Posted by Jane D on September 24, 2001, at 11:19:36
In reply to Re: Posting policy, posted by Mitchell on September 24, 2001, at 6:53:21
> > The choice may be between making a last ditch effort to go it alone or giving up completely.
>
> There might be other choices, too, such as between making a last ditch effort to go it alone, and purchasing mail order drugs from an off-shore source then being charged with a crime.Or there might not be other choices. Or there might not be any risk of being convicted of a crime. I doubt you can point to any case of someone being convicted for importing personal amounts of drugs in schedule 3 or less (to use your definition of the words for the sake of clarity).
> If I needed to do something illegal as part of a self-care plan, I would not do it out in public, such as on the Internet, or at least I would be very savvy about how I use the Internet to facilitate something that might be illegal.
> Far from being an advocate against self-care, I would rather see a general loosening of controls on healthcare, if we could do it while still having in place systems for quality assurance and as long as low-income clients enjoyed similar quality assurances as would moneyed clients.Quality assurance but not options? You seem to be saying we should be quiet about the internet option in order to preserve it for the sophisticated who are already in the know. Banning this information disproportionately penalizes the poor who are latecomers to the internet, who do not have the option of traveling abroad in person or of doctor shopping until they find one who will rubber stamp their import requests.
> The real risk, and I think the one the administrator cited, is the risk of providing a forum where people may advocate participation in illegal activity. To be more precise, I don't think the concern is that people will advocate illegal activity, but rather that the forum will be implicated in illegal activity. I think an administrator would do well to consider how an attorney general might view a discussion where amateur diagnoses are coupled with recommendations of medications and instructions about how to get those medications outside the law.
> The main concern seems to be that purchase of meds from an off-shore pharmacy without a prescription is illegal. It is also illegal to facilitate such purchases.
Your concern is touching which makes me wonder why this sounds so much like a threat. Perhaps some of your previous posts, where you have expressed a general hostility to this site, have caused me to misinterpret your meaning here.
The liability of the board owner is unproven. It is also unlikely to materialize out of thin air. If there is any at all it will end up, in practice, being determined by the level of the so called offense. That is unclear here. I spent several hours with most of the sites listed and I'm damned if I know what they say. I did not, however, find much to support any of the claims made here about what they say. It seems that the sites can be used as a kind of strange rorschach test - where what you see in the text has everything to do with your beliefs and nothing to do with the seemingly deliberate ambiguities of what is actually written there. It is that ambiguity that makes all your scenarios unlikely at best.
That said, this is an area that is sure to be clarified. Why not wait for the clarification to take place? You probably won't have to wait long. I suspect we may soon see a very entertaining dance where drug companies, who make most of their profits from their US sales, are eager to restrict the import of approved drugs from less expensive sources while preserving their option of bypassing the FDA by encouraging importation of non approved drugs.
Jane
poster:Jane D
thread:2069
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20010718/msgs/2113.html