There is a certain substance in this country that is illegal. If someone passed it to you, you’d probably accept it willingly, as would the majority of other people. Yet our government insists on keeping it illegal and spending taxpayer dollars prosecuting the offenders of a victimless crime. It is time this country realized once and for all, that we need to legalize milk — well, raw milk, that is: the natural, unpasteurized form of the beverage we all have such fond childhood memories of dipping cookies into.
In Canada it is illegal to market, sell, or distribute unpasteurized milk. Being convicted involves a fine or a jail sentence and this is the predicament Ontario farmer Michael Schmidt found himself in. Schmidt ran a dairy farm in which he sold shares. He would then provide the shareholders with the raw milk the government had prevented them from getting through less clandestine means. In January 2010, Schmidt was acquitted of 19 counts of selling raw milk. However, on September 28, 2011, the Ontario Court of Justice overturned this decision, finding him guilty of 15 out of the 19 charges.
Supposedly, the ban on raw milk is a form of consumer protection. The government mandates pasteurization in order to prevent individuals from unknowingly consuming E. Coli, salmonella or listeria. Surely consumer protection requires that consumers be ignorant to the inherent risks involved in what they are consuming. This was not the case with Michael Schmidt and the shareholders to which he sold the raw milk. These were people who were fully aware of what they were purchasing and bought it because of — not in spite of — the lack of pasteurization.
Schmidt himself has argued that the danger of unpasteurized milk comes from large production facilities in which milk from multiple sources is mixed together and one spoiled batch infects the rest. On his farm, Schmidt and the shareholders he sold to knew exactly where the milk came from and what was involved in the production process. If anything, they were much more informed than the traditional consumer, they were certainly more informed than consumers of the processed meats, eggs, and produce that recently infected large numbers of people in North America and Europe with the same bacteria that supposedly motivated a ban on raw milk. As Schmidt has himself noted, none of these products have been banned. It is only raw milk producers who are not given the benefit of the doubt in ensuring the safety of their product.
There is another argument against the legalization of raw milk: that it is not so much a consumer protection measure as a taxpayer protection measure. In Canada, we have a system of universal healthcare, funded by the taxpayer. If an individual gets sick, it costs the health-care system to treat them. If an individual consumes something like raw milk, knowingly or not it will supposedly heighten their probability of getting sick, thereby costing the taxpayer more money. Therefore, we must ban raw milk in order to prevent the spending of taxpayer money on treating people with raw milk-related ailments. If this is the case, then the ban should be extended to all products associated with the spread of dangerous bacteria — although this might rile corporate agri-business interests, which are much more powerful than small-yield, independent farmers like Michael Schmidt.
If the prohibition of raw milk is about keeping people safe, then let’s enforce the clear labelling of raw milk as is done with other unpasteurized products like apple cider or honey – with an obvious label on the product stating that it is unpasteurized and that this may add a certain amount of risk to its consumption. Also, let’s extend this requirement to other products with similar risk. But once we do that, let’s treat people like adults and allow them to make their own decisions. People aren’t stupid: they won’t knowingly and continually consume things that make them ill. The ban is a much greater indictment of the faith we have in each other than it is of raw milk.
