on the flimsy difference between vaccine mandates and drug prohibition

This is one of the more counterintuitive arguments I've made recently, but I think it's an important one:

Under a liberty framework, there is no difference between the government mandating that you get a vaccine and prohibiting you from taking one. They are both are government restrictions on the ultimate outcome of your physiology.

There is a default-human irrationality as it pertains to negativity, and by negativity I don't mean "mean" or "sad" things (although there are other irrationalities to that too), but rather negativity as in the absence or subtraction of something -- as in the artistic concept of negative space. The commission bias is a known medical bias¹ where doctors are predisposed to do something even when doing nothing is the appropriate thing or even the superior thing to do. It's also much easier to explain many human behaviors in terms of what is *unwanted* rather than what is wanted; asking the question "what do you want from marriage" can be a less informative question than "what do you hope to avoid by being married" (the answer is often loneliness), and "why do you want to work here" is for many less accurate than "what unwant(s) does working here prevent", which we all know the answer to and it's at minimum "homelessness."

I think there is a similar default-human irrationality about ingestion of substances. People seem predisposed to give much more weight in their sense of health or physiology or even morality to what substances are ingested than what substances *are not* ingested. Do you think it is more concerning that someone does four standard-sized² 75mg lines of cocaine over the course of a weekend than having a habit of not exercising and living a sedentary lifestyle? Not exercising is decisively the worse of these two options, and by a lot.³ in fact many of the benefits of exercise are from being *not sedentary*.

The bias toward ingestion of substances rather than removal of substances is, I think, enhanced due to needlephobia. The public has an irrational attitude toward drugs administered through needles. There is nothing bad inherently about drugs administered through needles and in fact oral versions of many injectable drugs are more harmful than the injectable equivalent. Unsafe injection practices can lead to infections -- but so can leaving food out for too long. For whatever reason, and it's always a dumb one, people think a substance is just more dangerous when injected, such as when you hear sentences with "injection" capitalized like "they're INJECTING them with" -- if this reasoning were carried to its logical endpoint, you'd get the sentence "they're INJECTING them with saline!" and the question is, of course, so? Saline is just water. The idea here is that injection carries some special property that it does not actually.

So when I say "both are government restrictions on the ultimate outcome of your physiology" I mean there is some kind of rule on what your physiology is allowed to be. It is no less of a restriction on your physiology that you be disallowed from taking a substance than it is to force you to take one. To make the point here, the fact that prohibition is just as much control over your physiology would be absolutely clear if, for whatever reason, the government prohibited the sale of insulin, or exogenous vitamin B. Restriction just doesn't as immediately seem like control over your physiology as a mandate to take a substance because the substances that are prohibited are ones you personally do not take or rely on.

The degree to which this is counterintuitive may be insurmountable. In my last attempt at explaining this, a person repeated themselves much in the way you may be familiar when a person's head has collided against a concept and refused to budge, such as being unable to understand calorie restriction because eating a salad "cancels out" their fries. I think something essential is burned if not branded into the brains of certain people; they are forever thought-caged by this paradigm.

Nonetheless, I encourage you to share this argument with others. It's an important one to understanding what's going on here more objectively, and with a more accurate and scientific pharmacological framework.

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¹ https://sjrhem.ca/.../11/CriticaThinking-Listof50-biases.pdf
² https://drugs.tripsit.me/cocaine
³ don't have study on hand, but a lot of people think it is pointless to exercise if your diet is bad. this is false. there are many benefits from exercise, regardless of whether your diet is good.

- Alfred