I've asked people before if the brake in automatic vehicles disengages the clutch and I never got an answer.

We're not herbivores (your teeth are one of the best indicators here, no herbivores have front teeth like ours). The main reason we don't have enzymes like cows is because there was no evolutionary pressure for us to, our ancestors have been able to get by on more easily digested vegetation and meat.

On a similar vein, the reason we can't eat raw meat like other meat-eating animals is because digesting it takes enzymes that we lack, which we probably lost because they take energy to produce so our ancestors eating cooked meat could survive more easily without them.

Little bit of brain damaged is better than dead

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but surely there are many herbivores in the wild so the food is limited no?

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This is fascinating. I did not know this.

Then are humans herbivores? If we are vegetarian, and eat some plant stuff but not all, why? Why don't we get the special enzymes? It'd be cool to munch on grass. We already eat vegetables so what makes the key difference?

Cows and Buffaloes literally chomp down on dried grass. DRIED GRASS! Why didn't we get those enzymes? They sound cool.

Everything evolved because it was passed along. This doesn't mean the trait is perfect, but rather that it's good enough to survive evolution. One adaptation humans have to an infection is a fever. If you have unwanted guests, then turn up the temperature until they leave. Usually, this works great. You run a fever, the unwanted guests die off, and everything goes back to normal. But what if they don't die? Unfortunately there's not a backup plan for that. We keep cranking up the heat, waiting for the signal that the threat is gone, until we start causing damage to ourselves. Because this is relatively rare, we didn't evolve a better system. Thankfully, we did evolve a higher intelligence, which allowed us to discover medication, so this issue rarely leads to death if medical intervention is allowed

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IIRC it's not exactly a "defense" it's plan A when something just happens to pass through the real defenses, like the mucus in your nose, the white blood cells in your blood etc

Like someone triggering the fire alarm in a building that may or may not be on fire

High temperatures are only used as a last ditch attempt, it is really a desperation measure, that evolved before modern medicine could solve the issue.

Primatene Mist is OTC epinephrine. It was also out of OTC for years because the government banned CFCs so one company got the patent on alternatives, so all the OTC ones had to come off the shelves.

Plants are mostly made of cellulose, which is a bunch of sugar molecules linked into a strong chain.

Humans can't digest cellulose. For us, eating grass is just fiber, zero calories.

For herbivores like buffalo and cows, they have multiple stomachs and special enzymes and bacteria that let them break down cellulose into usable sugars. For herbivores, eating grass is like eating bread for humans. It's a form of carbs for them.

The other factor is large herbivores spend hours and hours a day eating like 50 lbs of grass. If you eat 10 loaves of bread a day you'd be 800 lbs in a few years too.

That is usually the argument made by those that oppose narcan use but it has been debunked. Opioid users dont try to OD, but they will use the drugs with or without narcan available to them and doses are not standardized so ODs are inevitable.

There are some correlations like increased ER visits when narcan is used that are often pointed to as an argument against it however that is expected when people are found alive rather than long dead thanks to narcan. Kinda like how helmets increase head injuries, because they are actually preventing deaths.

I believe thisnis the best answer. Other answers only talk about preventing abuse, which is not really tied to the professional act of a doctor handing out the prescription. Understanding side effects is the true work of a doctor.

It seems to be fading due to the China Threat*. Countries like Japan and Australia are joining the UK and US in an economic group to fight its growth.

*the threat being China's... existence, since they don't do whatever the US says

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The couldn't we get this control done by the pharmacist then? It sounds like the issue is about controlling the distribution and educating people about usage. A pharmacist can do that. I can see that a doctor's medical advice would be necessary in the case where I don't know what my condition is and don't know how to treat it.

I agree epinephrine is unlikely to be abused by most people, it would probably be fine as an OTC. My comment was mainly on narcan which should definitely be OTC and unfortunately that is more controversial.

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Not that I'm against this, not at all, but one could argue that having the antidote easily accessible would make some people take greater risks. Kindof like if there was a cure for hangover, alcohol abuse might rise.

Epinephrine is not really pleasant and people don’t really abuse it

TLDR: World War 2

Many geopolitical problems in the 20th and 21st centuries can be directly traced back to the aftermath of WW1, WW2, and the Cold War.

Prior to WW2 the superpowers of the World were the European Empires like the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Having risen up during the Industrial Revolution, they controlled significant foreign territory, had big fleets of ships and armies, and even powerful independent nations like the US were loosely aligned with the European powers through trade.

After WW2 the European Empires (which were already in decline) started to collapse. The two World Wars had crippled the European economies and devastated the Continent. The Japanese and German Empires had been defeated and were taken over by the powers that defeated them. While the Former European colonies like India, Africa, IndoChina, and China started to gain independence. The Middle East meanwhile which was once the Ottoman Empire had been defeated in WW1 and taken over by the Europeans, was now being broken up into the smaller independent nations that we know today.

The Worlds superpowers became the United States and the Soviet Union.

With the two locked in a Cold War (due to the threat of Nuclear annihilation) different nations started to ally themselves with the now so called Eastern or Western powers out of a need for mutual preservation. The Soviet Bloc or Warsaw pact in the East, and NATO in the West.

This extended to the former European colonies far east (India, China, IndoChina, Japan), the Middle east (Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq), Africa (South Africa, Zaire, Egypt), Middle America (Cuba), and the Dictatorships in South America (Argentina, Columbia). Many of which having governments that were propped up by the CIA or KGB to create Western or Eastern aligned governments.