The problem with your scenario is when the consequences are unknown.
People who aren't in medicine really have a hard time understanding just how grisly the things the human body can go through might be.
Medical staff saw during COVID the mismatch between the degree of fear the average Joe had about the consequence of intubation and the degree of fear and panic of the average Joe when actually getting a tube down their throats.
A drug that goes wrong in a bad way can go REALLY wrong in a bad way. Dying from cancer sucks, but it's still several degrees less horrible than dying from your CNS being eaten away from an autoimmune response to an experimental drug which somehow leads to opiate-resistant neuropathic pain.
But if we simply caution "we don't know if this drug will cause horrible side effects" versus "this drug may likely cause unthinkable pain that we can't control in your last conscious moments" that's a very different level of informed consent.
You might be surprised by the number of doctors who privately lament how patients and patient families in general will so often choose to shoot for low odds outcomes that mean terrible conditions for the patient in their last months of life. Even when risks are known, people tend to be bad at actual risk assessment, and will downplay risks and focus on potential rewards, and this extends into medical care. And I'm skeptical that descriptions of what might go wrong versus actually seeing firsthand what it looks like when things go wrong still represents adequately informed.
So while in spirit I agree that completely criminalizing personal choice around consumption is not ideal, when there's insufficient data for truly informed consent I'm not sure I still see eye to eye on the topic.
People who aren't in medicine really have a hard time understanding just how grisly the things the human body can go through might be.
Medical staff saw during COVID the mismatch between the degree of fear the average Joe had about the consequence of intubation and the degree of fear and panic of the average Joe when actually getting a tube down their throats.
A drug that goes wrong in a bad way can go REALLY wrong in a bad way. Dying from cancer sucks, but it's still several degrees less horrible than dying from your CNS being eaten away from an autoimmune response to an experimental drug which somehow leads to opiate-resistant neuropathic pain.
But if we simply caution "we don't know if this drug will cause horrible side effects" versus "this drug may likely cause unthinkable pain that we can't control in your last conscious moments" that's a very different level of informed consent.
You might be surprised by the number of doctors who privately lament how patients and patient families in general will so often choose to shoot for low odds outcomes that mean terrible conditions for the patient in their last months of life. Even when risks are known, people tend to be bad at actual risk assessment, and will downplay risks and focus on potential rewards, and this extends into medical care. And I'm skeptical that descriptions of what might go wrong versus actually seeing firsthand what it looks like when things go wrong still represents adequately informed.
So while in spirit I agree that completely criminalizing personal choice around consumption is not ideal, when there's insufficient data for truly informed consent I'm not sure I still see eye to eye on the topic.