the article doesn’t note this explicitly, but possession of testosterone without a prescription is a federal crime because testosterone is a Schedule III substance, and you can receive up to a year in prison accordingly on your first offense (and up to ten if you possess with “intent to distribute”). the scheduling also makes even legally acquiring testosterone a hurdle for a lot of trans and gender nonconforming people, because of how it’s regulated:
“Criminalization has made it easy for pharmacists to deny my [testosterone] prescription, which has happened to me many times,” Artemis McGettigan, a trans student in Dearborn, Michigan, told Filter. “[Pharmacists] have told me in the past that ‘It’s corporate policy, they’re not allowed to fill that type of prescription … but I knew that was false because other CVS locations, for example, were able to fill it.” A CVS media representative told Filter that its policies “do not prohibit our pharmacies from filling testosterone prescriptions.”
Would it be fair to say that these restrictions were likely first introduced amid concern potential for abuse as performance enhancing by body builders and sports people, more than punishing gender variant people.
those are actually the reasons they were introduced; but they’re also almost entirely immaterial to the harm which is being done, because testosterone’s restriction unsurprisingly comes down most heavily on people with legitimate medical uses–people transitioning and people who have medical issues necessitating the use of testosterone–and not people who use it illicitly or illegally.
It’s always struck me as particularly weird that the government likes to make possession of many drugs, in any quantity, illegal. I can understand making laws that say if you have say, 10 years of use for one person, that it might be questionable whether that is entirely for you or for resale. But if the argument is to stop people who are not the government or pharmacies from selling a substance, the laws should explicitly call out selling the substance or having an extremely excessive amount, one beyond any reasonable expectation of personal use.
But then again drug scheduling was created explicitly as a way to start a war on drugs, so it doesn’t surprise me that they didn’t think through the medical implications of making drugs which people regularly are prescribed and need to live happy healthy lives. We’ve had decades to fix this, however, and have been entirely unable.
Let’s not forget how the war on drugs was also am excuse to discriminate without being as obvious about it, since weed was disproportionately used by mexican and black communities(? The details are a bit hazy to me, truth be told).
And since capitalism needs its blood sacrifice, and our constitution explicitly states that slave labor is still allowed for imprisoned people, we now have a permanent underclass of drug possessors to extract slave labor from. Not to mention that since we don’t have any robust ways to rehabilitate former criminals into society, and most jobs categorically deny the applications of anyone who has had a felony on their record, it just funnels these people back into the industrial prison complex. I mean what else are you supposed to do when you have no money and nobody will hire you?
Capitalism is working as intended and the criminalization of drugs is just one of those levers it can pull. It was never about the actual harmfulness of drugs, and that’s why problems like this have never been fixed.
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