Governments/regulators deciding what you can put into your body is beyond ridiculous: applies to all substances and drugs.
Inform about the potential risks and effects: sure.
Prevent: never.
"Regulation" vs "Information" also gets complicated, fast, when you consider global supply chains - for recentish news, checkout the stuff on heavy metals in Trader Joe's chocolate - how does all that information propagate to the final consumer? How does that consumer have the knowledge, skills, and time to process it?
(As with all things, IMHO, it's about balance, and, IMHO, balance comes from forces in opposition. "You are the ultimate authority on your body" is one force.)
"IL-6 Activities in the Tumour Microenvironment. Part 1"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765074/#:~:tex....
"Serum Level of Interleukin-6 in Patients with Oral Tongue Squamous cell Carcinoma"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4461844/
"Interleukin-6 role in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma progression"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5698512/
I also know from Google Scholar, that copper increases IL-6, penicillin breaks down into penicillamine, used to treat Wilson Disease, a copper metabolism difference, and I also know that Omega 3's look promising for reducing IL6.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29803716/
And thats just an example of a cursory look into SCC.
Socialised medical costs, isnt always a panacea, knowledge and honesty is the closest you will get to a panacea for medicine.
And if you protect the drug companies and doctors against those lawsuits, then you open the door to them exploiting desperate people.
People who aren't in medicine really have a hard time understanding just how grisly the things the human body can go through might be.
Medical staff saw during COVID the mismatch between the degree of fear the average Joe had about the consequence of intubation and the degree of fear and panic of the average Joe when actually getting a tube down their throats.
A drug that goes wrong in a bad way can go REALLY wrong in a bad way. Dying from cancer sucks, but it's still several degrees less horrible than dying from your CNS being eaten away from an autoimmune response to an experimental drug which somehow leads to opiate-resistant neuropathic pain.
But if we simply caution "we don't know if this drug will cause horrible side effects" versus "this drug may likely cause unthinkable pain that we can't control in your last conscious moments" that's a very different level of informed consent.
You might be surprised by the number of doctors who privately lament how patients and patient families in general will so often choose to shoot for low odds outcomes that mean terrible conditions for the patient in their last months of life. Even when risks are known, people tend to be bad at actual risk assessment, and will downplay risks and focus on potential rewards, and this extends into medical care. And I'm skeptical that descriptions of what might go wrong versus actually seeing firsthand what it looks like when things go wrong still represents adequately informed.
So while in spirit I agree that completely criminalizing personal choice around consumption is not ideal, when there's insufficient data for truly informed consent I'm not sure I still see eye to eye on the topic.
It should be legal too. I'm not defending the use of it in any way, this is not about drugs but a more fundamental problem: governments deciding what you can and cannot put into your own body.
They should inform people about potential dangers and effects of substances, and try to prevent the underlying reasons for people to, say, do heroin or fentanyl.
But if someone wants to do it anyway, making it illegal just makes things worse as people will be stigmatized socially where they should be welcome/accepted the most, and they'll obtain the substance illegally and dangerously (who-knows-what-it's-laced-with and exact actual dosage) anyway.
So just inform and support the people but make it legal and relatively safer to consume for harm reduction.
But if someone wants to OD and kill themselves, I mean, it's sad but it's their own body and their own life.
I know that in theory we all should be free and take whatever we want, but I know that in practice this doesn’t end well.
There are good reasons to control consumption of some classes of drugs that don’t have anything to do with religion and/or fake sense of morality. Some things just mess us up too hard and especially some people who are susceptible to it for various reasons.
Thought experiment: There is a magic drug or parasite where any dosage (whether deliberate, accidental, or fraudulent) will force the person into a single-minded violent quest to get another dose.
For the next month, another hit is the most important thing in their world, even if that means selling everything they own, cutting off their own leg, or murdering their children. Repeated doses cause mental confusion and are eventually fatal.
Are you still comfortable saying that nobody can make any law against the distribution or consumption of THAT substance?
Laws against consumption? A terrible idea.
What we should want to do as a society is funnel people interested in trying things we think they really shouldn't do towards legal chokeponts that are less onerous than DIY access under controlled distribution but still allow for attempts at prevention of the end outcome.
The clearest example of this even more than your drug scenario would be a drug that just immediately kills the user.
There's a lot of people every year that seek out that end result. While some can fall under a narrow scope of legal options under dignity laws when faced with terminal situations, there's many who seek out that outcome without physical ailments.
If there were a legal way to seek it which was overall less traumatic of a route, but which was also only on the other end of intervention measures like counseling, how many lives might be saved as compared to the rather ineffective prohibition that we see today which largely fails to prevent access and use, but whose illegality does prevent aspects of both research and prevention that might otherwise occur if distribution was the only thing targeted in laws and not attempted consumption?
If people are aware of the life ruining consequences of a drug but value their own lives so poorly that it doesn't deter them from throwing them away to seek out a drug, then society doesn't have a drug problem as much as it has a human experience problem.
There's few things more cruel in concept than ensuring people keep living under conditions where they'd rather not live at all. Whether they are seeking that result all at once or gradually throwing their life away, criminalizing their seeking rather than the conditions that motivate their seeking is wildly messed up.
> Laws against consumption? A terrible idea.
When we're on the topic of experimental medicine, it's the laws around distribution that have 99% of the effect.
Why would it be terrible to prohibit biochemical slavery and mind-control?
It doesn't matter if insurance companies aren't required to pay for it. People will max out credit cards, borrow from friends, and mortgage their house. All for something that could sit anywhere on the continuum of: does nothing to kills you immediately. Probably with a side of "did this rather than something that would have actually worked".
The principle at play here is “informed consent”. Unfortunately, modern society has little interest in the “informed” part which is why it is probably not a good idea to let people imbibe untested drugs even if they are giving “consent” unless they can demonstrate they are “informed”.