Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended. We call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational drugs and, ultimately, for their timely and appropriate legal regulation. We also call for criminal convictions for nonviolent offenses pertaining to the use or possession of small quantities of such drugs to be expunged, and for those currently serving time for these offenses to be released. In effect, we call for an end to the "war on drugs." KEYWORDS race and culture/ethnicity; health policy; regulatory issues A series of prominent killings of unarmed Black people by police in spring 2020 has renewed calls to address systemic racism in the United States and around the world. Among those killed was Breonna Taylor, whose home was wrongfully entered by officers without warning as part of a drug-related search. As we will detail, Black people in the United States are disproportionately targeted, arrested, and incarcerated for crimes related to non-medical drug use, and this is one area where social reform is urgently needed. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals (see Appendix for details) who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended. We call for the immediate decriminalization of all psychoactive substances currently deemed illicit for personal use or possession, 1 and, ultimately, for their full legalization and careful regulation. In effect, we call for an end to the "war on drugs."In principle, the "war on drugs" aims to protect people from harm and promote public health. In practice, it has worsened many aspects of public health while inordinately harming certain racialized communities (Mauer and King 2007). In addition, the "war on drugs" has fostered a condescending moralism that conflates drug use with violence or bad character and casts drug users-especially Black and Hispanic drug users-as criminals-in-waiting who deserve to be punished (Mallea 2014). Indeed, the very language of a "war" can work to reinforce "a set of beliefs and values that stress the use of force and domination as appropriate means to solve problems and gain political power" (Kraska and Kappeler 1997). In contrast to this approach, we argue for ending the drug war and investing in the most heavily affected communities. If managed carefully, this shift in policy will not only improve public health, reduce crime and recidivism, lower unemployment and poverty rates, and save governments large sums of money (which could be better spent; see Box 1); it will strike a necessary blo...

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments.

The High Court continues to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to make declarations about interventions into the lives of situationally vulnerable adults with mental capacity. In the light of the protective responses of health care providers and the courts to decision-making situations involving capacitous vulnerable adults, this article has two aims. The first is diagnostic. The second is normative. The first aim is to identify the harms to a capacitous vulnerable adult’s autonomy that arise based on the characterisation of situational vulnerability and autonomy as fundamentally opposed concepts or the failure to adequately acknowledge the conceptual relationship between them at common law. The second (normative) aim is to develop an account of self-authorised, intersubjective autonomy based on insights from analytic feminist philosophy. This approach not only attempts to capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults and account for the necessary harms to their autonomy that arise from standard common law responses to their situational vulnerability, it is also predicated on the distinctions between mental capacity, informed consent, and autonomy, meaning that it is better placed to fulfil the primary aim of the inherent jurisdiction—to facilitate the autonomy of vulnerable adults with capacity.

This article explores the impact of an Increase in the average Number of Authors per Publication (INAP) on known ethical issues of authorship. For this purpose, the ten most common ethical issues associated with scholarly authorship are used to set up a taxonomy of existing issues and raise awareness among the community to take precautionary measures and adopt best practices to minimize the negative impact of INAP. We confirm that intense international, interdisciplinary and complex collaborations are necessary, and INAP is an expression of this trend. However, perverse incentives aimed to increase institutional and personal publication counts and egregious instances of guest or honorary authorship are problematic. We argue that whether INAP is due to increased complexity and scale of science, perverse incentives or undeserved authorship, it could negatively affect known ethical issues of authorship at some level. In the long run, INAP depreciates the value of authorship status and may disproportionately impact junior researchers and those who contribute to technical and routine tasks. We provide two suggestions that could reduce the long-term impact of INAP on the reward system of science. First, we suggest further refinement of the CRediT taxonomy including better integration into current systems of attribution and acknowledgement, and better harmony with major authorship guidelines such as those suggested by the ICMJE. Second, we propose adjustments to the academic recognition and promotion systems at an institutional level as well as the introduction of best practices.

Phenomenology gives rise to certain ontological considerations that have far-reaching implications for standard conceptions of patient autonomy in medical ethics, and, as a result, the obligations of and to patients in clinical decision-making contexts. One such consideration is the phenomenological reduction in classical phenomenology, a core feature of which is the characterisation of our primary experiences as immediately and inherently meaningful. This paper builds on and extends the analyses of the phenomenological reduction in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in order to identify and explain its implications for our current understanding of the principle of respect for patient autonomy and the norms of clinical decision making.