It's a Free Country, Isn't It?

Remember when you were a kid and one of your pals would give you heck for something or other? And you'd say, Well, it's a free country, isn't it?

Well, maybe it used to be, but it sure as hell isn't now.

We've given some unelected, unaccountable, self-righteous busybodies way, way too much power over individuals who can't fight back.

Consider the case of the Whitby mental institution, which has decided to outlaw smoking anywhere on its vast grounds. Under a ban that was put in place last June, the residents have to walk five minutes or so to get off the property so they can stand on a public roadway -- bothering everyone around them -- to have a smoke. They have to hide their cigarettes off-site because they aren't even allowed to have smoking materials at the hospital.

The ban, imposed on the hospital's 330 in-patients, 1,000 staff members, outpatients and visitors, is part of their mission to help patients become healthy and reintegrate into the community, says president and CEO Glenna Raymond. She adds statistics are "staggering" for smoking-related illnesses in the mental health sector.

"We knew it wasn't going to be easy," Raymond says of the no-smoking policy, put in place after months of study.

"But it was the right move to make."

Now, we don't know, but Ms. Raymond may smoke like a chimney when she gets off the hospital grounds and goes home to her family. We don't know, and we don't much care. That's her right. To smoke or to not smoke in the privacy of her own home. She's a free person in a free society and is quite free to make decisions about her health for herself.

So when she says, quite brazenly, that "we knew it wasn't going to be easy," we know she wasn't thinking about herself. What she knew was that it wasn't going to be easy for the poor slobs who live at her facility.

The Whitby facility may have done months of study. It may have the best interests of its patients at heart. The day may come when those same residents may look back and thank Ms. Raymond for making their lives miserable for a few months do that they could go on to reintegrate into the community as clean and god-fearing people. From a health and public policy standpoint, she may, in fact, be one hundred per cent right.

But unless she lives in the old Soviet Union or Mao's China, she is one hundred per cent wrong in forcing her superior wisdom on such vulnerable individuals. In a free society, the rights of adult citizens to act as they judge appropriate within the confines of the law is paramount. It is fundamental to our concept of free society. It is part and parcel of being a citizen.

When the right to be a free adult is taken away, as it sometimes has to be, there has to be a powerful justification and a compelling reason. Compromises must be sought, and the least intrusive route selected. There is no evidence that the Whitby facility tried to mitigate, in any way, the iron fist of its decision. In fact, by banning smoking on its entire, vast property, it is evident that Ms. Raymond and her colleagues tried to make the situation as humiliating as possible for the adults whose behaviour they had decided to change.

Whatever her motive, Ms. Raymond is demonstrating to her patients that she has total power over them -- and that they have none. They are mere children, in need of guidance and direction from their betters. They are certainly not free adults in a free society.

This is wrong. Individual rights are important. They should be respected and defended. Stripping citizens of their dignity and humiliating them in front of their neighbours can never be right. No matter what the studies say.