have some basic medical training and realize that many of these things will make matters much worse if I have a problem that cannot be recified in a few days of treatment and do not consult a physician.
I do not in any way advocate self medication without education and experience to back it up. These are powerful chemicals and can have drastic and deadly effects if used or combined improperly.
On preview I see quadgop has checked in, and I agree that antibiotics are far more dangerous in the big picture than they might seem. If I ever want to see my registered nurse fiancee cringe all you have to say is “Methicillin resistant staph”
of course crime would go down! thats what happens when you legalize things. if you legalized murder then the crime rates would go way down too, since… all the crimes called murder… would be gone.
I’m going to agree with Qadgop the doc that it would be a bad idea overall. Drugs would kill more people than the diseases. Unnecessary and improperly administered drugs, that is.
I also think that the recreational drugs would become cheaper, more widely used, and that more people would die as a result. On the plus side, we’d spend less on on law enforcement and prisons. And drug dealers wouldn’t be getting rich. Maybe.
What would I have in my medicine cabinet? Same thing I have now, probably. An OTC anti-histamine and some chewable Pepto-Bismol. I might add a little marijuana.
Actually, I’d probably just buy the brownie mix with the pot already included.
It seems to me that while some forms of crime would go down, there’d be a concommitant rise in newly defined crimes related to driving or operating machinery under the influence of those newly legal drugs. There would almost certainly be extensive workplace testing for all kinds of substances and strict laws enacted in respect of performing certain occupational duties while under their influence.
Tobacco is a totally legal product here, yet there’s a huge black market in illegally grown and illegally imported tobacco products.
As far as prescription drugs go, I suspect we’d see a huge increase in morbidity and mortality.
I’d keep a really good painkiller, some kind of sleeping pill, and some Adderall, which I SHOULD be on right now but can’t because I don’t have 80 bucks a month.
I started this board out of bitterness.
In April and May I had pleurisy, which is an inflammation of the lining of your lungs. It is the most horrible pain I have ever experienced, except childbirth. Every breath feels like someone’s stabbing you in the chest.
I had gone to a doctor who gave me some heavy duty Ibuprofen, which tore me up and didn’t work. I ended up calling his office one day asking if he could prescribe me something else for the pain, because I was in agony and what he gave me wasn’t getting it.
It took them 4 hours to yank my records and piddlefart around only to call me back and tell me no.
I’m sure “drug seeking” is written somewhere in my records now.
Why is it if you ask for a painkiller they automatically assume you’re a druggie?
Anyhow, at that time I remember thinking how nice it would be to not have to beg some sadistic doctor for a prescription of something I should have the right to buy on my own anyway.
I don’t want to hijack this, but is there any such thing as a right to buy? Can anyone who manufactures or stocks a product can refuse to sell it (barring discrimination laws)?
I think the real focus of WV_Woman’s question is not so much the legalistion of drugs which are illegal in all circumstances, but the dismantling of the prescription system so that every drug which can currently be sold for any purpose can be bought freely.
Consequences
A rise in self-medication.
A fall-off in demand for GP services from people who already know what drug they want.
A rise in demand for GP services (and other medical services)from people who knew what drug they wanted, and it turned out to be a bad idea.
(Probably) more people looking to pharmacists/druggists to advise on what drug they should take; pharmacists gearing up to meet this demand; consumers generally unwilling to pay separately for this service, so the cost of the service loaded into the price of drugs.
Pharmacists and drug companies more likely to get sued when drugs do not have the effect the patient wants/expects; the cost of this loaded into the price of the drugs.
Insurance companies probably seeking to impose some substitute for the prescription system as a condition of paying for drugs. They might still require patients to get a doctor’s recommendation, or they might rely on a pharmacist’s recommendation, if they are satisfied as to the quality of the pharmacist’s advice. The obvious problem is that a pharmacist has an interest in recommending a drug with a higher margin for him.
If I read WV-Woman’s post correctly, she wants Adderall but can’t have it because it would cost $80 a month. This suggests to me that the drug is already freely available; she only wants a prescription because only then will her insurance cover it.
That’s not a problem which would be directly affected by making all drugs freely available, since it’s already freely available. That particular problem would only be affected if making all drugs freely available tended to make all drugs cheaper, including those which are currently freely available. But I don’t see that that should be so.
I have heard it suggested - no cite - that the best way to keep drugs cheap is to promote monopsony; concentrating all the purchasing in one person, so far as possible. The UK NHS, for example, is said to pay much less for its drugs than US consumers or US health insurers pay for the same drugs, because if the drug companies don’t sell in the UK at a price the NHS is willing to pay, they won’t sell very much in the UK.
What worries me about this kind of though is that how would parents tell their kids not to use drugs if they arn’t illeagle?
Street drugs are banned for a good reason, just look at the Neatherlands to see how fucked up a society can get when they legalize drugs in certain areas.
Actually Adderrall is an amphetamine used to treat ADHD, so it’s not widely available without a perscription. I think what WV_Woman is saying is that she doesn’t have script coverage on her insurance(or doesn’t have insurance) and thus would have to pay $80 for the perscription. She’s assuming that deregulation would make the price go down.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Blistex *
**What worries me about this kind of though is that how would parents tell their kids not to use drugs if they arn’t illeagle?
The same thing they tell their kids now when they tell them not to smoke, I guess.
As far as Adderall, I can easily get a prescription. I live in the Land of No Medical Insurance (most people in WV don’t have it, unless they’re on welfare/disability, because we have a really bad job market and most jobs don’t come with Blue Cross), thus I get to pay 80 bucks a month for it.
Can’t afford that right now, so I go without.
I’m thankful, though. I can physically LIVE without it … albeit much more disorganized. What if I had something life threatening and STILL couldn’t afford the meds?
Same way they tell them that eating too much candy makes you sick, that not getting exercise makes you unhealthy, that drinking too much alcohol gets you drunk, that driving like an idiot gets you killed, that murdering people is a bad idea, that rape isn’t such a good idea either, and that robbing the liquor store is a no-no.
Still, WV_Woman, the points made by UDSbefore the sentence about your access to Adderall must give pause: there are the added risks of improper use of drugs by the less-than-fully-trained (and the rendering useless of antibiotics IS a HUGE, scary problem even as it is) and on top of (and to a great degree because of) that, there is no certainty that this scenario would necessarily result in a general lowering of prices: the free-for-all environment could lead the pharmaceutical industry (and the pharmacy-services industry) to cover their collective liability risks by increasing prices on the medications and on the advice, even to the point of matching what the market already bears for health care in general. Or manufacturers could just cut their potential liabilities by folding entire product lines (like many contraceptive makers have done in the USA) or just cashing out the company altogether. So, then, what if the stuff were OTC and you STILL couldn’t afford it or even find it for sale?
I am, of course, assuming that all we will do is switch to make what are currently prescription meds and controlled substances into OTC consumer products. That we do not simultaneously do away with legal torts, with patent and trademark protection, with regulation as to safety, effectiveness, and truth-in-labeling of the meds, and with the profit motive as the prime reason why you even bother to build a multinational drug manufacturer or open a small-town apothecary shop.
Legions of Americans have to live …and die… with the answer to that question, every day. But I don’t think that the root of that issue is in classification of prescription/controlled drugs vs. OTC. We’d be going into the deep territory of whether healthcare is a right, and if so whether it’s a “positive” right that society is obligated to give to us. An entire different kettle o’fish than open access to drugs
Oh, yeah, and what Munch just said, re: legalized drugs and teaching kids it’s bad to be a junky.
Even if this were the case I don’t have a problem with idiots deleting themselves through misuse of drugs, electricity, lawn-care tools, etc.
But in reality this isn’t all that likely. Just look at how many drugs, pills, etc, are legal and not even age restricted and which are easy to abuse but seldom are. Robitussen is legal and while most people under a certain age group know how to abuse it it does not happen all that often, same thing goes for ephedra, and any number of “herbal” drug substitutes.
Certainly some people would do dumb things, but not much more than already goes on, and again, dumb people are no great loss.
