The goal is to provide incentives to get sober but not ruin someone’s job prospects forever for being addicted.
That is Hollywood, not reality. Tossing happy drunks into cells to sober up overnight is not a thing.
(1) There are no happy drunks. The drunks cops arrest are loud and aggressive. Often the physical act of arresting them results in more violent behavior.
(2) "Drunk" is not a thing for cops. They don't know if the person has had too many beers or had just taken LSD, or both. If they assume a person is simply drunk, and that person dies in the cell of an overdose, the cops will be responsible because they isolated that person. Cops are forced to treat intoxicated persons is more like patients than a 'drunks'.
(3) Mental health problems can look like, or at least exacerbate, intoxication. Cops cannot casually lock people up under the assumption they are dunk when in all likelihood they may be a non-drunk person in the middle of an episode. So cops must test people, evaluate them to determine what is at play. That takes time/money.
(4) Police cells are not happy places. They aren't private 8x4s with a soft cot. Spend a night in an LA lockup. You will not be getting much sleep. Casually throwing hundreds of drunk people into that mix will not help.
Assuming this is just about happy drunks, businesses that get people drunk and let them loose on the streets share the responsibility. We cannot allow bars and liquor stores, and their patrons, to rely on a pleasant police force ready to keep drunk people safe after the bar closes. If a bar is going to serve someone to the point of arrest-worthy intoxication they must contribute to the cost of keeping that person safe.
I saw a BBC doc yesterday about drinking in the UK. They have stores selling 3-liter bottles of 7.5% cider for four dollars. That is ridiculous. 3-liter bottles of dirt-cheap alcohol, cheaper than coke, are not bought by happy social drinkers. Any store selling those knows what it is doing.
Speak for yourself! The Strongbow 2-litre (sadly now £3-00 but was definitely closer to £2-00 back in 2000's) was the staple of many the happy teenager.
There’s a drinking game called Edward ciderhands where you tape a bottle to each hand and try to drink them both before going to the toilet.
The hardest part of Edward Fourtyhands is that you’ve got to consume 80oz of strong malt liquor without peeing. Or... figuring out some way to unzip your pants...
Alcohol is deeply embedded in French and German culture (and surely other nations) - I have seen a 3 year old sipping some beer in Munich in a beer house. Amusingly, neither of the countries really has binge drinking culture as the UK or US has so
>but we set drinking ages for a reason
is not really true...
I know at least 30 friends, family, fraternity brothers, and classmates who were arrested for being drunk in college or minor possession of alcohol for doing something stupid and being too young.
I also know people who had drug habits when they were 18/19 and were arrested for drugs. Some quit college immediately because they knew their job prospects would be limited.
Last time I went to a baseball game someone got arrested for having a thc vape. It’s a felony in my state.
Context and witnesses matter as well. There's a big difference between the police being called to handle drunks at a sports event and a passer by calling 911 to report someone intoxicated on the street. There's no context for the latter.
Or have certain areas where police don’t arrest people like the wire? I think we will have homeless camps we can’t get rid of.
If you’re going to decriminalize something you need to provide services or incentives to get people to stop using drugs.
If you’re shooting up on your porch, outside, at work in your car, someone where in public it should be a crime. The drug shouldn’t be illegal but the act should be illegal in public.
But I would say that cops should not be arresting people simply for being drunk in their own homes, or in the very businesses that intoxicated them. Arrest people who are violent, not simply anyone who is drunk.
I would argue that nobody is responsible for your bad decisions but you. Additionally, your logic leads to some absurd conclusions.
Should we also go after the farmers and distillers that make the alcohol because their product might be misused? Where does the chain of accountability end?
If we accept your premise that individuals are not wholly responsible for themselves, then you can arbitrarily blame anyone for anything if you try hard enough. Maybe you should get fined for shopping at the same liquor store that got that person drunk. You supported the business even though you knew what it was doing. Maybe the UPS driver that makes deliveries there should be fined. He knew what he was doing.
For another example, I think most people would agree that the author of an open source library should not be liable for damages if someone uses their code to write a virus. Why should physical goods be different?
Alcohol is heavily taxed in most jurisdictions - usually more so when served for consumption on the premises.
TABC was out of control back then though.
Hahahahaha! <knee slap> Good one!
Police can shoot unarmed people in the back with impunity.
What gives you the idea they give a fuck about drunk / drugged people in their “care”.
Edit to add: I’m not being hyperbolic here, they don’t care, particularly if you’re an Aboriginal Australian:
A 2018 investigation found that over half of the Indigenous people who died in custody since 2008 had not been found guilty.[2] In Australia, all deaths in custody trigger an inquest. In general, there has been a lack of action on recommendations arising from inquests, including the recommendations made as part of the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.[3]
As if being guilty excuses a death in custody. How absurd!
I love (/s/hate/) these kinds of generalizations that are broad to the point of inaccuracy.
Let's try some more.
Cops arrest mothers.
Cops arrest loved ones.
Cops arrest wives and husbands
Cops arrest innocent people.
Cops kill all of the above.
These statements aren't false, but they paint an inaccurate portrayal of the world. I hope you know that statements like that create genuine animosity towards both sides of the coin, cop or criminal.
Before Thatcher alcohol was widely available - in pubs. There were not corner stores and supermarkets selling the stuff everywhere. If you wanted take out beer to drink at home you bought it from the 'off license' bit of a pub. If you wanted wine you went to a specialist wine shop that would not be open all hours.
Now the thing that is going on in the USA is a lot of drug taking at quite an unusual level compared to what goes on in Europe.
Drugs in the UK exist but not in an epidemic. Teenagers and students smoke weed and then move on. In America the view of weed is that it is kids stuff, drugs start with white powders and things people stick into their veins. It is at a whole different level and quite terrifying.
It is a winner takes all capitalist society in America. That is where the drug problem comes from. Socialist republics (not that there any) don't have this problem.
Why? Most of my drinking has been done at home _in groups_ with retail bought alcohol. I don't see this is a problem. If anything, might not the opposite be true? You're encouraging people who want a drink to go out, increasing the risk of them being a nuisance to other people, and increasing the risk of them drink-driving.
this is not at all true from my understanding of MDMA usage in the UK
Thats sounds great except
1. Accusing the police of questionable arrest tactics, mistreatment, death while in police custody (even from lack of treatment) is already a PR issue that has caused huge public outcry.
2. Overdosing and sobering up isn't strictly safe on alcohol or on opioids. Where drug overdoses are a top killer in society right now.
3. Homeless and drug addled people don't have the cash to pay a small cash fine. They just spent it on their last score, or the only cash they have is stolen or pan handled. And if they don't have the money to pay, you've just criminalized them more or put them further into a debt they will never pay.
4. Denial is the first sign of a problem. Sure, tell a stranger to go to rehab. Thanks to the undoing of forced institutionalizing, that's all you can offer.
It's the same with alcohol, I can legally walk or drive around with a sealed container during transport. If I open that container in public and drink from it, I am breaking the law.
I 100% agree that possession of any drug should not lead to automatic arrest. But public consumption should not go unpunished nor should it be encouraged. Though, what is a good compromise for punishing public consumption? I say confiscate the drugs and paraphernalia while offering help as a good start. Arresting them just wastes time and money as once released they will go right back to doing what got them there in the first place. Jail is useless, they need a complete reboot in life which is extraordinarily difficult. I have no solution for that as there is no one size fits all approach.
Life isn't like in college full of debauchery and little of how our actions affect others . The public space is a space where we all have the responsibility to ensure that our enjoyment doesn't trample on others. Including:
- Not speeding on a street. (it's not a road, it's a street) - Cleaning up for yourself - Not making a nuisance of yourself - Not taking drugs/booze at the playground [0] - Ignoring the "dogs on a leash" or "no dogs allowed" sign
[0] Don't worry. If you're intoxicated or doing drugs in my kids playground, I'm calling the police. Why does my kid have to dodge your drunk ass or your syringes to get to the slide?
there's a difference between a guy quietly enjoying a beer on a park bench and a drunk plowing through children on a playground. you don't need a blanket ban on public use just to have an excuse to arrest people who are actually harming others. unless you're arguing that the mere sight of people being on drugs/alcohol harms you. in that case I propose that we also make it illegal not to bathe. dirty people make public spaces "unliveable" for me.
Number of times I've been driven from a train, street car or bus because someone's BO was goning to make me barf, dozens.
Number of times I've been driven from a train, street car or bus because someone was using drugs, 0.
Edit:
I've literally had my kid with me when someone's been injecting in a public space and while it wasn't my favorite moment in life it still wasn't a big deal. He asked me about it and I explained that the man was injecting something like medicine but that it is mostly not good like medicine usually is. And I explained that he probably shouldn't be doing it there but that he probably couldn't think right and no longer understood when it was appropriate to do something like that.
My kid understood and as far as I can tell and was not traumatized. Literally he got over something most adults can't and he's 7. Why? Because instead of going into grossed out, full panic, cover your virgin eyes mode I explained it, with words.
Imagine a kid, who has vivid memories of getting vaccinated and anyways knows sharp things are terribly painful, seeing a guy stick a needle in his arm. That's the stuff kid's nightmares are made for.
I'll give my kid (as young as two) a bill to give a homeless. I don't want them ever to not see the humanity of any individual. But I do not accept that their innocence is stolen from them!
To me, the benefit of sheltering my child is not worth the cost of forcing hundreds to thousands of people a month through the criminal justice system which will invariably make their entire lives much worse.
For now, that dichotomy represents our options. I will support state intervention when people are ready to let the government intercede in less life impacting ways and people are willing to put significant money behind some public interventions other than imprisonment.
But I will not advocate contribution to the ruination of lives to save myself or my child some unpleasantness.
For certain things, it's reasonable to police Behavior A rather than Behavior B. One could imagine speeding not being illegal, and punishing people extra for accidents if they were speeding. Society quite reasonably chooses to enforce the behavioral norms at an earlier stage. Likewise, if your kid almost steps on a syringe in a park (this is not uncommon in D.C.), what do you do? Arrest the guy who dropped it there?
I don't mind a quiet beer in public spaces. It's one of the things I enjoy about Savanah GA. But Americans (I'm not) seem unable to quietly enjoy a beer in a public spaces without becoming obnoxiously drunk.
Did I feel unsafe? Yes. These streets were also filled with seemingly average-joe locals who did not give a damn about any of the things I saw that freaked me out, though, and I saw cops a few times that day (not just the ones who showed up for what I'm assuming was an OD a few blocks from me), so I figured statistically, at least during the day, it probably wasn't that unsafe...
Yes, I saw people setting up to smoke crack on the sidewalk of a busy street. Yes, I saw a man making sure there weren't air bubbles in his needle. Yes, the detritus if drug paraphernalia was everywhere. Yes, I walked right past the front door of a crack den blaring music, with trash (largely composed of burnt foil) piling up around doors and windows. Yes, there were used needles all over the place.
The blatant drug use shocked me, but it's not what had me on edge that whole goddamn day.
That day, I saw dozens and dozens of people who, if I'd met in other situations, I'd think should be in a hospital. It was, to me at least, some serious post-apocalyptic shit. I'm not new to the appearance of long-term addicts, but this was another level.
I watched a band playing music in a park for a few minutes, before an unhinged man started screaming and yelling all kinds of nonsense. I watched a woman weaving all over the sidewalk, tearing at her clothes, crying. I watched a man covered in scrapes and cuts shuffle down the sidewalk, take off a shoe, then continue shuffling, and I can't even begin to figure out how to explain how wrong he looked. I walked by so many frail, disease-ridden bodies, and so many people acting terrifyingly _wrong_, I don't have words to describe how I feel about it.
There were times my brain said "oh shit, do we need to call an ambulance?" in the middle of a busy sidewalk, but everyone acted like nothing was happening.
I'm not sure what to do about this. I live in the SeaTac area, and am also concerned that Seattle will become as bad as Vancouver. I'm worried that policies like this result in an influx of vagrant drugusers. I'm worried that both this policy and resultant increase in users will make it even easier for dealers, who will flourish with the more stable user base. I'm worried that between easier availability, more obvious useage, and a dozen other factors, it will be even easier for people who find themselves homeless in Seattle to try crack or heroin (etc), and even harder for them to come back from that.
No, I don't think people's chance of livelihood should be harmed by a drug record. I'm just not certain this is the solution.
What most impacted me was a homeless man that collapsed and everyone walked over him as if he weren't there. What humanity! West Coasters will allow this man to destroy himself with drugs and booze, but will walk over him as he collapses.
I work downtown cooking for a bar (despite my deep involvement in tech as a child/teen and early work programming and some infrastructure stuff, life's challenges haven't enabled me access to significant wealth or appreciable social status). I've found survival, and I deal with drug addicts, mentally ill, the deeply traumatized and abandoned. The biggest thing anyone needs in these circumstances is love and acceptance.
Coming from a place of privilege, your leaning to exclude the suffering from society is wildly antisocial and a leading cause of the rise in "eat the rich" mentalities.
I think the issue is the choice of word 'unwelcomed'. Aggressive may be better in capturing (what I assume is) the author's intent, but I would still find it a bit lacking. Some homeless behavior isn't aggressive but is unpleasant enough to cause people to make changes to avoid it. How do you describe such behavior without also describing behavior that a different group may choose to avoid that they really shouldn't be avoiding?
Maybe we can define it as aggressive or unsanitary. Not perfect, but it is the closest I can get without shooting over the intent.
I'm not even commenting on whether these things should be legal in private, but there are very good reasons they shouldn't be allowed in public.
People literally think i'm a child molester. People like my dad. People like the two guys who assaulted me for absolutely no reason, in public, while no bystanders did anything whatsoever (as a trans woman, i'm glad he police weren't called -- my friends have been arrested and charged in similar circumstances).
Get out of your bubble.
No one really wants to have to deal with used heroin needles on the ground.
>But I think a community must have ways to discourage or push people out of the public sphere who practice unwelcome and unsocial behavior.
The point is, in much of even modern day US, and even more so in the past, just existing as a transgender individual who doesn't attempt to pass is deemed by a significant portion of society as unwelcome and unsocial.
When you tie discrimination to what is deemed unacceptable behavior, you encounter an issue when deal with a society that deems acceptable behavior as unacceptable.
No one is tying discrimination to the issue though. It’s 100% about public health. See my examples about dirty needles and crack smoke.
Why do you all really care if I smoke crack in public?
As a casual user, keep it indoors and I don't really care. I'll still throw your pusher in jail for a while.
> Do you really want rooms full of people smoking crack everywhere?
I don't think anyone should smoke anything in public indoor spaces. it's unfair to people who have to breathe it. outside, at a designated smoking area? smoke whatever you want. I won't be inhaling it.
> Also, crack makes people kinda crazy, no?
maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. if they start acting aggressive, we already have laws against that.
I've now seen this debate play out many times over the years. people talk about health concerns, litter, violence, and all kinds of things like that. but it's already illegal to litter and it's already illegal to threaten people. if it's not already, it should be illegal to leave dirty needles around. but I think these are all just ways to avoid saying what people really mean: they just want drug users banished from their sight so they don't have to think about it.
Perfectly said. It's amazing how often this train of thought derails the discussion about drug legalization.
This by the way is a perfectly legitimate opinion to have. There's all kinds of stuff I don't want to watch people do in public, hard drug use is near the top. It's pretty weird that people think it's some sort of right they have (or should have).
As for heroin, you can't just arrest people for shooting up in public and hope that's going to stop the problem.
The kinds of people who shoot up or light up a pipe in public are at such a low point in their life that the disincentive of arrest (and fines/jail) means literally nothing to them. They're also often homeless. Where exactly do you expect the homeless junkies to shoot up?
People doing hard drugs in public isn't like someone smoking a joint while walking down the street or even like someone drinking a 40 oz in public.
Instead, the better option is to take a pragmatic approach. In my city, in areas of high drug use, they have put needle disposal bins in the public toilets and other places people shoot up. Surprisingly, they actually do get used and have significantly reduced the number of used needles on the street.
Apparently, you are incorrect:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/39528...
> As for heroin, you can't just arrest people for shooting up in public and hope that's going to stop the problem.
The problem is that they are shooting up in public, so if you take them out of the public then it sort of does stop the problem.
So I do think, stepping up a meta-level that a general opposition to using force to suppress people and behaviors that some or a majority of society sees as degenerate, dirty, or a threat to public safety (but not a direct harm to others) relates to the grandparent commenter being trans.
[0] No Godwin's Law here - literal Nazis: https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AACC...
The argument is that public drug use is a harm to others. I don't see how shooting up on the street has anything to do with being trans. One is a public health hazard, the other is a personal choice.
Yes there exists discrimination against trans people. That's an entirely separate issue that is not helpful to discuss with the original topic. We should be able to decide if we want second hand smoke, dirty needles, strung out people... in public without poisoning the debate well by bringing in non-related issues.
it's this fundamental lack of perspective that leads to y'all blithely supporting policy that will end with egregious human rights violations.
everything that sucks in our society is a result of how we've designed it. come to reality. your ideologies kill people.
it really sucks that "tech" has been fully subsumed by capital -- many of the visionaries that made the endless wealth fountain possible shared a vision of an equitable future that brought a better world and it was rooted in anticapitalist, social justice oriented philosophy. that feels so dead, these days.
these people are victims of social views and policy as much as me. they aren't "hardcore drug use" they're people with a serious illness that develops as a result of something about our biology, culture, and environment.
i believe strongly in accountability. which is why i believe, as a society, we must hold ourselves accountable and that means facing the hard truths such as: any of us posting here is wealthy in some way and that wealth has come at the cost of suffering and death in some way. the very least we can do in this (potentially last?) period of widespread economic development is work to build systems that are humane and healthy. it's not going to happen overnight, and it will never happen if we build a world that hides the unpleasant things from the public.
we see the impact of the problem, but if your solution is to hide it then you haven't identified the actual problem and in this case externalizing the cost of actual human lives and suffering.
> I do not understand how you expect to have a functional, just, and free society based solely on individual accountability if you can just externalize human suffering and stash it elsewhere
You must accept that there will be some level of human suffering (quite a lot of it actually). It's quixotic to believe this will ever go away. All humans die eventually after all. Other than that, empathy at the individual level will bubble up in aggregate. This will vary from person to person. Some people want to go volunteer their time for charity, some won't. Again, this is all an immutable feature of living creatures.
Also your conclusion at the end is completely wrong. Prison excludes people from society. Letting them exist in society by imposing some rules is exactly the opposite.
This is just false. Even in 2019.
Prison abolition is a thing. We can do better, but it requires more humanity than your comment displays.
Nearby was a POC smoking weed. When a cop came through guess who got a ticket? The guy smoking weed — and this is despite that weed is supposed to be the lowest priority crime in SF.
When laws are enforced this arbitrarily it’s no wonder governments are taking enforcement away from beat cops.
1) Where is the line for what is socially acceptable to do in public?
2) If a line exists, why does it exist where it does?
3) Should there be a standard that society must follow, so we don’t end up with drug litter, litter, and human waste on the streets and around us all of the time?
Some commenters have brought up that maybe there should not be a standard that we strive to achieve with regards to public behavior and cleanliness. I am concerned that slowly we are becoming so individualistic(in the since of other people can do whatever they want), and liberal with standards of behavior, that the worst kinds of behavior will eventually be permitted because that is “their right” to act that way.
I am curious if other people feel that we are not very far from being a society that keeps saying “everything is permissible, because anyone has the right to do as they please.” Or I might be extremely alone in this regard.
>The gov't fully feeding, clothing, and sheltering large groups of addicts is impractical and unviable in most/all places.
It's completely viable it's just impractical. There are not THAT many homeless people. However there are diminishing returns for everything... Some people are on the street because they trash any home they're given access to. Also the better you take care of this population the more homeless people move to your progressive enlightened area. It's viable but nobody wants to pay for that shit when there are other social goods you could be doing.
As a comparison: The F-35 fighter program is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over 55 years. That's $27 billion per year, or about three times as much as it would cost to fix homelessness.
Let's compare with what you're advocating, which appears to be the status quo. The existence of homeless people (not all of whom are drug addicts, by the way) shows that drug criminalisation doesn't work.
Homeless people don't need more suffering to finally get their act together. Life on the streets is plenty uncomfortable and dangerous, and nobody operating according to your simplistic model of sticks & carrots would chose it.
Further criminalising behaviour you don't like such as being badly dressed or prone to shouting random, schizophrenia-induced nonsense seems not just heartless, but rather close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated. Because if you don't think they deserve food or shelter, and you want to drive them out of cities (and, presumably, towns) where are they supposed to go? I want to be as charitable as possible here, but "push[ing] people out of the public sphere" seems to be a euphemism to bus them into the desert and not watch them die.
Being slightly annoyed by homeless people is also the least you can do if you actually believe in the "public sphere" as a community of citizens, and not just the place to get cheap takeout. If others' suffering cuts into your bliss, either through its annoying smells and sounds or because there are remnants of empathy in play, that should be motivation to solve the problem. There are many countries poorer than the US that have far smaller homeless populations, so it is entirely possible.
> close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated
As does this bit from another post:
> why you seem to be indulging in such fascist revenge fantasies
It's not ok to argue like this on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel, or how wrong someone else is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and commenting more in the spirit of this site, we'd appreciate it.
You can say that, but it's very, very incorrect. Seattle spends $1 billion on services, clean up, housing, and etc. for a homeless population of 12,000.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of...
They'd do better just giving these people $1500/month to live on, along with some counseling services to get them reintegrated into society.
Every place that has had significant success in combating homelessness has done what you say. They've payed less attention to the "social ill" side of the token and have just put people in houses.
It's just not feasible for anyone to live in this city on only $1500/month, even if they don't require any social services.
What happens if you do that and next year discover that now you have 1,000,000 homeless people?
You're responsible for all of the consequences of a program, even the unintended ones. The line between "supporting" and "enabling" is very fine and hard to navigate. It's difficult to help people on the bottom while avoiding incentivizing people to stay on the bottom.