Happy Birthday

to icanbehave

Misuse of "non-prescription".

Just heard an item on the news about a tour bus accident in California(?).

What got me was that after they mentioned the driver had been arrested, they mentioned that an investigation was looking into whether "prescription or non-prescription" drugs were involved.

And the way they said it made me suspect that this was yet another case of the increasingly common practice of incorrectly referring to drugs that aren't legal (or at least not legal to have without a prescription) as "non-prescribed" or "non-prescription".

I suspect this is due to the seeming inability of many folks to grasp that there can be more than two categories for something like drugs.

I think I actually saw some rules once for a housing project that banned "non-prescription" drugs.

There are at least *four* categories of drugs:

A. Drugs that are illegal to have, period.
B. Drugs that are illegal to have without a prescription.
C. Drugs that are legal to provide/sell without a prescription.
D. Drugs that aren't covered by the laws yet.

And "Illegal drugs" can refer to category A drugs *or* to category B drugs that someone has without having a (valid) prescription.

Trying to oversimplify things (as usual) makes matters a lot murkier and makes finding out what is actually going on harder.