This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 11th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

When should the state have the power to abridge your right of self-medication.

And what are the implications of locking patients

into a permission-based system of medicine?

Jessica Flanagan is author of Pharmaceutical Freedom,

why patients have a right to Self-Medicate.

We spoke this month in Dallas.

It's easy to get bogged down in details of regulation and what how our Constitution has been interpreted to mean that we have

this right but we don't have this other right and the government may regulate this part of

our lives with you you know, in this narrow way or this broad way.

But you make a essentially moral defense of the right to self-medicate.

And if I recall from the talk you gave here in Dallas,

this is a very long history in the United States,

before it was the United States.

So detail that for me and what we know about what people used to think about the right to put

whatever you want into your body.

Right, so rights of self-medication used to be seen as continuous with bodily rights,

a right to decide what happens with your body,

which I think is the right judgment of what they are.

And for example, notes in the state of Virginia,

Thomas Jefferson was making the case for freedom of conscience.

And at the time, he's trying to convince people,

...