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More on drugs…

More on drugs…

In a recent
entry on this weblog, Roger Crisp discusses the recent and controversial
“Release” advertising campaign on drugs (and its slogan “Nice People Take
Drugs”),
and rightly highlights the need for serious and widespread debate on drug
legislation. My home country, Switzerland, precisely had a debate on this issue
a few months ago, when we were called to vote on a popular initiative
purporting to decriminalize the use, purchase, consumption and possession of
cannabis (not of other drugs) – which would have meant placing the consumption
of this drug on a similar plane with that of tobacco or alcohol. This measure
was supposed to be accompanied by others, notably destined to protect young
people. On the 30th of November 2008, however, the Swiss people
rejected the initiative by quite a large majority.

Read More »More on drugs…

Prenatal sex selection – When prenatal testing can threaten social harmony

China has an imbalance in the sex ratio resulting from selective abortion of female fetuses. Predictions that it may result in social disharmony are eventuating sooner than expected – but the problem is different to the one that was anticipated. Stolen girls have become increasingly valuable commodities in a cruel trade. A 2½ girl is feared kidnapped after she went to the shop around the corner. She vanished; her heartbroken mother and father fear she was kidnapped (1).

As many as 20,000 children and young women are reported kidnapped every year. This is said to be increasing. Only a handful of cases are solved. Many girls are bought by farmers who want wives for their young sons when they come of age, or by men who want a child bride without a dowry. Police raided one village & found that babies were being raised for sale and families were acting as brokers for other peasants who wanted to sell off “surplus” infants (1). 

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Nice People Take Drugs (Too)

The drug and human rights charity *Release* recently launched an advertising campaign in which the slogan ‘Nice People Take Drugs’ was displayed on the sides of London buses. Their aim was to encourage society to face up to the reality that a huge proportion of the population does at least experiment with drugs and to combat the popular assumption, which underlies a good deal of political rhetoric and media coverage, that since drugs are simply ‘evil’ there is no point in seriously debating drug policy. Those ads are now being withdrawn by the company that booked the space, after advice from the Committee of Advertising Practice: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/09/nice-people-drugs-ads-pulled

Apparently, Release has been told that their strap-line would be more acceptable if it included the word ‘too’. This suggests that the CAP may have felt that the public would read the original claim as equivalent to ‘All those who take drugs are nice people’. But even adding the word ‘too’ may not be enough. For the new sentence might be read as: ‘All nice people take drugs, along with other things (such as holidays when they can, advice when they need it, offence when people are rude to them, etc.).’ Of course, no one would have understood either the new or the old sentence in these ways. But in fact, though it should be up to Release how they word their strap-line (the censorship charge they have made doesn’t seem far-fetched), adding ‘too’ does bring out more clearly what they want to say: that we should stop demonizing drug-takers and have an open, impartial, and well-informed debate.

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Not better than the alternative: an informal experimentation tragedy

Police are reinvestigating the 2007 death of Yolanda Cox, a woman who collapsed in anaphylactic shock after being injected with an experimental drug by her sister, a GP. The drug was developed by their mother, originally intended to treat diabetes but apparently believed to extend lifespan. After testing on diabetic patients and apparently themselves without any apparent side effects the mother and sister gave it to the woman three times, with tragic consequences the third time. Was it a failure of medical ethics, research ethics – or plain psychological bias?

Read More »Not better than the alternative: an informal experimentation tragedy

Pandemic Pandemonium

Victoria, Australia – where I write these words – is apparently right now in the grip of an epidemic of swine flu – an epidemic significant enough to play an important role in the World Health Organisation’s decision to declare a pandemic. ‘Pandemic’ sounds pretty serious, but in fact it is very difficult to get a sense of just how worried we should be. The World Health Organisation has warned Australia to prepare for deaths, but deaths from flu are perfectly normal occurrences at this time of the year. WHO says it is “concerned about current patterns of serious cases and deaths that are occurring primarily among young persons, including the previously healthy and those with pre-existing medical conditions or pregnancy”, but in Australia there have been no deaths. Indeed, outside of Mexico the death rate has been in line with what one might expect from a normal seasonal flu. Given this fact, it is probable that the death rate in Mexico is not a reflection of high virulence, but of high infection rate. Most people who come down with the flu in Mexico probably don’t routinely go to a doctor; thus, it is only the serious cases that are being counted.

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Decisions, decisions.

I’ve just returned from Malta where I came across a story that I had missed at the time.  A decade ago a Catholic woman from the Maltese island of Gozo gave birth to conjoined twins.  Doctors said the twins would both die unless they were operated on; but if this operation went ahead only one of the babies would survive.

Read More »Decisions, decisions.

Precrime in Camden: using DNA profiles for crime prevention

The UK police has an estimated 5.3 million DNA profiles in its databases, of which about 850,000 are of people who were never convicted of any crime (including 24,000 samples of youngsters who have never been convicted, cautioned or charged with any offence). Although the European Court ruled that a policy of retaining profiles of innocent people is illegal, the Home Office seems keen to retain them anyway, at least for serious crimes. Now it is claimed by a police officer that police in Camden deliberately target young people who have not been arrested yet in order to obtain DNA samples. According to him it is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy to discourage future crime. But does pre-emptive acquisition of DNA profiles make sense as crime prevention?

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Disagreement about value or about the facts?

Both within and outside ethics, people often worry about disagreements that are purely about value. Suppose that you and I completely agree about all the empirical facts about some case, yet you think that it’s absolutely forbidden to do something and I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It can seem hard to see how we could ever resolve our disagreement. If after I have carefully considered the case, and still see nothing wrong, what could you possibly say that would make me see things in a different light?

 

Things are often a bit more complicated than this. For example, even if we agree on all the empirical facts, our moral disagreement might be due to disagreement about some metaphysical matter—say, about whether a foetus is a person. Metaphysical disagreements are also extremely hard to resolve. Then there is the old point that the way we frame factual matters, or the way we interpret some empirical evidence, might itself be shaped by our values.

 

Anyway, this is a common worry. But when it comes to many heated disagreements about scientific or technological advances, this worry seems to me to get the situation exactly backwards.


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Neonatal euthanasia without parental consent

A
provocative article soon to be published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
argues that parental consent should not be a prerequisite for neonatal
euthanasia. At present, the only country to permit neonatal euthanasia is the
The Netherlands. Medical personnel there are not prosecuted for actively
euthanizing infants in great suffering, provided that they satisfy the
requirements of the Groningen Protocol, which include obtaining consent from
the infant's parents. In the forthcoming article, Jacob Appel argues that the
requirement for parental consent should be dropped. 

Let's first consider the question of whether it
could be ethically permissible for medical staff to end the life of a child
without the consent of the parents.

Read More »Neonatal euthanasia without parental consent