Pharmaceuticals and Tobacco

Pharmaceutical companies are required to conduct tests and clinical trials that last for decades in order to ensure the effectiveness and safety of a new drug. If a new drug is known to cause medical problems in a small subset of the population, the drug is pulled within days (Vioxx, etc). However, cigarette companies routinely pump out millions of cigarettes and sell them to consumers knowing that smoking significantly increases your chances of developing lung cancer and emphysema. Not only do cigarettes kill the people that smoke them, but they cause lung and pancreatic damage to people that are around the smoke on a daily basis, like their children. Why does the FDA allow this?

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A better solution would be to require those addicted to dangerous drugs to get chemical vaccines against them (yes, chemical vaccines do exist). There's a vaccine that bonds cocaine to an inert virus so the immune system recognizes it. Once the person has been immunized they cannot get high from cocaine because thier body sweeps up the molecules before they can do anything.

The same can and has been done for THC, heroine and a bunch of other drugs.

Schizophrenia is a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes unwanted, irrational and sometimes violent behavior. Drug addiction is a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes unwanted, irrational and sometimes violent behavior.

The only difference between drug addiction and many mental illnesses is that addiction is induced while mental illness is not. It is perfectly ethical to forceably treat the mentally ill who cannot control themsleves so it is also ethical to forcibly treat addicts.

Addict gets hauled into a hospital ->> detox ->> chem vaccine ->> booster injection every six months.

Boom! Demand for drugs goes away, supply dwindles.