Voters in Four States Chose to Continue Infringing on the Right to Self-Medicate

As philosopher Jessica Flanigan pointed out in her book Pharmaceutical Freedom, autonomous adults have the fundamental right to self-medicate. Michael Cannon and I wrote in our white paper Drug Reformation, that Congress recognized the need to respect the right to self-medicate as recently as 1938, when lawmakers venerated that right even as they unintentionally undermined it by passing the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Alas, many decades have passed since policymakers and pundits have given even a slight nod to the right to self-medicate. And yesterday, voters in four states demonstrated how democracy and freedom are not synonymous. A majority of voters democratically chose to continue making it a crime for people to consume marijuana for nonmedical purposes, and in one of those states, they kept it a crime for people to consume psychedelics for medicinal or nonmedicinal purposes.