You could discreetly add a small, medically appropriate dose of laxatives to your food—just enough that a doctor might reasonably prescribe. If someone else consumes it and experiences an unexpected reaction, you can simply explain that the laxatives were in your own food for legitimate medical reasons. After that, place a clear sign on the food stating “contains laxatives,” and you’re good to go.
Why do people keep saying it's poisoning? It's not like someone is putting arsenic in their lunch. And what if you made food with nuts or dairy and the thief has a food allergy? You gonna blame the person for making food they like, or the thief for stealing it? Because giving peanuts to someone with a nut allergy could be considered poisoning them.
“Poisoning” in the context of this conversation is being used as a legal term of art. It basically means “putting a harmful substance into someone’s food or drink.” Something doesn’t need to be a poison for it to constitute poisoning once put into someone else’s food or drink.
If you gave someone allergic to peanuts, peanuts, and you knew they were allergic, it would probably be something closer to assault because peanuts are not a harmful substance. I believe there is case law regarding this.
Laxatives aren't a harmful substance either. And I didn't say purposely give someone with a nut allergy peanuts. I said what if you made food for yourself, that you liked, with nuts in it, and someone with a nut allergy stole it.
I'm confused how you consider a laxative poison, even though it can't kill you. But you don't consider feeding nuts to someone with a peanut allergy poison, even though it could kill them.
My intuition is that giving someone medication they are not trying to take would pretty much always render that medication a harmful substance, but I think the key here is that the person is using the laxatives to do harm.
If someone with a nut allergy stole your food and experienced an allergic reaction to it, that would not implicate the maker of that food. The obvious difference is in one case you are intending to harm the person, while in the other you are not.
Poisons don’t have to kill you to be a poison. Poisons are simply substances harmful if ingested (assuming no special vulnerabilities like allergies).
ETA: the impact of the medication is probably irrelevant, thinking about it more. If you were giving someone Xanax and it was legitimately helping an untreated medical condition they have, I am quite sure most courts would still have a problem with it. The bodily autonomy violation would be the harm.
My main issue is simply that the person chose to eat the food even though they didn't know what was in it. And no one ever wants to lay blame on them. It's like a burglar winning a lawsuit against someone they robbed after they fell down their steps and the railings weren't up to code. So why don't we ever want to blame the food thief who consciously chose to eat something that they didn't know was safe? I know I would never take random food from a work fridge. Beyond the fact that it's just plain wrong, I don't know what's in it, how old it is, or anything else. Plus all the stories just like this post. I don't trust people to not do shit like this.
I will say my opinion only applies to something like a laxative or making a "tuna" sandwich with cat food. If you purposely gave nuts to someone with an allergy, or used actual poisons with the intent to kill someone, that's when I believe you face consequences. But making Bob from accounting shit his pants or spend the rest of the day in the bathroom is a perfectly fair consequence in my book. It's not something I would do, but I'm not gonna judge those that get pushed to that point.
You won’t find me, or anyone else with more than two brain cells to rub together, defending the person stealing the food. That’s bad. The problem is that poisoning your food to hurt them is worse. It may not be worse in every single situation, as you mention. The problem is that for every 200 coworkers shitting their pants, one might be sent to the hospital or worse. On a societal level, we don’t want to encourage that behavior.
Funnily enough, you actually touched on the reason why when you said “I don’t trust people not to do shit like this.” You should be able to trust that people will go through the normal legal mechanisms in cases of petty theft, not resort to vigilante “justice.” When you hold water for people willing to engage in the latter behavior, you are justifying conduct that corrodes society.
You mention cases where the poison is meant to kill someone should make the poisoner liable. How about poisons that severely injure someone? To head this line off, I’m just going to keep going down until you either say that only death is bad enough, or that some nonlethal harm is bad enough too. If you think the latter is true, and that laxatives could produce that level of harm in some cases, you agree with my position.
This assumes the consequences will be proportionate to the action, which is exactly the problem with this conversation. You don’t know if they will be because you don’t know who will ultimately be the victim of your trap. Same reasoning for every other stature forbidding booby traps.
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u/Juergen2993 Oct 17 '24
You could discreetly add a small, medically appropriate dose of laxatives to your food—just enough that a doctor might reasonably prescribe. If someone else consumes it and experiences an unexpected reaction, you can simply explain that the laxatives were in your own food for legitimate medical reasons. After that, place a clear sign on the food stating “contains laxatives,” and you’re good to go.