However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.
Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.
One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.
I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.
This is a pretty ignorant comment to see on HN. So far we have strong evidence to show delegalisation causes huge issues and legalization works as expected. Have a look at any country that went that route.
https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. "
Prior to that, the numbers seemed quite impressive:
"By 2018, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. Portugal had the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. HIV infections from drug use injection had declined 90%. The cost per citizen of the program amounted to less than $10/citizen/year while the U.S. had spent over $1 trillion over the same amount of time. Over the first decade, total societal cost savings (e.g., health costs, legal costs, lost individual income) came to 12% and then to 18%."
Source: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
b) You may be able to tax the activity too, further offsetting costs
c) Ruining lives by attaching criminal charges to activities should not solely be a cost-benefit analysis anyway. Or if it is, it needs to take into account the lost opportunities and lost years of those who are caught up in the criminal system
If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away. I can really admire countries like China that don’t coddle their addicts and instead apply pure tough love.
I think you're probably right that the criminal justice system isn't the most effective way of dealing with people who are already addicted, but how do you propose we stop people from getting addicted in the first place if hard drugs are perfectly legal, and the government is actively working to minimize the personal downsides of being addicted to them? Why not become an addict if the only consequence is that it means you get free food and housing for the rest of your life?
Okay, but that debate is what this entire thread is about. I don't think it's a waste of time. We don't have to fix all the world's problems at once.
> We (as in civilization) tried criminalization, and it is more expensive (and has other added downsides) compared with decriminalization/legalization + taxation and treatment
Personally I think the jury's still out on that one, particularly once you ask yourself whether legalization is likely to result in less drug addiction overall, or more. But time will tell.
If you're saying you can't acquire heroine, given 24 hours, I'm afraid I've lost faith in everything else you've said because it's just based on a flawed perception of what world we live in.
There are shades of legal and illegal. There's "We're going to lock you up for years for simple possession" and there's "We're giving it away free to kids at the corner store!", and in between those extremes lies a whole multidimensional landscape we could explore.
With harder drugs like opiates, most people are not talking about them being available at the liquor store, but solutions like removing criminal penalties for possession while providing support services, maintenance doses and counselling for those who are addicted.
> Why not become an addict
Is that a life you want? Queuing up outside the medical centre every morning for a shot that keeps the pain at bay?
It's not a life I want.
Turns out, drugs are both fun AND addictive and it's hard to combat that with threats of jail time.
It seems people take a moral or 'fairness' based attitude to these social phenomena and that's what causes things like the war on drugs as a form of justice. The idea that everyone is self determined, which in a small way is true of the individual. But if you look at people in aggregate things are more clear, the universe doesn't play by those rules...
You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.
The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.
> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop
Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.
Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?
> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.
No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.
> I can really admire countries like China...
That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.
And from your other comment -
> it would be better if they didn't do drugs
Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...
But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.
And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.
The problem isn't that some people are weak willed. It's more that there are many cultural elements that covertly value antagonism and hostility, and the poor bear the brunt of that.
The rich bear the brunt in other ways. No one much cares if $billionaire is clearly off his head on coke, because he/she has the protective support system that makes prosecution unlikely - even though their decision-making can be ridiculous, self-harming, and catastrophic for millions.
That aside - wealth really doesn't mean they're models of mental and emotional health.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/poverty-homelessness-and...
To be in the position of recognizing a problem and then being relatively powerless to enact change is a powerful motivator in disavowing the problem or responsibility to fix it. It's an adaptive response to avoiding mental discomfort.
And it works - people who don't feel responsibility to others avoid an entire class of mental discomforts. Taking away that adaptive mechanism exposes folks to a level of pain they likely aren't equipped to handle - a reason they developed it in the first place.
There are plenty of people who really do want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. LA's homeless "crisis" is proof of that; there are literally thousands of shelter beds that go unused each night because almost all of LA's homeless shelters are sober facilities which do not allow alcohol, drugs, or related contraband, and the addicts would rather be on the streets using drugs than have shelter, food, and stability.
Yeah, that doesn't mean what you think it means when you're talking about people in the throes of addiction.
Furthermore, you could use the same argument about the effects of a whole lot of other mental health and healthcare issues. It'd be cheaper to let a whole lot of people suffer or die. It'd also be grossly inhumane. Like China.
How much do you think we have spent on the DEA, ATF, and 2 million prisoners?
Just because drug use is illegal doesn't mean that the damage of drugs is free.
You either spend XYZ millions of dollars (in both direct costs and wasted human potential) and inflict untold human suffering by 'treating' that damage through prisons.
... Or you decriminalize it, and spend QRS millions of dollars by treating it through other means.
Society still pays, the difference is in how and how much it pays.
We saw the same thing with drug use in Portugal. Lots of people for years were saying that the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and it was a tremendous success, so we should follow suit. But there was an article here recently talking about how it’s a mess there, and the responses were “Well, of course, because the government didn’t _also_ do XYZ.”
Also, the decriminalization movement seems to overlap mostly with the deincarceration movement. And if you have both, what incentives do you actually have? The above poster said to just threaten them with a fine. That’s what they did with fare evasion here, now people just give false names or ignore the fine.
Honestly, given we’re now seeing things we were told we wouldn’t see by the decriminalization advocates, a lot of this is sounding like “No True Scotsman” arguments. It seems like no matter the failure, someone is just going to come along and say that it’s not a real failure because the government messed up.
I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.
A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.
This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.
It remains illegal. It's just that the penalties for it are removed. It means no legitimate, tax-paying business will get into it, leaving it for criminal black market operations.
What it needs to be is legalized.
If we're ignoring them now, what's the problem with continuing to ignore them?
It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.
In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)
I also want to emphasize that the tax increases and tort protections that Anglo governments have end up usually costing individuals more than they would under a system that is willing to pay up front for a larger government, but that these costs are hidden in terms of tax garnishes, fees, and other things instead of upfront tax costs.
The entire idea is insane. Let’s make drugs legal and provide treatment for the problem we created.
It’s the same of saying hey! Lawn darts are now legal, don’t worry we will increase our EMS staff during the summer.
I don't think children should be going anywhere near such things without adult supervision, but completely banning sale seems like a wildly disproportionate response.
But throwing a dart high in the air and hitting a wandering 2 year old actually did happen, and there was no real attempt to only their the darts in one direction
I was a nine years old and I tossed it as high and as far as I could. I realized it was coming dangerously close to a friend. Everybody had their backs to me. I yelled, but nobody heard me.
In my memory it landed inches from them, but that could be because I was young and scared shitless. Maybe it landed fifteen feet behind them. All I know is it scared me enough that I have never touched a lawn dart after that.
Like having drugs be illegal?
You mean like providing basic infrastructure to ensure society and commerce can function?
There are plenty of things which can and should require government intervention. Unless you're a hardline anarchist, there's not a lot of wiggle room on this one.
As for drugs, let's be clear, they weren't made legal, they were made to function like traffic citations, with required treatment instead of prison time. Are you going to argue that we shouldn't have traffic citations, because they require traffic court and the necessary infrastructure to process the fines?
The "issue" drugs and their users existed no matter what, and decriminalization of them (I suspect) hasn't caused a spike in users of the bad drugs.
I for one, will not try meth or heroin no matter how accessible it is.
Decriminalization says "okay we don't want this stuff on the shelf at Walgreens, but trying to jail people for it isn't working, so let's try something else".
Jailing costs money. Treatment costs money. The question is which tool is better for society and each citizen?
Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
This does seem to be a particularly terrible ‘implementation’ though.
The problem near as I can tell is that people are ignoring the very real needs of the majority to not be miserable, and actively guilting the majority (you’re not allowed to not like these things because that would mean you’re a bad person) and that is winding the spring for an authoritarian backlash which we’ve already seen get very scary.
People care about their emotions, and when pressed will do almost anything to protect them. Including having people March ‘bad people’ off to ovens as long as they can pretend they’re awesome in the process.
Trump gets so much traction for this very reason, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
No, it can't
>Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
That's a horrible example.
I largely agree with the rest of the post.
As is a good idea (somewhere/some other time!) that no one can actually afford/doesn’t fit the circumstances where we are at, but we do anyway.
That is what I’m referring to. Communism, as an example, has a terrible track record beyond smaller communes (about 50ish, it appears). Folks I’ve met who push it as a good idea, call the larger scale failures problems with the implementation. It wasn’t done right.
It is also of course a common strategy for folks who are ideologically opposed to a new idea to sabotage the actual implementation of that idea, then declare the whole idea terrible.
I don’t know enough about the behind the scenes situation with the Oregon decriminalization to know if the treatment/rehab part of the effort was sabotaged or not, or actually went as well as could be expected, etc.
But time to design it and ramp it up, or evaluating if it would even produce useful/good outcomes or would even be effective (and what to do if it wasn’t) clearly wasn’t provided in the measure.
If they’re even now struggling to even get it ramped up, then that falls solidly under one of those three categories IMO. Feel free to pick which one.
Notably, these are the same issues that SF has been having with homelessness and drug use, among many other places.
Or if you think I’m wrong, I’m all ears!