I frankly hope America gets real about drugs- treat their use and presence as a given, decriminalize them, regulate them like alcohol and marijuana, render drugs a public health issue and not just a way to fill prisons, and put this town out of business.
idk what we can possibly do. Drugs are already effectively decriminalized in coastal cities anyway and it doesn’t look like it’s doing good things for the population.
I imagine it’s important to support the drug infrastructure so to speak - support for addicts, non-police-centric ways of dealing with the potential addicts etc. drugs are the devil, but they do come with their share of problems, which you can’t expect to just vanish upon legalizaton.
Government/ society gotta put in an effort comparable at least to that of the anti-tobacco etc.
The stick hasn’t been working for anyone except the private prison investors. We should do exactly what you’re saying. I fear the unfortunate truth is that even those measures wouldn’t be enough, we need to fix the push toward this need to escape. Something like the changes you listed, and the new deal era public works projects paying a legit middle class wage.
Filling prisons with drug users is probably not the answer, but just letting people do as they please because they are addicts with issues doesn't guarantee great outcomes either.
Would the US do this in a sensible fashion, or in a half-assed "public-private partnership" fashion?
Some drugs are just so much more addicting than alcohol. I quit drinking a few years ago without any side effects.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
Part of me knows that it’s because only the most surface level feel good things are being done, and we are just helping addicts stay addicts (and alive!) instead of treating them.
On the other hand, I’m not holding my breath for “our current approach is failing, we need more of it” to get ANY political traction. Not these days.
If we regulated fentanyl and meth like alcohol, we would have an absolutely enormous population of addicts, and even in a legal, regulated market, those addicts would resort to crime to pay for drugs.
Perhaps there is a better solution, but the best solution I know if is simply to much more aggressively enforce drug laws. Dealers of serious drugs should be facing major jail time, and even personal possession should be punished with significant jail time.
My best friend (and angel investor / VC) died of fentanyl in SF in 2018. At first I thought it was suicide because I had no idea he was on drugs. What ended up happening is he was prescribed legal opioids for legitimate reasons (he had brain cancer including surgeries), and then never got un-addicted to them when the refills ended, so he resorted to street drugs to avoid going into withdrawal. (and then "oops, fentanyl...")
And he couldn't tell anyone or share that he was going through this with anyone because he was extremely high functioning VC / angel investor.
At a minimum, we need to create a society where "an addict" doesn't immediately conjure an image of a homeless person with no teeth. Or come up with some new "branding" for it (for lack of better terminology). We need to normalize the concept of addiction so it can be discussed more openly and broadly.
Suppose your friend were in a country like Singapore, where drug punishments are extremely harsh. When his prescription ran out, he would have been faced with the choice to either kick opioids or engage in serious criminal activity. Finding a dealer would be very hard, because dealers are executed if caught. Even if he found a dealer, he would know that, if caught, he would be facing jail time. There's a very good chance that someone in your friend's position would decide to go through the extremely difficult process of kicking.
In SF, even for someone who is trying to kick, it is so easy in a moment of weakness to just to go down to the Tenderloin and buy fentanyl, like your friend did. Buying fentanyl there is pretty easy, not too expensive, everyone knows where to go, and there is zero chance of being arrested. The only problem is that you might get more than you bargained for and overdose and die.
I also have a friend who got addicted to stimulants and was going insane from them. I tried hard but ultimately wasn't able to help him. I talked to a lot of people who deal with addiction professionally, and what I kept hearing was that in this situation someone has to hit rock bottom before they can start to recover.
In the end, he was arrested for forging prescriptions and had to spend some time in jail, where he didn't have access to drugs. He would say that this was the first step towards his recovery and the best thing that ever happened to him. He got clean and went on to get a master's degree, get married, and now has a good job and a couple of kids.
Rock bottom in San Francisco though isn't a jail cell, it's overdosing on the sidewalk and dying.
Gambling is a vice and can be a damaging addiction. Yet it’s legal in many places and while there are stories of people gambling their life away, society doesn’t seem to see it as a major problem (and in fact is promoting its use via legalization of online gambling)
The one good thing that the gambling industry has is the ability to add yourself to a self exclusion list.
Gambling and alcohol are different though from Fentanyl in that the large majority of people who gamble or drink alcohol don't become addicted. Fentanyl though is just such a strong stimulus that it exerts a nearly irresistible pull for too many people.
I'd bet (but hopefully someone can link to research) that there are many contributing factors for why vast hordes of people don't feel the need to numb themselves to death with drugs in those locations?
Very few people voluntarily want to become addicts if they are having a happy fulfilling life. So why are there so many people in the US who see no other road to take?
That's wishful thinking, it can't be done. No human society has ever been able to supress something for which there is a huge amount of inelastic demand. It can't be done.
It's raw capitalism at its finest (maybe not finest, but most raw). If there is a huge demand, the supply will happen no matter what.
It's simplistic to think of the drug trade in terms of the good guys who are pure and looking to stop it and the bad guys trying to create and sell it. When there are billions of dollars involved, these groups infiltrate each other constantly and are quite intertwined.
You can find endless stories of how trafficking is done by the police themselves. No better way to avoid detection than by being there. One random recent example.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bay-area-police-union-leader-alleg...
If you want to stop drug trade, the one and only way is to eliminate (or at least reduce to inconsequential levels) the demand for it.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Mayor-Breed-...