Booze bans are bananas

re: "Regulate in moderation" (BP, March 14, 2022) 

Dear editor,

A personal devotion to the teachings of a religion is an excellent reason for those so devoted to follow when making personal decisions as to how they live their own lives. Devout Thai Buddhists might, for example, choose to abstain from drinking alcohol on the holy days of Buddhism, just as they similarly abstain from paying others to kill sentient beings on their orders merely to enjoy some tasty animal flesh. However, neither the personal religious beliefs of some, not even of a majority, nor the teachings of any religion, are legitimately relevant to forming public policy and law.  For the state to be persuaded by some group to force their personal religious doctrines on all is to expose that religion as an authoritarian despotism, something I do not think that the Buddha set out to create. The ban on alcohol sales on Buddhist holy days is every bit as rationally defensible as a universal ban on the sale and consumption of meat on those days. 

Prima facie, the capriciously timed ban on alcohol sales at certain times every day appears more reasonable in order to "minimise the impact of (that popular drug of addiction) on society, claiming it causes health and family problems, accidents and crimes." No one disputes that alcohol is harmful, not only to its users, but to others in society. Indeed, although heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are all more harmful to their users, alcohol is by far the most harmful drug to others in society. A more careful analysis shows, however, that the excuse of protecting society cannot justify the draconian laws currently controlling the sale and consumption of alcohol any more than such considerations can justify the policy that has for many decades uselessly, and worse, criminalized the sale and use of a range of other drugs.

The state may only use law to punish behaviour that directly harms or threatens to harm others in society. That is why laws against obnoxious public drunkenness are just, and this is the most that good Buddhist can reasonably expect the state to impose on others. The restriction of direct harm or threat is also why laws against driving under the influence of drugs such as alcohol are right and reasonable. It is true that society suffers when instead of going to work productively, alcohol users are hungover or worse. But those who so harm themselves are not the property of the state, which may not punish their rash recklessness in getting drunk. Employers might very reasonably decide to dispense with the services of employees whose drug use makes absence or incompetence a recurring event; they may not, however, have the state act as policeman controlling the private lives of employees and citizens in general, who are not in fact slaves either of the state or of corporations.

The retailers and restaurant owners peacefully petitioning for reform of the laws regarding the sale, and also advertising, of alcohol are doubtless acting from the capitalist profit motive, but that does not reduce the cogency of their of their call for reform of bad law. 

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on March 20, 2022, under the title "Booze bans are bananas" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2282063/inspired-thai-diplomacy-