On 3/29/2020 at 6:28 AM, BTGBullseye said:Some interesting takes on this, but the fact was that he interfered because it was a distress call, and those take precedence over the Prime Directive. Once the emergency had been taken care of, (the people from the ship retrieved) he had to do his best to put the genie back in the bottle. (not easy mind you) Sadly, in this case, that meant effectively dooming both planets, as he could not interfere to help either side, including not being able to tell the addicts that it wasn't plague related. If you pay close attention, he really wanted to help the addicts, but to do so would actually be a major infraction of the Prime Directive.
Seems you may have started off with a false interpretation for your analysis.
I'd still like to see more of this though.
What part of my analysis is false?
I wasn't against Picard saving the survivors. I was saying he shouldn't have sent the drugs back with them AFTER rescuing them. If the Enterprise never showed up, the drugs would have burned up in the atmosphere (along with the survivors). I'm saying him giving back the drugs was the violation; the Enterprise's actions literally changed the course of history for planet A in a big way. Simply rescuing the survivors wouldn't change the course of history much, if at all.
He saw helping the addicts as violating the prime directive. Fine. The planet would have gone through hell and recovered in some fashion. You can argue he shouldn't have helped them, but then he ALSO interfered by giving them one last shipment that would never have made it otherwise.