It is ironic—to use the limpest adjective—that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come to care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take “hard” drugs on the parental ground that they are bad for the user’s health. One is touched by their concern—touched and dubious. After all, these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in an year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted, a national health service.

Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, New York, 2002, p. 58