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Taken from the description: > Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily au

by maeln 2y ago

Taken from the description: > Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state. Taking those rights back for yourself is then labeled "BioTerrorism". So be it. Let's learn how. This is, in most country, false. You can absolutely decide on your own to mix up some chemical and then take it (you might just be held accountable for the result, i.e, not coverage from your health insurance). There is some exception related to the consumption of narcotics, but, what most law, not government (its an important distinction in a democracy), make illegal is the distribution (and the intent of) of drugs without the proper licence. And there is very, very good reasons for it. Drugs are no joke. Some ingredients needs to be very precisely dosed, at very low concentration, requiring special tooling and precaution, or you might reach a toxic dosage very, very quickly and kill someone (or permanently damage some organs). Then, there is the issue of quack doctor and quack medicine. While the current system is far from perfect (see: the opioid crisis in the US), it still give legal repercussion for people who sale snake oil, potentialy dangerous ones, and who prey on already often desperate victim. The other thing is, the law also prevent buying some chemical without the proper licence. And again, there is usually good reasons for it. Either because they make it easy to synthetise drugs that society has judged detrimental (again, narcotics like meth, heroin, ...), or because they make explosives (wasn't it sulfuric acid that could turn a lot of stuff into energetics ?). And for the most part, theses laws where written in blood. We can debate the specifics of their implementations (the war on drugs, the free access to birth control, how to allow for experimentation, ...), but the overall spirit of those laws is, I believe, sadly very needed in our current world. Obviously there is also the patent issue, but it's a whole lot of debate in itself.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
It's quite difficult to know if there's a good reason for a prohibition, vs whether it's just there to protect somebody's monopoly. In a healthier society there'd be a smooth gradient between the layman and the professional such that B.S. prohibitions would be identified and removed by informed subsets of the population. But instead we have this very crisp boundary between the in-the-know and the clueless, and to be in-the-know is so expensive that one can't afford to be in-the-know while also not being on somebody's payroll--those tend to be the same somebody's who have a monopoly to protect, so the clueless stay clueless and the capable stay under control. There's a lot of criticism in adjacent threads for these guys having cherry-picked the easy examples, but given the circumstances I think that that's precisely what we ought to be doing: Identify the cases where taking control of your drugs is relatively easy, teach people to do it, and level up gradually until that set of cases starts growing. We may never get to the point where we're making everything at home, but if we don't at least take a shot at the easy ones then we'll never know where the reasonable equilibrium point lies (i.e. the point beyond which you should leave it to a corporation). As it stands we're letting that point be decided by people who have a conflict of interest in doing so.

by maeln 2y ago

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

It's quite difficult to know if there's a good reason for a prohibition, vs whether it's just there to protect somebody's monopoly. In a healthier society there'd be a smooth gradient between the layman and the professional such that B.S. prohibitions would be identified and removed by informed subsets of the population. But instead we have this very crisp boundary between the in-the-know and the clueless, and to be in-the-know is so expensive that one can't afford to be in-the-know while also not being on somebody's payroll--those tend to be the same somebody's who have a monopoly to protect, so the clueless stay clueless and the capable stay under control. There's a lot of criticism in adjacent threads for these guys having cherry-picked the easy examples, but given the circumstances I think that that's precisely what we ought to be doing: Identify the cases where taking control of your drugs is relatively easy, teach people to do it, and level up gradually until that set of cases starts growing. We may never get to the point where we're making everything at home, but if we don't at least take a shot at the easy ones then we'll never know where the reasonable equilibrium point lies (i.e. the point beyond which you should leave it to a corporation). As it stands we're letting that point be decided by people who have a conflict of interest in doing so.