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Comment by carllerche | Hacker News Reader

The issue here is that, after M110, there is little the police can do to prevent *public* usage of hard drugs like fentanyl. Drug addicts will be smoking fent in front of a K-5 school and all the police can do is fine them. There is more enforcement of public alcohol consumption than fent / meth.

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Isn't this preferable to forcing drug addicts into prison? Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves

No, they are hurting both tangibles- because they steal and attack bystanders, and intangibles- like ruining neighborhoods, driving down prices, making drugs more accessible to young kids etc.

> steal and attack bystanders

That's a crime on it's own, and it's a crime that most drug users aren't committing.

> ruining neighborhoods

How?

> driving down prices

That's a good thing for people who need to buy homes.

> making drugs more accessible to young kids

Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.

> Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.

These people have families. They may be parents themselves. They are living in a community, one which has children. Here in Canada, with how things are now going -- I now see young children in the tent camps with their parents.

Public drug use almost certainly encourages children to uptake the behaviour themselves. Children are impressionable. They adopt the behaviours of their parents, of their older siblings, of their older siblings' friends, and yes, even just people they see on the street.

Along with that, simple physical accessibility - the widespread presence of the substance in society - means children will have more access.

When cannabis was legalized in Canada there was a sharp increase in the number of children showing up in the ER from cannabis poisoning. [1] Children steal their parents' drugs all the time, both by accident and by intention. The more proliferate and visible drugs are, the more people walking around with some fentanyl in one of their pockets, the more such exposure incidents will happen and the more such drugs will fall in the hands of children.

I'm pro-legalization, for what it's worth. But this is one of those downsides I'm worried about.

[1] https://www.sickkids.ca/en/news/archive/2022/hospitalization...

I agree that kids getting access to their parents drugs is a problem (although I don't think that's what the person I was responding to was talking about). It sounds like you might agree that if a parent is using drugs but is still capable of caring for their children, the best thing to do would not be to arrest them but rather to either make sure that they're preventing their kids from getting access to those drugs (by providing them with a safe, for example).

You can rationalize all you want but a bunch of junkies hanging around where you live ruin everything. They make everything dirty, they are themselves dirty, drop needles everywhere and shit on the sidewalk. One junkie jumped up and ran towards one of my buddies in Philadelphia once screaming “I have HIV”. Get your head out of your ass.

I’ve also seen people in the street do wild things in Philly. And yes, homeless people are often dirty because the way don’t have access to running water. And yes, drug users sometimes litter needles (the crime you’re complaining about is littering, which is still illegal).

None of those things are a reason why someone should lose their freedom for using drugs. Prison isn’t a punishment we should throw around to people we find distasteful or annoying, it’s an extremely serious measure.

Respectfully, have you ever lived next to an encampment? I have. Is your assertion "Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves" based on past experience, or how you imagine the world ought to be?

I haven't but I've visited for a week with a friend who does. Of course it was sad to see people in so much pain, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly what you mean.

Even if you have more specific issues with living next to homeless people, that doesn't mean they deserve to be in jail for drug crimes. They should be given housing.

Even if you did want to throw people in jail for being homeless, only about half of chronically homeless people use drugs (https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaign...), so outlawing drugs wouldn't even solve the issue you want it to solve.

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