From: Sandor Spruit (sandor@cs.uu.nl)
Date: Thu Nov 30 2000 - 05:15:16 PST
Eugene,
On Tuesday, November 28, 2000, 9:28:09 PM, you wrote:
Eugene> Tony Berkman writes:
Eugene> > Dutch legalise euthanasia
Eugene> If they'll also legalize headfreezing, I'll board the next
Eugene> plane to NL. And they haven't even mentioned legal drugs!
Duh. With all due respect, you folks still not get it, do you ?!
Drugs, prostitution and now euthanasia are NOT legalised as such.
They're still illegal. What is really happening is that these things
are being decriminalized. Or, as one list subscriber recently noted:
"Actually I took a class on the whole process and we used the
Netherlands as a guiding example to explain the difference between
decriminalization and legalization. It seems like the prostitution
issue didn't really change, they just wrote law to codify its social
practice."
The law just describes in detail under what circumstances someone may
not be prosecuted. If drugs where legal, you could just ship a large
container crammed with drugs via Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. I would
not recommend this - their latest high-tech container scanner was on
the news just a few weeks ago :) Same with euthanasia. If you've ever
seen a relative painfully "fade away" as a result of terminal cancer,
I think you will appreciate the subtle differences between murder (as
some folks might call it) and euthanasia under carefully controlled
circumstances. Personally, I'm proud to live in a country where such
things are discussed very seriously and thoroughly, out in the open.
So don't tell me we *legalize* these things, please ! :)
Cheers,
Sandor
-- ir A.G.L. Spruit, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Institute of information and computing sciences "There is a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out" (from: Lou Reed, "Magic and Loss")
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