Some people believe in the right to doctor-assisted suicide. I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today.
Chances are on HN you'll find people sufficiently detached from reality to advocate for this.
Btw: we should not encourage suicide. I think we need to help people that are in a position where they are considering and also there are things that are deeply f'ed with our society to begin with that slowly push people to this (ie helping suicidal people is a drop in the bucket if we don't fix fundamental issues)
If it's because of the reco: how do we ensure that we ban all other possible lethal combos? Disable recommendations? Ban certain things?
AFAIK, in the US, suicide is not a crime. Assisting in another person's suicide is a crime in most states.
As the post you're replying to said, we could allow physicians to offer painless and dignified deaths after the patient proves they are of sound mind or will never recover from a horrible condition. Much like the courts recognize there can be reasonable limits to purchasing and possessing guns. Admittedly, I don't know what fraction of those who commit suicide do so because of a temporary mental state they could recover from with help, but I'm guessing it's the majority. If so, it'd be inhumane to remove basic barriers that might save people, even if it'd make it easier for the smaller group of people who "rightly" believe they would rather die.
This is a complex topic that touches on so many sore spots in society. But that's when I most doubt all-or-nothing stances. They tend to come from strong emotions rather than reason.
We are hypothesing that people don't want to actually do it and that we are doing the a service from preventing it. This could be the case - but how many people decide to end their life on a whim?
Re: recovering with help. That was one of the main things i had in mind. If the factors that lead you to suicide and/or drive you insane are not removed do you actually believe that stopping you from the final act is going to be effective? As a society we don't give 2 shits about people that are struggling. Money is our religion everything else is secondary :(
Secondly, in many studies of attempted suicides, the vast majority of people of people who survived one suicide attempt did not try again (even though the risk of further attempts is much higher with an initial attempt than in the general population, it is still quite low - around 13% in one 35-year long follow-up study).
This doesn't even count the huge number of people that have suicidal thoughts and don't actually attempt suicide - at least sometimes because of barriers like those mentioned before, which prevent a suicidal thought from turning into a rash decision like jumping in from the of the train or off the building.
In fact, for many people, this type of "near-miss" offered by such barriers is exactly what allows them to realize they need urgent help: they don't want to die, but had been ignoring similar thoughts as meer fancies, until such a moment when they realize that they would have actually done and may try again if they don't seek immediate help.
My bigger point was that nobody decides to kill themselves for fun and what needs to happen is systematically helping people not knee jerk reactions like banning X or Y. I may be wrong
This is how you end up with acetaminophen banned from gas station convenience stores and locked up behind the pharmacy counter. Or, for that matter, prohibition of alcohol, undoubtedly the most popular way to slowly kill yourself.
Seems like that would fall under basic bodily autonomy. Why should a doctor gatekeep something so important...
This is a case where rigidly-based reasoning about rights fails the common-sense test.