The Doped, the Detained, and the Depressed: Reflections on a Public Morality Gone Mad

Civitas, 22 September 2006

Should Pete Doherty ever find himself banged up for possessing hard drugs, he would soon discover that incarceration had not remotely put them beyond his reach. This is especially so, should he have been incarcerated north of the border.
According to a report in yesterday’s Times, so easy has it become for inmates in Scottish prisons to gain access to illict hard drugs while inside them, and so awash with drugs have they become, that they are shortly all to be given personal drug-taking kits, complete with syringes, swabs, filers, and a sharps disposal box.
I was only surprised to read that a gram or two of heroin or coke is not be thrown for good measure.

Apparently, the prisoners are being given these kits to obviate their need to share needles with each other which might expose them to the risk of contracting from each other HIV or hepatitis.
So, supplying prisoners with drug-taking kits is being justified by appeal to considerations of what is in their own best interests, as well as cost to the NHS. Surely, it would have been even more in the prisoners’ best interests were prison authorities to be resolved to stamp out the ready availability of drugs in prisons, as well as to provide addicted prisoners with opportunity to undergo rehabilitation so that they could be weaned from their habits while inside.
This seems not to have been considered an option. We and the prisoners have, apparently, human rights legislation to thank for that which protects the right of prisoners to engage in such intimate forms of contact with their visiting loved ones as make drug trafficking easy to go on undetected.
Even should a temporary tiff with a girl friend have dried up this possible supply route, an imprisoned Mr Doherty would find he still need not go short, should he wish to indulge his drug-habit. For, apparently, what their estranged girl-friends and wives may withhold from them, prisoners can readily obtain from the many corrupt screws (pardon the term!) willing to deal in drugs to them at a price.
It is not sound reasoning, but woolly-minded bleeding-heart liberalism, that has resulted in such a morally unsound measure.
Such woolly-mindedness is also about to lead to an equally as morally unsound measure, should the Swiss Supreme Court decide in favour of a clinically depressed person who has applied to it to be granted the right to die by means of assisted suicide – which dubious form of privilege is currently confined by Swiss law to the terminally ill alone.
Should the Swiss Supreme Court find in favour of the appellant, that decision would, according to a second report in Thursday’s Times, have huge ‘implications across Europe’. According to Ludwig Minelli, founder of ‘Dignitas’, a Zurich-based organisation that assists the terminally ill to die, it would reduce present suicide rates in Europe by as much as 75%. ‘You could avoid the huge majority and reduce costs to the health services’, he is quoted as saying.
Of course, it was not by appeal to economics but to human rights, that old friend of inveterate drug-addicts, that Mr Minelli, a lawyer by profession, argued in favour of extending assisted suicide from the terminally-ill to the clinically depressed. He did so at a fringe-meeting on Wednesday at this year’s Liberal Democratic Party conference in Brighton where he is reported to have said:
‘We should accept generally the right of a human being to say, “Right, I would like to end my life”, without any precondition, as long as this person has capacity or discernment…. We should see in principle suicide as a marvellous possibility given to human beings …. If you accept the idea of personal autonomy, you can’t make conditions that only terminally ill people should have this right.’
Again, it seems not to have registered on Mr Minelli’s moral radar that someone’s powers of discernment may have been so badly impaired, as a result of clinical depression so severe as to lead them to want only to die, that they can no longer be said to be enjoying at that moment anything worth speaking of as personal autonomy, any more than can a drug-addicted prisoner, presented by the prison authorities with all that they need for a fix.
Equally absent from Mr Minelli’s field of moral vision is any suggestion that, because we are not creatures of our own making, we may not enjoy the same right as our Creator to decide for ourselves the moment of our death.
It is worth recalling how vociferously some used to argue until only very recently, on grounds of economics and by appeal to the suffering of loved ones, in favour of the withdrawing of life-support from those in persistent vegetative states. Then, it was discovered that many of them remain fully aware of all that is going on around them, but only lack the ability to move and so convey their thoughts to others.
Many people in these states subsequently recover, as, indeed, do some diagnosed as terminally ill. Similarly, many depressed people, especially where their depression is but the down side of a bi-polar condition, regain the will to live and a taste for life.
Surely, the authorities should always only ever be on the side of life, sanity, health and mental-freedom, never on that of death, insanity, sickness and mental slavery. Neither drug-kits to help prisners take medically un-prescribed narcotics, nor a right for depressed people to receive assistance in committing suicide, are the sorts of thing authorities should ever be willing to dispense.