Ariel - Volume 5 Number 6

Editors J.D. Kanofsky Mark Dembert Entertainment Robert Breckenridge Joe Conti Gary Kaskey Photographer Scot Kastner Overseas Editor Mike Sinason Circulation Jay Amsterdam Humorist Jim McCann Staff Ken Jaffe Bob Sklaroff Janet Welsh Dave Jacoby Phil Nimoityn Frank Chervane

From Harm to Robustness: A Principled Approach to Vice Regulation

John Stuart Mill’s harm principle maintains that adult behavior cannot justifiably be subject to social coercion unless the behavior involves harm or a significant risk of harm to non-consenting others. The absence of harms to others, however, is one of the distinguishing features of many manifestations of “vices” such as the consumption of alcohol, nicotine, recreational drugs, prostitution, pornography, and gambling. It is with respect to vice policy, then, that the harm principle tends to be most constraining, and some current vice controls, such as prohibitions on drug possession and prostitution, violate Mill’s precept. In the vice arena, we seem to be willing to accept social interference with what Mill termed “self-regarding” behavior. But does that willingness then imply that any social intervention into private affairs is justifiable, that the government has just as much right to outlaw Protestantism, or shag carpets, or spicy foods, as it does to outlaw drugs? In this paper I argue that advances in neuroscience and behavioral economics offer strong evidence that vices and other potentially addictive goods or activities frequently involve less-than-rational choices, and hence are exempt from the full force of the harm principle. As an alternative guide to vice policy, and following some guidance from Mill, I propose the “robustness principle”: public policy towards addictive or vicious activities engaged in by adults should be robust with respect to departures from full rationality. That is, policies should work pretty well if everyone is completely rational, and policies should work pretty well even if many people are occasionally (or frequently) irrational in their vice-related choices. The harm and robustness principles cohere in many ways, but the robustness principle offers more scope for policies that try to direct people “for their own good,” without opening the door to tyrannical inroads upon self-regarding behavior

Guidance for the use of methadone for the treatment of opioid dependence in primary care.

• Methadone is an effective evidence based medication used for the treatment of opioid dependence. • It is most effective when used as a maintenance agent at optimal dosing. • Its primary function is to reduce (and eventually replace) illicit opioid use and in so doing, reduce harm and improve the health and psychological well-being of the patient

The absence of <i>Cd24</i> has no effect on dopaminergic neuronal survival or fibre innervations in the striatal 6-OHDA lesioned mouse model of Parkinson's disease.

<p>(A) Tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) immunohistochemistry on coronal sections of brain from a 6-OHDA lesioned <i>Cd24-/-</i> mouse (left column) and a <i>Cd24+/+</i> littermate (right column) at 12 days post-surgery, at the level of the striatum. (B) Representation sections of midbrain (from the respective brains provided in panel A) illustrating the loss of TH+ cells on the 6-OHDA lesioned side of the brain. (C) Optical density analysis of the TH+ fibres in the striatum indicated no difference between the genotypes. (D) Optical density analysis of the TH+ fibres in the SNpr also showed no significant difference between the genotypes. (E) Stereological estimations of the number of SNpc TH+ cells found no difference between the <i>Cd24-/-</i> and <i>Cd24+/+</i> mice. Co-ordinates in the right-hand corners of panels A indicate location of the coronal plane relative to bregma. The scale bar in panel A represents 1cm and 500μm in panels B.</p