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> the personal decision to use hard or addicting drugs is something of a moral failing.

Watch the documentary I mentioned above. Also try this one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4079250/ Addiction is a mental health issue before it becomes a debilitating physical health issue ... one that (very often) leads to suicide or death. To suggest that unwell people have the strength to fight it on their own with the strength of "morals" is really damaging to your argument.

Besides: the healthy environment you want to "give people" is totally subjective. Who decides what is "healthy" for whom? Now you're back to policing and criminalizing ... these things do not work to improve the mental health of sick people.

I don't read mythrwy as blaming those who are already addicted and can't fight their drug habit, but rather those who start taking drugs even when they should be able to see the consequences. (Some quotes [emphasis mine]: "the personal decision to use hard or addicting drugs is something of a moral failing.", "it is a vice in which people for the most part, at least initially, have some choice.")

Shaming doesn't help the addicts, and probably hurts them by making help less available, but it absolutely helps those people who do not yet have a drug habit. The stigma definitely helped me decline when a bunch of my friends started with marijuana (and I'm sure some did worse, but by then we had become distant).

Although decriminalization is the right move to help addicts, it will also have an effect on non-users who were curious but shied away from doing something illegal and getting in trouble. Personally, I think drugs should be available on a prescription for everyone who actually needs them, but off-limits to those who just want to try them out.

Regarding your aside: I'm not sure what kind of dystopia you imagine a "healthy environment" would be. I interpreted it as making sure that people can feel happy without drugs, e.g. by giving them a stable source of income, fostering community and so on. Do you disagree that those would be a good thing?

> rather those who start taking drugs even when they should be able to see the consequences.

The Just say No campaigning of the 80s and 90s didn't work. It became a parody and undermining of the core issue which is the invisible line people cross when they cross into abuse. The IMDB link I posted for mythrwy explains this very well as it shows another class of addicts on the edge of a very religious community: those whose addictions started with prescriptions from their doctors.

Certainly no one has a beer or fills a prescription from an MD with the intent of becoming an alcoholic or addict, but that is what happens sometimes; the invisible line into abuse territory is, in fact, invisible to most people who find themselves on the other side of it. And on the other side, they find themselves increasingly powerless to control. The more isolation society heaps upon them for being unable to "control" it, the further they stray from the territory where it's possible to reach them for help. The Audioslave guy. Robin Williams. Famous people and non-famous people. Addiction is an equal-opportunity destroyer.

To suggest that anybody has the intent to become a drug addict is absolutely ridiculous. Decriminalization helps a society address the core issue sooner (keeping them in touch with society) and saves lives.

You must being living in a very different community than mine. I live in Texas and being a heroin/cocaine/alcohol/nicotine(not as much) addict is a shameful thing. Yet we still have quiet the drug problem.

I've only known a few people who fell down the deadly spiral of drug abuse. But each one hid their addiction because of shame until it was so terrible they couldn't. And I believe if it had been less shameful they might have gotten support before they completely ruined their lives.

I live close enough and here's my observation.

There is a very large subgroup that doesn't regard these things as shameful. This often becomes the main group of people involved with drugs. And it keeps sucking them back in, sometimes when they would otherwise get and this is exactly the problem I'm talking about.

Have you considered that a large part of the reason it keeps sucking them back in might be that it's the only environment where they're not judged for their problem?

If so, a less judgemental environment might very well help more people out of the addiction cycle, and a more judgemental environment might very well make it harder to escape.

It's not at all clear that making it into something shameful has any positive effects.

In the US, bible belt culture generally regards drugs as shameful, and yet, this is where heroin and meth abuse is most prevalent. Same with porn use, drug use's cousin. Less shaming leads to the same levels or less than if their were shaming because, counterintuitively enough, shame and blame increases isolation and foul moods which leads to more drug use than otherwise would exist.

Best for anti-drug folks to take some responsibility for creating this "war on drugs", its attendant culture and the lives lost.

Sometimes people get addicted to drugs starting from painkillers, which are prescribed by doctors. http://www.businessinsider.com/heroin-drug-overdoses-prescri...

At least in this case, perhaps it's not just a moral failing. Maybe it's an education issue? Or some other way we should help prevent situations like this.

I think that shame doesn't help the people already addicted- it makes it harder for them to deal with their current issues. It encourages avoidance of help, and avoidance of looking at the problem head on. A better deterrent in my opinion would simply be ads about the consequences, like successful anti smoking campaigns. It would be hard for me to disagree more than I do with the advocacy of continued shame for addiction.

I don't think ads will work. But you might be right about shame.

I don't know, I'm not an expert on addiction and human psychology. But I have known a few and most of them weren't either.

You admit you aren't an expert, but are demonstrably willing to extrapolate from the "few" you've known to "it's a moral failing"?

You appear to have misread.

Most importantly following the same reasoning so popular here we could argue that no one is a criminal, if anyone commits some crimes it is because of the social environment in which he was raised, or because of some mental health issues, or whatever excuse you want to find. In these years we are assisting to a de-responsibilization in which every one is excused for any behaviour. Pointing out like you that a lot of the addicts at the beginning did a conscious choice to use drugs will just bring a lot of downvotes and simply false replies asserting that everyone is an addict because it was given some pain relief medication or that alcohol is worse than heroin, just to make some people curious about it and to try it probably.

The problem with this is it doesn't match reality in many cases; people prescribed large doses of painkillers or drinking a bit more during a stressful life event are triggers for addiction. Those changes in behavior cause long term biological changes that can make people sick, and then their behavior changes. There is often no clear turning point like a decision to rob a bank. It really is a different kind of "crime" and I don't buy the slippery slope argument here.

So what about the people for which this matches reality? Do you believe that they exists or not?

I'm sure they do, but given a) the current approach isn't working well for anyone and b) this approach of decriminalization is working for some, I'm not sure it matters to me if some irresponsible people are spared the punishment they deserve for being irresponsible if we can stop punishing the undeserving.

And who knows, maybe the willfully irresponsible will also be helped by this approach, and the state will be saved the greater expense of imprisioning then.

May I suggest Johann Hari's book "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs"?

It addresses (among other things) the personal responsibility component of American attitudes towards drug use. I found it informative and an excellent read.

Thank you for articulating a sincere opinion. Regardless of whether it's a good opinion, many people share it and it is worth discussing.

I don't know what downvoters are trying to accomplish here, frankly.

You are wrong: it is a big moral failing. Why is it impossible for Westerners not to use drugs, while the Japanese manage not to use it fairly well?

Should we set the bar for behaviour so low?

Even if drugs were legalized, the cost for treatment would be high (and presumably be bourne by the tax payer).

The moral failure is on your part for desiring to restrict the freedom of others. It's people like you who don't really care that millions have been imprisoned over a personal choice. You are an authoritarian, which is fine, but some of us don't take that kind of thing laying down.

> It's people like you who don't really care that millions have been imprisoned over a personal choice.

Japan imprisons a very small percentage of people compared to the USA.

Furthermore,it is a personal choice only if the other individual's choice does not have negative externalities.

Yet, a casual stroll through San Francisco 's mission district would tell you that this is not the case.

Who would have thought that drug use by the mentally unstable would result in a bad outcome...

> You are an authoritarian,

Perhaps. But when I compare the outcomes of Japan/ Singapore to that of the US, it is simple to see which model is the best.

> Furthermore,it is a personal choice only if the other individual's choice does not have negative externalities.

So we should ban every personal choice with negative externalities? There goes alcohol, twinkies, contact sports, driving, etc. It's a personal choice as much as anything else, so just estimate the cost of any negative externalities and cover that through taxation.

> Yet, a casual stroll through San Francisco 's mission district would tell you that this is not the case.

Of course you don't know any of those people and can't say for sure whether drug abuse is what lead them to the behavior that you disapprove of.

> But when I compare the outcomes of Japan/ Singapore to that of the US, it is simple to see which model is the best.

The model of inhumane prisons and death sentences? Actually the US has a pretty similar model to that already, so I'm not sure what your point is.

> whether drug abuse is what lead them to the behavior that you disapprove of.

I am pretty sure the needles on the sidewalk is just there because everyone suffers from diabetes, right?

I think that, fortunately for most IT people like us, we can live in nice neighborhoods, where none of the social ills of drug-ridden neighbortlhoods affect us. So, we can support drug legalization, without being affected by the consequences.

> The model of inhumane prisons and death sentences?

Japan/Singapore imprisons much less people for drug crimes than the US - due to the USA's lenient laws on drugs (grey line vs. red line). The ill effects of drug use in japan is virtually non-existent.

You can moralize all you want, but it is a better system with less actual harm.

Society is predicated on some restriction of freedom. That's a moral failure? For an alternative view on drug legalization which you will no doubt want to contest - https://www.city-journal.org/html/don%E2%80%99t-legalize-dru...

The author is a ex-prison doctor who's spent his career working with the convicted and the mentally ill.

>> Why is it impossible for Westerners not to use drugs, while the Japanese manage not to use it fairly well?

Japanese people drink. Japanese people also are major users of over the counter drugs which we in the west can't get hold of, notably benzodiazepines like flutazolam and flutoprazepam are available to buy there.

Yes, Japanese people drink a lot, and it is a social issue. But there are a lot of functional alcoholics in Japan.

> Japanese people also are major users of over the counter drugs

Japan is much stricter with medicine than US. Several medicibes that are OTC in US are illegal in Japan: https://jp.usembassy.gov/u-s-citizen-services/local-resource...

I am sure that there are abuse of prescription drugs. But I have not heard anything about a systematic, widespread problem (comparable to prescription drug abuse in US).

A cursory reading of the WP says that the legal status of the drugs you mentioned is more or less the same as the US:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine

This is not the impression I have, where it comes to benzodiazepines such as the ones mentioned. It may not be as systematic and widespread as prescription opiate dependency in the US, but it does seem to be a problem, and potentially one that is not fully acknowledged by the medical establishment over there.

I have been thinking along the same lines lately. Issues like addiction and poverty are complex, multicausal and cannot objectively be blamed solely on the individual. Still, we have to consider what a person needs to believe in order to act in their best interests. I cannot imagine a situation where someone overcomes addiction or poverty with a victim mindset. Ultimately, you have to believe you are still in control to some degree even if it's only enough to accept help. Social mechanisms like shaming seem useful as a reminder that regardless of your state you are still responsible for yourself. I understand vulnerable people like addicts need help but I don't think always seeing them as victims of circumstances is the right approach.