Thursday, July 31, 2003
 
Enabling Illegal Behavior for the Greater Good--Well, No

The first time I read Steve Chapman's piece in today's Chicago Tribune, entitled "Eliminating death penalties for drug use" (registration required), I misunderstood its contents.

The title, of course, does not refer to state-imposed death penalties. Instead, he's talking about some of the unintended consequences friends of the White Lady suffer. Heroin addicts swap needles and give each other a bunch of neat blood-borne diseases. They overdose, too, in increasing numbers. These aren't death penalties, they're just the unexpected results that can occur when you use the human body in ways not explicitly covered in the documentation.

When I first read it, I thought Chapman was talking about whacky enabling behaviors, like hypodermic giveaways, but I should have known better. He's simply talking about making it legal to buy as many hypodermic needles as you want and making the antidote to overdose, a non-addictive and non-enjoyable drug, into an over-the-counter medication. These subsidary things are only illegal because heroin is, and because in the national War on Drugs, some collateral damage is acceptable.

So Chapman's comments are really applicable. Read them more carefully at your first glance than I did.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:33 PM
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