Discussion
Societies have tended to have an ambivalent attitude toward public intoxication. In some eras, alcohol consumption or drug-taking have formed the basis of religious or other socially approved ceremonies and festivals. In other eras of a more puritanical nature, intoxication has been stigmatized as a sign of human weakness, of immorality, or as a sin. This lack of consistency reflects different attitudes and cultural standards of public behavior and propriety. Alcohol and other drugs may affect the inhibitions that help to keep socialized individuals from breaking the prevailing social taboos which may or may not have been expressly criminalized. In more modern times and depending on the nature of the crime, the potential effectiveness of the defense will sometimes hinge on whether the defendant's intoxication was voluntary or involuntary. Hence, the potential defense would be denied defendants who had voluntarily disabled themselves by knowingly consuming the relevant liquids or substances, while allowing a defense to those who had unknowingly consumed them.
Read more about this topic: Intoxication Defense
Famous quotes containing the word discussion:
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test: though a different opinion prevails in this country.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)