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Can someone steelman requiring prescriptions to buy medicine? Why not just allow people to buy whatever medications they want over the counter? Obviously many people would seriously hurt themselves as a result, but I don't think that's a good argument in favor of prescriptions. People hurt themselves with cars, knives, and guns all the time but we allow people to buy those in part because cars, knives, and guns are useful. Why is medicine any different? If we stopped requiring prescriptions to buy medicines, then people who wanted to consult doctors about which medications to buy could still go ahead and do it. As for people who preferred to do their own research or consult alternative sources instead of doctors, in the vast majority of cases they would just be hurting themselves when they made mistakes, they would not be hurting others, at least not in any direct way.
Virtually all jurisdictions require a license to operate a car. Many jurisdictions either require a license to own a firearm, or forbid it entirely. Many jurisdictions place strict limitations on who may purchase knives (e.g. minors).
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You need a drivers test as proof that you know how to drive a car. The test for understanding medications is being a physician.
Patients are also tested by physicians before some medications are prescribed, both physically and mentally.
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Exactly, this is a bad idea.
Knives are safe enough, but guns and cars can lead to unintentional harm for both the user and onlookers. They should be regulated.
There can be 3 tiers: over-the-counter (free for all), needs based and testing based.
Pepper ball guns, tazers, and lowest caliber pistols can be over-the-counter. Wilderness communities can get needs-based allocation for larger guns. And hobbyists would have to take demanding tests to qualify for the wider selection.
Cars would come with speed limiters (80mph), limited acceleration (0-60mph 5 secs) and sales be limited to low-ground clearance vehicles of limited size. Tall vehicles like pickup trucks would be approved for those who need them. And those that want to go faster, must qualify for harder driving tests.
It seems excessive, but if you look at road & gun deaths in the US and it makes sense.
You know that the vast majority of gun crime is done with small-calibre pistols, right? I mean, maybe not lowest, IIRC most of it's 9mm Parabellum instead of .22LR, but generally criminals aren't looking for stopping power and range - they're looking for low noise, low cost, low recoil, and especially small size, because the use-case of career criminals is "I need this unarmoured guy 10 metres away to go away on zero notice, ideally without attracting attention" and that usually means hipfire from something that can be worn on the belt and wielded one-handed (and ideally hidden).
If you want to stay on the Pareto frontier, small-calibre pistols are the first thing to ban over-the-counter.
(Also, pistols are really convenient for suicides; longarms are less so, although not much less.)
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People generally don’t understand drugs or how dangerous or addictive they can be. Allowing the public to take addictive forms of morphine or opioids for every ache and pain without supervision just makes a population of addicts who cannot hold down jobs and are thus dependent on the state. Other drugs are easy to overdose on and do pretty serious damage to the body.
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Antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains are a good reason.
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There's a very-clear argument in favour of requiring prescriptions for government-subsidised medicine, because the state has much more of an interest in people consuming appropriate medications than inappropriate ones. As it happens, I just got some drugs here in Oz that are over-the-counter legal but which are far-cheaper with a prescription.
There are some drugs that you probably don't want in the hands of the general population due to third-parties being harmed (methamphetamine because murders, plus all the various drugs to pacify people that can be abused for rape or slavery); requiring prescriptions for those appears pretty logical as well (obviously, if you buy into recreational-drug prohibition as a whole, requiring a prescription for medical use is necessary to enforce that).
There's also the point to be made that people in countries without a culture of medicine prescriptions just love taking antibiotics for anything that ails them, and those people not finishing an antibiotics regimen once they have started one.
This directly leads to things like India being a global hotspot of antimicrobial resistance, which kills at least 300k (likely a multiple of that) people a year.
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Unless they're buying them for children.
There are practical factors, like maybe some medications are supply-restricted so it's necessary for doctors to prescribe them only to people who actually need them. But it's for similar reasons that there's no country where all drugs are legal - most societies have decided to operate with a degree of paternalism regarding what other people can and can't do to themselves.
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