During a recent trip to Goddard Health Center to procure a prescription for AD/HD medication, I reflected on the utter uselessness of my trip. The very notion of my being required to make this trip seemed absurd to me, and I concluded that the legal requirement of a doctor’s prescription is unnecessary and wasteful.
As mentioned, I was attempting to acquire a prescription for AD/HD medication. I was on medication for a few years as a child and have struggled with attention problems throughout my time here at OU.
Thanks to the wealth of information available on the Internet, I was able to read up on the disorder and conclude that I was probably suffering a reoccurrence and should seek medication.
In a truly free society, I would be free to act on this suspicion and simply order the medication of my choice online or from a local pharmacy. Because of health laws, however, I was required to schedule the first of multiple screening/testing meetings at Goddard Health Center, and will not be able to purchase the medication until the process is done, which I was told will take more than a month.
To their credit, the entire staff at Goddard has been both remarkably accommodating and exceptionally friendly to me. It is no fault of the OU health staff that this time-consuming transaction has been forced upon me, and the staff has made it much less painful than I anticipated.
The entire transaction of pursuing a prescription is largely useless. With resources like WebMD.com, which has hundreds of patient reviews for thousands of prescription drugs, at one’s fingertips, a trip to the doctor and then to a legally licensed pharmacist is often simply a legal formality.
These unnecessary trips to a doctor force up the demand for doctors’ services, which both drives up prices and leads to long waiting times to meet with physicians.
To force someone who can learn the purpose, effectiveness, and possible risks of a drug on his or her own time is not only ridiculous, it is wasteful. The prescription requirement associated with drugs should be abolished to eliminate this waste and to further patients’ freedom.
One objection to this proposal is that many people do not fully understand the dynamics of drug treatment, especially the interaction between different medications, and abolishing the prescription requirement will endanger these patients.
This is an argument based on fear rather than reason. Those people who find themselves confused about their symptoms would still have the option to visit a doctor or talk to a pharmacist if they felt it was worth their time.
Indeed, it is rational to expect many still would, especially those with serious afflictions. In many cases, individuals don’t even know what is causing their health deficiency, so of course people would freely choose to continue visiting doctors for advice and prescriptions.
Another objection to this proposal is that some would abuse and become addicted to powerful painkillers and other drugs that are now available only to those with prescriptions. This argument is plainly true, but prescription abolition is still desirable for two main reasons.
First, people should be free to use and abuse drugs if they so choose. People who aren’t free to do whatever they want to their bodies, including ingesting dangerous drugs, are not self-owners in any sense. Therefore, the abolition of prescription requirements is an essential requirement of personal freedom.
Second, one must remember that many people already become addicted to pharmaceuticals despite the legal prescription requirement. When these addicts are unable to acquire prescription renewals, they either have to search for their desired drugs through the black market or begin abusing other drugs.
Either way, refusing to allow addicts to legitimately acquire their drugs fuels the black market for drugs. This forces otherwise harmless addicts to do business with criminals. Therefore, abolishing the prescription requirement will decrease the demand for black market drugs.
In conclusion, the abolition of the prescription requirements would remove the burden of useless visits from the health delivery system, shortening waiting times and allowing quicker diagnosis and treatment of more serious injuries. Americans would remain free to consult with doctors, and many would do so, but all citizens would be free to make their own health decisions.
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"I was on my way to get a prescription for my attention deficit problems, when I got distracted by something."
Anyway...
I mostly agree, except for the fact that it would suddenly be much easier to drug other people.
No, no, no, no, and no. It's nice that you're such a smart economics student that you can self-diagnose all your health problems. I guess in a perfect anarcho-capitalist society, people would NEVER try to abuse addictive prescription drugs or take it upon themselves to diagnose their own heart or blood pressure problems and inadvertently kill themselves. Your claim that giving drugs to addicts will decrease the black market is ridiculous and stupid since you can't acknowledge that total drug use is going to skyrocket without limited access.
I've had a personal exchange with this guy where he accused me of sounding stupid and ignorant because I didn't know anything about his freakish Randian anarcho-capitalist utopia but, at least in my eyes, it's apparent to almost every non-freakazoid-Libertarian reader of this paper that these columns go directly in the loony bin. At least other bad columnists are just writing glorified blog posts - Staib thinks he's some sort of deep philosopher and the result is a bunch of high-minded pretentious writing cloaking that, to acquire all this special economics wisdom, he's sacrificed any and all understanding of how society and human nature work.
Also, that little A on his hoodie means that if your house burns down you should have to pay for a for-profit fire department to come burn down your house. What a nice society!
"I've had a personal exchange with this guy where he accused me of sounding stupid and ignorant because I didn't know anything about his freakish Randian anarcho-capitalist utopia but, at least in my eyes, it's apparent to almost every non-freakazoid-Libertarian reader of this paper that these columns go directly in the loony bin. At least other bad columnists are just writing glorified blog posts - Staib thinks he's some sort of deep philosopher and the result is a bunch of high-minded pretentious writing cloaking that, to acquire all this special economics wisdom, he's sacrificed any and all understanding of how society and human nature work."
You are downright personifying bigotry with such snark and presumptuous insinuations. Your first paragraph was right on the money. Your role was played correctly on this forum in objecting to the column rationally, with your own insight into the issue.
But the personal attacks on the author and the newspaper...?
If you feel such militant degradation is necessary toward these opinions differing from your own, go find somewhere with people more like you to spend your time.
The author missed an important issue. Doctors and any sort of diagnostician are imperfect at their job. It is very difficult to accurately diagnose physiological or psychological disorders. Doctors often ignore base rates and often give a different diagnosis one week than they did the week before for the same symptoms. HOWEVER, that is no reason to allow people to diagnose themselves. If doctors have problems diagnosing individuals, then those individuals themselves will have even more problems. The idea of people self-diagnosing themselves is ignorant and dangerous. The person may diagnose themselves incorrectly and will often not try to correct their mistake. For example, to use the author's case, they may diagnose themselves with ADHD. Now, after the person has self-diagnosed and self-prescribed his medication, no matter what (i.e. whether or not he has the disease), he will do "better." 1. Because ADHD drugs generally make everybody do "better" (i.e. higher grades) and 2. The ubiquitous placebo effect. The difference between the doctor and the normal everyday person is that the doctor knows the base rates of diseases, co-morbidity and many other complex issues. For example, most people may not know (and WebMD may not always express) that many people are diagnosed with ADHD even though they actually have Grave's Disease. A solution: actuarial models. Should still have a doctor make a decision because they are aware of the extremely complex issues that arise in medical diagnosis, but a model will always be more consistent than any doctor.
Also, is the author assuming that we must all be "self-owners" in order to live in this society? He needs to realize that things are not so easily clear-cut as being Mentally Retarded or Autistic. Many diseases exist on a spectrum. So, just because I am not diagnosed with autism does not mean that I do not have traits of being autistic. Indeed, most people have traits of these diseases, but not to the extent that they are dysfunctional. So, if I happen to have some traits of having the predisposition to drug addiction and I have a surgery and need pain pills, say that two weeks later I still "think" I need pain pills. Does that mean that I am not a "self-owner" and that I deserve the immense suffering that will inevitably occur, given that I will probably still think I am in pain and will therefore continue to prescribe myself drugs? Without someone who has the legal authority to stop me from taking pain killers, then I will probably do immense damage to my body and my ability to function as a citizen. Are you saying that non-"self-owners" deserve this because they cannot "control" themselves? Tell me, to what extent does anybody really have control of their lives? I am thinking they have some control of their lives, but consciousness is not as causally efficacious as we tend to believe (I would recommend reading some Dan Dennett or watching his lecture on "deflating consciousness" on Ted.com or youtube).
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