Keeping drugs illegal harms countless users, who can't be sure the drug they're using isn't cut with something harmful or is what they though they were getting or isn't too pure (all of which are the major causes of overdoses and deaths).
Throwing people in jail also harms them and their families (and risks them getting killed or maimed during arrest or while in jail).
Jail itself is a training ground for criminals, and many inmates come out more hardened criminals, and they're forced in to committing more crimes because once they've been in jails many legal jobs are closed to them because most companies don't want to hire people with a criminal record.
Society also wastes billions of dollars on fighting the War on Drugs, which could be used much more productively, especially as the War on Drugs is so ineffective and actually hurts millions of people world-wide, causes organized crime to thrive, and even destabilizes governments when organized crime gets too powerful and starts corrupting/killing politicians, lawyers, journalists, and judges... etc.
Addiction should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one.
We can treat addiction as a medical issue, but the sad truth is that there really are no effective treatments that can be deployed on a mass scale. The relapse rate of even the best programs is pitifully high. The best treatment is public policy which does not encourage drug use in the first place, or at least, tries to minimize its use.
Can we do something about money then? I know people who have spent years of their lives arguing over pointless differences in specifications that end up going into the trash bin because it pays them more money than something useful. Lives and years down the tube.
Simply because something contributes to a set of behaviours you disagree with doesn’t mean we should attack.
Sadly, for that very freedom we’ll end up with many more mega conferences about UI ecosystems while the world burns. C’est la vie.
But at least in the meantime we made a lot of money and we succeeded in stopping the kids from smoking the damned pot.
Behaviors I disagree with include things like flaking on a commitment with friends, forcing your children to do activities they don't want, etc. The effects of drugs are a whole order of magnitude worse, and these effects affect myself, others, and the drug user, in potentially deadly ways. Equating these concerns to simply being things I disagree with is disingenuous.
I would argue that obsession with accumulating capital has caused several orders of magnitude more situations like the ones you've named.
So we probably agree that while we're at banning drugs all over again, we should probably do something about mindless capital accumulation as its as harmful an addiction as any other—or more! It has led to the ruin and sublimation of entire nations of people—a far sight worse than a stolen car stereo.
Or if we don't want to get so dramatic, maybe just let the people eat their damned mushrooms in tranquility and stop using such broad strokes to paint over situations.
I don't have the exact numbers, but in practice you're talking about public policy which destroys a hundred lives to save one.
When addicts cannot find a supply of their chosen drug, they’ll steal from anyone, even those closest to them, to fund their addiction. If they go homeless, you can’t give them money because you can’t trust that they won’t just use it to buy more drugs. This is to ignore the fact that buying most hard drugs directly funds the Mexican drug cartels and the atrocities they commit in many countries.
This is also to ignore the terrible and unrecoverable health effects that many drugs have. Have you heard of meth mouth? Meth rots your teeth no matter how much you brush them [0]. It also causes permanent brain damage but I find that the kind of people pushing to legalize meth find losing teeth to be a worse outcome.
Jail isn’t the best outcome for inmates, sure, but it’s the cheapest. If you’re a Governor of a US state and your voters see that you took money away from schools, the police, the fire department, or the roads to give to addicts instead, you’re not going to get re-elected.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, and especially not if one area decriminalizes drug possession while another nearby does not. At least that’s been my anecdotal experience in Oregon. Theft of all kinds is through the roof right now. Of course, it’s impossible to disentangle the current situation from the effects of COVID-19, but I see a lot fewer smashed shop windows in Vancouver Washington than I do in Portland.
Most of the harm associated with drug addiction comes from societal demonizing of the addicted.
I say largely because there ARE people who simply will refuse treatment due to other personality issues, or are generally anti-social otherwise.
The societal costs of these diseases is bigger than any of the illegal drugs.
Handling of ill people should be the job of the health care system, not punitive system.
Also, alcohol is one of the worst drugs, but it is legal.
> In the early 2000s, the monetary cost of alcohol-related crime in the United States alone has been estimated at over $205 billion, more than twice the economic cost of all other drug-related crimes.
> Alcohol is implicated in one quarter of all homicides globally.
> A report released in 2001 showed that 80% of violent crime committed by young people in Estonia has been linked to alcohol abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol-related_crime
https://web.archive.org/web/20140504141105/http://www.who.in...
Should we take a hard line on them in order to redeem society?
So you want to put small time shoplifters and drug users in jail? Why?
Does it really go no further than "these are the rules, break the rules and I will spend a whole lot of money making your life even worse than it already is"?
Then again I advocate that in any case of stealing or fraud the perpetrator should spend equal amount of time that it takes on minimum wage to earn that amount. So steal a hundred worth and it's a day.
Freedom was supposed to be complete liberty as long as with your actions you aren't directly limiting the freedom of others, or so I was taught. In practice things couldn't be farther from the truth.
I'm sure we could all have our own take on what a thriving society is. But I don't see this specific issue being all that relevant to that topic. To me this is about, a few, very few, entities waking up to the fact that you cannot assert that much control to enforce adherence of the population to a "one true way" of living. Doesn't work, it's absurd, and in the end you're only allowing the connected/elite to get of scot-free for breaking the law.
> An analog can be seen in places
(with my own completion) Portugal[0]. There was also a report for Netherlands how drug use among young people saw a decrease through the years since it has been decriminalized; but I couldn't Google it easy now.
Anyway, I want to take your comment in good faith, but as a minty-fresh account on this website I'm skeptic because often when privacy, drug, [insert non government friendly] topics are discussed/presented, new accounts pop up pushing ideas that prop the current status quo, or dismiss the topic.
[0] https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
It's perfectly rational to think that the law against meth use is unjust while being otherwise law abiding. Most people would consider drug use an issue of personal freedom.
"Otherwise law abiding"? That makes no sense. If you're considered law abiding by following only the laws you consider "just", then everyone is law abiding.
Law abiding literally means you follow the laws.
Not Trudeau or Biden.
USA's OSHA attempted to mandate use of a new drug. Canada still requires use of the new drug to visit or live there. Most of EU-country vaccine drug mandates expired June 1, and OSHA lost their court case months ago.
There are millions of legal amphetamine users, some of whom are prescribed meth.
This kind of conversation is pretty useless without considering the health outcomes for that group of people, since those consequences are overwhelmingly positive.