> 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?
Why?
If someone buys deadly nightshade, and gets deadly nightshade, why should the government care?
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.
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.
Or corporal punishment, where scientific consensus since 1990s is that it is harmful. The countries which have banned it since did so ahead of change in public opinion.
There are times when the government is wrong, but it is by far more right than wrong. Thanks to government intervention we saw childhood mortality drop from the high levels in previous centuries, and letting parents just do their thing would eliminate much of that progress.
Keep in mind: This whole "debate" is about parents doing insane crap, like homeopathy and "natural remedies" for which there is no positive evidence, not debatable stuff where there's honest evidence for multiple positions. Parents failing to provide proper medical treatment for their kids is abuse, just as it would be if your boss somehow forced you to drink bleach. And, yes, some of the "natural remedies" are bleach:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement
> Miracle Mineral Supplement, often referred to as Miracle Mineral Solution, Master Mineral Solution, MMS or the CD protocol,[1] is a branded name for an aqueous solution of chlorine dioxide, an industrial bleaching agent, that has been falsely promoted as a cure for illnesses including HIV, cancer and the common cold.
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.
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-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.
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.