Also UBI let people do what they wanted. If someone wants to study cockroaches they can without worrying how to monetize it. If they have to spend all day at their UBJ
They’ll need to find a job, since drugs tend to be expensive luxuries.
If people freed from the necessity of work can't figure out anything better to do with their lives than consume entertainment and get high all day, I find that rather sad. It's still not as sad as forcing them to LARP at obsolete agriculture on arable land that used to be productively mechanized. At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy.
I'm ok with governments employing people to do productive tasks that still require human labor -- many others have mentioned elder care or fixing aging infrastructure, for example -- but I think that the specific agricultural proposal floated in the original article is terrible. Unlike the author, I'm also not anxious on behalf of other people who might end up "deprived" of a time clock and obeying a boss 5 days a week. I'm not going to tell them that I know better if they think that games are more enjoyable than farming like it's 1899.
You're forgetting that these people can still vote. I can imagine a lot of ways that promises of bread and circuses could be used to form them into a dangerous voting bloc.
There are a lot of cases where introducing untrained human labor into an existing production process has a marginal productivity less than zero. Adding random people to a process that doesn't need more people, or needs people with specific skills, isn't just poor value for effort. It's negative value for effort. Every additional hour that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to "help," they're destroying more.
These caveats only apply if people are assigned pointless jobs that they're not even good at. It's destructive to replace high-productivity mechanized agriculture with random unemployed wielding hand tools. It's safe, though still IMO insulting and a bad idea, to make people perform some pointless but harmless pseudo-white-collar job like adding up columns of random numbers with pencil and paper. It actually adds value (though perhaps not a lot) if governments can assign jobs that people can actually perform competently and that machines aren't great at yet, like collecting litter.
Which would be a rebuttal if doubling food cost wasn't an expensive luxury in context; people choosing drugs without food is a self-limiting problem, and most optimistic (and, unreasonably so, in my view) near term UBI proposals barely hit the federal poverty line for a one-person household.
You probably still can't get cheap cocaine, since it doesn't have a cheap synthesis route yet, but every major class of recreational drugs at least has potent, cheap-to-manufacture synthetic or semi-synthetic members. In the case of weed it's probably not even worth pursuing synthetic analogs to THC given how easy it is to grow.
IMO choosing to indulge in some of these drugs, without medical need, may be akin to a slow-motion suicide. But I'm not in favor of outlawing suicide either.
UBI (or uncontrolled UBJ) that lets somebody do drugs all day makes society worse.