How to Regulate the Right to Self-Medicate

Abstract

In Pharmaceutical Freedom Professor Flanigan argues we ought to grant people self-medication rights for the same reasons we respect people's right to give (or refuse to give) informed consent to treatment. Despite being the most comprehensive argument in favour of self-medication written to date, Flanigan's Pharmaceutical Freedom leaves a number of questions unanswered, making it unclear how the safeguards Flanigan incorporates to protect people from harming themselves would work in practice. In this paper, I extend Professor Flanigan's account by discussing a hypothetical case to illustrate how these safeguards could work together to protect people from harms caused by their own ignorance or incompetence.

Special Issue on Jessica Flanigan’s Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Selfmedicate

“…In support of Flanigan’s approach Roberts offers an account of how her approach could work in practice. He argues that pharmaceutical liberalization should be accompanied by the requirement that pharmacist be subject to mandatory disclosure rules, so that their obligations to disclose are “in line with those of clinicians seeking informed consent for treatment” (Roberts, 2022 , 244). He also argues that to safeguard incompetent people from harm, drugs should be placed behind the counter.…”