I lived in BC for 40 years and this policy affected me negatively it turned my neighborhood from a clean safe place to a nightmare. This always turns Into a flamewar online, I will keep it at this. I am happy they are finally changing something, whatever they were doing was terrible but I hope whatever they do now, a better solution is found, whatever that means.
I grew up in BC, lived there almost 30 years before I moved away.
I loved in Downtown Victoria for most of the 2010s and I got to watch streets turn from being nice to being sketchy and the sketchy ones became downright dangerous
A mcdonalds near where I lived went from being a place that a bunch of older folks would get coffee and do a crossword in the mornings, to a place where you might sometimes find human feces on the floor. No exaggeration.
Guessing you mean the McDonalds on Pandora? I remember going there a lot during high school and walked by it again recently while visiting the city for the the first time since 2009. Sketchy doesn't begin to describe it. Was really sad to see what happened to the city I grew up in.
I'm not really aware of the measures that were taken but the situation you originally described seemed wonderful. What were the problems solved by the legalization?
Let's be clear here: the decriminalization may have made things worse, but the problems were there well before.
That particular McDonald's was ruined mostly because a shelter and various other supports opened up down the block, and kind of turned the area into a mini-Skid Row. Victoria has the best year-round weather in the country: it tends to attract people who are living on the street, and there's big intersections there between that group and the mentally unwell, anti-social, and/or drug addicted.
As for why the mentally unwell, anti-social, and/or drug addicted have become a bigger problem in recent years, well, take your pick: laxer drug laws and/or enforcement, laxer enforcement of laws in general, safe injection sites, housing crisis, cost-of-living crisis, Fent and/or "super meth", cuts to mental health care programs, lack of God, you name it.
> ruined mostly because a shelter and various other supports opened up down the block, and kind of turned the area into a mini-Skid Row
That’s why I’m against social housing.
Inner city welfare/government housing aggregates all the homeless into one area where open air drug markets can flourish and other nefarious activities are normalized.
Low income people should instead move to the outskirts of big cities where the rent is more affordable and they are more spread out.
Except their jobs and the services they need are also more spread out. Plus their friends and family and further away. The result: now those people need cars and the benefit of any cost savings is lost. That's not to mention the other problems that come with increased automobile usage.
That’s the wealthy’s issue: Fund reliable, efficient, and safe mass transport.
I attribute most of todays problems to NIMBYism and highly-selective and classist—as in, target the ones without the funds to fight back—use of eminent domain.
The last application of the death penalty in Canada was in 1962, it's been outlawed even in cases of treason since 1999. I'm very confident that no Canadian politician with any level of influence is looking to change that.
We’ve done a lot of things relatively recently that are good and pointing at something as “only a temporary thing that we can revert” is not always a good mindset to have
Yeah, really the intent was not to advocate for death penalty - but rather highlight that there are tools to fight these things, and getting tangled in endless root cause analysis isn’t needed to utilize them.
As I understand it the intention behind decriminalization was to accept the reality of the situation that addicts aren’t likely to be dissuaded from taking drugs simply because it’s illegal. Rather than push them to the fringes of society (where they’ll likely spiral into deeper and deeper depths) you should try to keep them closer than help them out of the addiction.
Obviously this didn’t work. I have sympathy with the viewpoint though. Far too often when we’re faced with difficult situations like this our instinct is to throw someone in jail. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t really help us in the long term, it just lets us put it out of sight and out of mind in the short term.
(as someone who spent some time in Vancouver long before decriminalization… there were areas incredibly rough with homeless and drug use back then too. It didn’t magically arrive when decriminalization was passed, I doubt it’ll disappear with recriminalization)
It was easy to think, because of movies or pop culture, that cops are a bunch of mean uptight jerks throwing harmless kids in jail for “smoking the reefer”. But that view was a little naive.
It now seems that everyone from citizens who call the cops to judges and parole boards are not just arbitrarily cruel but have a pretty fine tuned sense of “this person is harmless” or “this person is an antisocial menace and needs to be off the street”.
At least this has become my view after working with prisons. We were doing an ok job and have changed in the name of progress.
I.e. don't throw bad apples into bin, because they will rot deeper, but keep them closer to healthy apples with hope that healthy apples will heal bad ones.
I really struggle with this fact. Some % of people are going to murder, steal, etc no matter what you do. They are going to live in a manner the majority of us do not want to permit.
Anything I can think of ends up either too authoritarian (no path to redemption) or too chaotic (see the article above).
1/ is it absolutely maybe has. Just because something was out of sight and out of mind before doesn't mean the problem was less prevalent. It all depends on the definition of the problem.
Is the problem: "There are people in poverty, in drug addiction, and they're dying?"
Or is the problem "Sensible moderate tax payers have to interact with icky drug addicts in their day to day life"
The truth is because of Fentanyl both problems actually got worse. But in theory treating addiction as not a crime probably DOES save lives relative to the alternative.
But make no mistake, we're not now challenging the status quo because of problem 1 and the fentanyl epidemic. There's a backlash becaue of problem 2.
Truth is, people don't want to see visible poverty or addiction. They associate with crime and feel unsafe (even if it's illogical).
People agree that you shouldn't have to go to jail for doing heroin, but when faced with the choice of passed out heroin users in their alley regularly, or have them in jail, most are happy to find the excuse to get them out of their sight and into jail.
So 2/, the real reason decriminalization didn't work is because decriminalization isn't enough. Decriminalization is "cheap" to implement. But it's nothing without more social programs to help people get out of poverty, subsidized housing to get them off the streets, and mental health support for those that need it (a huge % of homeless addicts). But nobody - even in progressive places like Vancouver - wants to fund those enough. So, we try decriminalization, watch it fail, and then roll things back. And so the pendulum will go back and forth.
I think some addictions are powerful that they are effectively chronic diseases. The problem is that managing this disease may require government or some other entity to be a drug dealer for highly-addictive substances.
I can’t speak for others, but that’s a step too far for me.
> "Sensible moderate tax payers have to interact with icky drug addicts in their day to day life"
You phrased this in a way to make it sound absurd, but the fact is that this is absolutely part of the problem. "Sensible moderate tax payers" are participating into society because it makes them feel safer, and it abstracts away a lot of the details of building
important infrastructure like roads and hospitals.
Those Sensible Moderate Tax payers are generally ok with paying taxes that they know will go to things that don't benefit them directly, partly because they believe it will make their overall society better. They pay for schools even though they don't have kids, or their kids already are finished their education. They pay for roads, even ones they don't drive on. And yes, they even pay for housing for homeless and help for addicts, even though most of them have never been homeless or an addict, and never will be
But those Sensible Moderate Taxpayers aren't stupid. They can see when a policy is not actually improving the world around them. Sure they don't have the research or stats to back it up, but they are often the ones who actually have to bear the negative externalities of bad policy. They're the ones who have roads riddled with potholes, or kids in schools with overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers. And they're the ones stepping over unconscious heroin addicts on their way to work, or sitting quietly on a bus while someone on fentanyl rages at people while everyone tries not to make eye contact
These interactions make people's lives worse. Yeah, the person on Fentanyl raging on the bus is probably not having a good day, but they are also making everyone else's day worse. They are arguably making society worse.
So yeah. The Sensible Moderate Taxpayer has to ask themselves why they are paying taxes to support such people who don't participate in the same society or behave with the same social norms. Especially since it seems to be making their own life worse as a result
By the way..
> They associate with crime and feel unsafe (even if it's illogical)
It's not illogical. People who are addicts are often not behaving rationally, they are unpredictable and that makes them potentially dangerous. It's not "illogical" to feel unsafe when confronted by someone behaving aggressively and erratically, even if statistically they don't tend to cause harm.
And homeless people often have little to lose. Which similarly makes them potentially dangerous. Especially if they are panhandling they are sometimes invading people's space and maybe shouting at people, which always comes across aggressive. Again, it's not illogical to feel threatened and unsafe when people are actually behaving aggressively towards you
Anyways, all this to say, ignore the opinions of the Sensible Moderate Taxpayer at your peril. If you have an interest in guiding policy a certain way, you will have to convince them your policy won't make their lives worse
But "we live in a society". We can't completely segregate all the classes from one another. We can't just imprison or kill the drug addicts. (i'm sure some reading would disagree).
So what do we do? Well, we don't solve the root causes, that's for sure. We don't prioritize poverty reduction or mental health. We seem to think it's more important for a society to allow the possibility for someone to become a billionaire, than for NOONE to ever have to risk being homeless.
That seems to me to be the core problem. We claim we care about these problems but we don't actually prioritize solutions. Then we overreact to signals that are only loosely correlated with them. A fentanyl addict screaming on a bus aggressively actually is at least commiting a crime, though punishing them for it won't help his addiction or help address the root cause of why they became an addict.
But there are lots of other signals of visible poverty that we police even if they're not strictly speaking crime. We create hostile architecture to prevent homeless people from sleeping in public spaces. Why? Because we don't want them ruined for everyone else. Understandable. But again, dealing with the symptom, not the root cause.
So it's not that I don't care about the opinions of the sensible moderate taxpayer (i am one). It's that I don't think their preferences for solutions actually address the root cause unless taken to their logical conclusion and we put all the poors in an internment camp.
That's pretty funny but sad. I'm not even in BC or the US but I had to remove the light bulb from my porch to stop people shooting up in there and poking the syringes in my plants. I still have "HIV yucca" as it's known now. It's totally illegal here but it didn't stop people doing it.
Want to fix this? Start with the problems in society that lead to it.
Humans are infinitely adaptable and we live on a hedonic treadmill. Regardless of material and/or social circumstances, there’s gonna be a subset of people who will continue to find existence a terrifying suffering, and will seek escape, including drugs.
No society in history has fixed the first problem. But we can keep negative externalities minimal by outlawing public use of drugs.
Ok, I’ll bite a little. I’m not from BC but live two provinces east from there and we have similar problems but not nearly as bad.
One of the causes of this is inter-generational trauma and the chain reaction that this causes. In my province a significant fraction of homeless and drug-addicted people are First Nations (for non-Canadians: aboriginal, “Indians” although we don’t use that term much). Our government has done horrific things to this population; significantly worse historically, although some of it still persists today. Here’s how the chain reaction persists:
- a child in the 70s was forced to go to a Residential School where they were separated from their parents and culture and frequently endured physical and sexual abuse.
- that person leaves school broken. They have complex PTSD and no supports. They start doing drugs to forget the pain. They get pregnant.
- maybe not right away, or maybe immediately at birth, the government takes their child and places him or her into the foster care system. Some of the parents in the foster care system are great, many are not and treat it as a way to get additional income every month while doing the bare minimum to raise the child. Many children in the foster care system suffer their own abuse.
- To manage the PTSD from being in the foster care system without significant mental health support they start doing drugs…
Repeat ad nauseum.
I have several friends (saints, really) who work in the Ministry of Social Services who genuinely care and want to help change things by providing support etc but the ministry is perpetually understaffed and underfunded. Many go into that line of work bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to make a difference, and after a few years end up bitter and jaded.
While I partly agree with you on the hedonic treadmill part, it does also change the externalities of the situation. Someone who has a home (apartment, homeless shelter, whatever) might still choose drugs but they’re probably not going to choose to sleep under a ragged blanket on a park bench.
It’s an incredibly complex problem. What happens to someone who uses drugs in public when that is criminalized? They can be fined (which they have no means to pay) or they can go to jail for a bit. So now they’re in jail and meet more people who come from similar situations. Our prisons are also full of drugs (how?!?) and are definitely not the place to finally have a chance to work on your mental health. People then get released with new friends and more PTSD.
I don’t have the answers by any means, but around here at least our government was responsible for a huge amount of the damage that was done years ago and continues to be responsible for perpetuating its effects.
Jail is not actually about rehabilitation. Its use is to separate criminals from law-abiding citizens in society. A drug user may have good intentions but they will more likely to involve themselves in crime to feed their addiction.
For deterrence, I think it does a decent job for most of the popularion. Without elaborating too much, there are several things in the Canadian Criminal Code that are illegal but that I personally believe have no moral or ethical guilt associated with them and are also victimless. Some of them are things I would love to be able to do, but I don’t because I have zero desire to spend any time in jail. This doesn’t necessarily apply to people who are habitual offenders though.
On the protection of society side of things, yeah, we have a bunch of people who are going to be in jail for a long long time and really shouldn’t be part of the general population. We also have a bunch of low-level habitual offenders who are basically “catch and release” and they continue to go around stealing bicycles and sunglasses to feed their meth addictions.
And then there’s rehabilitation… which… wow. Not really doing so great on that front.
These people spent centuries evolving a culture and were violently forced into a Western European one. Do we have any evidence a Western European culture will ever work for them?
We assume that all people can live in all cultures but I think that’s naive - chestertons fence and all that. Is there any historical evidence that diverse democracies work? There’s ample literature to the contrary.
Here’s the fun part: we didn’t even give them a hope in hell to adapt. It’s not just “will our culture ever work for them” it’s “will a culture that systematically tried to eradicate them for 200 years and then switched to maliciously marginalizing them ever work for them”?
If it’s ever going to work, it’s still going to take time. The last of the Canadian residential schools (where First Nations children were put after being forcefully taken from their parents) closed in 1995. In many cases we’re only one generation removed from that atrocity. It’s still the case that many reserves don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water.
I believe it. Drug liberalization advocacy suffers from at least two flaws: the failure to understand the instructive dimension of law, and naïveté concerning the harm drugs cause and the power of personal responsibility when drugs enter the mix in light of human frailty.
In the first case, one end of the law is to teach good behavior by punishing what is bad, and perhaps incentivizing what is good. Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason. Any attack on reason of this kind is gravely immoral, and constitutes a direct assault on human flourishing and what is most essential to human beings. The result is the degradation of the human person and the degeneration of society. The common good suffers greatly, as you have described, and since the primary purpose of law and the governments that make law is to guard the common good, it falls to governments to criminalize and regulate drug availability and use.
In the second case, ask yourself why anyone takes drugs. Unhealthy curiosity. Boredom. Escapism. Mental illness. There is no legitimate reason for drug liberalization as there is no legitimate reason to take hard narcotics recreationally (I emphasize that word because there is a place for regulated use in the context of medicine under the principle of double effect). Liberalization lowers the barrier of entry by signaling that using narcotics is no big deal. And yet it is a big deal. The instructive dimension of the law, by penalizing use, helps counteract the foolishness and frailty of human beings that would bring ruin to such people and those around them. Libertarian anthropology does not stand a chance in the face of reality.
(Obviously, plenty of substances are psychoactive, and I do not propose a categorical ban on everything from cough medicine to cigars to Merlot to coffee. I am no teetotaler. We know what kind of drug use is problematic when we say “doing drugs”. Prudent regulation that takes into account
a number of factors like the severity and nature of chronic and acute harm, how addictive something is and its potential for abuse, dosage, etc. It’s one thing to chew on a coca leaf, another to snort 30 mg of powder.)
You know what cripples the effective exercise of reason more than any drug? Living in a society that is organized in extremely unreasonable ways, yet one has to accept and actively participate in it because that's the only way to keep on living. Perhaps start there when considering the reasons for drug use...
The vast majority of people worldwide have no ability to move away from the society to which they are born, no matter how oppressive. I did immigrate away from my country of origin, and I am much better for it, but I was insanely privileged to have this opportunity, and many people whom I know from back there are not so lucky.
This is absurdly wrong. Most immigrants are poor people entering their new societies at the very bottom, not hipster digital nomads. Sometimes they are lower middle class in their own societies, but often they are pretty much at the bottom at home as well.
For whatever reason the west fails to successfully socialize an unacceptably large portion of the native born population.
A train engineer with decades of experience moved to the US when the war in Ukraine started. The job she could get here was as a nanny, watching children in her extended community, and even that was half a favor.
> For whatever reason the west fails to successfully socialize an unacceptably large portion of the native born population.
Part of the reason for that is protection and promotion of freedoms of individuals, which means that we expect the society to stay away from our lives, because we did try various forms of state and church hierarchies running our lives and we did not like it. If you come to the West or are born here learn what it is about and decide how you want to live your life. The same people complaining about the society not caring for all are those who wanted the society to leave them alone.
You need to consider the distinction between legal and illegal immigration for starters. Most legal immigrants are reasonably well off in their society of origin - enough so to afford the legal process (which is not cheap).
And yes, immigrants generally tend to end up lower on the social hierarchy in their new society as compared to the old one, but how is that relevant to what I wrote?
Regrettable that you are not being engaged in a verbalized discussion. I appreciate your thoughtful comments, as someone who habitually uses pot and tobacco and recognizes the harmful effects of these substances. At least society is now fully onboard in recognizing the harm of habitual tobacco use. Pot is a mixed bag, there is some good in it but it is possible that its harm exceeds its benefits. It is certainly addictive, in my experience. It is not easy at all to stop. That said, I've always found the punitive legal measures against pot to have been highly excessive and possibly motivated by considerations other than public health, as its roots have clear racist ('Reefer madness') dimensions. These days however I am rather alarmed at the promotion of pot as a benign substance. I have seriously wondered if its liberalization is a means at social pacification (ala Victory Gin of 1984) given the grave distortions that have manifested in Western society, specially in the economic dimension. There is money to be made and the plebes now have a outlet that keeps them content.
It is not clear to me if law in fact incentivizes good behavior. In general my view on these matters -- social architecture -- is that form can not engender meaning. Meaning needs to be project into form, in the sense of it being an expression of collective understanding. This brings up the matter of pedagogical aspect of social order, to wit, your views would be entirely orthodox in a strict patriarchal societal order. And our society is no longer that, as you must know.
~
"The most important things about beliefs are whether they are true. The most important thing about motives is whether they are good."
I saw this on your profile page. What is necessary is that actions are timely and true. As to "good", I hope we agree that what is true is by definition good (if timely) and what is good can not possibly be false or untimely. So in my opinion, it suffices to say "Be timely, be true".
I saw this first hand from the locals too in Lisbon. I was up the hill looking over a wall to get a photo of the bay from down a side street. I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top
Of the wall as a kind of razor wire.
When I looked closely and slightly over the wall I found syringes with remnants of brown tar leaking of of them.
Less than the time it took me to realize a window in the house opened and someone was clearly going to give me a good yelling at but when she saw we were just tourists in the alley closed the window mumbling something and left us alone.
So yea, what it does to communities is bad but the solution isn’t to look back at old ways hoping things will change if we try again. As you’ve mentioned, a better solution needs to be found, but it’s a difficult problem, and there aren’t many great ideas going around
Having read the article I am interested in what the penalty would be. If you can’t do it with a civil penalty then criminal proceedings make sense I guess.
This is correct, I mentioned it more as a scene setting mechanism. A quiet alleyway with a wall you can’t climb over at the end. Seems like a nice quiet place to shoot up.
This doesn't seem like a particularly good example of the negative effects on communities. Fundamentally, your story is that you looked over a wall and then someone opened a window and didn't shout at you.
The lady was obviously conditioned to think noises in the alley meant people shooting up heroin. Sorry your weren’t there to see it but the discarded drug paraphernalia and then scowl on her face which subsided when she realized we were taking photos and not horse really was the important aspects of the story
You should've seen what it was before. Read up on Portuguese drug history before you speak please. Decriminalising drug usage was a good move by the Portuguese government and it improved the population's wellbeing significantly by introducing rehab instead of imprisonment.
Also, you'll find things like that on every capital of the world, no exceptions. Maybe you'll notice it a little less in Singapore, where drug consumption can lead to the death sentence.
I’m aware of Portuguese drug policy as I would say most people here. There’s a 6 monthly refresher article on the front page.
Decriminalization and the rehabilitation focus that followed has been a huge success for Portugal’s drug taking population.
I was excited to see it in action when I was there but what I found and what I mentioned earlier wasn’t all positives.
For example, everywhere outside at night in Lisbon you’re going to have people trying to sell you coke. A guy from the tour group I was in was getting free samples poured into his hand.
The level of pushy these sellers are too, I had a guy follow me into a _bank_ offering me his mothers home phone number that I could call if the coke he was trying to sell me was shit quality.
The discussion though is the impacts of this policy on local communities. I’ll defer to my last paragraph on this from my previous post.
Lastly, I’ve never been chased or offered a free sample in any other European capital, even the party ones. Once in South America though.
There was a great docu-drama on the BBC a long time ago called something alone the lines of "If Drugs Were Legal" [0]. They had a not-very-interesting drama alongside a list of experts such as Prof David Nutt discussing the potential legal framework.
What I found fascinating about the documentary is the vision of what a complete overhaul would look like. Not half-measures like they've done in BC & Portugal.
The thing that annoys the public the most is the crime. We need to bankrupt dealers, purify supply and then we can focus on getting people off the streets when using.
None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism.
Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business? What about the producers - does the government get into the business of making drugs as well? Would they need labs to ensure purity? And, hire government workers - arguably, with distribution experience - to give away the good stuff?
Okay, so let's say they succeeded. The dealers are bankrupt. Well, not really - they're now all government workers. But, anyway, they are out of the business of dealing illegally.
Step 3: Rehabilitation. Why would the new bureaucracy want to end addiction when its continued growth and existence depends on it?
Step 1 is already done. UK hospitals, for example, uses heroin - under its generic name diamorphine - for pain relief instead of morphine for some patients because it's often less problematic.
Step 2 then is easy: The NHS has suppliers of medical grade heroin. Some people already have been getting it prescribed.
Step 3 is also then far less problematic than you make it out because there's not even any organisational link between the producers (private pharma companies), distributors (private pharmacies), and anyone who'd be involved in rehabilitation.
But even without the rehabilitation step, you've reduced the cost, and the harm.
We know that, because prescribing heroin to heroin addicts has been tried.
EDIT: Here is the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) page for heroin, btw. (NICE set prescription guidance for the NHS):
Don’t we need better drugs? Like, people have a natural desire for what drugs do. Can’t we satisfy that in a way that is more positive?
Some of that is surely cultural. So ideally, you combine a growing and vibrant positive drug culture with good drugs.
The Netherlands has essentially done this. There are basically soft-legal dealers (via WhatsApp) that widely sell most illegal drugs at high purity — but you won’t ever find opiates on the menu. So then people are happy getting their ketamine and mdma and coke and ghb and lsd and 2cb etc — and the police are surely monitoring to make sure that the dealers don’t cause problems. That means they allow the good dealers and shut down the dealers that cause problems (sell bad drugs or sell to people who cause problems).
This is combined with a positive drug culture that shuns opiates but embraces party drugs and music culture.
The same mafias setting up that drug supply chain for your dealer in the Netherlands are the same one who are attempting to assasinate the crown princess, prime minister, and justice minister [0] and have caused over 100 bombings and shootings in Rotterdam by mid-2023 alone in a city where stuff like this was almost unheard of 30 years ago [1]
> embraces party drugs and music culture.
Party drugs like XTC are smuggled as well, leading to a massive gang war in Israel in the 2000s [2], where most XTC in Europe is synthesized.
(Side note - most of the Israeli mafia are ethnic Moroccans just like their Dutch compatriots)
The drug supply in Amsterdam is heavily regulated by the police. They have closing hours at 11 on weekdays and at 1 on weekends. There are arrangements where some people make money so other people don’t.
A few years ago, all the encryption for dealers was broken [1]. Many of them agreed to continue under certain circumstances. It’s a reasonable balance.
During Covid, they shut down all the coffee shops selling weed — and that lasted a day. Because they realized the black market would step in. Keeping things flowing in a regulated market is always preferred to a completely illegal (unregulated) market.
If a "regulated" market can still have players explicitly target heads of state, cabinet members, and the future monarch of a country for extrajudicial killings and saw a dramatic increase in violence, then by definition the light touch regulation used is failing.
All my examples happened in 2022.
You can try to rationalize, but at the end of the day it is a dirty business and even regulation would not clean it up (eg. Oklahoma's attempt at legalizing Marijuana cultivation lead to an influx of Chinese organized crime players [0] because of high taxes on legal marijuana)
There is a happy path between harm reduction, decriminalization, and legalization, but imo the Dutch system is clearly not it.
Check out California, Washington, Colorado, Alaska, or Oregon sometime.
Marijuana access is legal in all those states and LSD is on the path of legalization as well.
While organized crime does continue to be an issue in the Marijuana industry in these states, they haven't attempted to assassinate our Governors or Congressmembers.
Literally most of the US has legalized Marijuana (not decriminalized - LEGALIZED), and the Dutch system is extremely archaic and continues to perpetuate a black market.
Access to clean financing and crackdowns on black market dealing are what keep criminals out of the industry. Plus in CA you can audit the supply chain of marijuana products because of the paper trail required.
Most of OK's illicit marijuana is shipped to states where it's still a black market product due to lack of legal access (eg. NY)
All it sounds like is you like to party sometimes but want to remain in denial that a product your consuming is morally tainted.
Sure, there are drugs that are worse than others, and seeking to redirect use where possible would be good. Especially when dealing with addicts.
Some people do seek out opiates especially because of its specific effects, and I don't think you can entirely prevent that, though you may be able to reduce it with better mental health support, but even then you could also redirect use to safer options, and also segmenting out those seeking opiates from those seeking party drugs etc. so that you don't create pathways between them might well be beneficial.
To stick with my heroin example, I don't know where specifically heroin sits relative to opiates that would actually satisfy existing addicts and that's part of the challenge, but heroin itself is also nowhere near the worst opiate, and one of the negative effects of the current way we're handling this is that we've created a pathway towards more dangerous ones.
E.g. a frequent pathway to heroin use today is from oxycodone, to oxycodone on the black market after you lose your prescription, to heroin. But then it gets worse: Dealers cutting heroin with fentanyl or even carfentanyl.
Getting users nudged gently or not so gently towards the safest options that will satisfy them would in itself likely help a lot, and of course, a black market dealer has no incentive to do that unless there's a very severe difference in how they're treated by law enforcement.
Perhaps a variant of what you described would be a good first step in many places not ready for more decriminalization: Much more aggressively segmented drug sentencing by the harm of the worst drug a dealer can be connected to, and perhaps even explicitly punish "crossover" between drugs with differ harm profiles to reduce the pathways between them.
But that means being honest about the abuse potential, and not politicizing it, and that is in itself an uphill battle in many places.
>Is it possible to keep an addict satisfied with a lower tier drug?
Yes, but the person has to want to make the change, since the ‘lower tier drug’ (buprenorphine) doesn’t get them high. It just stops cravings and withdrawal symptoms, while largely blocking the effects of most other opioids.
Another benefit of buprenorphine is that it has a ceiling effect in relation to respiratory depression. For most opioids, if you take enough, you will stop breathing and die. Buprenorphine’s dose/response curve for respiratory depression and sedation turns flat after ~24mg, which makes the drug very difficult to overdose on.
It really depends both on what you mean by "lower tier" drug, and what people are seeking, and how frequent users they are.
But I suspect a reliable potency alone would do a lot for slowing the upward creep than shunting people to a drug dealer who might decide you'll be a more profitable customer if they raise your expectations of the high to seek by selling you "heroin" without telling you it's not pure heroin but cut with fentanyl (tens of times as strong) or carfentanil (thousands of times the potency).
Even with an upwards creep, there are vastly different strength levels and harm profiles for different opioids, and a strategy of what is available focused on slowing advancement and steering around the most dangerous options might well allow for keeping people on far milder options for far longer and/or give more options for shunting people onto interventions if they want to stop.
The first step is really to accept it's a healthcare problem, and recognise that it's a worse healthcare problem if people go to drug dealers because you refuse them. If so, the question becomes not necessarily about a free for all, but about how many hoops you can get people to jump through to shunt as many as possible in a healthier direction without making too many decide it's easier to buy from a dealer.
Larger doses yes, but the opiates being consumed are almost entirely a result of cost/availability. Genuine prescription pills are by far the most desirable choice amongst opiate addicts, but tight control on supply post opiate-crisis has made them practically nonexistent in illegal drug markets.
The extent of prescription opiates desirability is somewhat evidenced by most "street" fentanyl being consumed in counterfeit oxycodone/vicodin pressed-pills. And then of course there is cost--why smuggle 50 packages of heroin when a single package of fentanyl contains an equivalent number of opiate doses and can be manufactured far more efficiently/discretely?
But in general the opiate market is defined by the practical constraints of cost and availability. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has been used in hospitals for decades, but its emergence as a street drug in recent times is the result of precursors and synthesis methodology becoming very accessible
Define “natural”. I don’t think any mature, temperate, and healthy human being desires to use or abuse drugs, and even if they have a genetic predisposition to abuse (like some alcoholics), they know to avoid the so-called near occasions of sin that put them at serious risk of using. Obviously, I don’t mean everything with psychoactive properties is bad. Having some chamomile tea or a cup of coffee or a beer is fine in moderation. But drug use as we commonly mean it is drug abuse by definition, as the corruption and distortion of mental faculties for a thrill (or to escape) is intentional and intrinsic. So I find the very notion of a “vibrant positive drug culture with good drugs” in this context incoherent, or subject to such a restrictive notion of “good drugs” (which is also partly a matter of dosage) that it becomes as banal as pipe smoking forums or beer clubs.
I do not understand how you could say "I don’t think any mature, temperate, and healthy human being desires to use or abuse drugs, and even if they have a genetic predisposition to abuse" followed by "Having some chamomile tea or a cup of coffee or a beer is fine in moderation."
Caffeine - and especially alcohol - are absolutely addictive drugs. Alcohol especially has many negative effects on society, and is in a similar class as GHB, benzodiazepines and even opiates. Drinking alcohol IS using drugs, even if society has accepted this drug. Coffee is a stimulant, just like Adderall (i.e. speed) and meth.
Weed is another pervasive drug that's used by many mature, temperate and healthy humans. And frankly, I would argue the same of psychedelics and MDMA. I don't know how you could even argue otherwise besides "no true Scottsman."
A lot of people are incapable of realizing other people are different from them.
If you could give the entire population each their own “happy button” a significant portion would be hitting it all day long, ignoring everything else in their life. Those on HN are largely not the same type of people.
> Those on HN are largely not the same type of people.
I mean, fair number of them have a 'happy button' of insane work loads and work hours. Of course those people consider work abuse acceptable and totally not a drug at all.
This definition of drug abuse as thrill seeking or corruption of facilities is overly broad as it would cover a lot of normal behaviours.
Drug abuse can be identified with drug addiction. If you get blind drunk once on your stag night, that’s not abuse, if you do that every night salaryman-style then that’s a problem.
This is as good a solution as is likely to be found, but it hardly exists in a vacuum. The culture in which this fragile status quo is imbedded ensures its relative success.
Try to transplant it into other cultures, and the myriad potential perverse incentives would turn it into just plain old police running the drugs business, with murders and all the other fun stuff that comes along with that.
Some cultures are able to maintain fragile systems such as this because civic responsibility and collective good are strongly valued. Unfortunately, most cultures are not that responsible.
What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs? On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize, let people take personal responsibility for their drug use choices, but then on the other hand, we are saying society should also be on the hook for reforming bad personal choices? Decriminalize and invest billions in drug rehabilitation! It doesn’t make sense to me.
Canada has free public healthcare for all.
Alcohol rehabilitation is government funded.
So is chemo for various cancers attributed to smoke inhalation and tobacco use.
So are appetite reduction operations for very obese people.
Why should heroin rehabilitation be any different?
Some people would then argue that some drugs are significantly worse than others - that they are significantly more costly to rehabilitate, that their consumption causes more harm etc. Should the costs be calculated average or total?
Let's say that the consumption and / or distribution should be penalized.
What should the punishments be for consumption? How harsh should the punishments be for distribution? Jailing people costs a lot of money too.
How do we create a society where people don't become so easily addicted?
Canadas healthcare system is under severe strain, with people being unable to access routine care due to not having enough resources and the ones they have being stretched thin. Having government healthcare does not magically remove basic economics.
To their credit, many places ban alcohol and even gambling as social negatives. I’m ok with socially funded drug treatment for something that is illegal, because at least we are trying to make sure the problem doesn’t keep growing when we are trying to fix it. I don’t like a plan that has us throw money at an avoidable problem forever.
> On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize
i dont think thats it. one of the main arguments is that people will do the drugs anyway legal or no. But if they get/do them illegally they'll be afraid to seek help when ODing or trying to quit, and they have nowhere safe to do them so they do them anywhere and everywhere. This explains why we both decriminalize and rehab
You see much better results in Asia where drug laws are harsh and you or your family are on their own for rehab: people simply can’t afford to take the risk anymore because they understand very well their life and a probably ruined if they try. But then we have to consider literal survival bias: maybe you just don’t see many drug addicts in Asia because they die quickly.
> What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs?
We let people mainline sugar to the point where they get diabetes[1], but we spend lots of money on holistic treatment to make sure that its manageable is as little medical intervention as possible (continuous blood sugar monitoring is awesome)
Substance abuse is more often than not a symptom of other things.
> On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize
I would say that mischaracterises the issue. I would suggest that its a case of lesser of two evils. An entire shadow economy worth billions, with no regulation and no qualms about killing people for profit, and is the cause of most petty crime, or cutting out a money supply to crime, but you need to change the way you spend on support and care of addicts.
[1] its mot complex than that, and also depending on what type you have.
We don't need nationalised alcohol, tobacco, or paracetamol production to ensure safety, so why would we need the production of other drugs nationalised?
> Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business?
Why do you need to give it away for free?
You just need to make it so that normal businesses with normal procedures produce the supply and distribute it.
Compare bathtub gin to any modern factory made liquor.
Normal companies can produce the stuff, and normal companies can distribute it. Walmart and co are enormously efficient at the latter, and still provide clean and safe products. No need to give anything away for free, you just need to make it legal for normal, formal companies to compete.
One of the reasons to give it away is to stop it being cut. If it costs $50 someone will buy it for $50, cut it and sell it to a friend for $30, a homeless person with little money will opt for the $30 rather than the $50 and then be stuck with all the adulterants, while the first person will have got high for $20 and only need to make another $20 to do the cycle again rather than the whole $50.
Amounts just a simple example and not accurate.
One thing that alot of people miss is that it's not just drug dealers cutting, it's the drug users themselves. I don't think the same can be said for other common drugs like cocaine, mdma etc
But instead, in the UK we're going for outright bans on tobacco. Even introducing a new form of discrimination to do so, where one person will be able to smoke, but a person born one day later will never in their lifetime be permitted to buy tobacco.
(Just wait until they apply a birth-date cut-off like that to owning ICE cars, then manual driving of any powered vehicle...)
Oh, it isn't anti-government at all. It's a question of what and how much you the citizen would like to pay your government to do.
Alcohol / marijuana systems may be a better comparison since, despite alcohol being so cheap, there are still people who produce and distribute unverified products.
Since the use is recreational, people will often pay for the cheapest version of the same high.
> there are still people who produce and distribute unverified products
Sure, but that's more people getting into homebrew as a hobby, not people trying to undercut supermarkets. Unless you tax the bejeesus out of it, no-one's home-grown op is gonna be price-competitive with industrial scale production.
Always terrifying when a utopian and deadly policy is enacted, and leads to more horror and death, and its proponents just insist that we didn't enact it hard enough and demand to go even deeper.
There's mountains of skulls that way. It's been done, so many times. Please stop pushing us towards hell.
> None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism.
Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective. Where we sit now is not effective because it doesn't embrace actual justice, nor does it embrace actual recovery. In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options. Nor is there social pressure to not use drugs. Nor is there actual justice for those who prey on people who are too weak to escape.
I think a combination of both approaches could be good; target the dealers, the movers, and the makers; allow users who want rehab to undergo rehab without facing charges (make no charges contingent on the absence of crime other than possession and use).
> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users
Please cite your sources if you are going to make ridiculous claims. The city of Seattle does not have a municipal policy to distribute drugs to drug users at the syringe exchanges.
We have no empirical proof that the permissive extreme works. There's also no moral impetus for the permissive extreme, except maybe in rare cases when people are forced into drug use against their will. We are talking about something that virtually always starts out as a deliberate, anti-social choice.
Prohibition failed because European Americans have a deep affinity for alcohol. And it was adopted shortly after the mass immigration of Irish and Italians to the US, who had a specially deep affinity for alcohol. It wasn’t just prohibition, it was removing something that the whole country was already addicted to—an addiction that was cultivated over generations and ingrained in the culture.
Prohibition can work fine with alcohol when combined with a strong social taboo. In my home country of Bangladesh, alcohol is illegal for Muslims and virtually nobody drinks it.
Drugs are much more like prohibition of alcohol in Muslim countries than the prohibition of alcohol in America. We have a pre-existing taboo against drug use that we could be strengthening instead of trying to tear down. Capital punishment for drug dealers would go a long way towards reaffirming the taboo.
Prohibition worked by basically all measures. Cirrhosis rates were down. Violence overall was actually down. Child abuse was down. 100s of thousands of people were saved due to prohibition of alcohol.
I'm not even in favor of alcohol prohibition but denying it saved lives goes completely against all data.
The common cultural belief that prohibition failed is a total myth. It achieved everything it set out to achieve. People just wanted to drink. There's actually very little evidence of the supposed ills of prohibition.
For example, organized crime is typically said to have been caused by prohibition, but there were other factors at play as well (immigration, economics, etc). Harder liquor being available is another one, and this is true. Cirrhosis severity increased during prohibition but the drop in cirrhosis rates more than made up for that.
Criminals due to prohibition, i.e. drinkers of alcohol, should report to the prohibitor, cirrhosis, which a very good and clear sign of alcohol consumption, indicative of their criminal behavior?
A pregnant unmarried young woman of muslim religion, should report to her parents she is pregnant, indicative of sexual behavior with no one claiming legal status as her husband? That's prohibited, why should she do it?
I mean, a criminal reporting their own crimes to the prohibitor, doesn't sound like a very bright move to say the least.
I know personally people who drink alcohol a lot, their friends, family and social circles usually drink as well. Not always but increased probability. As soon as i meet a cousin of mine 3 times a week, and he gets busted for alcohol then i know i am next. So why should i let him report his own disease?
Cirrhosis kills, so the data is pretty 'fair', unless you're claiming there are piles of unnamed, uncertified dead people who died of cirrhosis during prohibition but were not autopsied. The data showing cirrhosis decreased is counting cirrhosis deaths as reported by hospitals getting indigent bodies. Several hospitals went from handling thousands of indigent cirrhosis deaths to handling a few hundred. You can't hide dead people easily.
Yes you can. You can change their cause of death. Covid proved, this can be very easily achieved. Hundreds of thousands of people with wrong and misleading cause of death.
When the doctor is intimidated because he will be fired or he will be beat up by thugs then you put in the cause of death anything you like. A doctor can be intimidated by FDA thugs who revoke licenses, or beat up street thugs with the same effect.
I know personally one doctor who does autopsies. Autopsies are far from rigorous.
Usually people care about a person while he is still alive, as soon as his soul flies away to some remote heaven no one cares. Especially when that person is drinking for decades, usually everyone knows what the cause was, his family, his friends, it is not rocket science.
I didn't read the citations, it is many hours of study, but if any of the above is in question, i can give pretty lengthy citations about Covid and cause of death. A lot of research is pretty widely known.
Well, I'm just describing the practical effects of the drug policy in Singapore.
It's very similar in the West: poor people get busted for doing drugs much more than rich people do.
Yes, I sometimes think policies could be made more efficiently, if they were to openly acknowledge the loopholes that exist for rich enough people, and just turn them into a saner official policies, instead of 'open-secret' accidents.
Singapore has a good example for gambling: foreigners can just enter our casinos, but locals have to pay something like 200 dollars to enter. Just so that you are under no illusions that you could come out ahead on net by going to the casino.
In theory, they could open 'opium dens' where you pay 200 dollars to enter, and then you can do your drugs there (all regulated and taxed and under supervision).
The link you provided does not even remotely support your claim, which I can only assume is that the death penalty stops drug distribution.
But unless you control for Singapore’s somewhat unique geography and politics, pointing to Singapore’s death penalty - itself the result of a wider political context - signifies very little.
The death penalty is very important. What makes ordinary people follow the law is a desire to conform to society’s expectations. Humans are social animals—we want to be “good people,” not “bad people.”
Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are. Its society’s ultimate sanction and indicator of the acts society deems evil. It’s like the social opprobrium we have in the US for child molesters, where we look the other way when they get killed in prison. It reinforces the norm—even other criminals realize that child molesters are especially evil.
The majority providing for an orderly, clean, and safe society for themselves through democratic means is not “totalitarianism.” Democracy does not require kowtowing to antisocial individuals. If you want to be disorderly then go live in the jungle.
By this token, if the majority believes that an "orderly, clean, and safe society" means not having, say, people with a certain skin color in it, do you think that is also fine?
Or taking an existing modern example of Russia. The majority of its population genuinely believes that e.g. LGBT persecution (which, to remind, these days means that two women kissing in public get arrested) is necessary for an "orderly and clean society". Is that also a good example of such a democracy?
I don't think there's any comparison between drug users and dealers and racial minorities and LGBT people. Putting that aside, democracy--the collective right to create the kind of society the people want--is more important than individual rights. Societies sometimes make terrible mistakes. Democracy doesn't mean that people always make good decisions. But there is no moral justification for any other approach. Such as having a minority decide that the majority must put up with having to step over drug needles in streets or public parks.
You don't think so, but who are you to argue against the democratic social consensus? In Russia they believe that being LGBT is a choice and that it is a choice that is socially harmful. Just like you believe the same wrt drugs.
Putting that aside, if you believe that democracy is more important than individual rights, then you are in no position to claim that democracy and totalitarianism are incompatible. One can certainly have a totalitarian society in which the majority consents to it being so.
The moral justification for a different approach is that unchecked majority rule is merely "might is right" dressed up in a way that makes it a bit more palatable for the masses.
> In Russia they believe that being LGBT is a choice and that it is a choice that is socially harmful. Just like you believe the same wrt drugs.
Except sexual orientation isn’t a choice and drug use is a choice. Except maybe if you’re one of those children born addicted to drugs because of pre-natal exposure.
> Putting that aside, if you believe that democracy is more important than individual rights, then you are in no position to claim that democracy and totalitarianism are incompatible
“Totalitarianism” is defined as “government that is centralized and dictatorial.” Dictatorial is defined as referring to “a ruler with total power.” So defimitinally totalitarianism is a form of minoritarianism. A government that imposes rigid norms based on broad social consensus isn’t dictatorial. Toxic individualists might deem such a government oppressive, but that doesn't make it dictatorial.
> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options
As a seattlite, this is the first I’ve heard of this. There might have been safe needle exchanges a decade back when heroin was popular, but these days when you just need some foil to smoke some fent…you don’t even see needles on the street anymore. And I’m pretty sure we aren’t giving out drugs (fent or heroin) to addicts, maybe you mean Narcan or methadone as first aid against ODing?
If the government makes equivalent drugs available for free, no dealer can compete.
Giving out free drugs like candy isn't ideal, so you can put just enough speed bumps to limit the free drugs only to actual drug addicts with a black market dealer. That means that all the dealer's best customers disappear even faster than before.
The "free candy" approach doesn't take into account the part where some of these drugs literally unwire self control in the user, that is they lose their ability to choose whether they do a drug or not and lose any agency they once had. There's a reason highly addictive drugs should be tightly controlled.
Yeah: There's some very interesting philosophical territory in there about what situations and choices are actually voluntary, and which ones are essentially a kind of biochemical slavery that the person needs to be liberated from.
Drugs cost actual resources to produce. Giving them away for free will distort the market towards more consumption than ideal. And unlike e.g. healthcare or education, it's not like we can morally justify that overconsumption. Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to get/keep people addicted to drugs.
We are all already paying a high price for street drugs. The addicts are not paying out of their pockets, but instead are stealing things and extracting a fraction of the value. Then we pay for emergency medical care when the street drugs have terrible quality.
Pharmaceutical quality opioids and amphetamines are definitely cheaper when you factor in the externalities of street drugs.
The low price also allows lower consumption, counterintuitively. Taper the supply, and if the dealers return, increase supply until they are out of business. Hard to be an addict when the government tapers you and drives the street dealers out of business if they try to supply again.
Last I checked, based on the UK NHS actual supply costs for heroin, a typical users daily consumption would cost.the NHS ca. $12. That is not nothing, but it's low enough that while you don't want to turn everyone into addicts, it far cheaper for society to give it away for free to existing addicts than it is to deal with the effects on both addicts and society of an unclean, uncontrolled supply (heroin addicts, counter to public perception, can largely - not always, much like alcoholics -function, hold down jobs, pay taxes etc. as long as they have a reliable, clean supply and don't have to desperately chase money to find their next high)
So don't give it away for free, sure, but make it available to anyone who is addicted.
Taxpayers are already paying for many forms of addiction, through policing, violence and robbery/theft, healthcare, prisons.
>
Last I checked, based on the UK NHS actual supply costs for heroin, a typical users daily consumption would cost.the NHS ca. $12. That is not nothing, but it's low enough that while you don't want to turn everyone into addicts, it far cheaper for society to give it away for free to existing addicts than it is to deal with the effects on both addicts and society of an unclean, uncontrolled supply (heroin addicts, counter to public perception, can largely - not always, much like alcoholics -function, hold down jobs, pay taxes etc. as long as they have a reliable, clean supply and don't have to desperately chase money to find their next high)
I don't get your argument at all. Why not charge the addicts the 12 dollars?
The NHS as it is has a schedule of payment for prescription drugs that is applied for everything - including heroin - if prescribed, to ensure they are available to everyone that needs them. If you're below certain income threshold you get it all for free.
Above that you pay fixed fees. Currently that is ca $12 for a single prescription (irrespective of amount prescribed, which is typically regulated), ca $40 for unlimited prescriptions for 3 months, ca. $143 for unlimited prescriptions for 12 months. So if you were to follow the same schedule as normal, in the UK that'd mean $0 or $143 per year.
But the argument for making it available potentially for free to addicts irrespective of income thresholds especially for the most serious drugs is ensuring there's no barrier to a stable, secure supply triggering the very behaviors you want to prevent. A heroin addict is not going to be able to hold down a job if they find themselves unable to afford their next dose because they have a serious addiction that will compulsively drive them to try every desperate method to find money to satisfy that addiction. The societal cost of even a single mugging etc. is going to far exceed the cost of ensuring they have a stable supply.
> until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism.
Why is anything that is not 100% supportive of people putting needles in their butts is deemed puritan and reactionary?
We had a long public consultation recently where I live, because the city wants to introduce free housing for drug addicts with a safe shooting room. Next to a day care, a park, and a bridge, and in an area that currently doesn't have any of the east-van type population. It was basically locals speaking against and support associations speaking for. Locals were called bigots, racists, needed to check their privilege, stereotyping. They weren't allowed to say there'd be more crime because "there won't be".
There are certainly better things that can be done to help addicted people, but just counting on being nice and giving them clean needles won't change the current curve. The dealers are not the ones making daily life literally shittier through human feces on the sidewalk, and bikes disappearing from under your butt if you only gaze elsewhere for a minute. Their violence is mostly internal. The real impact is from the thousands of these people who need a revenue stream to keep subsisting while trying to surf their high one last time, ride that they'll preferably have slowly on a sidewalk or crossing a street with their pants midway through their calves.
I pity those people, their life must be horrendous, and they don't get any help getting out. But I don't recognize their right to fuck themselves up to a point that it's a nuisance for everyone, and it becomes everyone else's problem to unfuck them.
If you replace them by state sponsored products, you'll just keep the same trend. The only way is to a) break the cycle that makes the problem worse, by making it illegal (prison is not an answer but at least allow cops to confiscate) and breaking the procurement chain and b) fix the existing problem by introducing real programs that get those people out of their addiction, rather than just helping them live through it.
And yeah I know that neither are possible, it's a simplistic point of view, but the policy of just letting things be a vaguely supporting it has only made things worse, and just saying "screw it, nothing can be done, just go with it", that doesn't sound like a winning stance to me.
It’s pretty damn easy to solve this tbh. Yes, you imprison people, push them out of your cities and confiscate all drugs. You don’t have to change the laws, just enforce them, it doesn’t matter if you’re addicted to drugs, taking a dump on the street has a criminal penalty.
> Not half-measures like
> they've done in BC &
> Portugal.
Are you actually aware of what Portuguese drug policy is like, or are you just going by the popular North American misconception that they just decriminalized everything and called it a day?
The actual Portuguese drug policy is draconian in a way that would be unimaginable in the US or Canada. The decriminalization is only a small part of it.
Portugal didn’t fully fund treatment, and in the past few years they’ve seen a reversal of their early successes. Oregon is going through the same thing.
Recognizing that drug addiction is a health issue is progress, but that means you actually need to fund treatment.
I actually am fine with drug legalisation. It should be legal for people with more than X acres of land (or people who rent X acres of land). You should be required to have a certified drug security person on staff that will deal with anyone who has a 'crisis' while using, and to especially make sure they don't leave the property to become a public nuisance. And you should be required to provide evidence of sufficient health insurance and coverage.
You should also have to prove that you will be able to maintain this lifestyle in perpetuity, perhaps by posting a sufficiently large bond with the state you're operating in, which can be re-funded to you if you can prove that you're no longer using permanently (I.e., maybe after a decade of no further use).
But if you do all that... please like bake yourself as high as you want and pay good taxes.
I have a substantial problem with people doing drugs in public. And having their trips on public streets.
But seeing as the requirements to safely do drugs are much stricter than most of what the 'typical' street drug user seemed to ever be capable of, I doubt decriminalizing all drugs in a safe manner will do much of anything. The irresponsible people will still be doing it. At some levels drugs will always be criminal, because they're anti social and humans don't like anti social behavior in general.
Why do people not have to do anything remotely like that for alcohol? It’s almost a cliche of course, but worth noting in this context since alcohol is addictive, destructive to physical and mental health, and commonly provokes violent and antisocial behavior.
Certified drug security person? You mean a medical team and hospital equipment plus security guard and counselor rolled into one? Or an ex-user just watching?
It’s interesting to me that you referred to all drugs as one big bucket (“drug legalization[sic]”), and then referred to the usage as “bake yourself as high as you want,” which is typically a term used only for cannabis.
Do you feel like your proposed rules should apply to all currently-illegal drugs equally?
Sure I truly do not care what you want to ingest. I'm truly not a drug prude. I just can't deal with the drugged out individuals masturbating in public in front of kids and stuff.
As for baked v something else, I don't do drugs and have no interest so whatever... You know what I mean.
Decriminalization has never been about compassion or freedom. It just is an easy escape from social responsibility allowing parts of the population to indulge into extremely detrimental behavior to themselves and others. The rest can just look away "because it is legal".
Those policies never take into account that part of the population which gets affected by the drug users' behaviour. I was recently approached and threatened with extreme violence by a person who looked like he was on drugs and had an unmuzzled dangerous breed of dog with him, not on the leash. The dog was chasing after joggers and he was chasing after the dog, promising people that "if you ever follow me I'll slice ya". He picked on me too and listed the things he would do to me while his dog was too close for comfort. Central London, broad daylight. Compassion for drug addicts is a hard sell, because there are so many of them and they show no desire to change because "I'm an addict, I can't help it".
The need is for a nuanced policy that recognizes that people have bad habits, vices, and addictions, and that you can't stop them from that or else they'll just do it harder, like a petulant child. But there's a difference between all alcohol must be legal all the time, and limiting sales to no hard liquor, beer and wine only at certain times. And then, what do people see as the government's role in all this. How much should be up to the government and how much should be cultural norms enforced socially?
Yes, but clearly that was a different situation, where you had large non-addict populations still wanting to consume.
With heroin there aren't any occasional users, who shoot it twice a month and are totally clean otherwise.
Alcohol is bad, sure, but just because it is a socially acceptable drug, doesn't mean you should allow other drugs to become socially acceptable as well. Just because it seems near impossible to get criminalize one bad thing, doesn't mean that all other bad things should be decriminalized.
In the end I don't see drug decriminalization as anything more than a political class who creates severe misery, because they are utterly unable to help with the underlying problems which push people to drug use.
People often fall into the trap: A is bad, but B is bad too. B is allowed, so therefore A must be allowed too. When put in this abstract way, the irrationality of it is clear. But when it's an emotionally vested topic, the lines suddenly blur.
The powers-that-be are indeed unable to help with the underlying problem, but there's more to it. Politicians want to be seen as doing good. The myths surrounding good drug use have been pushed for a long time, and the combination with the prospect of the very hard task of eliminating drug trade and the social class aspect, means that for many --in particular progressives-- legalization becomes an attractive option.
The idea that all heroin users are addicts that can't just stop has been known to be false since at least the 1970s. The heroin addicts you notice are by no means the only heroin users (nor the only addicts).
One can argue over ratios, but the addiction rates for heroin are low enough it's sometimes prescribed for post op pain in the UK as an alternative to morphine.
It'd be interesting to have further discussion beyond just parroting a flawed experiment from almost 100 years ago though. DUI has caused very high mortality, although funnily some people here will suggest that we abolish the "driving" part instead.
In my country (Indonesia) where alcohol is frowned and restricted culturally, DUI rates is almost nonexistent compared to developed countries. Although we "replaced" it with sleepy driving which also caused lots of deaths, so maybe we do have to abolish driving after all.
The irony is that alcohol prohibition did actually work. It increased health, reduced violence in the home and on the street, increase safety for women and girls, decreased deaths and increased economic wealth amongst other benefits. It also (needless but I have to say it) increased organised crime which in the end overwhelmed the positives.
I'm not familiar with the history and details. I'm for decriminalization of drugs but I think that only helps if you also provide meaningful help in getting free of addiction.
I'm for decriminalization because if you can't admit you have a problem and need help without being charged with a crime, it's a barrier to getting clean. I'm also generally for "It's your body. Put what you want in it."
I am not criticizing this change in policy. I am also for holding people accountable for their behavior and not excusing bad behavior generally based on "Poor baby. Has an addiction."
We don't say chemo patients are excused from behaving appropriately, though we do make allowances for the fact they are probably grumpy and not at their most diplomatic because they are miserable. I believe addiction frequently has an unrecognized medical component and people are literally self medicating, often for an issue that doctors have failed to identify. I believe if you find the underlying cause, they can stop.
Anyway, just trying to give context here. Decriminalization should not be code for "Let's let assholes claim the rules don't apply to them at all and excuse all their awful behavior."
In theory I'm also for decriminalization, but in practice it doesn't work. Some drugs are so intense, can't compare to your Friday night beer. See the heroin epidemic in Amsterdam during the 70s, some neighborhoods became completely uninhabitable and an emergency status was declared. It just doesn't work.
Drugs that are legal for adults are typically illegal for children. Alcohol and tobacco are both legal for adults in the US and illegal for children.
Saying adults who are generally functional should generally have agency over their own body is not saying "Anything goes!" and is not saying "Let's actively seek to turn kids into addicts!"
A lot of arguments against decriminalization are posited as extremist, worst case scenarios.
I said from the start that I don't know what the history is for the jurisdiction in question and ended with my firm belief that decriminalization should not be code for giving assholes a pass on any and every shitty thing they want to excuse or justify.
Seems like something went wrong in BC and they are trying to course correct. I'm fine with that.
Stealing is what is illegal. Your reasoning is very dangerous, as you can link whatever you want. For example, it's common in the US to blame certain videogames or movies after mass shooting: by that logic illegalizing the videogames solves the shootings. Or we need to illegalize some videogames because they might cause shootings.
When people think drugs and addiction they immediately think of heavy opiates. But there are a lot of drugs that cause mild to no addiction (and certainty less than alcohol or tobacco), and low harm: LSD, for example. Nobody steals shit from your car to do some acid.
To be fair, we do this for a lot of other stuff as well. For instance, driving over the speed limit does not harm anyone per se, it's only when this leads to a traffic accident that harm is caused. You could just as well say: let's not have speed limits, let's only criminalize harming people in an accident, and then it's everyone's responsibility to drive at a responsible speed (and maybe in case of an accident, you would need to prove in a court that you drove (ir)responsibly and who was at fault). But we know this doesn't work in practice.
We don’t criminalize production or possession of a car capable of exceeding the speed limit. The penalty for exceeding the speed limit is basically so minor as to be an administrative rather than criminal action in most cases. And that penalty only applies in public spaces (no speed limit on a drag strip).
If we were to apply a similar model to drug use, production and sales would be legal, possession would be legal, use in private spaces would be legal, and we’d fine (not jail) people for being high in public spaces or high risk situations.
Which is almost exactly what we do with alcohol. And aligns fairly well with a lot of other suggestions people have made around taking production and supply out of the hands of criminals.
Driving a car doesn’t make you an irrational car driving addict who can’t function without driving and will do basically anything to drive more because not driving hurts so bad and driving feels so good.
There are only a handful of drugs that turns you into that king of zombie. Mainly opiates that ilegalization itself made so powerful.
Before being ilegal, the most common opiate was opium. It has about the same strength as codeine, about 1/10 of morphine. Some people took it daily for decades, and they were fully functional, not zombies.
Only after ilegalization we see people taking fentanil. Because it's easier to smuggle 10,000 doses of fentanil (1 gram) than 20 doses of opium (2 gram). The same happened with coca leaves vs cocaine: were coca leaves are legal, only a few use cocaine. And some people chew coca leaves all their lifes without too much problem. Certainly less than an alcoholic.
Alcohol is legal. But it's ilegal under some circumstances (driving). Or it's not tolerated on some places (work).
There are a number of low risk drugs, like LSD, that are very ilegal. In fact, they were made ilegal on false premises, like "they led to suicides" or "you'll stare at the sun". Often people make a big bag of drugs, from LSD, shrooms and marihuana, to heroin and fentanil, put them in a bag and stamp "ilegal because some of them are very bad" on it. Sorry, what? Ban the worse of them, and leave the less harmful out. I'm personally for full legalization, but I get that some people want to ilegalize at least the worse opioids.
To go back to your speed example: yes, speeding is bad. Yet we put a limit reasonably high that allows you to use the car. We didn't outlaw car usage altogether! We know there are traffic related deaths and injuries every year, and still we are allowed to drive: we study the problems, we try to fix it, new regulations are in place... We try to get a balance between the risk and the benefits. But the current discourse with drugs is "going in a car at 5mph in the highway is very, very, very harmful". Except alcohol: that "car" can go at full speed.
The difference between video games and smoking fentanyl is like between a chair and an electric chair. If you don’t see it, we have nothing to talk about.
And you are doing exactly what I said: straight to the most powerful opiod available. Fentanil is bad, lets outlaw shrooms, LSD, MDMA, marihuana... But leave out alcohol because...? Ah, yes, because when it was ilegal, mafia, violence and damages related to them were worse than ever.
Also notice how heroin and fentanil are currently illegal. Everywhere. How is it going? I guess there are no addicts, or people stealing cars to get their fix. Because that only happens when they are legal, isn't it?
Somehow we know that ilegalization solves nothing or create worse problems like mafias and linked violence, and still believe that it's the solution.
> I'm for decriminalization because if you can't admit you have a problem and need help without being charged with a crime, it's a barrier to getting clean. I'm also generally for "It's your body. Put what you want in it."
Like literally... this is usually the case even in places where drugs are actually still illegal. In the US at least. For example, my state of Oregon decriminalized drugs. This did... nothing in terms of legal process, other than to eliminate any court appearances (police can't jail you so you don't show up in court). While Measure 110 was being implemented I was on the grand jury. Essentially, the status quo before the bill was that people would be held pre-trial. They would go on 'trial' or take a plea deal and be sentenced to recovery. That is what went on before decriminalization. Then suddenly one day, police could no longer hold them and everyone stoped showing up to court. I think I read today that the drug courts went from thousands of cases to a few hundred per year. That's thousands of people slipping through the cracks.
The problem with stuff like that is that you'll still have the law enforced, just in a haphazard way. So everybody is doing it, and most aren't any worse off for it, but some end up with their lives ruined, largely at random.
It does mean that maybe throwing people in prison for possession is not the brightest idea given how likely it is to be just some random guy who really didn't do anything that everybody else wasn't doing.
After decades of decriminalized drug use, people are finally fed up with it, see through the limitations of compassion that is largely driven by political ideology and are voting for stronger laws.
Yet I question whether we will see actual enforcement.
The grandparent might be referring to various degrees of decriminalization, not just the more recent experiment of decriminalizing possession of 2.5 grams of drugs and the allowance of drug consumption in public spaces that was backed by the BC court injunction last year. For example, Insite (a supervised drug injection site which opened 21 years ago) could be considered an early step in decriminalization, including acquiring a legal exemption allowing it to operate.
Insite can almost be seen as a medical clinic. A hospital OR is a "supervised drug injection site" where you can be legally knocked out with propofol and fentanyl.
Yes, in the same sense that a street drug user could almost be seen as an amateur anaesthesiologist subjecting themselves to a controlled dosage of opioids for medical purposes. But despite that, street drug use and supervised injection at Insite would both have been criminal offenses if not for changes and exemptions made by legal system to allow them. That's precisely what "decriminalization" is, and a large part of this is the idea that drug abuse should be seen as a medical matter rather than a criminal one.
Insite may not have been a 'de jure' decriminalization, but it was definitely a site where the government acknowledged the laws were not to be followed as written, and was a 'de facto' decriminalization.
"evil", "good" are terrible words. Religious trickery to fend of questions like "what?", "why?".
Tell what you object to or what you support and why and then you can have a conversation and possibly arrive at some solutions or at least some knowledge.
It's mindblowing that you think compassion is a political ideology and not, you know, a normal human emotion that motivates people to push for certain policies.
A cynical person would never push for (largely unpopular) compassionate/harm-reducing policies.
It's a bizarre inversion to say that enabling a small antisocial minority to terrorize the majority and strip away their enjoyment of public spaces is "compassionate."
harm reduction doesn't work when somebody actively/constantly seeks harm. we've put the personal liberties of a small group of people addicted to hard drugs above the rest. that is the misplaced compassion I'm talking about that hasn't worked.
I'm curious what studies you have seen that jailing people helps them improve their life or stay off drugs. From what I can tell, that is not the case.
"The theory of deterrence would suggest, for instance, that states with higher rates of drug imprisonment would experience lower rates of drug use among their residents... higher rates of drug imprisonment did not translate into lower rates of drug use, arrests, or overdose deaths."
Perhaps if prisoners actually received the drug treatment they needed.
"To be effective for this population, treatment must begin in prison and be sustained after release through participation in community treatment programs. By engaging in a continuing therapeutic process, people can learn how to avoid relapse and withdraw from a life of crime. However, only a small percentage of those who need treatment while behind bars actually receive it, and often the treatment provided is inadequate."
It improves everyone else's quality of life and it means they have the potential to access services. The individual homeless are certainly stakeholders but they are neither the only one nor the most important
It’s mindblowing that you think compassion means letting s hoard of people absolutely destroy areas of a major cities and not, you know, an over correction to “war on drugs”-like awful policies.
For the individual drug user things might be “better”, but for cities/society they are absolutely not.
Yes, I was reflecting on this recently, it feels like public drug use (as well as homeless encampments, aggressive panhandling etc) is putting the rights of the individual drug user well above the rights of society, which seems incongruous for the people that support it.
Of course the boundless compassion of the kind that permits public spaces to be littered with needles and fentanyl smoke is driven by a political ideology, come on.
When people make this point they usually refer to Vancouver, Seattle, Portland (OR) or San Francisco. What they do--and waht all politicians do--is completely ignore the root problem: unaffordable housing.
Lack of affordable housing is the number one cause of homelessness and it's not even close (eg [1]). California, in particular, votes in measures to fund housing the homeless but it doesn't really get spent. Why? Because residents, developers and politicians do everything they can to resist building anything to house the homeless in any capacity.
We have decades of long-term incarceration for minor drug possession to show this is not an effective strategy. That's what led to drug decriminzation after the crime panic of the 1980s and 1990s. Decriminalizing drug use is good. If people don't want to see it (which I get), maybe they should do something to house such people, particularly because homelessness itself is a major cause of drug abuse as such people turn to self-medication.
>Lack of affordable housing is the number one cause of homelessness
Homelessness isn't a monolith. Treating someone who gets evicted after job loss the same as mentally ill drug addicts is making the problem worse. Homeless assistant programs are successful at helping people who accept the help.
The drug addicts you see on the streets are engaging in destructive antisocial behavior. Sadly the only effective remedy for this behavior is to be roughed up by police and thrown in jail.
But lack of affordable housing is still the number one cause.
We only claim someone's problems are entirely due to drug use when they hit skid row. We don't predict homelessness for millionaire rock stars who go to rehab repeatedly.
Drug use doesn't cause homelessness. Lack of housing causes homelessness.
The real solution is: We need to fix the housing crisis.
Lack of affordable housing is the reason people might fall into despair and then drugs, but the people who get into drugs are basically a lost caused compared to the ones that don’t. The drug addicts…you can throw millions at just one case and make no progress in getting them back in their feet, the non-drug addict just needs housing.
At that point, isn’t a moral judgement, just an effective use of limited resources (do we burn money trying to treat drug addicts who try to cook meth in the housing you give them, or do we spend $2k/month getting that non addict an apartment so they can get a job).
B. I would like to address the housing crisis per se as a first line of defense rather than wait until people are homeless and then try to decide who merits help and what the cost-benefit ratio is and etc.
For many people, if there was enough affordable housing, this whole argument about their merits and defects and etc wouldn't happen at all. There would, no doubt, be other arguments but my research indicates lack of affordable housing is the primary issue here.
I wish there was a sane and humane way of shutting off the infinite supply of out-of-state (and, increasingly, international) transients. Our homeless programs here in Portland are absolutely overwhelmed with people who arrive here daily from all across the country. Recent arrivals have been either a plurality or an outright majority of our homeless population for many years now.
I’d absolutely choose going all-in on affordable housing over a return to the war on drugs or doubling down on catastrophic decrim. But without limits on in-migration for social programs, the idea seems frustratingly doomed from the start.
Isn't that what you have a Federal Government for in the US? Naturally if just one city starts some programs it can't take on the entire US population of homeless people.
The solution to this in-migration should be clear. These programs need to be offered in every single city in the entire country. People need to pay more taxes to fund social programs. I'm clearly not American ;)
A federal solution is the only solution that has any chance of working. But I don’t see it as working without restrictions on migration, like a residency system of some kind. Not everyone gets to live in affordable Santa Barbara housing, obviously, some people have to live in Toledo or even Gary. Anything that isn’t market must be restricted in some way, even the USSR didn’t let everyone live in Moscow even though most wanted to.
Not sure how the USSR is relevant, in the USSR people had no freedom to choose anything.
But your point is valid. That said there's still probably enough friction in the system such that someone living in a certain place isn't just going to move to Santa Barbara. Moving is expensive and has uncertainties. People coming today to places like Portland or Vancouver, BC, are desperate. If they had some basic support where they're currently living they would be a lot less likely to take those risks.
Yes, but there are people where there is not much more friction than the cost or donation of a greyhound bus ticket, who we are talking about in this story. There is also a trend that people move to where their addiction isn’t going to get them thrown in jail, social services are better, and they won’t freeze to death outside in the winter.
I’m not sure if people would stay put in say great falls MT if the support was better. But even among the well to do housed, they often move from these towns because the economic opportunities are better in larger richer cities. People have freedom of movement in the USA and mostly use it across the economic spectrum.
You would discover two very different problems between those where housing costs too much but were functional otherwise, and the other problem of completely non-functioning people where even cheap housing is too expensive since they can’t hold even a minimum wage job.
The only debate right now is whether the first category mostly leads to the second category (and vice versa if the second mostly comes from the first). That is should we just treat the categories the same or not, then more affordable housing would help if most people in category two are coming from one. If the assumption is wrong, we will still see people on the streets even if housing is affordable.
The other part of the debate is whether these problems are local or national, which has implications in how homeless programs are funded and where the affordable housing should be built. If all of the country’s homeless decides to move to SF, Seattle, LA for their affordable housing, the program will obviously fail.
You: "Let's throw a bunch a people off a cliff and then assess who is worth saving afterwards!"
Me: "Let's stop throwing people off a cliff. If we stop doing that, we can stop arguing about who is too broken to save and whether or not it's a personal character defect that they ended up more broken than others who got thrown off the same cliff."
You didn’t even read my comment, so I give up. Ok, everyone just come to Seattle for their affordable housing, because DoreenMichele doesn’t want to think about the problem and would rather just throw half baked solutions at it.
Oh you don't understand? It's simple--BC's lawmakers were presented with the option of either making housing affordable nationwide or criminalizing drug use in their city. Darn lawmakers always picking wrong!
Housing is affordable in many cities where people don’t want to live, at least in the states. If everyone wants to live on the west coast though, is it even possible to just make housing more affordable on one place until everyone lives there? If not, it basically means you induce more demand with lower home prices, so you wind up trying to fit a hundred million people in a few big metros.
Lawmakers can’t magic up affordable housing, especially at the federal level. I get people have crazy ideas, but this is the craziest. We could do what Singapore or Austria does with a residency system, though, but progressives don’t like that either.
Hope it was obvious but I was being sarcastic. Suggesting we simply "fix housing" is akin to suggesting we just "eradicate poverty" when confronted with widespread, immediate famine.
I'm pretty sure a lot of the people on the street doing drugs have other issues. I live in Vancouver. People have mental health and other problems that aren't related to their housing status.
The problem isn't simply housing costs. The problem is the lack of a social support structure. Shelters, access to (mental) health care of various forms, addiction treatment etc... Even in "socialist" (ha) Canada you're mostly on your own. BC used to have more money for those things and at some point in the early 2000's those budgets were cut with pretty immediate impact on the homelessness situation. That said housing should be part of the solution but it all boils down to the attitude that you don't need to take care of ($$$) your neighbor. Each to their own. Worse in the US ofcourse but still.
When I came to Vancouver ~23 years ago I was absolutely shocked by the homeless situation. I've never seen anything like that. It's much worse now. Again, boils down to are members of society willing to take care of each other- or is it each to their own and ignore the people who are down. House prices were 1/8th of what they are now but there was no shortage of drug addicts on the streets. North Americans seem to generally be ok with having a mix of worse than the 3rd world alongside middle class and well off. Nobody cares about what goes on in their city. I guess not trending on TikTok.
I’m calling bullshit on this one. Too many examples on YouTube of folks interviewing homeless folks en mass and finding that the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning. The “functional” heroin users you may claim exist are almost always functional enough to not be homeless.
Houston for example simply throws your ass in jail if you’re doing drugs and houses you if you aren’t. They claim to have solved homelessness, and they have in that the actual folks you’re talking about end up housed or in shelters every night.
Being married to an immigrant who actually had to struggle in a third world country with almost no social or economic mobility has left me with almost no sympathy for the homeless in America. Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.
> Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.
> Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If these folks were screwed up from the beginning doesn't this mean they had no hand to play from the start?
There are many, many folks in third world countries that don't make it through life too well either. Life is pretty doomed for you if you're just born in Sudan right now for example. Yet some, very few, of them will succeed in extirpating themselves from the situation.
Statistically there will always be people who fare better than others, through a combination of sweat, blood, and luck. I don't know if it's fair to have "almost no sympathy" for the ones who were too stupid and unlucky to be winners.
> the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, and furthermore, they likely have major overlap.
This reeks of the American brain rot that views poverty as a personal moral failure. Some might couch it as "wealth is the result of hard work and talent". The latter is known as the myth of meritocracy. Those are two sides of the same coin.
Luckily, we have studies we can rely on rather than feelings or Youtuber anecdata eg [1]:
> In many instances, substance abuse is the result of the stress of homelessness, rather than the other way around. Many people begin using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with the pressures of homelessness
I know it’s just more anecdata, but that just does not match my experience at all. I’ve known over a dozen people who have struggled with this over the years, become homeless, had drug overdoses, and several who’ve died.
Every single one of them had a home when they started using the hard drugs, and many had a home through most of their addiction, and only became homeless after the addiction had progressed to severe levels.
If most people have personal experience like mine, then maybe there are issues with the research (people blaming their personal failings on things outside of their control, for example)
It is silly to think that question is one that can be investigated by scientific inquiry. The only thing that study (which you haven't linked to) reveals are the opinions of those who funded it.
98% of homeless people are addicts or mentally ill people. They can't hold a home no matter how cheap it is. Affordable housing won't stop homelessness, because drug addicts and mentally ill people will consume themselves and in the process lose everything including their housing.
Not just unaffordable housing, but homelessness and addiction is a nationwide problem. Only a few cities try to do anything at all, while the rest of the country just pushes them toward those cities. No matter how much money a city throws at the problem, there’s no way it can ever deal with it at the volume necessary.
what comments like GP ignore is that there has been housing provisions for homeless/drug addicted population in the past and each time it did not alleviate any of its residence from their afflictions, instead these free housing units became just another bazaar, a place to do business.
Arguing that a random homeless drug addict with negative net social utility is entitled to housing on some of the most expensive land in the world is completely bonkers.
Should we kick out our children from our home who misbehave? Or do we try to teach them, and help them and let them grow.
Many (most?) of the homeless you see around you are your community. They don't need to be invited into the city because it's their home too.
I live in SF and I know homeless people who have lived on the same street corner longer than some of my coworkers have lived in the city (or even the country). Many of the people who experience such misfortunes - even drug addicts who behave poorly - are long-time residents who once helped make the city the place it is. Sure their behave causes issues, and society needs to do something, but implying they don't have a claim to be helped in their own city is unfair.
> Should we kick out our children from our home who misbehave? Or do we try to teach them, and help them and let them grow.
The second one. Over and over again. And when they are adults and we've given them a few more chances, we should then cut our losses. Many families go through the heartbreak which is trying again and again and failing. I don't judge those families, and know a few of those personally. And this is people's blood relatives. Extrapolate from that what you will.
If someone in my home is daily screaming at me, shitting on the floor, stealing things and threatening children - they're going. Roommate, relative, doesn't matter. They're out, or I am.
Someone's claim to live in a good community ends when they start actively destroying that community day after day. You get the community you work to build; you don't get to live in my wonderful community every day while you daily do horrifying things to ruin it.
They only have net negative social utility at the moment, they have the potential to be productive citizens.
Plus, productive citizens need to share a society with the drug addicted homeless. That society is going to be more peaceful if the needs of those homeless are met.
Because some people view privilege of any kind critically.
Also, especially in North America, being some place first has not historically proven to be a sufficient claim.
I’m really in favor of the opposite: zone for fewer jobs. Set limits on headcount per sq ft. Limit zoning of anything that provides jobs to be no more than local housing. If the locals want to keep their residential density, fine, no more commercial development.
There hasn't been decades of decriminalization though? There have been decades of extremely harsh enforcement, far exceeding that applied to, for example, alcohol, fraud, sexual assault, ...
What there has been is decades of "maybe years in jail for drug use is excessive?", to which some places said "let's have less restrictions on drug use than we do on alcohol" which is absurd though I suspect less harmful in the long term, but many have doubled down on punishment.
That is ignoring the demonstrable bias in enforcement of drug crimes, that meant that even in heavily policed and restrictive areas the drug laws primarily act as a method to criminalize specific social groups (drugs used by the wealthy generally have lower penalties than those use by everyone else, enforcement of drug crimes means that despite every study on the topic showing little racial split in use, the overwhelming majority of people in prison for weed use in the US are black).
Treat drugs the same way we treat alcohol: taxed, regulated, age restricted, etc (and please get people to stop smoking joints at concerts. I don't understand why people who would never consider smoking a cigarette inside then light up a joint in a crowded hall.)
It’s possible decriminalizing works but it’s also been combined with the absurd no policing of public places at all policy in these cities.
If people want to shoot up at home that’s fine. But there’s no reason we need to have large meth/fentanyl encampments with violent and severely mentally ill people on the streets in addition to that.
If you have too many chaotic policies that build up on each other it’s gonna end poorly as we’ve seen
> decades of "maybe years in jail for drug use is excessive?",
Which is why we have a massive network of treatment and diversion programs often initiated by courts directly. It's been a long time since we've had a true "black and white" enforcement regime.
> drugs used by the wealthy generally have lower penalties than those use by everyone else
Wealthy people smoke crack too. What they can afford is to insulate themselves from the risk by being several layers removed from the transactions.
> Treat drugs the same way we treat alcohol
There are dry counties. There are states with specific ABV prohibitions in certain products and with dispensing limits in establishments. Some states have state operated liquor stores. The way we treat alcohol is not homogenous.
Then we'd have to get into product safety, licensing and liability concerns. What process should a "herion shop" be required to submit to before opening?
