A Legal Question
‘The online purchase of a New Zealand-made drug touted as the "strongest energy pill legally available in the world" could land NSW residents in jail, police have warned.
The benzylpiperazine-based products are legal in New Zealand and marketed online under names such as "Dark Angel", "Grin", "Red Hearts", "Majik", "Kandi", "Frenzy", "Altitude" and "Humma", police said.’
Quoted from the Sydney Morning Herald on the 10th of October.
Seriously, why is there always someone to rain on other people’s parade? Presumably the jurisprudential logic behind a penal sentence for the purchase of these drugs, or for their illegality at all, is based in a desire to prevent one form causing harm to oneself, and as such amounts to a form of paternalism (I am assuming that there is no particular moral reason for their prohibition). If we are to give any weight to the liberal tradition’s justification for a criminal prohibition, as our legal system appears to do so heavily, then this should theoretically not be considered a legitimate reason for any liberty limiting legislation, or at least not in the opinion of J.S. Mill. It seems that if these drugs are criminalized because of harm to self, then so should all forms of drug, including alcohol and nicotine and presumably also caffeine and its ilk, unless there is some moral reason for paternalism, which again, Mill would not have found sufficient reason for such legislation.
What justification is there for criminalising the purchase of a drug that is unlikely to cause personal harm to the degree of causing collateral harm to others, especially if we consider that two of the most socially harmful drugs (alcohol and nicotine) are not legislated against (if you are of a threshold age and in certain areas) on the basis of either harm to others or harm to self?
posted by Captain Kickarse at 12:34 am
1 Comments:
Yep, that's it in a nutshell, raining on people's parade. I agree that it is hard to take the claims made by policy makers that they really are concerned for our wellbeing very seriously. Expecting consistency from them in this (or indeed any) area will always result in disapointment.
On one hand we are not allowed to take this (and many other) drugs. But on the other we are allowed to drink, smoke, eat junk food, watch Dancing With the Stars etc, and the complicity of the legislature in this is often defended by appealing to the idea that we are personally responsible for these decisions and that the state has no right to tell us to do otherwise.
I appreciate that some drugs are probably illegal with very good reason - they cause people to be a danger to others, Methylamphetamine being a good example. But for every ice crazed bogan on Today Tonight or A Current Affair, there would be at least an equal(if not much higher) number of alcoholics and binge drinkers behaving just as badly. I have seen the effects of addiction to speed and alcohol in close aquantainces, watched their personal lives fail utterly, and witnessed them use and abuse the people closest to them. Both these situations are destructive, sad, and bereft of human dignity. The difference is tax revenue. So by getting drunk and beating up strangers or collapsing on the floor in front of your kids in a pool of vomit, citizens can help fund the War on Terror. They aren't a waste of space, they're fucking patriots! Death by liver failure should be renamed Martydom by Pickling.
As you well know the reality of this situation is best understood in terms of vote-buying and conservative pissing contests, neither of which are overrun with intellectual rigour.
In order to change this two strategies present themselves:
Campaign to legalise things. - This hasn't really worked so far.
or
Campaign to make everything illegal. This also might not work, but if we can't have any fun, I don't see why anyone should.
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