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 safe-guards 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 safe-guards could work together to protect people from harms caused by their own ignorance or incompetence.

在Pharmaceutical Freedom中，Flanigan 教授认为我们应该授予人们自我用药的权利，原因与我们尊重人们给予（或拒绝给予）知情同意治疗的权利相同。尽管这是迄今为止支持自我用药的最全面的论据，但 Flanigan 的《药物自由》留下了许多悬而未决的问题，因此不清楚 Flanigan 为保护人们免受伤害而采用的保护措施在实践中将如何发挥作用。在本文中，我通过讨论一个假设案例来扩展 Flanigan 教授的论述，以说明这些保障措施如何共同保护人们免受因自己的无知或无能而造成的伤害。