I agree that BP won't get off free, but I also think that consumers will be paying higher prices. BP will likely be paying billions in fines and clean up costs. BP will have to either raise prices or cut costs in order to meet those charges. Those costs will divert resources from ad campaigns, building new service stations, exploring for new wells, etc. Either way, this will ease competitive pressure on the other oil companies. If BP raises prices to pay for clean up, the other companies can raise their prices somewhat too, and still beat BP's prices (since they don't have to pay clean up costs). In addition, the other companies will likely be spending a lot more money upgrading and inspecting their equipment in order to avoid BP's fate. The spill will also likely make regulatory costs much higher, and prevent oil companies from exploring new territories. As a result, they will have to find more (expensive) ways to extract oil from existing sites.

allowing random people to decide what they can take when they want has a definite negative effect on the society at large

But are prescription controls the best way to combat drug resistance?

There are two potential causes of harm:

1. You could take an antibiotic when you don't really need, thereby hastening drug resistance.

2. You could fail to take an antibiotic when you really need it, and thereby suffer or die from the bacterial infection.

Prescription laws may help with 1), but they may harm via 2) due to people failing to get antibiotics they need due to the cost of getting a prescription. Prescription laws for antibiotics would only be justified if the harm of 1) outweighed the harm of 2). How do you know that the harm of 1) outweighs the harm of 2)?

In any case, the drug resistance argument applies only to antibiotics. We could eliminate prescriptions on all other drugs without worrying about increasing drug resistance.