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.
Like having drugs be illegal?
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.
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!
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?