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> Someone has to decide what substances safe and prevent them from sold. Why? If someone buys deadly nightshade, and gets deadly nightshade, why should the go

> Someone has to decide what substances safe and prevent them from sold. Why? If someone buys deadly nightshade, and gets deadly nightshade, why should the government care?

Eji1700 3y ago
Basically for the same reasons they don't let you buy other toxins/dangerous materials with almost no alternative use?
diob 3y ago
I mean, can't you take this to the extreme and see why it is a bad point of view. Anything is sell-able as long as we slap a warning label on it. That seems like a recipe for disaster, right? We sold a highly radioactive substance to Jim, and endanger more than Jim. Consequences are often far beyond the individual, and I think folks believe they're too smart to get caught in the fallout of someone else's decisions. Oops, Karen from HR brought in deadly nightshade muffins to share ("small amounts are said to be good for the liver, I heard it on my favorite podcast!"). There's a middle ground here, where if it's dangerous enough, we don't allow it to be sold. It's not one way or the other. That's dangerous thinking in and of itself.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > We sold a highly radioactive substance to Jim, and endanger more than Jim. Gasoline + air is a high explosive. Most fluids at a hardware store are poisonous and some of them taste sweet. The MSDS for the things under your sink will tell you all the ways they can destroy you. You can have hydrofluoric acid send to your front door. It can kill someone if you spill it on them, but it also has legitimate uses and is such a simple compound that there is no point in prohibiting it because anyone can make it themselves. Dangerous things are widely available and everywhere and it's rarely a problem. > Oops, Karen from HR brought in deadly nightshade muffins to share ("small amounts are said to be good for the liver, I heard it on my favorite podcast!"). https://www.amazon.com/Belladonna-Seeds-Atropa-belladonna-Flower/dp/B07CRXCV3D/ https://www.amazon.com/Belladonna-Seeds-Atropa-belladonna-Fl... > There's a middle ground here, where if it's dangerous enough, we don't allow it to be sold. Many of the things all around us are even more dangerous than the things that have been banned. If you ask someone to choose a central example of things they think should be banned, they'll often start with military explosives like C-4. Military explosives are designed to be stable. You have to use a blasting cap to set them off because the last thing you want is unintentional detonation. If you fill your house with propane or natural gas, the slightest spark from anything will vaporize the entire building and everyone inside. Natural gas is dramatically more dangerous than C-4. But C-4 is scarier because Hollywood shows it being used in a different context, and that's how politics decides what's banned. And once you get into the banning things business (because you have to ban C-4, don't you?), people relentlessly want to add more things to the list. Which doesn't happen in any more principled a way.
  - diob 3y ago
    I think you missed the point. All of those things are sold to do the purpose they're meant for. Someone isn't telling folks to drink gasoline. Actually someone probably is. . . Most would assume a supplement is safe. If it isn't, we shouldn't be allowing advertisers to lie. Everything you mentioned is upfront about purpose, it doesn't mislead people to use it in a dangerous way. I'd be okay with the FDA allowing dangerous things to be sold, so long as the product explicitly said it was dangerous and not to be used in anything other than the proper way.
iakh 3y ago
I'm assuming you agree the FDA shouldn't allow somebody to sell deadly nightshade to somebody that doesn't know that nightshade is deadly, but then how do you tell the person that knows the nightshade is deadly apart from the person that doesn't know that the nightshade is deadly?
bell-cot 3y ago
Is the product's seller paying for the "recipient's" ER visit, hospitalization, autopsy, or any other possible externalities of the purchase?
ben_w 3y ago
My mum was a big believer in homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. The homeopathic sodium chloride and silicon dioxide sugar tablets probably didn't hurt me, but given how dumb Bach flower remedies are it's entirely possible she randomly and unwittingly dosed me with a small quantity of ground up something in the Solanaceae family. Governments care because well meaning hippy parents who don't know any better feeding snake oil to their kids gets headlines in newspapers.
- msla 3y ago
  And this is something the "Freedom!"-yelpers don't mention: Yes, adults can be "Free!" to do crappy and dangerous things to themselves, but when it's parents poisoning children, you have to be pretty damned sociopathic to only consider how the rights of the parents are being infringed by regulation. I honestly think some people consider children to be property.
  - CapitalistCartr 3y ago
    The Libertarian view is that children are property, in that the gov't. should not interfere in child-rearing.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    This is assuming the parents are rubes and the government is competent, ignoring the cases when it's the other way around. In practice parents and the government agree most of the time because it's established science that no one contests, and cases where the government got it wrong are a large class of exceptions. Then people see the government forcing its rules even when they're in the wrong and lose faith in the whole system, including the general consensus. Then you get more counter-culture types fooling around with weird plants. Whereas in the absence of coercion, the people who are right when the government is wrong are able to openly prove it without being punished, which allows the government to improve its recommendations more rapidly, which reduces how often their recommendations are wrong and thereby the number of people disregarding them wholesale after watching them be incompetent pigheaded bullies.
growse 3y ago
The government's got to pay for the road the ambulance drives you on when you stop breathing.
djur 3y ago
A regulatory state where a government agency has to decide whether every product is sold in a way that accurately describes its risk to the consumer is going to be bigger, more expensive, and more intrusive than one where sufficiently dangerous products are banned outright.

> Someone has to decide what substances safe and prevent them from sold. Why? If someone buys deadly nightshade, and gets deadly nightshade, why should the government care?

Eji1700 3y ago

Basically for the same reasons they don't let you buy other toxins/dangerous materials with almost no alternative use?

diob 3y ago

I mean, can't you take this to the extreme and see why it is a bad point of view. Anything is sell-able as long as we slap a warning label on it. That seems like a recipe for disaster, right? We sold a highly radioactive substance to Jim, and endanger more than Jim. Consequences are often far beyond the individual, and I think folks believe they're too smart to get caught in the fallout of someone else's decisions. Oops, Karen from HR brought in deadly nightshade muffins to share ("small amounts are said to be good for the liver, I heard it on my favorite podcast!"). There's a middle ground here, where if it's dangerous enough, we don't allow it to be sold. It's not one way or the other. That's dangerous thinking in and of itself.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> We sold a highly radioactive substance to Jim, and endanger more than Jim. Gasoline + air is a high explosive. Most fluids at a hardware store are poisonous and some of them taste sweet. The MSDS for the things under your sink will tell you all the ways they can destroy you. You can have hydrofluoric acid send to your front door. It can kill someone if you spill it on them, but it also has legitimate uses and is such a simple compound that there is no point in prohibiting it because anyone can make it themselves. Dangerous things are widely available and everywhere and it's rarely a problem. > Oops, Karen from HR brought in deadly nightshade muffins to share ("small amounts are said to be good for the liver, I heard it on my favorite podcast!"). https://www.amazon.com/Belladonna-Seeds-Atropa-belladonna-Flower/dp/B07CRXCV3D/ https://www.amazon.com/Belladonna-Seeds-Atropa-belladonna-Fl... > There's a middle ground here, where if it's dangerous enough, we don't allow it to be sold. Many of the things all around us are even more dangerous than the things that have been banned. If you ask someone to choose a central example of things they think should be banned, they'll often start with military explosives like C-4. Military explosives are designed to be stable. You have to use a blasting cap to set them off because the last thing you want is unintentional detonation. If you fill your house with propane or natural gas, the slightest spark from anything will vaporize the entire building and everyone inside. Natural gas is dramatically more dangerous than C-4. But C-4 is scarier because Hollywood shows it being used in a different context, and that's how politics decides what's banned. And once you get into the banning things business (because you have to ban C-4, don't you?), people relentlessly want to add more things to the list. Which doesn't happen in any more principled a way.
- diob 3y ago
  I think you missed the point. All of those things are sold to do the purpose they're meant for. Someone isn't telling folks to drink gasoline. Actually someone probably is. . . Most would assume a supplement is safe. If it isn't, we shouldn't be allowing advertisers to lie. Everything you mentioned is upfront about purpose, it doesn't mislead people to use it in a dangerous way. I'd be okay with the FDA allowing dangerous things to be sold, so long as the product explicitly said it was dangerous and not to be used in anything other than the proper way.

iakh 3y ago

I'm assuming you agree the FDA shouldn't allow somebody to sell deadly nightshade to somebody that doesn't know that nightshade is deadly, but then how do you tell the person that knows the nightshade is deadly apart from the person that doesn't know that the nightshade is deadly?

bell-cot 3y ago

Is the product's seller paying for the "recipient's" ER visit, hospitalization, autopsy, or any other possible externalities of the purchase?

ben_w 3y ago

My mum was a big believer in homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. The homeopathic sodium chloride and silicon dioxide sugar tablets probably didn't hurt me, but given how dumb Bach flower remedies are it's entirely possible she randomly and unwittingly dosed me with a small quantity of ground up something in the Solanaceae family. Governments care because well meaning hippy parents who don't know any better feeding snake oil to their kids gets headlines in newspapers.

msla 3y ago
And this is something the "Freedom!"-yelpers don't mention: Yes, adults can be "Free!" to do crappy and dangerous things to themselves, but when it's parents poisoning children, you have to be pretty damned sociopathic to only consider how the rights of the parents are being infringed by regulation. I honestly think some people consider children to be property.
- CapitalistCartr 3y ago
  The Libertarian view is that children are property, in that the gov't. should not interfere in child-rearing.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  This is assuming the parents are rubes and the government is competent, ignoring the cases when it's the other way around. In practice parents and the government agree most of the time because it's established science that no one contests, and cases where the government got it wrong are a large class of exceptions. Then people see the government forcing its rules even when they're in the wrong and lose faith in the whole system, including the general consensus. Then you get more counter-culture types fooling around with weird plants. Whereas in the absence of coercion, the people who are right when the government is wrong are able to openly prove it without being punished, which allows the government to improve its recommendations more rapidly, which reduces how often their recommendations are wrong and thereby the number of people disregarding them wholesale after watching them be incompetent pigheaded bullies.

growse 3y ago

The government's got to pay for the road the ambulance drives you on when you stop breathing.

djur 3y ago

A regulatory state where a government agency has to decide whether every product is sold in a way that accurately describes its risk to the consumer is going to be bigger, more expensive, and more intrusive than one where sufficiently dangerous products are banned outright.