Bending the law

The British Medical Association has issued a new report entitled "The use of drugs as weapons - The concerns and responsibilities of healthcare professionals". The addresses the loopholes in international law that allow governments to use drugs as weapons for the purposed of internal law enforcement even though they are banned in war time under both the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. The BMA document cites three primary reasons why this activity should be outlawed:

1. The international legal norms which protect humanity from poison and the deliberate spread of disease which have been put in place by decades of negotiation risk being undermined.
2. Widespread but responsible deployment of drugs as weapons would inevitably result in their reaching the hands of state or non-state actors for whom lethality among those targeted is not of concern. This would simply be chemical warfare with a medical label.
3. Using existing drugs as weapons means knowingly moving towards the top of a ‘slippery slope’ at the bottom of which is the spectre of ‘militarization’ of biology; this could include intentional manipulation of peoples' emotions, memories, immune responses or even fertility.

The full report (PDF) is available here.