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Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

What bugs me most, communities like the one I am referring to will denigrate anyone pushing back about homeless Uber all agenda. They are open to the distribution of needles without support services. Anything against this line of thought, one is a hater, anti homeless, etc. Yet these same people do nothing personally to help those on the streets and do not want oversight in effectiveness of plans/etc.

In this case, the individual forsake his parents and his kid. What about the rights of the teenager having to watch / know their father will likely die because the powers that be will do nothing?

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> In this case, the individual forsake his parents and his kid. What about the rights of the teenager having to watch / know their father will likely die because the powers that be will do nothing

Do you want to live in a world were the "powers that be" can force medical intervention and/or forced detention for a competent person who's opposed to it? As the cops mentioned: being a dick isn't illegal, and there's no societal-level solutions to dicks, the best we can do is try to avoid them as individuals.

I'm all for rehabilitation - but it has to be voluntary (and humane, probably has to be well-funded too) - that's what liberty is. Anything less is too authoritarian for my tastes.

I'm not OP, but when someone is a repeat offender of some petty crimes, and they're assessed to be mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, they should be given a choice: help or jail.

(Ideally, jail would just _be_ help, but unfortunately that's not the case. And there's a long tail of criminals who _aren't_ mentally ill or addicts, so let's assume jail still exists.)

I am a _staunch_ supporter of liberty, but I reject the notion that you can repeatedly pollute, steal, and commit violent acts on the streets without any recourse from the rest of society. And I absolutely support compassion as the first step of that recourse! Housing, counselors, harm reduction, and other treatments for addiction (esp opiate blockers) should all be on the table for people that need it.

But the alternative to that choice has to be jail. Because the status quo is not cutting it, and you're not "free" to infringe on people, their homes, and their businesses.

America already has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world. I don't think that locking even more people up is going to help. I don't think that putting a mentally ill person in an overcrowded, underfunded jail will do anything to resolve their mental health problems. I don't see any evidence to suggest that coercing people into treatment actually treats their addiction.

Being a drug addict is utterly miserable. We can all see that misery with our own eyes. I don't think we are willing to confront the much wider epidemic of misery that is driving people into addiction and perpetuating addiction.

I also doubt reducing incarnation will improve the situation either. Though its mostly being used as damage control as many people in our society come apart at the seams. it wont just require money, education and humane asylums, but a rethinking of modern social values. Humanity is more idiosyncratic and irrational than required to sustain classical liberalism.

> and they're assessed to be mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs

I think this is where you'll get a lot push back because I have absolutely zero trust in my or any government to make this determination and not abuse it. I'm "mentally ill" a few times over, Johns Hopkins says 24% of adults have a mental disorder.

As much as I agree with you in theory that getting people help is good it requires a government of angels. It's the same thing with the war on drugs, the reality is much much worse than the theory.

> but when someone is a repeat offender of some petty crimes, and ...

This is a critical part of the comment you are talking about. Everything you say is irrelevant if you're already objectively guilty of crime.

Legalization of drugs doesn't mean legalization of behavior caused by drugs.

Sure, but if you wouldn't jail them for their petty crimes then I don't think it's right to force them into a mental institution or rehab either. So as long as it's only an alternative to jail I agree.

Yes. I think more people wouldn’t be so annoyed by decriminalization in Portland or other places if police would actually throw people in jail for property crimes that go along with drug decriminalization.

>> but when someone is a repeat offender of some petty crimes, and ...

> This is a critical part of the comment you are talking about. Everything you say is irrelevant if you're already objectively guilty of crime

This sounds like an expansion of "three strike" laws to include petty crimes.

I think forced rehabilitation is a better alternative to jail for people who are causing harm to others with their addiction (I'm not talking about, "their family is sad", I mean assaulting people, cutting drugs with dangerous adulterants and then selling them, or theft).

I'm all for living and let live for people don't harm others, whether they're addicted to drugs or not.

I think most addicts are also casualties of the drug war. If the government supplied clean drugs with very little markup from the production costs, and intervened for users who harmed others (using some combination of imprisonment, forced rehab, and counseling) I think we'd be much better off.

Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices (less motivation for things like theft), on top of being a source of revenue to fund the social programs

> Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices

Too late to edit, but I forgot another massive benefit of this: Cutting out the cartels, and funding of global terrorism in general. But I'm not convinced the powers that be aren't doing dirty dealings, and thus want to maintain existing power structures

Drugs are really cheap right now, basically fentanyl is cheap and they just lace it into everything else to reduce costs. It is hard to imagine (a) fentanyl being even cheaper than it is and (b) that any taxation on it wouldn’t make it a magnitude more expensive than it currently is. Heck, just having real businesses distribute it rather than other addicts would increase prices significantly.

I mean, if heroin was the same price for an equivalent dose, wouldn't people use that? I know (many? most?) addicts prefer fentanyl, but that's because it's cheaper for a better high. It's much more effective at a much smaller dose, so a kg of fentanyl smuggled in goes much further than a kg of heroin.

But I don't think people actually prefer the sensation of the high, right? Like, you can do enough heroin for an equivalent sensation, you just have to do a lot more of it.

So it sets up this situation where fentanyl is the easiest to smuggle in 1 billion doses, so it's the cheapest, so people prefer it, but it's actually way more dangerous because the difference between a dose that feels nice and a dose that kills you is too small to measure for most people.

Yeah, maybe don't make fentanyl legal, but make heroin legal and make it price competitive with fentanyl

edit: and really, isn't fentanyl like $10 / dose on the street? I'm pretty sure heroin could be produced for a fraction of that if it was done legally. Sell it for $5 for an equivalent dose, people will make the switch

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