> Heroin was sold as cough medicine that might stop your breathing? If it tells you you might die and you choose to ingest it, that's on you. If you choose to play Russian Roulette, nobody's stopping you.

Yes, heroin was sold as children's cough medicine by Bayer [1]. It stops coughing because it slows breathing. Take enough and you stop breathing, then die. This how 30k+ Americans die from (non-)prescription opioid overdoses each year.

No, it did not indicate that it could harm or kill you. Why? Because regulations didn't exist that mandated purchasers were informed of all potential side-effects. Regulations didn't exist that mandated testing to determine those side-effects or the safety profile.

> In case it wasn't sold with a warning that it might stop your breathing, you could have chosen to verify that it did what you expected before ingesting it.

It does exactly what it says: stops coughing. You might be able to take 10 bottles over time, but the next time you dose from the 11th bottle, you don't wake up. It could be a multitude of reasons: lack of quality assurance means different batches have different concentrations of the active ingredient, your tolerance for heroin lowered after disuse and you take the same dose you're used to taking and die, what's in the bottle isn't the product you thought it was or you happened to have a drink of alcohol before taking it and overdose from a normal dose. These are the same problems heroin users face in the unregulated black market for drugs. How does "verifying that it did what you expected" help in any of those cases? Why offload the responsibility to ensure a product's safety, side-effect profile and drug interactions on the user when it could just as easily be done at the source by knowledged professionals and save laymen lives from being needlessly ruined?

How does one verify the medicine they bought does what they expected and not give them cancer in a couple of years?

Also, this is a children's medicine. They aren't consenting adults. How can you suggest in good faith that a child verifies the medicine they're given by a doctor, parent, nanny, babysitter, teacher or friend does exactly what it should? What if they're old enough to buy it themselves, but still a minor with underdeveloped decision making processes? What if the child finds the medication? Child proof packaging and bottling exist because of regulation.

But here's the thing:

> History has shown that without regulation the quality, efficacy, composition, safety and side-effect profile of drugs might stray from reality because of market incentives. The unfortunate truth is that sometimes it is more profitable if those five things are ignored and people get hurt or die. Hence, regulation.

With or without regulation, you will have a market of desperate people who need treatment so that they don't end up in pain, injured or dead. Snake oil salesmen took advantage of this. The world doesn't need a Pfizer that, instead of making the investment to develop drugs that treat diseases, pushes a variety of unproven harmful cures because it is immediately profitable to do so. Before you say the market will ensure that drugs are safe, effective, etc: this wasn't the case at all until the FDA. The market didn't incentivize these things and we all suffered for it.

Later we got dextromethorphan: technically an opioid and morphine derivative, like heroin, that suppresses a cough but doesn't completely stop breathing at any dose.

Heroin is cheaper to produce. The market would decide that a certain number of dead children are acceptable because people will buy the cheaper, deadlier medication. Unknowingly, because they lack the necessary information to make an informed decision due to the lack of regulation. The type of information needed for a market to function.

They might not even have the option of purchasing DXM, as it was developed by the government as an non-addictive alternative to codeine. Years later it was brought to market as an antitussive because the market was lacking cough suppressants. The market was lacking because the FDA banned morphine and heroin as OTC cough suppressants.

>They may be regulated but any adult can still choose to partake of however much they like regardless of the damage to their health.

Anyone that purchases cigarettes in America is not purchasing the cigarettes Philip Morris et al want to be selling in their ideal world. Cigarette composition, manufacturing, marketing and price are all heavily regulated by decades of legislation in response to more toxic, addictive cigarettes being introduced and the advertising campaigns behind them.

Without regulation, cigarettes would be more toxic and deadly; and they would cause more damage to someone's health.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/yes-bayer-promoted-heroin-for...