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Thank you. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and with me today is Professor Jessica

Flanagan. Jessica is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond, where her work

focuses on applied ethics and normative ethics. And she's recently published a book titled

Pharmaceutical Freedom, Why Patients Have a Right to Self-Medicate.

That's the argument that we're going to be talking about today.

Jessica, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So patients having the right to self-medicate is basically the idea that if patients want to take

pharmaceuticals for some medical condition,

they should be able to do that without getting permission from a doctor in the form of a prescription.

And when I first encountered your argument, just like the topic sentence version of your argument,

I sort of assumed that you

were going to be saying the version of it that I've heard before, which is basically,

patients should have this right because people have the right to autonomy, and even if they make

...