Your right to choose ends where society’s obligation of care begins

Published: April 25, 2014 at 4:16pm

A reader asked, via a comment on this site, what the problem is with allowing adults to make their own choices in a comprehensively decriminalised drugs environment.

Given that this point crops up regularly, I think I should upload my answer below as a post, rather than simply as a direct reply to her comment.

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The problem is that some choices lead to adults becoming a burden on others, i.e. the state/taxpayer. In a truly liberal society, it is every man for himself, with no welfare state. You sink, rise or survive by your own hand and nobody is obliged to help you stay alive or in healthcare or pay your pension.

In the true meaning of liberalism, people are free to make their own choices, but then everyone else is free to decide whether they can be arsed to pay to help others when the results of those others’ poor choices come through and they end up half-dead or incapacitated by their own hand and choices.

European society strikes a balance between the liberal and the welfare state. Your choice to drive without wearing a seat-belt ends where the taxpayer’s obligation to pay for your hospital care, or your pension if you end up permanently disabled and unable to work, begins.

Drug addicts, like alcoholics and heavy smokers, end up a financial and care burden on society – hence the heavy tax on cigarettes and alcohol, imposed because you cannot ban what has already been legal and part of life for a long, long time.

The world now acknowledges that allowing the uncontrolled sale of cigarettes was a mistake. But then cigarettes entered a world in which cocaine was used in dentistry, and when there was absolutely no insight into the gross harm that cigarettes cause. If cigarettes had been developed today, their manufacture and sale would not have been permitted.

It would be madness to make the same mistake with drugs that are currently illegal that was made with tobacco cigarettes. With cigarettes, the legislators can be partly excused because there was no knowledge of the great harm they do. When that harm became evident beyond dispute, legislation was used to control sales and becomes increasingly harsh with every passing year. Cigarette manufacturers’ biggest markets are now in third-world and developing countries where there are few or no legislative controls and much poverty and ignorance.

With drugs that are now illegal, there is no such excuse. We know what great harm they do. It would be insanity to de-schedule them, and the first step to doing that is decriminalisation of possession for personal use. The more decent and sensible solution would be to change the law to ensure that first-time offenders are not sent to prison – but there is no need for that anyway, as first-time offenders are never sent to prison.




15 Comments Comment

  1. C. Calleja says:

    Daphne, whilst I appreciate your opinion and see your point, if certain soft drugs were legalised, the government could control their quality and finally slap a tax on them.

    Keeping these soft drugs illegal does not reduce their use, does not control their quality and their users still are a burden on the welfare state.

    But as you said in your previous posts, this is just a cheap way to distract the people’s attention from the real issues.

    [Daphne – Taking drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin off the proscribed list will not mean better quality products that are taxed. It will mean that the illegal market continues in parallel. Criminal organisations and networks don’t suddenly go legal because their product is legalised. They carry on trading, undercutting the legal market and endangering the lives of legal traders. To imagine otherwise is naive in the extreme.]

    • Jozef says:

      It will be simply encouraging the use of drug mules carrying cocaine packets in their stomach, poppy harvesting in Afghanistan financing terrorist groups and endorsing the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta to carry on with building an empire stretching across the globe.

      Holland reversed its laws, Amsterdam had become a dump, Switzerland did the same, closing down all coffee shops across the border to Italy.

      We seem to forget the minister of the interior also happens to be legal consultant to some association having its business mostly in Paceville.

      It will be the parting shot to English language schools.

    • A VELLA says:

      The government wants its cut.
      vimeo.com/81294883

    • Natalie says:

      Use of marijuana causes permanent damage to the brain after just a couple of smokes and is addictive too.

      There are no soft drugs.

  2. Conservative says:

    Well said, Ma’am. Well said.

    The problem with socialists in general is that they regard the lifting of moral restrictions and norms as the “liberal wind of change” – the determined and bleeding demoiselle lifting high the tricolour in shreds, rising from amongst the casualties of the establishment to lead the way to greater freedom and liberty.

    As a result they give “freedoms” and “liberties” to the masses and then the casualties of the mess fall onto the honest, hard-working taxpayer. Decriminalising the use of drugs isn’t liberal, it is regressive. It is going back, not forward.

  3. Jozef says:

    http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140425/local/Repeat-drug-users-should-not-have-to-face-court-Sedqa.516293

    One wonders which drug. And it’s disingenuous to say that facing a court translates automatically into a prison sentence.

  4. Jozef says:

    http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140425/local/updated-one-injured-four-arrested-in-paola-fight.516401

    I can’t help linking the increase in such incidents to Mallia’s pompous freedom for all announced last year.

  5. Chris says:

    “you cannot ban what has already been legal and part of life for a long, long time.”

    Ah but that is the point. Drugs have been part of life since time immemorial. They formed part of the culture of many civilisations until they were criminalised.

    Like the prohibition before it this ‘war on drugs’, has merely facilitated a black market which suited both criminal organisations and state organisations looking for funding for undercover operations.

    The money being spent on this ‘war’ is not proportional to the needs of society. Worse still has proved to be unsuccessful.

    There will always be those who are addicted and will seek that addiction. The current state of play does not help ether them or the state. Indeed it may have caused deaths, brought fear and trouble to whole communities The status quo is no longer an option.

    [Daphne – You are wrong. Or rather, partly wrong and extrapolating from that, which is worse. In centuries gone by, there was no legislation against dangerous drugs just as there was no legislation against pretty much anything else that was dangerous, including sending children up chimneys and down mines, and putting people to work at risk of falling into vats of acid or boiling tar, which they often did. There may have been no restrictions, but there was no market either, or rather, not much of one. When people couldn’t afford food or a winter coat, they weren’t going to be spending their money on cocaine or opium. The market for those was entirely among the moneyed classes, and restricted even therein because of the cost and the frivolity factor. As soon as there were indications that these drugs posed a risk to the population at large, there was a move to restrict accessibility, and licensed dealers were in fact traders in medical supplies, as cocaine and opium were used as anaesthetics in dental and physical surgery. For an example of what happens when a market is flooded with legal opium – widespread social destruction – you need only look to what happened to China in the 19th century when British traders began paying for their tea with opium.

    To say that there will always be those who seek addiction is quite fatuous. Of course – but then, that is exactly why the law should seek to decrease the possibilities and temptations and not increase them. If tobacco cigarettes had been banned, as they should have been, when they were first invented and marketed, do you honestly think that there would be the huge number of addicted smokers there is now? Or that parents would be battling with 13-year-olds over packets of cigarettes? Of course not. Making something legal throws the market wide open and increases the number of potential and actual buyers. Large numbers of schoolchildren are now smoking marijuana, despite the high number of factors militating against their doing so. Once those factors are removed, what does common sense and experience tell you that the result will be – more schoolchildren giving it a go, or fewer? Or the same number? Obviously, more – because buying the stuff becomes easier, the fear of prosecution has gone, and better still, using has the ‘blessing’ of authority so parents can happily be ignored.]

  6. Bob marley says:

    If anything, legalisation and consequent taxation is the only solution to create the balance between liberalism and social welfare that you speak of. It works amazingly well in the truly liberal European countries.

    [Daphne – Which ones, and which drugs in particular? Cannabis, the comparatively mildest of the lot, is legal nowhere in Europe, not even in the Netherlands, where it is merely ‘tolerated’ in certain circumstances in Amsterdam.]

    • Bob marley says:

      It is completely legal in Amsterdam and in two or three U.S. states. It is decriminalised in a dozen or so other European countries (including Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal), as well as Australia and Canada. In Switzerland, even cultivation is fully legal.

      [Daphne – It cannot be ‘completely legal in Amsterdam’ because Amsterdam is not a federal state but a city. It is not ‘completely legal’ anywhere in the United States but completely illegal under federal law though possession for personal use is tolerated in Washington and Colorado. You are confusing decriminalisation of possession for personal use with decriminalisation of the drug itself, which would allow it to be sold openly, publicly and legally. Trading in or cultivating marijuana is a serious criminal act in Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain, contrary to what you say. Again, you are confusing possession for personal use with trade or removal of the drug from the scheduled list.]

      • Bob marley says:

        In Amsterdam weed is sold openly and legally like tobacco, but only in the so-called coffee shops. It is also legal and sold in specialised establishments in the states of Colorado and Washington.

        I think you’re confusing legalisation with decriminalisation. The latter simply means that the matter is treated as a heath issue rather than a criminal one. Legalisation means making it openly available to adult consumers.

        [Daphne – I’m afraid you are rather confused. In Amsterdam cannabis is NOT sold like tobacco. It is sold in highly restricted circumstances. Washington and Colorado have nothing to do with your original argument, which claimed that cannabis is freely bought and sold in many countries ‘in Europe’. But it is not. Decriminalisation does not mean cannabis is treated ‘as a health issue’. It means that the sale or purchase or possession of cannabis, or all three, is not a criminal act. Nowhere in Europe is cannabis (still less heroin or cocaine) fully decriminalised. Trading in and cultivation of cannabis are serious crimes right across Europe. At most, you have decriminalisation of possession for personal use in a few European states, together with toleration of restricted sales in certain shops in one city, Amsterdam.]

      • Francis Saliba M.D. says:

        Marijuana is illegal in the Nederlands but the local authorities in Amsterdam choose not to apply the law under pressure from the marijuana drug barons who run the “coffee shops” – even so they are now tightening the screws because of the protests from the civilian population.

        Malta should not learn that lesson the hard way.

  7. Alexander Ball says:

    Are there any laws that specifically mention people drug-driving?

  8. Frank says:

    Malta’s occupational health and safety legislation unequivocally states that its provisions have to be ‘ensured’ by the employer.

    How could it ever be reasonably possible for an employer to comply with the provisions of this legislation when, at the same time, there is any form of legalisation of drugs?

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