It might be a position that you don’t agree with, but calling it a fallacy suggests that it is objectively untrue or unworkable, which I think it clearly is not.
Voting with your taxes is one of the few equitable ways to resolve the US espousal of the contradictory ideals of both democracy and capitalism. Instead of voting with your money in a marketplace of consumers, you are voting for what kind of government even needs to be done by means of what you are willing to pay for. An irony of why this is not done is because in the US taxation has increasingly been skewed away from entrenched wealth interests towards the average person, so it would give the common person more influence in government than corporations of plutocrats currently have.
That was not the point I was making, as I am more of a scientist than capitalist. But what I was getting at is that consent to be ruled is not in any way absolute. Government and its agencies get whatever authority they may have from the public at large, so they do have a real obligation to do what they are told.
Sure, it is what people call a “waiver”. I have recommended those as an antidote to the war on (some) drugs for decades. But hardly any governments are willing to do this, because they have a fundamental problem with accepting people as having any personal responsibility. That’s a problematic outlook for any society which claims to be a democracy. It’s also completely contradictory when people somehow have no responsibility to choose to take a drug, but somehow they are responsible enough to suffer draconian punishments once they do make that choice. Waivers are out of favor in a litigious society that sees an endless goldmine in lawsuits of the “how could you let me do this to myself” variety, which strengthen both economic as well as political control of the individual.
Also, this posits the question of why waive a right to treatment for kratom specifically? There are lots of things, foods, drugs, supplements, etc which have had more problems but yet not resulted in far more medical problems. Do you have a medical excuse to eat figs? Do you need a waiver to take aspirin? What exactly constitutes “abuse”? I hate to say it, but the DEA’s history here is pretty transparent. They tend to ban substances NOT based upon how safe their physiological effects may be, but upon the basis of how much people like them. Those are IMO weird priorities, and really not a thing anybody needs enforced.
