Decriminalizing use is the only sane solution; using and/or being addicted to a substance is not a crime, period.
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.