GodKlown said:
I say no. You chose your actions, and you knew the risks of your actions. People don't want to seem to pay the consequences for their actions anymore, they just want to do whatever the hell they like and expect someone else to fix it for them. I'm not saying that they are undeserving of treatment, but there are a lot more people in serious need of those livers who did nothing to complicate their situations by bad decisions.
I have a strong dislike of alcoholics for personal reasons, but I'm not going to sit here and say that all people who drink to excess deserve liver failure and to die a painful death. Anything done to excess is bad. Sure, I eat and smoke and I know in the future what the consequences might be if I don't take more responsibility for what I am doing now, but who the hell in their right mind even thinks about that?
You know that is NOT how liver transplants work, its not like they are NOT infinitely divisible and can just "sew them into anybody, they'll work just as well".
No. You get a liver (from a Donor who died in a state where their organs can be stabilised) and you match up the cell receptors. A perfect match is unlikely, but you want as many surface receptors to match as possible as the more matches = less immune-suppressant drugs needed.
usually, this results in only a single individual within an area the organ can be promptly transported to being the best match. There are adjustments made according to need, such as if someone is on the brink of death or another can wait another month, but it comes down to one person.
But if that one person happens to be an ex-alcoholic would you burst into the ethics meeting and say: "Fuck That! Put the Liver in the person that is a worse match - and is most likely to be rejected - because the alkie *deserves* to suffer because they *brought this on themself*"
Seems like in the United States, the government is doing nearly all they can to make cigarettes as borderline illegal as they can. By the end of this month, they are prohibiting the postal service from shipping them anymore, and a lot of states do not allow people to smoke indoors, unless they own their own house. You can't smoke in bars, at work, closer than 100 feet of the doors at work, in company cars, all hotel rooms, rental cars, and I've even seen some outdoor concerts that don't allow smoking.
No, that' just common courtesy because cigarette's stink up the place, so everyone, private business included prohibit indoor smoking. It was tolerated in like the 1950's when EVERYONE smoked (probably because there wasn't anything better to do) but most people don't smoke any more probably because it went out of fashion.
Regardless of the law, if you are going to create large volumes of smoke, go outside to do it.
But drinking apparently doesn't suffer the same restrictions, I suppose because they can argue that being drunk doesn't affect the person sitting next to you... unless you happen to throw up on them or kill them in a car accident driving home. Why alcohol in general doesn't suffer the same stigmas as cigarettes and isn't listed in drug schedule is beyond me at this point. Alcohol has no health benefits and is addictive and ruins people's lives, yet it is as legal as water, so long as you are of a certain age in this country. I'm not exactly saying that this world should mirror the one shown in the movie Demolition Man, but I think there needs to be more stricter rules for alcohol like they have for cigarettes. There are certain benefits from red wine and whatnot, but they have compressed those benefits into a pill form, so it eliminates the need to get drunk if you claim you are only doing it for the healthy aspect.
"yet it is as legal as water, so long as you are of a certain age in this country."
yeah, Twenty One. America has some of the strictest alcohol laws of the western world.
Have you considered moving to Saudi Arabia or Oman? They may treat booze with the appropriate over-reaction over there.
Hard drug addicts should fall into the same category as alcoholics when it comes to any kind of organ transplants because they chose their fate when they sat around for years shooting heroin between their toes. You knew every single time you stuck a needle in you or poured yourself another drink that you were doing harm to your body, but when those ramifications start to actually affect you, that's when you begin to worry.
Except that cause-and-effect of damage is highly disconnected, there is no certainty. The certainty is they will get intoxicated but there is no certainty their will destroy their body, everyone thinks that they can stop before too much damage is done and the point is life is not like a video game, we don't have a HUD in the right field of our vision telling us the health of each organ.
People make mistakes, accidents happen.
I don't remember ever seeing a warning label on a bottle of alcohol, and there is no sign that those warnings actually deter anyone from any harmful behaviors. The thing is, governments make entirely too much money off of people making bad decisions because of the outrageous taxes they impose on cigarettes and alcohol that they don't really want to make those things illegal. They want you to make poor decisions and drown your sorrows in your drugs of choice, so long as they make a few bucks in the process. The overall drain on the health care system apparently seems like a small price to pay in the eyes of the government when weighed against the income those substances bring in before the trouble starts for any one person.
Bullshit. That makes ZERO SENSE. The Govt. makes more money by people staying in work and paying income tax than out of work on some drug or another.
Even if they stay in work, if they die well before retirement... that is income tax money the govt can't take.
Should all people who ruin their lives be denied access to quality medical care because they make poor choices? No. But someone who intentionally does harm to themselves over years don't deserve the same respect as someone who had no choice in their resulting health condition. Let people who were born with lousy organs and accidents have priority over people who were too weak/stupid to make good life choices over someone who never had a choice from the beginning.
Ah HAH!
Gotcha. Do you know what is a safe level of consumption of alcohol? Obviously the answer is not no-amount, yet some people can drink vast quantities for years with no ill effect. The point is NO ONE INTENTIONALLY KNOWS the damage they are doing because everyone's body responds differently. It is EXACTLY the same as someone who does some skateboard stunt and breaks a bone. Sure with hindsight it's easy to see where they went too far and injury was inevitable, but you can't see that at the time.
There is no ethical difference between someone who injures them-self accidentally and someone who is injured spontaneously, they did not DELIBERATELY cause this harm, though their actions are deliberately the end result was not.
