Would providing free and clean heroin in safe, monitored sites be a solution? Starve the black market of clients, give people support and safety when they need it, as well as the time required to get their life back together enough to take a leap.
Don't get me wrong: I am absolutely in favor of decriminalization, as well as other radical changes in our society's relationships with drugs, mental health, and addiction. But it would be catastrophically naive to suggest that legalized/decriminalized opiates are some kind of panacea.
If heroin didn't exist, these people would probably plain old alcoholics. The damage caused by an alcoholic is pretty similar to the wake of a heroin addict... It's not identical, but the overlap in causes & effects of abuse is pretty similar between the two drugs.
Ultimately, the problem is that some people reach young adulthood without having developed a robust set of emotional coping mechanisms for handling the stresses of their lives. These folks are a LOT more likely to fall into the larger patterns of self-destructive behavior that drive them back toward drugs, over and over again.
I think the ideal system is some sort of government-run one that is not out to profit, and keep on suggesting that maybe you don't need any drugs, but will give you some if you insist and are willing to watch a safety video.
I understand why people want to focus on legalization of drugs. It's a simple idea, with precedent in th US and many other countries, and it doesn't require expanding goverment spending or power. But it's just too simplistic to be useful. We cannot limit the harms caused by addictive behavior with pure Libertarian self-interest, because addiction IS a self-interested response to larger problems that the addict lacks the capability to handle, emotionally.
If we want to truly reduce the addiction, death, and suffering, we need to develop real, effective social services that help families and individuals on many, many levels. We need to plug the gaps in our children's emotional upbringings, which means permanently repairing the jagged indifference of our society that inflicts so much harm, in the first place.
In short, we need to let go of our fear of collective social welfare programs, and start truly giving a shit about each other.
Legalization is a necessary component of the overall solution that also includes social services intended to reduce both the need for drug use and mitigate any impacts from it.
I just wanted to emphasize that without legalization, we'd be failing before we started to fix the problem as a society.
Around here ads for alcohol has been banned since I don't know when despite having multiple producers, of which at least one classify as large on a national basis.
The last two decades we've also seen laws against tobacco coming into place and - as someone who had friends who smoked since early teenage years or in at least one case even well before that - it is kind of weird to see someone young smoking in public today so the law has obviously worked.
The result has been a disaster. People on meth run around the streets at night causing chaos. Homeless people on heroin leave needles everywhere. People avoid transit and parks now because there is regularly someone losing his or her mind nearby.
Long sentences aren’t the answer of course. But I do think that sending someone to a Nordic-style prison for a few weeks would be better for these folks than just letting them run free.
By the way, free mental healthcare doesn’t actually work because many of these folks don’t want help and won’t seek it willingly. There needs to be a way to forcefully separate them from the addictive substance for a time, stabilize their drug crisis, and then help them find long term care.
I think it's unrelated to whether drugs are a crime or not - homeless and drug users in general will find a way to get it.
It's a sad reflection on the state of society and our cities.
Personally, after a terrible experience in Paris, I decided I will avoid all big cities.
I think we should do something about it and forcefully throw homeless and drug users out of cities, but it's not a very popular (or easily enforceable, for that matter) point of view.
Do you also think that we should forcefully push the Sacklers & all of their paid off politicians out of the nation for what they've done?
I'm not sure I agree with the above poster about their solutions to the problem, but "solving" homelessness, or addiction, is a lot harder than making some broad brush laws about decriminilisation.
My cousin is a heroin addict, 12 years running at this point. He's in Dundee, the smack capital of the UK and quite possibly western Europe. Methadone is the worst idea possible for him, because he swaps it with the cancer patients for diazepam and then makes himself a happy cocktail. He's from a genuinely loving, supportive family, but still breaks into their house to steal stuff to pawn for smack money.
The only thing that would probably "help" him is full decriminalisation, but that would not help his victims, or his family, or the already overstressed health service in general, because the whole point of these measures is an expectation that addicts will suddenly "see the error of their ways", rather than thinking "wahay, free smack".
And back to the original point, when you have people actively preferring the street to the fully serviced hotel rooms, then you've probably got a severe structural problem. At which point it's easy to understand the above point of view, especially if you have a home and a family in close proximity to the inevitable social disorder (and I've also lived in Portugal. It is far from the free drug liberal paradise that some imagine it as)
We don't have all that many people preferring this. Pretty much all of these and all homeless shelters come with massive catches that are reason for why they are not viable solution for many people. It opens at certain hour and you have to completely leave with everything in the morning. Cant have work tools inside, cant lock doors. Noise.
The shelters themselves do have reasons for all those rules. One of them being homeless do make your mental issues and addition issues worst in addition to these people being overrepresented in the first place. But, framing these places as "fully serviced hotel rooms" as if that was what life in them actually looked like is not accurate.
In the same trip I've experienced several instances of homeless or just economic immigrants from Africa grabbing your arm trying to steal / sell you something.
There is also plenty of homeless peeing and pooping pretty much everywhere in Paris, which is disgusting enough.
I found London to be much better compared to Paris, even if things got way worse in the last few years. 5-10 years ago it was a rare occurrence to see homeless people, now you see homeless people sleeping everywhere and shooting drugs on the street like it's nothing.
I've since moved in the middle of nowhere and I'm definitely not going to raise my kids in a city.
I live in a market town. Small towns are often a magnet for druggies - they're safer than big cities, and they're often much nicer places.
We don't really want all the druggies from the Big City forcibly ejected, so they end up in small towns. Why should townies have to deal with the problems that Big City folk can't be bothered with?
If they can't integrate in society, they can go and live in the woods or start their own town, for what I care.
I'm not opposed to helping people with problems: I think we should use voluntary charities (eg. not forcibly taken taxes) to help them - but healthy citizens' lives should not affected because of the problems of a minority.
If that means keeping someone outside of cities, so be it.
If you have no home, it's hard to get a job. But it's hard to get a home if you have no income. So people end up on the street. They then face a choice of a street in a town, near to shops and services; or sleeping in a ditch in the boonies. I've slept in a ditch in the boonies, and I can't recommend it. And Social Services don't patrol ditches in the boonies.
A homeless person can disappear in a big city; it's easier for services to find them and help them in smaller towns. So if I was in a scrape, I'd head out of the city, to a smaller town.
With respect to forcibly taken taxes: they're taken "forcibly" because it's the law that you have to pay taxes. They don't usually come around with guns, to separate you from your belongings. We have a social contract, where I live, that we get free education and health-care and stuff, in exchange for paying taxes.
I was a fairly high earner, until I retired. I've never objected to paying taxes. I do object, very strongly, to corrupt politicians taking the piss with taxpayers' money; but in fact it's a small proportion of tax revenues that get stolen like that (here).
Frankly, I'm OK with the taxpayer paying up so that we don't have an underclass of people who are ill, psychologically troubled, homeless or intellectually challenged, and who are compelled to live under hedges. It could be me that's down on their luck, some day. If I were in that situation, there's a pretty good chance that I'd be resorting to substance abuse.
You're entitled to your views; but it seems pretty harsh to me, to simply declare that those people need to solve their own problems, and leave the taxpayer alone.
Is it perhaps also your view that the only legitimate use for taxpayers funds is to send armies to foreign countries? I'm not in favour of that. And I'm not in favour of taxpayer subsidies for diesel-oil for motor cars. I cough up, because the deal is that I either put up with the way collective taxpayer resources are spent (after making my point at the ballot box), or I leave the country.
As it happens, there's no other place I'd prefer to live. So here I'm is, very comfortable thank you, and I try to be kind to people who have to live on the street. Nobody would choose that if they had an alternative.
Why? Cannabis market thrive is US. More and more people use cannabis every day, making profits for sellers. Some people will switch to hard drugs and die, of course, but car incidents are not stopping car sales.
Things take time to get better, and as others have mentioned, most places that have decriminalized haven't exactly bolstered all other services that need to be around once decriminalization happens.
It's sort of like the amount of people who are pissed about how Chinese tourists act. Their nation has just recently entered a point in which they're able to be tourists. Americans have had decades to learn how to act and are often still shitty tourists. Things take time.
This is an inconsistent statement. In once sentence you say that free mental healthcare doesn't work, then in the next you posit that imprisoning them, then providing free mental healthcare is the answer. I think at the end of the day, people need to want to stop using drugs and have the help they need to do so. I don't think prison is the magic bullet for bringing about that change that you imagine it to be.
> People on meth run around the streets at night causing chaos. Homeless people on heroin leave needles everywhere. People avoid transit and parks now because there is regularly someone losing his or her mind nearby.
It's not realistic to expect only legalizing drugs to solve all your social problems. Why are there homeless people? Why are people having mental health crises on the street, and the only options are to ignore them, or put them in prison? I'm not sure what is meant by "causing chaos", but if they are committing non-drug crimes, why are they not being arrested?
It's the same freedom vs. detention debate and we've swung towards full freedom option in the US since the shutdown of mental health prisons and we've offloaded the care for the most difficult cases to police, ER, health workers, and they live on the streets. It's high time the pendulum swung back a bit with some (hopefully humanely administered) compulsory treatment options which is was the other commenter may have been getting at
So, you deregulate drugs, but for those who fall into addiction, you evaluate their competency to decide whether or not to take drugs, and if someone(s) decide they're not competent (a panel, psychiatrist, psychologist, whatever), you force them into treatment, take away their drugs, etc and so forth. If a drug dealer provides them with drugs, then they're breaking the law for a different reason.
Part of the problem is this "one size fits all" with drugs, and with criminalizing use rather than treating it as a disease. Call it what it is: someone not being competent to make decisions about drug use, period.
Fixed that for you. Truly sorry for your loss, but people make choices, and those choices have consequences.
Can we hold these two things to be true at the same time:
1. No one is forcing people to take these drugs. The choice to start is theirs. They are ultimately responsible for their choice to become addicted.
2. We should view an addict’s behavior through the lens of addiction, not the lens of a rational person making destructive choices. Addicts won’t respond to incentives like a normal person will.
We need to find ways to make it extraordinarily costly to start using drugs. This is how you prevent the crisis we’re in currently.
That means prison time for users. Heroin and fentanyl pour across the border due to demand for it. New users dabble in it because the perceived cost is low. If people understand that possessing or using means automatic and significant jail time if caught, then people are much less likely to even dabble.
Ultimately, people will still try it regardless, get hooked, and eventually get caught and sent to prison. And that’s a good thing. That means there are less users who are on a path to homelessness, overdose, and dependency on family, friends, and government programs. It also means less users out there to persuade others to start using. If we’re not going to run mental health hospitals with involuntary commitments, then prison time is what you’re left with.
Prison terms for using are five times as long as it takes to get users clean. Once they get out, if they’re caught again, the sentence is ten times as long as it takes to get clean. Each consecutive offense ratchets upward.
The result is twofold: users have ample opportunity to get clean and stay clean in prison, but most importantly, we create a society in which we simply do not tolerate drug use. It’s really that simple.
We are going to have as much drug addiction and use as we’re willing to pay for. If you lower the cost of using, you get more usage. Free usage sites with free needles and less risk will, and already has, resulted in more usage. The fact that people won’t recognize this is mind boggling.
If that was the case I don't think you would have written what you did.
Until we're able to talk candidly about the decisions that led to those outcomes, we will continue to mourn preventable deaths in the future.
For this to work, people need to think about the longer term consequences of their actions. They don’t.
My personal experience has been that life can be so unbearable, you’ll turn to anything to get some relief from the pain of being alive.
I’m fortunate to be high-functioning bipolar. My uncle isn’t and he can’t tolerant medication. It doesn’t surprise me he constantly struggles with alcohol, along with the rest of his father’s family.
The only reason I’m not an alcoholic is alcohol does not have any positive effect for me. It just makes me sick. Same with opioids.
You get what you get, the best opioid or analogue that the doctors decide to give you, possibly with a slow release mechanism that avoids the rush but allows you function throughout the day, hold a job, not stick the first AIDS-infected needle in your vein etc.
Anecdotally, a close friend of mine sold his buprenorphine so that he could afford to purchase heroin.
If you want to help people, you need to meet them where they're at. The moralizing "you get what you get" approach is only going to tide people over for when they can't afford to score the potent stuff.
Make that: free strong beer versus liquor that has a 2% chance to be mixed with rat poison, is illegal to sell or buy, and costs more to use than the average job pays. A quite compelling offer for any drunk, but, yes, some lost souls will still go for the "real" shit.
I understand the whole "reduce harm, addicts are lab mice caught in a chemical trap" philosophy. But providing ever increasing doses of hard drugs, as most addicts eventually require when left to their own devices, might be an even faster way to the grave.
Let a doctor make the choice minimizes overall harm, not consumer preferences.