Then of course you need to consider that that person may have family and friends who will suffer as well.

Ooh, I have a good one: the impact on the economy of people receiving 18 years of state-funded education and then getting themselves killed in a car accident. Should suicidal behaviour be limited to those whose tax payments have exceeded the state spending they have received?

The “does not cause harm to others” concept is cute and sometimes interesting to think about, but does not work as a strict rule.

I dont understand half your post.

Mill believed in the harm princiapl, if someone chooses to not weare a seatbelt is it likley to cause harm to others?

I make one concession however. Legalising drugs is a policy worth considering seriously.

If we are talking about risking the ‘health or safety of mentally competent adult risk takers’. Then how do you define mental competence?

Maybe the first time somone takes a highly adictive drug such as Heroin they are in full control of their mental state, but surely there is a question over whether a severe addict can be said to be acting with sound judgement? I’m not saying this is really a legal definition of mental capacity but I’d like to here people’s own thoughts on it.

If ywe do accept this as being the case would it not suggest that the Proffessors ‘cream bun test’ would mean that the first time someone took a drug then they should be allowed to do so, but that if they become addicted to it then there would be a case for crimilising their behaviour.

So your left in a situation where you can allow someone to become addicted and then withdraw their right to their addiction- even if this does help people with an addiction it seems a pretty cruel way for the state to act!

If we were to start again with a totally clean slate and everything in life was free again I might take my Liberal Freedom hat off to ban the following as being too dangerous for the general good.

1. Chip fat as used in Yorkshire – southerners call it lard.
2. Premier league football management
3. Nightclubs in Nottingham, Sheffield and Newcastle, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights
4. Cream buns purchased unwrapped from an independent petrol station on the South Circular Road, particularly in summer and if its late in the day.

Almost anything you eat, drink or come into contact with can act like a ‘drug’ in the body.

Safety belts share the same range of options and effectiveness. A rally driver uses a six point harness and plane passengers use lap belts. If either crashes who is more likely to survive?

Attitudes to both drugs and seat belts are about society’s attitude to itself. Much of the wealth of the British Empire was built on the opium trade of the 18th and 19th century. Seat belts only became important when colour television first appeared on our screens and news programs started to become a more important part of western culture (1966). The highest number of accidents on our roads was in the 1930s – not rate per car but total accidents. The response was to invent the driving test not the seat belt.

Drugs –
1. a chemical substance that affects the processes of the mind or body.
2. any chemical compound used in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease or other abnormal condition.
3. a substance used recreationally for its effects on the central nervous system, such as a narcotic.

Seat belt –

A three-point seat belt.A seat belt, sometimes called a safety belt, is a harness designed to hold the occupant of an car or other vehicle in place if a collision occurs. Seat belts are intended to reduce injuries by stopping the wearer from hitting hard interior elements of the vehicle or from being thrown from the vehicle. In cars seat belts also prevent rear-seat passengers from crashing into those in the front seats.

Lap belts are seat belts that go over the wearer’s hips. These were an earlier style of belt and are today less common in the developed world, being found mostly in passenger aircraft. Shoulder belts, or three-point belts, include a lap belt and a second belt going from one anchor point on the lap belt to a point over and behind the occupant’s shoulder. Three point harnesses were first made readily available in mass-produced vehicles by Volvo. Until recently shoulder belts were only available in the front seats of the cars, the back seats having only lap belts. Evidence of the potential for lap belts to cause separation of the lumbar vertebrae and the sometimes associated paralysis, or “seat belt syndrome”, has led to a revision of safety regulations in nearly all of the developed world requiring that all seats in a vehicle be equipped with three-point belts.

Five-point harnesses are safer but more restrictive seat belts, typically found in child safety seats, and also in racing cars. The lap portion is connected to a belt between the legs and there are two shoulder belts, making a total of five points of attachment to the seat.

Seats belts were first invented by George Cayley in the 1800′s. George invented many things in the early 19th century that had to be reinvented a 100 years later – like flight and the internal combustion engine. He was thought of as a great eccentric and would certainly been locked away for his own safety if he didn’t have friends in high places.

He also just happened to be a Whig Member of Parliament.

“You said “It increases the risk of injury to your fellow passengers” and I dont believe that’s true.”

It is totally true and backed up by numerous studies, experiments and just about every other supporting evidence imaginable. You could even test the theory yourself: Put a person or other heavy object on your back drivers side seat, steam down a clear road at 50mph then slam on the brakes. Your’ll feel the person on the back seat hit the back of your seat with a force equivalent to an elephant putting it’s foot in your back, your injuries could be significant but not as bad as the person in the back seat without their seat belt on, obviously.

However I have a suspicion that Professor Adams probably knows this. I don’t think he intends his “Cream Bun Act” to be realistic. He’s just making a basic philosophical point about Liberalism and pulling in two examples of what he sees as illiberal laws.

In any case that’s why I implicitly modified his argument in terms of considering what causes the minimum harm – which is in line with my own philosophy if how Liberalism should be applied in real world terms. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that point.

The prof writes:

“The Cream Buns Act would remove all existing laws and regulations that proscribe behaviour that risks only the health or safety of mentally competent adult risk takers.”

He then goes on to say that the set of laws criminalizing the sale or use of drugs pass his [implicit] Cream Buns Test.

They most certainly do not.

Whilst the evidence does indeed appear to show that de-criminalising some and possibly all drug use would improve our wellbeing, this is not the same thing as claiming that drug use only risks the health or safety of the drug taker.

The risks go much wider than that, as Prof Nutt and the ACMD acknowledge. So long as you accept the ACMD’s research, which is peer reviewed and of a considerably and manifestly more robust nature than the Cream Bun Test, then you have to conclude that Prof Adams is wrong.

Or more likely, Prof Adams is having a laugh.

Now this is an argument I have more sympathy with. Liberalism (at least to me) is about minimising harm. So here, you have to weigh up the small amount of harm caused by requiring millions of people to wear seatbelts (I consider restricting freedom to be a form of harm by definition) against the emotional harm caused by a small percentage of people witnessing an accident made more horrifying by the victim(s) not wearing seatbelts.

That’s obviously a subjective judgement – but I’m inclined to agree that the balance may well fall in favour of seatbelt use.

Different drugs score different results on each scale, and some are certainly going to do harm to others, even in a fully regulated, decriminalised setting.

I don’t think many people believe that drug use is ever entirely harmless. I think the question is whether less harm would be done in a regulated setting than in the current unregulated, black market setting. I think on this issue I come down on the Professor’s side – prohibition is manifestly not working and is causing a great deal of harm. It’s hard to imagine how a regulated environment could be worse.

Sorry no, this argument doesn’t hold water either. We place lots of restrictions on minors and people “not of sound mind” that we wouldn’t dream of applying to everybody else.

The first problem with the principle is that all action has some impact on others. Consider two extreme examples to make the point. Does breathing cause harm to others? If you’re in an enclosed space and the CO2 levels are above 5%, choosing that moment to do some hard exercise could kill someone. And using water to wash might kill someone with dehydration in some parts of the world, hence the very real fear of future water wars.

You cannot do anything without it having an impact.

Then there’s the problem of defining harm. If your action means I fail to get a job – because you applied and got it instead – is that harm? If I crash my car and you’re first on the scene, and the resulting carnage causes you emotional trauma, is that harm?

Which takes me neatly onto the problem with the examples. Prof Adams needs to shadow his local emergency services for a few weeks, then he might change his mind about seat belts not harming others. A friend of mine used to work in a vehicle recovery yard and had the job of cleaning brains off windscreens. That was bad enough, but those who are first on the scene are often emotionally traumatised. Earlier posts above list other examples of the harm caused other than to the choice-maker.

‘Drugs’ are even more complex. Because there is such a range of substances with extraordinarily diverse and complex effects, it may not be appropriate to consider all drugs together. The amount of harm caused by any action has multiple dimensions, and in the case of drugs the former ACMD recognised many (the proper Nutt version not the pathetic excuse for a council we have now) . They describe three main factors that together determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse: the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug; the tendency of the drug to induce dependence; and the effect of drug use on families, communities, and society. Each of these in turn then subdivides into a wider range of harms. Different drugs score different results on each scale, and some are certainly going to do harm to others, even in a fully regulated, decriminalised setting.

I find it hard to believe that someone of the calibre of a professor would not understand this.

The problem with this argument is it applies equally to all risky behaviour including for example smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods and most sports, since all these things increase the chances of death or disability. So I’m not sure it makes sense to judge laws liberal or illiberal on this basis.

Having said that, I’ve never before considered seat belt laws to be an abuse of my civil liberties, and this article has got me thinking. It’s clearly not unreasonable to expect people to take simple safety precautions – the issue here is, is it unreasonable to require people to take such precautions?