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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I used to believe that — before I lived in a city that effectively decriminalized all drugs.

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.

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I feel the same way. I was so excited to see a decriminalization measure on the ballot. A year after it took effect, our drug problems are worse than ever. It turns out that for the Portugal model to work correctly, there needs to be carrot and stick, but Portland only opted to implement the carrot, and the quality of life here has gotten much, much worse in a very short amount of time.

I understand that, although it's difficult to say whether that experiment is indicative of what a nationwide relaxation of drug laws would do. Cities which have decriminalized drugs (removed enforcement) are going to attract a disproportionate number of problematic or homeless addicts from other parts of the country. Cities with a more hospitable climate (in the sense of weather) already have this problem, so I imagine for San Francisco it's a double whammy.

What utter nonsense. Portland has an incredibly inhospitable climate (I mean I live in a lovely house and I find it overbearing). And yet we have more than enough people willing to tough it out in the torrential downpours.

This doesn't contradict what I said. I don't know much about Portland's homelessness problem, but I'd guess that being the largest city in the state, and having famously left-wing laws, might attract people on the margins to come. There are probably a lot of reasons.

Portland has moderate weather like the rest of the northwest. Have you tried living in New York during the winter?

There's yet another model, which is to think of compulsory actions not in terms of crime, but in terms of competency to make decisions.

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.

I've never met somebody informed and for decriminalization that isn't aware that the first few years, perhaps even decades, especially when just in a small region and not an entire nation, are going to be a bit of a shitshow.

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.

Of course you shouldn't only decriminalized, you must in parallel fund social services and clinics to help drug abusers. Else it's just useless

> it's just useless

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.

Cannabis is very very VERY different from heroin and coke in term of dependency creation. Abusers need a totally different level of support from the health system and social services

Yep. My classmates, which started to smoke cannabis in school, died because they switched to opiates.

I see the same in London, where everything is illegal.

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.

> 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?

If you don't mind me asking what incident let to you to taking to such a hardline stance? I don't necessarily disagree or agree I just would love to hear that kind of perspective?

As someone else from the UK, at the start of the pandemic lockdown measures several cities tried to give every homeless person a bed. In every case, the majority ended up leaving the accommodation offered due to the rules around drugs, smoking, antisocial behaviour, whatever.

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)

> when you have people actively preferring the street to the fully serviced hotel rooms

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.

As a guy (as weird as it may sound) I've been followed and jumped on by a drugged up homeless making sexual advances in an isolated street next to Gare du Nord. There was a small altercation and I ran away.

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.

> forcefully throw

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?

I don't think you should, keep them out in the same way.

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.

I know that many share your views.

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.

Sounds like any city where it's still illegal to me, the change won't happen overnight and I don't doubt it could get even worse initially.

So, to clarify, these people are not forcing you to do anything, but you want to force them to do something?

I, too, agree that we should leave unvaccinated people alone.

What city?

> 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

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?

Not inconsistent; many will refuse treatment if simply asked, but with forced treatment / detox may come through the woods a bit and make a different decision.

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

I work in the ER in a high drug use area - I estimate around 80% of patients who start outpatient "medication assisted treatment" in the ER (outpatient buprenorphine-naloxone to treat the withdrawal symptoms) are there because the judge in their criminal case tells them it's that or go to prison. Some people definitely can't make good decisions for themselves and need to be "forced" to get treatment - and are later often grateful for having been forced to do so if they stay clean.

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