The question writ large but not asked is "What constitutes medicine?" versus all the other ways that we struggle to manage the messy and painful nature of life.
What hits me about the author's dialectic— and also the bulk of these comments— is the unexamined pre-disposition towards a calculus of life in place of a spiritual reckoning of its mystery. Such reckoning need be nothing more than a conscious observation of life's ultimate mystery; "conscious" in the sense of allowing this observation to inform the dialectic.
Regarding overt libertarian political jabs at Greenpeace or the FDA, the author fails to regard the the major purpose of policy is to restrain activity that causes general harm, not advance activity that leads to individual prosperity.
The author is facing the final conflict of every individual, that he shall meet his end in some fashion not of his own choosing with a dialectic of choice. This mode of discourse is internally unreconcilable.
If there's any credence to the observation of 5 stages of grief, this article is locked at the bargaining stage.
But so is the entire financial intelligence system: being incapable of recognizing nor authorizing the obvious dimensions of life beyond any calculus.
Here the true libertarian must acknowledge the limits of his discourse and turn attention to making the most of his circumstances, in which he has every right and responsibility to seek a path of his own, subject to a principle of freedom most succinctly stated as the liberty to do what you have to do, informed by a rich social tapestry of relationships all of which, if sane, must recognize the afore mentioned strange, yet obvious, dimension of life that manifests as a surplus beyond any a-priori design intention.
Where this article informs its readers of specific constraints in the author's experience and story of his path, it is truly valiant and valuable.
Where it digresses into observations about policy I find haphazard generalization from the specific.
What stands out is our culture's unrelenting bias towards reason over the unreasonable.
A mind wiser than mine has observed that today's science has quietly replaced any hope for an intelligible world with theories that are intelligible, with the attendant consequence to reason, that life may be beyond our "scope and limits" as grammatical creatures, and I will add to this my thought that we require a philosophy of the unknowable that let's us continue to explore the world's mystery in a way that nurtures a decent life, given our limits.
It's not paradoxical that social policy attempts to restrain us from the misfortunes that attend an "anything goes" California-ideology mindset in the interest of preventing harm from radical experimentation.
It's ok if the progress of the human condition takes longer than our own lives. We can become adapted to our nature.