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.
>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?
> 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 a casual user, keep it indoors and I don't really care. I'll still throw your pusher in jail for a while.
No one really wants to have to deal with used heroin needles on the ground.
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.