This week's editorial is in response to a question I received about my opinion on the decriminalization of personal drug use. It should be noted that what follows is a personal opinion.
The Supreme Court bases its decision to decriminalize personal drug use on Article 19 of the Argentine National Constitution, which states: "The private actions of men that in no way offend public order and morality, nor harm a third party, are reserved to God and exempt from the authority of magistrates.".
I believe there are several points in the Torah that can help us form a clear idea of what God would say regarding drug use (in a personal way).
1) The Torah commands each person to take care of their body. Man does not own his body; rather, it is a kind of loan from God, so that a soul may reside within it and, through it, fulfill its purpose. Therefore, like any borrowed object, there is an obligation to return it in the best possible condition. I believe no one denies that drugs (any of them) destroy the body, affecting both intellectual and emotional capacity.
2) From the perspective of the Torah, there are no "private" human actions, that is, actions outside the "legislation" of the Torah and its relationship with God. In other words, the Torah is not a set of laws and rules that apply to certain aspects of human life while other aspects are left to chance, or to the pleasure and will of man.
The Torah is an all-encompassing Divine system. There is not a single moment in a person's life that the Torah does not consider. And the reason for this is very simple: our sages say that God does not create anything in His world in vain. Everything has a purpose. Even the lifespan allotted to us is the exact and precise time necessary to fulfill our mission. Therefore, there is no moment about which one can say, "Now I do as I please," or "This is a private moment or action, outside of my relationship (and responsibility) to God." God is infinite; therefore, the reach of His influence on existence is infinite, down to the smallest details, even to the thoughts, words, and actions of humankind.
3) Judaism views the universe as a scale where everyone is being weighed, and the actions of all human beings affect everyone. A good deed by one individual can bring the entire universe to a state of absolute wholeness, while the opposite, a bad deed, even if it causes "private" personal harm and not harm to others, ultimately harms the entire universe (to others, etc.), as our sages say, that humankind was created only to be aware that the entire world depends on each of us.
Finally, a highly interesting concept expressed by the Constitution itself: returning to the aforementioned article, the Constitution removes from magistrates the responsibility for private acts that do not affect third parties, but, at the same time, involves God, as the absolute authority, to judge those acts according to His will. Based on this, in every case where there is doubt about whether a certain human behavior is acceptable or not, we must ask ourselves: what would God say about it?
Of course, on the one hand they claim to live in a secular society - without God - but on the other hand, when it comes to "the private actions of men that in no way offend public order and morality, nor harm a third party," there is no other tool to determine the quality of those private actions than to reserve them to God... In simpler terms: there is no justice, nor do we know what is good or what is bad if there is no God.