PROS AND CONS

This is modest information. The Senate committee on civil legislation approved Mr. Poulle's proposal to allow the courts to prohibit, temporarily or permanently, the practice of medicine to doctors convicted of drug trafficking.

We are tempted first of all, upon learning of this little news, to exclaim: “Good time! » But if we take the trouble to think, we exclaim, with much more aptness: “That’s steep. »

Of course, it's steep. Thus, in the current state of our idyllic legislation, the good doctor who gets caught, like Grand Frisé or like Julot du Sébasto, in the act of dispensing coconut or morphine to adults of both sexes risks a few months of prison perhaps, but do not risk losing the right to “treat” the sick. He has complete freedom to continue, after some cellular intermission, the happy course of his exploits... He only has to move, to get a new look and the tutelary law protects him... Those by example that the law does not protect, it is the unfortunate sick people who will fall, doleful and ignorant victims, to the qualified poisoner. Poor people!

If they are weak, if they suffer, if they despair, the dear doctor will quickly intoxicate them, stupefy them, make them slaves to the insidious poison, the devilish drug. He will not need to recommend to his “patients” to come and see him often. They will come. They will besiege his gate. They will crawl to him. He could really have a rich clientele.

We should not be too surprised by this extraordinary pusillanimity in our laws. Our laws, in fact, are almost always devoid of practical sense and psychology.

Every philosophy student is taught that Society does not have the right to take revenge, nor the right to punish, that it only has the right to preserve itself, to defend itself. However, our criminal laws seem, for the most part, to have been made quite simply to “punish” without any other principle. When they send a guilty person to prison, they are fully satisfied and limit their action there... There is prison. There is the penal colony. There is even the scaffold. There is also the fine. Our laws know nothing other than punishment... It's Father Fouettard's system.

There should be another system than this. There should be the defensive system. Which would not prevent the application of Père Fouettard's system. Our criminal laws should not only be laws of punishment. They should be at the same time laws of preservation and laws of defense and prudence. Putting a coconut trafficking doctor, a thieving financier, in prison is justice. But allowing these rascals to do it again is madness.

Prison is a drug, but wisdom is a cure... The cure is even better than the drug.

Maurice Prax,