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Re:Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison by belorn on Sunday September 20, 2020 @09:48AM (#24534012)
> Why should the government be able to tell you what you can and cannot put into your own body?

The answer to that question that I see is that the government is responsible to step in when someone else get hurt under humanitarian obligations. If you make someone responsible for an outcome then they will likely want to implement rules to reduce their own risks.

The rules should of course be proportional to the risk and balanced. It make sense that drugs and driving should not be combined and which outcome can't be fixed afterward. Parenting and drugs are also a pretty problematic area, but it is difficult for the government to make a law against that combination without banning drugs completely. If people took drugs while working with heavy equipment, makes decisions that impact people, work within health care or education, then there is an additional increased risk that the government is expected to manage.

ADHD medicine, especially the non-self medicated versions, have the opposite effect for the government. It reduces the risk that they have to step. If all the other alternatives have failed and you found a solution that do work then that is good and the law might then need to change to incorporate that success. It doesn't however change the reason why the government might still want to tell you what you can and cannot put into your own body.

Where I live we also have universal health care and meth stresses the heart quite a lot. The result is that when the heart start to fall apart it is the government that has to pay for repairs, and those are often quite expensive surgeries that need to be redone every few years. I am no doctor so I can't answer if 10mg is small enough to be safe, but if I was taking it I would find a doctor and do regular heart checkups.

Re:Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison by bunfunton on Sunday September 20, 2020 @11:44AM (#24534635)
Governments shouldn't be responsible for the outcome of their people, the individual should. This is the perspective difference we share. It's really a choice between individual freedom despite possible negative stats "addictions" vs less freedom and more government control while optimizing number of addictions. I value my personal freedom and see no reason why the government should pay for healthcare. In the USA, they caused this distorted market to begin with (see also student loan bubble)
Re:Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison by belorn on Sunday September 20, 2020 @05:16PM (#24537482)
I understand the idea in theory but have a much harder time in practice to not want the government to take a final responsibility. If a child parents can't take care of them it make humanitarian sense that the government step in. We should not punish children because their parent won't take responsibility for the outcome of their own behavior.

Similar, I would want the government to step in and pay for healthcare when a victim get hit by a car driven by an uninsured driver. It is not fair to let the victim die just because someone else were unable to take responsibility for their own faults.

So to make a general theory, people should be responsible for their own actions when there is a high likelihood of repayment for wrong doing. For those things individual freedom is positive. For other actions which is irreversible and where individuals will sometimes be unable to take responsibility, and we expect the government to step in, then individual freedom may be balanced against risk.

Re:Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison by tchaffee on Sunday September 20, 2020 @12:14PM (#24534838)
The vast majority of countries where healthcare is both far cheaper and more effective than in the US have government provided healthcare. Most of those countries also have affordable or free higher education. So the smoking gun would seem to point at US style capitalism and lobbyists rather than government services themselves.

"It doesn't work in the USA" is increasingly very poor evidence when it does work many other places, and often has for over a half a century.