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tmp-20150107

This is interesting, and confirms what I understand about heroin addiction. This is why harm reduction is such a good policy - addicts aren't sitting around waiting for something external to appear and help them quit heroin, if they want to quit they will generally go ahead and seek out the means to do so. Until then, making sure there is a supply of clean needles etc. is the best option, while making sure facilities and medication is available to help those who have decided to fix the problem.

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Or you can try to fix the problem, with drug laws that are actually enforced.

You can say addicts are irreversibly damaged, but there is little excuse for the authorities to sit idle while new people become addicted.

This simply doesn't work. There is no level of enforcement which can make it impossible to obtain drugs, merely very difficult. Even in overtly totalitarian countries.

Drugs are available even in prisons.

Singapore is clean, other countries don't have a growing opiate problem.

Singapore is clean because anyone possessing more than tiny bit of any illegal drug automatically gets the death penalty.

We can look at countries that have fierce, well enforced drug laws and see that even they have problems with addiction.

If the aim is to reduce harm to addicts, and the people around addicts, and the victims of crime perpetrated by addicts then authorities need to start treating addiction as a public health problem, with support from criminal justice around acquisitive crime.

Treating addiction as a criminal justice problem clearly, unambiguously, does not work.

Why doesn't it work? One argument is to say it hasn't historical worked well in the USA, but it might be interesting to actually figure out the reason .

In other places it has for example opiate use in China is 5x less than in the US.

Have you got data that supports the 5x difference of opiate use being solely a criminal justice victory?

Seems like there are many reasons why that might be true.

19th century China was synonymous with opiate use, then they shot everybody. I'm not sure this is the approach America should take, but I am consistent shocked by the wide availability of hard drugs in the USA - and frankly a culture that tolerate their use.

Absolutely, and this is why I talked about harm reduction as a drug policy in my parent comment. The thing about addicts is that they will do anything to get their next hit - someone who does not have a heroin habit just has no idea of the strength of the drive to obtain more. As mentioned, drugs are available in prisons. One thing that would make most addict's lives easier and less chaotic would be the ability to obtain their drug of choice without fear of prison; essentially decriminalisation of personal use quantities. I don't think we're ready for legalisation, or prescription of drugs, but it is not considered a bad thing by most drug treatment professionals.

And how is that working out so far?

Exactly! Current enforcement has been terrible, we should fix that.

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