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Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking drugs that are necessary to keep them alive. Chemotherapy kills a lot of people, si
by natnat 16y ago
Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking drugs that are necessary to keep them alive. Chemotherapy kills a lot of people, simply because the whole purpose of it is to kill a tumor with poisons. Does that mean that chemo should be banned? Of course not, because people who take chemo drugs are probably going to die if nothing is done.
Likewise, opiates kill a lot of people. But how many people would forgo life-saving surgery because of the pain they would have to live with after the surgery if effective painkillers were illegal? My guess is a lot more than the number of people who are killed by opiates directly.
The duty of the FDA is to make sure that drugs are safe and effective. If they're overpermissive, more people will die of drugs themselves. If they're too restrictive, people won't get the medicine they need to stay alive. It's a tricky balance to strike, and I think the FDA is doing a reasonably good job.
- Alex3917 16y ago"Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking drugs that are necessary to keep them alive." People dying from drug abuse is largely the government's fault, and relatively few people die from taking drugs that are medically necessary.
- natnat 16y agoHow do you know that few people die from medically necessary drugs? I've been looking for a source of number of deaths by drug, but I can't find one. Also, I'm fairly confident that drugs being illegal causes fewer people to die from drug use directly.[1] Drug illegality makes drugs more expensive, which makes it more difficult for the average junkie to obtain a lethal dose. Another big issue is medical errors. This isn't a government problem so much as it's a problem with our health care system. I'm not really sure whether government-run healthcare would improve this (by removing the profit motive to see as many patients as possible) or make it worse, by creating the wrong incentives. It's really easy to blame the government for everyone's problems, but government regulation often saves lives, even if it ends up indirectly killing some people. For example, if the FDA kills people by prohibiting a potentially life-saving drug for safety reasons, they look really bad. But you don't see the people whose lives were saved because they didn't take a drug that turned out to be severe latent carcinogens. [1] Of course, drugs being illegal makes more people die from drug-related violence. Violence is probably a worse problem, even if it's less deadly than overdosing, because it can affect nonusers.