British Columbia to recriminalize use of drugs in public spaces | Hacker News Reader

British Columbia to recriminalize use of drugs in public spaces

cbc.ca

239 pointsKairon439 comments

I lived in BC for 40 years and this policy affected me negatively it turned my neighborhood from a clean safe place to a nightmare. This always turns Into a flamewar online, I will keep it at this. I am happy they are finally changing something, whatever they were doing was terrible but I hope whatever they do now, a better solution is found, whatever that means.

I saw this first hand from the locals too in Lisbon. I was up the hill looking over a wall to get a photo of the bay from down a side street. I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top Of the wall as a kind of razor wire. When I looked closely and slightly over the wall I found syringes with remnants of brown tar leaking of of them.

Less than the time it took me to realize a window in the house opened and someone was clearly going to give me a good yelling at but when she saw we were just tourists in the alley closed the window mumbling something and left us alone.

So yea, what it does to communities is bad but the solution isn’t to look back at old ways hoping things will change if we try again. As you’ve mentioned, a better solution needs to be found, but it’s a difficult problem, and there aren’t many great ideas going around

> I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top Of the wall as a kind of razor wire.

That has nothing to do with drug policy, and is common in many places around the world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ifbvbh/is_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HostileArchitecture/comments/eh9fz4...

Drugs are criminalised here and it still happens. Safe injecting room actually means less of this stuff on the streets round my house.

If BC will recriminalize "use in public spaces", presumably means injection rooms can remain. Best of both worlds?

True.

Having read the article I am interested in what the penalty would be. If you can’t do it with a civil penalty then criminal proceedings make sense I guess.

This is correct, I mentioned it more as a scene setting mechanism. A quiet alleyway with a wall you can’t climb over at the end. Seems like a nice quiet place to shoot up.

But you have no idea how it was before, do you?

This doesn't seem like a particularly good example of the negative effects on communities. Fundamentally, your story is that you looked over a wall and then someone opened a window and didn't shout at you.

The lady was obviously conditioned to think noises in the alley meant people shooting up heroin. Sorry your weren’t there to see it but the discarded drug paraphernalia and then scowl on her face which subsided when she realized we were taking photos and not horse really was the important aspects of the story

You should've seen what it was before. Read up on Portuguese drug history before you speak please. Decriminalising drug usage was a good move by the Portuguese government and it improved the population's wellbeing significantly by introducing rehab instead of imprisonment.

Also, you'll find things like that on every capital of the world, no exceptions. Maybe you'll notice it a little less in Singapore, where drug consumption can lead to the death sentence.

I’m aware of Portuguese drug policy as I would say most people here. There’s a 6 monthly refresher article on the front page.

Decriminalization and the rehabilitation focus that followed has been a huge success for Portugal’s drug taking population.

I was excited to see it in action when I was there but what I found and what I mentioned earlier wasn’t all positives.

For example, everywhere outside at night in Lisbon you’re going to have people trying to sell you coke. A guy from the tour group I was in was getting free samples poured into his hand. The level of pushy these sellers are too, I had a guy follow me into a _bank_ offering me his mothers home phone number that I could call if the coke he was trying to sell me was shit quality.

The discussion though is the impacts of this policy on local communities. I’ll defer to my last paragraph on this from my previous post.

Lastly, I’ve never been chased or offered a free sample in any other European capital, even the party ones. Once in South America though.

I grew up in BC, lived there almost 30 years before I moved away.

I loved in Downtown Victoria for most of the 2010s and I got to watch streets turn from being nice to being sketchy and the sketchy ones became downright dangerous

A mcdonalds near where I lived went from being a place that a bunch of older folks would get coffee and do a crossword in the mornings, to a place where you might sometimes find human feces on the floor. No exaggeration.

It was really sad to watch

I'm not really aware of the measures that were taken but the situation you originally described seemed wonderful. What were the problems solved by the legalization?

As I understand it the intention behind decriminalization was to accept the reality of the situation that addicts aren’t likely to be dissuaded from taking drugs simply because it’s illegal. Rather than push them to the fringes of society (where they’ll likely spiral into deeper and deeper depths) you should try to keep them closer than help them out of the addiction.

Obviously this didn’t work. I have sympathy with the viewpoint though. Far too often when we’re faced with difficult situations like this our instinct is to throw someone in jail. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t really help us in the long term, it just lets us put it out of sight and out of mind in the short term.

(as someone who spent some time in Vancouver long before decriminalization… there were areas incredibly rough with homeless and drug use back then too. It didn’t magically arrive when decriminalization was passed, I doubt it’ll disappear with recriminalization)

It was easy to think, because of movies or pop culture, that cops are a bunch of mean uptight jerks throwing harmless kids in jail for “smoking the reefer”. But that view was a little naive.

It now seems that everyone from citizens who call the cops to judges and parole boards are not just arbitrarily cruel but have a pretty fine tuned sense of “this person is harmless” or “this person is an antisocial menace and needs to be off the street”.

At least this has become my view after working with prisons. We were doing an ok job and have changed in the name of progress.

I.e. don't throw bad apples into bin, because they will rot deeper, but keep them closer to healthy apples with hope that healthy apples will heal bad ones.

Nice idea, I like it too.

I really struggle with this fact. Some % of people are going to murder, steal, etc no matter what you do. They are going to live in a manner the majority of us do not want to permit.

Anything I can think of ends up either too authoritarian (no path to redemption) or too chaotic (see the article above).

I eat a lot of apples: if you keep a moldy apple near a healthy apple, you get two moldy apples.

I'm not sure what your message was going to imply, I tried to read between the lines, but I'm afraid mother nature twisted your message, lol

> Obviously this didn’t work.

There are two things here to challenge.

1/ is it absolutely maybe has. Just because something was out of sight and out of mind before doesn't mean the problem was less prevalent. It all depends on the definition of the problem.

Is the problem: "There are people in poverty, in drug addiction, and they're dying?" Or is the problem "Sensible moderate tax payers have to interact with icky drug addicts in their day to day life"

The truth is because of Fentanyl both problems actually got worse. But in theory treating addiction as not a crime probably DOES save lives relative to the alternative.

But make no mistake, we're not now challenging the status quo because of problem 1 and the fentanyl epidemic. There's a backlash becaue of problem 2.

Truth is, people don't want to see visible poverty or addiction. They associate with crime and feel unsafe (even if it's illogical).

People agree that you shouldn't have to go to jail for doing heroin, but when faced with the choice of passed out heroin users in their alley regularly, or have them in jail, most are happy to find the excuse to get them out of their sight and into jail.

So 2/, the real reason decriminalization didn't work is because decriminalization isn't enough. Decriminalization is "cheap" to implement. But it's nothing without more social programs to help people get out of poverty, subsidized housing to get them off the streets, and mental health support for those that need it (a huge % of homeless addicts). But nobody - even in progressive places like Vancouver - wants to fund those enough. So, we try decriminalization, watch it fail, and then roll things back. And so the pendulum will go back and forth.

I think some addictions are powerful that they are effectively chronic diseases. The problem is that managing this disease may require government or some other entity to be a drug dealer for highly-addictive substances.

I can’t speak for others, but that’s a step too far for me.

> "Sensible moderate tax payers have to interact with icky drug addicts in their day to day life"

You phrased this in a way to make it sound absurd, but the fact is that this is absolutely part of the problem. "Sensible moderate tax payers" are participating into society because it makes them feel safer, and it abstracts away a lot of the details of building important infrastructure like roads and hospitals.

Those Sensible Moderate Tax payers are generally ok with paying taxes that they know will go to things that don't benefit them directly, partly because they believe it will make their overall society better. They pay for schools even though they don't have kids, or their kids already are finished their education. They pay for roads, even ones they don't drive on. And yes, they even pay for housing for homeless and help for addicts, even though most of them have never been homeless or an addict, and never will be

But those Sensible Moderate Taxpayers aren't stupid. They can see when a policy is not actually improving the world around them. Sure they don't have the research or stats to back it up, but they are often the ones who actually have to bear the negative externalities of bad policy. They're the ones who have roads riddled with potholes, or kids in schools with overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers. And they're the ones stepping over unconscious heroin addicts on their way to work, or sitting quietly on a bus while someone on fentanyl rages at people while everyone tries not to make eye contact

These interactions make people's lives worse. Yeah, the person on Fentanyl raging on the bus is probably not having a good day, but they are also making everyone else's day worse. They are arguably making society worse.

So yeah. The Sensible Moderate Taxpayer has to ask themselves why they are paying taxes to support such people who don't participate in the same society or behave with the same social norms. Especially since it seems to be making their own life worse as a result

By the way..

> They associate with crime and feel unsafe (even if it's illogical)

It's not illogical. People who are addicts are often not behaving rationally, they are unpredictable and that makes them potentially dangerous. It's not "illogical" to feel unsafe when confronted by someone behaving aggressively and erratically, even if statistically they don't tend to cause harm.

And homeless people often have little to lose. Which similarly makes them potentially dangerous. Especially if they are panhandling they are sometimes invading people's space and maybe shouting at people, which always comes across aggressive. Again, it's not illogical to feel threatened and unsafe when people are actually behaving aggressively towards you

Anyways, all this to say, ignore the opinions of the Sensible Moderate Taxpayer at your peril. If you have an interest in guiding policy a certain way, you will have to convince them your policy won't make their lives worse

It's a difficult problem.

I agree with 99% of what you said.

But "we live in a society". We can't completely segregate all the classes from one another. We can't just imprison or kill the drug addicts. (i'm sure some reading would disagree).

So what do we do? Well, we don't solve the root causes, that's for sure. We don't prioritize poverty reduction or mental health. We seem to think it's more important for a society to allow the possibility for someone to become a billionaire, than for NOONE to ever have to risk being homeless.

That seems to me to be the core problem. We claim we care about these problems but we don't actually prioritize solutions. Then we overreact to signals that are only loosely correlated with them. A fentanyl addict screaming on a bus aggressively actually is at least commiting a crime, though punishing them for it won't help his addiction or help address the root cause of why they became an addict.

But there are lots of other signals of visible poverty that we police even if they're not strictly speaking crime. We create hostile architecture to prevent homeless people from sleeping in public spaces. Why? Because we don't want them ruined for everyone else. Understandable. But again, dealing with the symptom, not the root cause.

So it's not that I don't care about the opinions of the sensible moderate taxpayer (i am one). It's that I don't think their preferences for solutions actually address the root cause unless taken to their logical conclusion and we put all the poors in an internment camp.

Let's be clear here: the decriminalization may have made things worse, but the problems were there well before.

That particular McDonald's was ruined mostly because a shelter and various other supports opened up down the block, and kind of turned the area into a mini-Skid Row. Victoria has the best year-round weather in the country: it tends to attract people who are living on the street, and there's big intersections there between that group and the mentally unwell, anti-social, and/or drug addicted.

As for why the mentally unwell, anti-social, and/or drug addicted have become a bigger problem in recent years, well, take your pick: laxer drug laws and/or enforcement, laxer enforcement of laws in general, safe injection sites, housing crisis, cost-of-living crisis, Fent and/or "super meth", cuts to mental health care programs, lack of God, you name it.

> ruined mostly because a shelter and various other supports opened up down the block, and kind of turned the area into a mini-Skid Row

That’s why I’m against social housing.

Inner city welfare/government housing aggregates all the homeless into one area where open air drug markets can flourish and other nefarious activities are normalized.

Low income people should instead move to the outskirts of big cities where the rent is more affordable and they are more spread out.

Except their jobs and the services they need are also more spread out. Plus their friends and family and further away. The result: now those people need cars and the benefit of any cost savings is lost. That's not to mention the other problems that come with increased automobile usage.

I'm sorry, it's just not that simple.

That’s the wealthy’s issue: Fund reliable, efficient, and safe mass transport.

I attribute most of todays problems to NIMBYism and highly-selective and classist—as in, target the ones without the funds to fight back—use of eminent domain.

That’s why it’s better to distribute and thin out social housing across every neighborhood, rather than concentrate them all in a handful of places.

It’s easy to police one or two “problem” residents and maybe some positive habits will rub off; likewise, ground the wealthier residents to reality.

> lack of God

There has never been one :)

Thereby confirming the lack of one.

Guessing you mean the McDonalds on Pandora? I remember going there a lot during high school and walked by it again recently while visiting the city for the the first time since 2009. Sketchy doesn't begin to describe it. Was really sad to see what happened to the city I grew up in.

Ironic that the street is named Pandora, as it seems BC opened just that box.

Yep. I used to live just up the street on Pandora, on the edge of Fernwood

Apparently I got out before it got really bad, too

Letting people shoot up on your porch was the only thing they could think of to keep housing prices in check

That's pretty funny but sad. I'm not even in BC or the US but I had to remove the light bulb from my porch to stop people shooting up in there and poking the syringes in my plants. I still have "HIV yucca" as it's known now. It's totally illegal here but it didn't stop people doing it.

Want to fix this? Start with the problems in society that lead to it.

What “problems in society” lead to this?

Humans are infinitely adaptable and we live on a hedonic treadmill. Regardless of material and/or social circumstances, there’s gonna be a subset of people who will continue to find existence a terrifying suffering, and will seek escape, including drugs.

No society in history has fixed the first problem. But we can keep negative externalities minimal by outlawing public use of drugs.

I don't have an answer and I agree with you with the latter (so does HIV yucca)

What is HIV yucca?

See parent comment. HIV yucca is the yucca plant which friendly heroin users left their needles in on my porch.

Ok, I’ll bite a little. I’m not from BC but live two provinces east from there and we have similar problems but not nearly as bad.

One of the causes of this is inter-generational trauma and the chain reaction that this causes. In my province a significant fraction of homeless and drug-addicted people are First Nations (for non-Canadians: aboriginal, “Indians” although we don’t use that term much). Our government has done horrific things to this population; significantly worse historically, although some of it still persists today. Here’s how the chain reaction persists:

- a child in the 70s was forced to go to a Residential School where they were separated from their parents and culture and frequently endured physical and sexual abuse.

- that person leaves school broken. They have complex PTSD and no supports. They start doing drugs to forget the pain. They get pregnant.

- maybe not right away, or maybe immediately at birth, the government takes their child and places him or her into the foster care system. Some of the parents in the foster care system are great, many are not and treat it as a way to get additional income every month while doing the bare minimum to raise the child. Many children in the foster care system suffer their own abuse.

- To manage the PTSD from being in the foster care system without significant mental health support they start doing drugs…

Repeat ad nauseum.

I have several friends (saints, really) who work in the Ministry of Social Services who genuinely care and want to help change things by providing support etc but the ministry is perpetually understaffed and underfunded. Many go into that line of work bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to make a difference, and after a few years end up bitter and jaded.

While I partly agree with you on the hedonic treadmill part, it does also change the externalities of the situation. Someone who has a home (apartment, homeless shelter, whatever) might still choose drugs but they’re probably not going to choose to sleep under a ragged blanket on a park bench.

It’s an incredibly complex problem. What happens to someone who uses drugs in public when that is criminalized? They can be fined (which they have no means to pay) or they can go to jail for a bit. So now they’re in jail and meet more people who come from similar situations. Our prisons are also full of drugs (how?!?) and are definitely not the place to finally have a chance to work on your mental health. People then get released with new friends and more PTSD.

I don’t have the answers by any means, but around here at least our government was responsible for a huge amount of the damage that was done years ago and continues to be responsible for perpetuating its effects.

Jail is not actually about rehabilitation. Its use is to separate criminals from law-abiding citizens in society. A drug user may have good intentions but they will more likely to involve themselves in crime to feed their addiction.

Nominally in Canada it is for three things:

- deterrence

- rehabilitation

- protection of society

For deterrence, I think it does a decent job for most of the popularion. Without elaborating too much, there are several things in the Canadian Criminal Code that are illegal but that I personally believe have no moral or ethical guilt associated with them and are also victimless. Some of them are things I would love to be able to do, but I don’t because I have zero desire to spend any time in jail. This doesn’t necessarily apply to people who are habitual offenders though.

On the protection of society side of things, yeah, we have a bunch of people who are going to be in jail for a long long time and really shouldn’t be part of the general population. We also have a bunch of low-level habitual offenders who are basically “catch and release” and they continue to go around stealing bicycles and sunglasses to feed their meth addictions.

And then there’s rehabilitation… which… wow. Not really doing so great on that front.

> people are First Nations

These people spent centuries evolving a culture and were violently forced into a Western European one. Do we have any evidence a Western European culture will ever work for them?

We assume that all people can live in all cultures but I think that’s naive - chestertons fence and all that. Is there any historical evidence that diverse democracies work? There’s ample literature to the contrary.

Here’s the fun part: we didn’t even give them a hope in hell to adapt. It’s not just “will our culture ever work for them” it’s “will a culture that systematically tried to eradicate them for 200 years and then switched to maliciously marginalizing them ever work for them”?

If it’s ever going to work, it’s still going to take time. The last of the Canadian residential schools (where First Nations children were put after being forcefully taken from their parents) closed in 1995. In many cases we’re only one generation removed from that atrocity. It’s still the case that many reserves don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water.

that which led to it. meaning the lack of purpose, employment, community, moral expectations, religion, and connection with their ancestors and nature

If only. West coast housing prices have been on a tear for the last 20 years at least

I believe it. Drug liberalization advocacy suffers from at least two flaws: the failure to understand the instructive dimension of law, and naïveté concerning the harm drugs cause and the power of personal responsibility when drugs enter the mix in light of human frailty.

In the first case, one end of the law is to teach good behavior by punishing what is bad, and perhaps incentivizing what is good. Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason. Any attack on reason of this kind is gravely immoral, and constitutes a direct assault on human flourishing and what is most essential to human beings. The result is the degradation of the human person and the degeneration of society. The common good suffers greatly, as you have described, and since the primary purpose of law and the governments that make law is to guard the common good, it falls to governments to criminalize and regulate drug availability and use.

In the second case, ask yourself why anyone takes drugs. Unhealthy curiosity. Boredom. Escapism. Mental illness. There is no legitimate reason for drug liberalization as there is no legitimate reason to take hard narcotics recreationally (I emphasize that word because there is a place for regulated use in the context of medicine under the principle of double effect). Liberalization lowers the barrier of entry by signaling that using narcotics is no big deal. And yet it is a big deal. The instructive dimension of the law, by penalizing use, helps counteract the foolishness and frailty of human beings that would bring ruin to such people and those around them. Libertarian anthropology does not stand a chance in the face of reality.

(Obviously, plenty of substances are psychoactive, and I do not propose a categorical ban on everything from cough medicine to cigars to Merlot to coffee. I am no teetotaler. We know what kind of drug use is problematic when we say “doing drugs”. Prudent regulation that takes into account a number of factors like the severity and nature of chronic and acute harm, how addictive something is and its potential for abuse, dosage, etc. It’s one thing to chew on a coca leaf, another to snort 30 mg of powder.)

> Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason.

This blanket statement heavily depends on which specific drug we are talking about.

Or rather, do you feel the same way about alcohol and nicotine?

Yes obviously, for alcohol at least.

Regrettable that you are not being engaged in a verbalized discussion. I appreciate your thoughtful comments, as someone who habitually uses pot and tobacco and recognizes the harmful effects of these substances. At least society is now fully onboard in recognizing the harm of habitual tobacco use. Pot is a mixed bag, there is some good in it but it is possible that its harm exceeds its benefits. It is certainly addictive, in my experience. It is not easy at all to stop. That said, I've always found the punitive legal measures against pot to have been highly excessive and possibly motivated by considerations other than public health, as its roots have clear racist ('Reefer madness') dimensions. These days however I am rather alarmed at the promotion of pot as a benign substance. I have seriously wondered if its liberalization is a means at social pacification (ala Victory Gin of 1984) given the grave distortions that have manifested in Western society, specially in the economic dimension. There is money to be made and the plebes now have a outlet that keeps them content.

It is not clear to me if law in fact incentivizes good behavior. In general my view on these matters -- social architecture -- is that form can not engender meaning. Meaning needs to be project into form, in the sense of it being an expression of collective understanding. This brings up the matter of pedagogical aspect of social order, to wit, your views would be entirely orthodox in a strict patriarchal societal order. And our society is no longer that, as you must know.

"The most important things about beliefs are whether they are true. The most important thing about motives is whether they are good."

I saw this on your profile page. What is necessary is that actions are timely and true. As to "good", I hope we agree that what is true is by definition good (if timely) and what is good can not possibly be false or untimely. So in my opinion, it suffices to say "Be timely, be true".

You know what cripples the effective exercise of reason more than any drug? Living in a society that is organized in extremely unreasonable ways, yet one has to accept and actively participate in it because that's the only way to keep on living. Perhaps start there when considering the reasons for drug use...

Alternative societies are available worldwide, so... maybe try them?

The vast majority of people worldwide have no ability to move away from the society to which they are born, no matter how oppressive. I did immigrate away from my country of origin, and I am much better for it, but I was insanely privileged to have this opportunity, and many people whom I know from back there are not so lucky.

This is absurdly wrong. Most immigrants are poor people entering their new societies at the very bottom, not hipster digital nomads. Sometimes they are lower middle class in their own societies, but often they are pretty much at the bottom at home as well.

For whatever reason the west fails to successfully socialize an unacceptably large portion of the native born population.

A train engineer with decades of experience moved to the US when the war in Ukraine started. The job she could get here was as a nanny, watching children in her extended community, and even that was half a favor.

You need to consider the distinction between legal and illegal immigration for starters. Most legal immigrants are reasonably well off in their society of origin - enough so to afford the legal process (which is not cheap).

And yes, immigrants generally tend to end up lower on the social hierarchy in their new society as compared to the old one, but how is that relevant to what I wrote?

> For whatever reason the west fails to successfully socialize an unacceptably large portion of the native born population.

Part of the reason for that is protection and promotion of freedoms of individuals, which means that we expect the society to stay away from our lives, because we did try various forms of state and church hierarchies running our lives and we did not like it. If you come to the West or are born here learn what it is about and decide how you want to live your life. The same people complaining about the society not caring for all are those who wanted the society to leave them alone.

There was a great docu-drama on the BBC a long time ago called something alone the lines of "If Drugs Were Legal" [0]. They had a not-very-interesting drama alongside a list of experts such as Prof David Nutt discussing the potential legal framework.

What I found fascinating about the documentary is the vision of what a complete overhaul would look like. Not half-measures like they've done in BC & Portugal.

The thing that annoys the public the most is the crime. We need to bankrupt dealers, purify supply and then we can focus on getting people off the streets when using.

None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism.

[0] - https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/if-drugs-were-legal/

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539406/

> None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism.

Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective. Where we sit now is not effective because it doesn't embrace actual justice, nor does it embrace actual recovery. In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options. Nor is there social pressure to not use drugs. Nor is there actual justice for those who prey on people who are too weak to escape.

I think a combination of both approaches could be good; target the dealers, the movers, and the makers; allow users who want rehab to undergo rehab without facing charges (make no charges contingent on the absence of crime other than possession and use).

> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users

Please cite your sources if you are going to make ridiculous claims. The city of Seattle does not have a municipal policy to distribute drugs to drug users at the syringe exchanges.

If they did, it would be illegal federally and all involved would be jailed.

Curious. I must be misremembering.

I mean, the executive branch can pick and choose who it prosecutes. If they are in favor of the program, they can simply not prosecute.

Do you mean judicial branch?

The attorney general (and the DOJ) is part of the executive branch

oh, i should have noticed that too; thank you.

The charitable interpretation is methadone but that's neither new nor unique to Seattle.

You don't have to target dealers.

If the government makes equivalent drugs available for free, no dealer can compete.

Giving out free drugs like candy isn't ideal, so you can put just enough speed bumps to limit the free drugs only to actual drug addicts with a black market dealer. That means that all the dealer's best customers disappear even faster than before.

The "free candy" approach doesn't take into account the part where some of these drugs literally unwire self control in the user, that is they lose their ability to choose whether they do a drug or not and lose any agency they once had. There's a reason highly addictive drugs should be tightly controlled.

Yeah: There's some very interesting philosophical territory in there about what situations and choices are actually voluntary, and which ones are essentially a kind of biochemical slavery that the person needs to be liberated from.

Drugs cost actual resources to produce. Giving them away for free will distort the market towards more consumption than ideal. And unlike e.g. healthcare or education, it's not like we can morally justify that overconsumption. Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to get/keep people addicted to drugs.

We are all already paying a high price for street drugs. The addicts are not paying out of their pockets, but instead are stealing things and extracting a fraction of the value. Then we pay for emergency medical care when the street drugs have terrible quality.

Pharmaceutical quality opioids and amphetamines are definitely cheaper when you factor in the externalities of street drugs.

The low price also allows lower consumption, counterintuitively. Taper the supply, and if the dealers return, increase supply until they are out of business. Hard to be an addict when the government tapers you and drives the street dealers out of business if they try to supply again.

You can ranson the drugs. There are plenty of methadone programs around the world.

But ye it should be regarded as some sort of damage control and not like 'free libraries and subways for everyone'-policy.

Last I checked, based on the UK NHS actual supply costs for heroin, a typical users daily consumption would cost.the NHS ca. $12. That is not nothing, but it's low enough that while you don't want to turn everyone into addicts, it far cheaper for society to give it away for free to existing addicts than it is to deal with the effects on both addicts and society of an unclean, uncontrolled supply (heroin addicts, counter to public perception, can largely - not always, much like alcoholics -function, hold down jobs, pay taxes etc. as long as they have a reliable, clean supply and don't have to desperately chase money to find their next high)

So don't give it away for free, sure, but make it available to anyone who is addicted.

Taxpayers are already paying for many forms of addiction, through policing, violence and robbery/theft, healthcare, prisons.

> Last I checked, based on the UK NHS actual supply costs for heroin, a typical users daily consumption would cost.the NHS ca. $12. That is not nothing, but it's low enough that while you don't want to turn everyone into addicts, it far cheaper for society to give it away for free to existing addicts than it is to deal with the effects on both addicts and society of an unclean, uncontrolled supply (heroin addicts, counter to public perception, can largely - not always, much like alcoholics -function, hold down jobs, pay taxes etc. as long as they have a reliable, clean supply and don't have to desperately chase money to find their next high)

I don't get your argument at all. Why not charge the addicts the 12 dollars?

The NHS as it is has a schedule of payment for prescription drugs that is applied for everything - including heroin - if prescribed, to ensure they are available to everyone that needs them. If you're below certain income threshold you get it all for free.

Above that you pay fixed fees. Currently that is ca $12 for a single prescription (irrespective of amount prescribed, which is typically regulated), ca $40 for unlimited prescriptions for 3 months, ca. $143 for unlimited prescriptions for 12 months. So if you were to follow the same schedule as normal, in the UK that'd mean $0 or $143 per year.

But the argument for making it available potentially for free to addicts irrespective of income thresholds especially for the most serious drugs is ensuring there's no barrier to a stable, secure supply triggering the very behaviors you want to prevent. A heroin addict is not going to be able to hold down a job if they find themselves unable to afford their next dose because they have a serious addiction that will compulsively drive them to try every desperate method to find money to satisfy that addiction. The societal cost of even a single mugging etc. is going to far exceed the cost of ensuring they have a stable supply.

I'm all for giving poor people money.

The dealers successfully compete by making stronger drugs.

Take a look at the black market for marijuana. Much stronger.

> Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective.

We have empirical proof that the restrictive extreme works: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/singapore-announces-plans-....

We have no empirical proof that the permissive extreme works. There's also no moral impetus for the permissive extreme, except maybe in rare cases when people are forced into drug use against their will. We are talking about something that virtually always starts out as a deliberate, anti-social choice.

The link you provided does not even remotely support your claim, which I can only assume is that the death penalty stops drug distribution.

But unless you control for Singapore’s somewhat unique geography and politics, pointing to Singapore’s death penalty - itself the result of a wider political context - signifies very little.

The death penalty is very important. What makes ordinary people follow the law is a desire to conform to society’s expectations. Humans are social animals—we want to be “good people,” not “bad people.”

Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are. Its society’s ultimate sanction and indicator of the acts society deems evil. It’s like the social opprobrium we have in the US for child molesters, where we look the other way when they get killed in prison. It reinforces the norm—even other criminals realize that child molesters are especially evil.

Arguing for extrajudicial punishment in prison for criminals as being good, actually is pretty wild

> Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are

This is just so unbelievably stupid that I have no words at all.

> We have no empirical proof that the permissive extreme works.

Alcohol.

We have plenty of empirical proof that Prohibition doesn't work.

Prohibition worked by basically all measures. Cirrhosis rates were down. Violence overall was actually down. Child abuse was down. 100s of thousands of people were saved due to prohibition of alcohol.

I'm not even in favor of alcohol prohibition but denying it saved lives goes completely against all data.

What data? I'd love to see your sources for "100s of thousands of people were saved due to prohibition of alcohol."

You should update the wikipedia article with those sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_Prohibition

You should read actual data instead of Wikipedia

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9681 <- cirrhosis declined 20 percent

https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/13/1/1/183009

https://academic.oup.com/aler/article/16/2/433/168495 <- prohibition associated with up to 30 percent reduction in violent crime

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01448... <- another researcher with similar findings.

The common cultural belief that prohibition failed is a total myth. It achieved everything it set out to achieve. People just wanted to drink. There's actually very little evidence of the supposed ills of prohibition.

For example, organized crime is typically said to have been caused by prohibition, but there were other factors at play as well (immigration, economics, etc). Harder liquor being available is another one, and this is true. Cirrhosis severity increased during prohibition but the drop in cirrhosis rates more than made up for that.

Criminals due to prohibition, i.e. drinkers of alcohol, should report to the prohibitor, cirrhosis, which a very good and clear sign of alcohol consumption, indicative of their criminal behavior?

A pregnant unmarried young woman of muslim religion, should report to her parents she is pregnant, indicative of sexual behavior with no one claiming legal status as her husband? That's prohibited, why should she do it?

I mean, a criminal reporting their own crimes to the prohibitor, doesn't sound like a very bright move to say the least.

I know personally people who drink alcohol a lot, their friends, family and social circles usually drink as well. Not always but increased probability. As soon as i meet a cousin of mine 3 times a week, and he gets busted for alcohol then i know i am next. So why should i let him report his own disease?

Cirrhosis kills, so the data is pretty 'fair', unless you're claiming there are piles of unnamed, uncertified dead people who died of cirrhosis during prohibition but were not autopsied. The data showing cirrhosis decreased is counting cirrhosis deaths as reported by hospitals getting indigent bodies. Several hospitals went from handling thousands of indigent cirrhosis deaths to handling a few hundred. You can't hide dead people easily.

Where is your pile of bodies?

> You can't hide dead people easily.

Yes you can. You can change their cause of death. Covid proved, this can be very easily achieved. Hundreds of thousands of people with wrong and misleading cause of death.

When the doctor is intimidated because he will be fired or he will be beat up by thugs then you put in the cause of death anything you like. A doctor can be intimidated by FDA thugs who revoke licenses, or beat up street thugs with the same effect.

I know personally one doctor who does autopsies. Autopsies are far from rigorous.

Usually people care about a person while he is still alive, as soon as his soul flies away to some remote heaven no one cares. Especially when that person is drinking for decades, usually everyone knows what the cause was, his family, his friends, it is not rocket science.

I didn't read the citations, it is many hours of study, but if any of the above is in question, i can give pretty lengthy citations about Covid and cause of death. A lot of research is pretty widely known.

How many people have ended up in prison that wouldn't have been there but for Prohibition?

Ending up in prison because you broke the law is not a social outcome we should be seeking to minimize.

We absolutely should, by not passing stupid laws.

Prohibition works great in Singapore.

It's still quite possible to get drugs here, but they tend to be more expensive.

From a completely practical point of view, keeping poor people off drugs (and making rich people think twice) prevents most of the harm.

I wish the west was more open to elitist policy

Well, I'm just describing the practical effects of the drug policy in Singapore.

It's very similar in the West: poor people get busted for doing drugs much more than rich people do.

Yes, I sometimes think policies could be made more efficiently, if they were to openly acknowledge the loopholes that exist for rich enough people, and just turn them into a saner official policies, instead of 'open-secret' accidents.

Singapore has a good example for gambling: foreigners can just enter our casinos, but locals have to pay something like 200 dollars to enter. Just so that you are under no illusions that you could come out ahead on net by going to the casino.

In theory, they could open 'opium dens' where you pay 200 dollars to enter, and then you can do your drugs there (all regulated and taxed and under supervision).

"Permissive extreme" with regard to alcohol would look like the Gin Craze in 18th century England.

Every other house sells hard liquor, even to children.

I would say that it definitely didn't work. The question is whether anything works at all with regard to addictive substances.

Maybe something like Ozempic, that reduces your appetite to everything.

18th century England different from modern day societies in a lot of other ways, too, not just in how they treated alcohol.

Eg it was a much poorer society.

Prohibition failed because European Americans have a deep affinity for alcohol. And it was adopted shortly after the mass immigration of Irish and Italians to the US, who had a specially deep affinity for alcohol. It wasn’t just prohibition, it was removing something that the whole country was already addicted to—an addiction that was cultivated over generations and ingrained in the culture.

Prohibition can work fine with alcohol when combined with a strong social taboo. In my home country of Bangladesh, alcohol is illegal for Muslims and virtually nobody drinks it.

Drugs are much more like prohibition of alcohol in Muslim countries than the prohibition of alcohol in America. We have a pre-existing taboo against drug use that we could be strengthening instead of trying to tear down. Capital punishment for drug dealers would go a long way towards reaffirming the taboo.

Oh great, the death penalty. It works fine in Korea even without it.

Ah yes, totalitarianism works! FFS, do you even think about the non drug ramifications of said governments policies.

The majority providing for an orderly, clean, and safe society for themselves through democratic means is not “totalitarianism.” Democracy does not require kowtowing to antisocial individuals. If you want to be disorderly then go live in the jungle.

By this token, if the majority believes that an "orderly, clean, and safe society" means not having, say, people with a certain skin color in it, do you think that is also fine?

Or taking an existing modern example of Russia. The majority of its population genuinely believes that e.g. LGBT persecution (which, to remind, these days means that two women kissing in public get arrested) is necessary for an "orderly and clean society". Is that also a good example of such a democracy?

I don't think there's any comparison between drug users and dealers and racial minorities and LGBT people. Putting that aside, democracy--the collective right to create the kind of society the people want--is more important than individual rights. Societies sometimes make terrible mistakes. Democracy doesn't mean that people always make good decisions. But there is no moral justification for any other approach. Such as having a minority decide that the majority must put up with having to step over drug needles in streets or public parks.

You don't think so, but who are you to argue against the democratic social consensus? In Russia they believe that being LGBT is a choice and that it is a choice that is socially harmful. Just like you believe the same wrt drugs.

Putting that aside, if you believe that democracy is more important than individual rights, then you are in no position to claim that democracy and totalitarianism are incompatible. One can certainly have a totalitarian society in which the majority consents to it being so.

The moral justification for a different approach is that unchecked majority rule is merely "might is right" dressed up in a way that makes it a bit more palatable for the masses.

> In Russia they believe that being LGBT is a choice and that it is a choice that is socially harmful. Just like you believe the same wrt drugs.

Except sexual orientation isn’t a choice and drug use is a choice. Except maybe if you’re one of those children born addicted to drugs because of pre-natal exposure.

> Putting that aside, if you believe that democracy is more important than individual rights, then you are in no position to claim that democracy and totalitarianism are incompatible

“Totalitarianism” is defined as “government that is centralized and dictatorial.” Dictatorial is defined as referring to “a ruler with total power.” So defimitinally totalitarianism is a form of minoritarianism. A government that imposes rigid norms based on broad social consensus isn’t dictatorial. Toxic individualists might deem such a government oppressive, but that doesn't make it dictatorial.

> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options

As a seattlite, this is the first I’ve heard of this. There might have been safe needle exchanges a decade back when heroin was popular, but these days when you just need some foil to smoke some fent…you don’t even see needles on the street anymore. And I’m pretty sure we aren’t giving out drugs (fent or heroin) to addicts, maybe you mean Narcan or methadone as first aid against ODing?

Ugh. Then I'm terribly out of date.

> but not offer effective recovery options

They do offer treatment, but few take it.

Always terrifying when a utopian and deadly policy is enacted, and leads to more horror and death, and its proponents just insist that we didn't enact it hard enough and demand to go even deeper.

There's mountains of skulls that way. It's been done, so many times. Please stop pushing us towards hell.

The goal posts move at a rate that would make spaceships shameful.

It’s amazing that I literally can’t tell if you think legalization or prohibition is the utopian and deadly policy based on your post.

I actually am fine with drug legalisation. It should be legal for people with more than X acres of land (or people who rent X acres of land). You should be required to have a certified drug security person on staff that will deal with anyone who has a 'crisis' while using, and to especially make sure they don't leave the property to become a public nuisance. And you should be required to provide evidence of sufficient health insurance and coverage.

You should also have to prove that you will be able to maintain this lifestyle in perpetuity, perhaps by posting a sufficiently large bond with the state you're operating in, which can be re-funded to you if you can prove that you're no longer using permanently (I.e., maybe after a decade of no further use).

But if you do all that... please like bake yourself as high as you want and pay good taxes.

I have a substantial problem with people doing drugs in public. And having their trips on public streets.

But seeing as the requirements to safely do drugs are much stricter than most of what the 'typical' street drug user seemed to ever be capable of, I doubt decriminalizing all drugs in a safe manner will do much of anything. The irresponsible people will still be doing it. At some levels drugs will always be criminal, because they're anti social and humans don't like anti social behavior in general.

It’s interesting to me that you referred to all drugs as one big bucket (“drug legalization[sic]”), and then referred to the usage as “bake yourself as high as you want,” which is typically a term used only for cannabis.

Do you feel like your proposed rules should apply to all currently-illegal drugs equally?

Sure I truly do not care what you want to ingest. I'm truly not a drug prude. I just can't deal with the drugged out individuals masturbating in public in front of kids and stuff.

As for baked v something else, I don't do drugs and have no interest so whatever... You know what I mean.

Certified drug security person? You mean a medical team and hospital equipment plus security guard and counselor rolled into one? Or an ex-user just watching?

Why do people not have to do anything remotely like that for alcohol? It’s almost a cliche of course, but worth noting in this context since alcohol is addictive, destructive to physical and mental health, and commonly provokes violent and antisocial behavior.

> and then we can

Step 1: Purify the supply.

Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business? What about the producers - does the government get into the business of making drugs as well? Would they need labs to ensure purity? And, hire government workers - arguably, with distribution experience - to give away the good stuff?

Okay, so let's say they succeeded. The dealers are bankrupt. Well, not really - they're now all government workers. But, anyway, they are out of the business of dealing illegally.

Step 3: Rehabilitation. Why would the new bureaucracy want to end addiction when its continued growth and existence depends on it?

What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs? On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize, let people take personal responsibility for their drug use choices, but then on the other hand, we are saying society should also be on the hook for reforming bad personal choices? Decriminalize and invest billions in drug rehabilitation! It doesn’t make sense to me.

Canada has free public healthcare for all. Alcohol rehabilitation is government funded. So is chemo for various cancers attributed to smoke inhalation and tobacco use. So are appetite reduction operations for very obese people.

Why should heroin rehabilitation be any different?

Some people would then argue that some drugs are significantly worse than others - that they are significantly more costly to rehabilitate, that their consumption causes more harm etc. Should the costs be calculated average or total?

Let's say that the consumption and / or distribution should be penalized.

What should the punishments be for consumption? How harsh should the punishments be for distribution? Jailing people costs a lot of money too.

How do we create a society where people don't become so easily addicted?

Canadas healthcare system is under severe strain, with people being unable to access routine care due to not having enough resources and the ones they have being stretched thin. Having government healthcare does not magically remove basic economics.

Repealing the Law of Supply & Demand never works.

Which healthcare system is not under severe strain?

I don’t think that is a function of gov or private healthcare.

I would even argue that states that privatised healthcare have lower quality than those with government healthcare.

> Which healthcare system is not under severe strain?

Singapore, probably.

I wonder why that is ;)

It's pretty easy to find material online investigating different healthcare systems, and their strengths and weaknesses.

> On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize

i dont think thats it. one of the main arguments is that people will do the drugs anyway legal or no. But if they get/do them illegally they'll be afraid to seek help when ODing or trying to quit, and they have nowhere safe to do them so they do them anywhere and everywhere. This explains why we both decriminalize and rehab

You see much better results in Asia where drug laws are harsh and you or your family are on their own for rehab: people simply can’t afford to take the risk anymore because they understand very well their life and a probably ruined if they try. But then we have to consider literal survival bias: maybe you just don’t see many drug addicts in Asia because they die quickly.

> What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs?

We let people mainline sugar to the point where they get diabetes[1], but we spend lots of money on holistic treatment to make sure that its manageable is as little medical intervention as possible (continuous blood sugar monitoring is awesome)

Substance abuse is more often than not a symptom of other things.

> On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize

I would say that mischaracterises the issue. I would suggest that its a case of lesser of two evils. An entire shadow economy worth billions, with no regulation and no qualms about killing people for profit, and is the cause of most petty crime, or cutting out a money supply to crime, but you need to change the way you spend on support and care of addicts.

[1] its mot complex than that, and also depending on what type you have.

What I don't get is the attitude of:

Gambling is terrible look at the harm it does it should be banned.

Alcohol is terrible look at the harm it does it should be banned.

Hard drugs - it's their choice leave the users alone, actually open up a place so they can take drugs.

To their credit, many places ban alcohol and even gambling as social negatives. I’m ok with socially funded drug treatment for something that is illegal, because at least we are trying to make sure the problem doesn’t keep growing when we are trying to fix it. I don’t like a plan that has us throw money at an avoidable problem forever.

This reads like an anti-government rant.

Why you would think drug production and distribution would be vastly different than the current pharmaceutical system I don't know.

Oh, it isn't anti-government at all. It's a question of what and how much you the citizen would like to pay your government to do.

Alcohol / marijuana systems may be a better comparison since, despite alcohol being so cheap, there are still people who produce and distribute unverified products.

Since the use is recreational, people will often pay for the cheapest version of the same high.

> there are still people who produce and distribute unverified products

Sure, but that's more people getting into homebrew as a hobby, not people trying to undercut supermarkets. Unless you tax the bejeesus out of it, no-one's home-grown op is gonna be price-competitive with industrial scale production.

Who said anything about giving it away for free? That's frankly a ridiculous idea.

It was a stupid statement and distracts from the rest which was a valid question.

We don't need nationalised alcohol, tobacco, or paracetamol production to ensure safety, so why would we need the production of other drugs nationalised?

Consider heroin as an example.

Step 1 is already done. UK hospitals, for example, uses heroin - under its generic name diamorphine - for pain relief instead of morphine for some patients because it's often less problematic.

Step 2 then is easy: The NHS has suppliers of medical grade heroin. Some people already have been getting it prescribed.

Step 3 is also then far less problematic than you make it out because there's not even any organisational link between the producers (private pharma companies), distributors (private pharmacies), and anyone who'd be involved in rehabilitation.

But even without the rehabilitation step, you've reduced the cost, and the harm.

We know that, because prescribing heroin to heroin addicts has been tried.

EDIT: Here is the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) page for heroin, btw. (NICE set prescription guidance for the NHS):

https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/diamorphine-hydrochloride/

Don’t we need better drugs? Like, people have a natural desire for what drugs do. Can’t we satisfy that in a way that is more positive?

Some of that is surely cultural. So ideally, you combine a growing and vibrant positive drug culture with good drugs.

The Netherlands has essentially done this. There are basically soft-legal dealers (via WhatsApp) that widely sell most illegal drugs at high purity — but you won’t ever find opiates on the menu. So then people are happy getting their ketamine and mdma and coke and ghb and lsd and 2cb etc — and the police are surely monitoring to make sure that the dealers don’t cause problems. That means they allow the good dealers and shut down the dealers that cause problems (sell bad drugs or sell to people who cause problems).

This is combined with a positive drug culture that shuns opiates but embraces party drugs and music culture.

Sure, there are drugs that are worse than others, and seeking to redirect use where possible would be good. Especially when dealing with addicts.

Some people do seek out opiates especially because of its specific effects, and I don't think you can entirely prevent that, though you may be able to reduce it with better mental health support, but even then you could also redirect use to safer options, and also segmenting out those seeking opiates from those seeking party drugs etc. so that you don't create pathways between them might well be beneficial.

To stick with my heroin example, I don't know where specifically heroin sits relative to opiates that would actually satisfy existing addicts and that's part of the challenge, but heroin itself is also nowhere near the worst opiate, and one of the negative effects of the current way we're handling this is that we've created a pathway towards more dangerous ones.

E.g. a frequent pathway to heroin use today is from oxycodone, to oxycodone on the black market after you lose your prescription, to heroin. But then it gets worse: Dealers cutting heroin with fentanyl or even carfentanyl.

Getting users nudged gently or not so gently towards the safest options that will satisfy them would in itself likely help a lot, and of course, a black market dealer has no incentive to do that unless there's a very severe difference in how they're treated by law enforcement.

Perhaps a variant of what you described would be a good first step in many places not ready for more decriminalization: Much more aggressively segmented drug sentencing by the harm of the worst drug a dealer can be connected to, and perhaps even explicitly punish "crossover" between drugs with differ harm profiles to reduce the pathways between them.

But that means being honest about the abuse potential, and not politicizing it, and that is in itself an uphill battle in many places.

Is it possible to keep an addict satisfied with a lower tier drug? Genuine question.

My understanding is that opiates become less effective over time as your body adapts, so you seek out stronger drugs in larger doses.

It really depends both on what you mean by "lower tier" drug, and what people are seeking, and how frequent users they are.

But I suspect a reliable potency alone would do a lot for slowing the upward creep than shunting people to a drug dealer who might decide you'll be a more profitable customer if they raise your expectations of the high to seek by selling you "heroin" without telling you it's not pure heroin but cut with fentanyl (tens of times as strong) or carfentanil (thousands of times the potency).

Even with an upwards creep, there are vastly different strength levels and harm profiles for different opioids, and a strategy of what is available focused on slowing advancement and steering around the most dangerous options might well allow for keeping people on far milder options for far longer and/or give more options for shunting people onto interventions if they want to stop.

The first step is really to accept it's a healthcare problem, and recognise that it's a worse healthcare problem if people go to drug dealers because you refuse them. If so, the question becomes not necessarily about a free for all, but about how many hoops you can get people to jump through to shunt as many as possible in a healthier direction without making too many decide it's easier to buy from a dealer.

Larger doses yes, but the opiates being consumed are almost entirely a result of cost/availability. Genuine prescription pills are by far the most desirable choice amongst opiate addicts, but tight control on supply post opiate-crisis has made them practically nonexistent in illegal drug markets.

The extent of prescription opiates desirability is somewhat evidenced by most "street" fentanyl being consumed in counterfeit oxycodone/vicodin pressed-pills. And then of course there is cost--why smuggle 50 packages of heroin when a single package of fentanyl contains an equivalent number of opiate doses and can be manufactured far more efficiently/discretely?

But in general the opiate market is defined by the practical constraints of cost and availability. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has been used in hospitals for decades, but its emergence as a street drug in recent times is the result of precursors and synthesis methodology becoming very accessible

>Is it possible to keep an addict satisfied with a lower tier drug?

Yes, but the person has to want to make the change, since the ‘lower tier drug’ (buprenorphine) doesn’t get them high. It just stops cravings and withdrawal symptoms, while largely blocking the effects of most other opioids.

Another benefit of buprenorphine is that it has a ceiling effect in relation to respiratory depression. For most opioids, if you take enough, you will stop breathing and die. Buprenorphine’s dose/response curve for respiratory depression and sedation turns flat after ~24mg, which makes the drug very difficult to overdose on.

This is as good a solution as is likely to be found, but it hardly exists in a vacuum. The culture in which this fragile status quo is imbedded ensures its relative success.

Try to transplant it into other cultures, and the myriad potential perverse incentives would turn it into just plain old police running the drugs business, with murders and all the other fun stuff that comes along with that.

Some cultures are able to maintain fragile systems such as this because civic responsibility and collective good are strongly valued. Unfortunately, most cultures are not that responsible.

“people have a natural desire for what drugs do”

Define “natural”. I don’t think any mature, temperate, and healthy human being desires to use or abuse drugs, and even if they have a genetic predisposition to abuse (like some alcoholics), they know to avoid the so-called near occasions of sin that put them at serious risk of using. Obviously, I don’t mean everything with psychoactive properties is bad. Having some chamomile tea or a cup of coffee or a beer is fine in moderation. But drug use as we commonly mean it is drug abuse by definition, as the corruption and distortion of mental faculties for a thrill (or to escape) is intentional and intrinsic. So I find the very notion of a “vibrant positive drug culture with good drugs” in this context incoherent, or subject to such a restrictive notion of “good drugs” (which is also partly a matter of dosage) that it becomes as banal as pipe smoking forums or beer clubs.

I'm curious: are you formally Catholic? And if so, how did you arrive there?

I do not understand how you could say "I don’t think any mature, temperate, and healthy human being desires to use or abuse drugs, and even if they have a genetic predisposition to abuse" followed by "Having some chamomile tea or a cup of coffee or a beer is fine in moderation."

Caffeine - and especially alcohol - are absolutely addictive drugs. Alcohol especially has many negative effects on society, and is in a similar class as GHB, benzodiazepines and even opiates. Drinking alcohol IS using drugs, even if society has accepted this drug. Coffee is a stimulant, just like Adderall (i.e. speed) and meth.

Weed is another pervasive drug that's used by many mature, temperate and healthy humans. And frankly, I would argue the same of psychedelics and MDMA. I don't know how you could even argue otherwise besides "no true Scottsman."

A lot of people are incapable of realizing other people are different from them.

If you could give the entire population each their own “happy button” a significant portion would be hitting it all day long, ignoring everything else in their life. Those on HN are largely not the same type of people.

> Those on HN are largely not the same type of people.

I mean, fair number of them have a 'happy button' of insane work loads and work hours. Of course those people consider work abuse acceptable and totally not a drug at all.

This definition of drug abuse as thrill seeking or corruption of facilities is overly broad as it would cover a lot of normal behaviours.

Drug abuse can be identified with drug addiction. If you get blind drunk once on your stag night, that’s not abuse, if you do that every night salaryman-style then that’s a problem.

Look at historical human societies - how many of them did not have some kind of socially accepted psychoactive drug?

> positive drug culture

The same mafias setting up that drug supply chain for your dealer in the Netherlands are the same one who are attempting to assasinate the crown princess, prime minister, and justice minister [0] and have caused over 100 bombings and shootings in Rotterdam by mid-2023 alone in a city where stuff like this was almost unheard of 30 years ago [1]

> embraces party drugs and music culture.

Party drugs like XTC are smuggled as well, leading to a massive gang war in Israel in the 2000s [2], where most XTC in Europe is synthesized.

(Side note - most of the Israeli mafia are ethnic Moroccans just like their Dutch compatriots)

[0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/15/d...

[1] - https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/27/100-explosions-shootings-rotte...

[2] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jan-06-fg-israe...

The drug supply in Amsterdam is heavily regulated by the police. They have closing hours at 11 on weekdays and at 1 on weekends. There are arrangements where some people make money so other people don’t.

A few years ago, all the encryption for dealers was broken [1]. Many of them agreed to continue under certain circumstances. It’s a reasonable balance.

During Covid, they shut down all the coffee shops selling weed — and that lasted a day. Because they realized the black market would step in. Keeping things flowing in a regulated market is always preferred to a completely illegal (unregulated) market.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/encrypted-phones-crime-encrochat-...

None of that actually disproves my point.

If a "regulated" market can still have players explicitly target heads of state, cabinet members, and the future monarch of a country for extrajudicial killings and saw a dramatic increase in violence, then by definition the light touch regulation used is failing.

All my examples happened in 2022.

You can try to rationalize, but at the end of the day it is a dirty business and even regulation would not clean it up (eg. Oklahoma's attempt at legalizing Marijuana cultivation lead to an influx of Chinese organized crime players [0] because of high taxes on legal marijuana)

There is a happy path between harm reduction, decriminalization, and legalization, but imo the Dutch system is clearly not it.

[0] - https://www.propublica.org/article/chinese-organized-crime-u...

Name a better system. Perfect is enemy of good. The system evolves.

It’s just the beginning of soft regulation — obviously some bad players didn’t like it.

Check out California, Washington, Colorado, Alaska, or Oregon sometime.

Marijuana access is legal in all those states and LSD is on the path of legalization as well.

While organized crime does continue to be an issue in the Marijuana industry in these states, they haven't attempted to assassinate our Governors or Congressmembers.

Literally most of the US has legalized Marijuana (not decriminalized - LEGALIZED), and the Dutch system is extremely archaic and continues to perpetuate a black market.

Access to clean financing and crackdowns on black market dealing are what keep criminals out of the industry. Plus in CA you can audit the supply chain of marijuana products because of the paper trail required.

Most of OK's illicit marijuana is shipped to states where it's still a black market product due to lack of legal access (eg. NY)

All it sounds like is you like to party sometimes but want to remain in denial that a product your consuming is morally tainted.

It wasn’t an attempted assasination. You are overblowing this.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/08/man-arrested-for-amalia-thr...

Lots of products we buy are morally tainted. I don’t appreciate black and white thinking — it is polarizing.

I did not know about this, yet it's been in place for a long time!

Yes, it addresses #1 and #2. #3 is not as problematic as I thought either.

It isn't all smooth, but if it is working and there's less violence and societal breakdown, then I think it's a step in the right direction.

Thanks!

> Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business?

Why do you need to give it away for free?

You just need to make it so that normal businesses with normal procedures produce the supply and distribute it.

Compare bathtub gin to any modern factory made liquor.

Normal companies can produce the stuff, and normal companies can distribute it. Walmart and co are enormously efficient at the latter, and still provide clean and safe products. No need to give anything away for free, you just need to make it legal for normal, formal companies to compete.

One of the reasons to give it away is to stop it being cut. If it costs $50 someone will buy it for $50, cut it and sell it to a friend for $30, a homeless person with little money will opt for the $30 rather than the $50 and then be stuck with all the adulterants, while the first person will have got high for $20 and only need to make another $20 to do the cycle again rather than the whole $50.

Amounts just a simple example and not accurate.

One thing that alot of people miss is that it's not just drug dealers cutting, it's the drug users themselves. I don't think the same can be said for other common drugs like cocaine, mdma etc

Eh, cutting and (re-)selling takes time and effort. People don't work for free; there's always opportunity costs.

But instead, in the UK we're going for outright bans on tobacco. Even introducing a new form of discrimination to do so, where one person will be able to smoke, but a person born one day later will never in their lifetime be permitted to buy tobacco.

(Just wait until they apply a birth-date cut-off like that to owning ICE cars, then manual driving of any powered vehicle...)

> until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism.

Why is anything that is not 100% supportive of people putting needles in their butts is deemed puritan and reactionary?

We had a long public consultation recently where I live, because the city wants to introduce free housing for drug addicts with a safe shooting room. Next to a day care, a park, and a bridge, and in an area that currently doesn't have any of the east-van type population. It was basically locals speaking against and support associations speaking for. Locals were called bigots, racists, needed to check their privilege, stereotyping. They weren't allowed to say there'd be more crime because "there won't be".

There are certainly better things that can be done to help addicted people, but just counting on being nice and giving them clean needles won't change the current curve. The dealers are not the ones making daily life literally shittier through human feces on the sidewalk, and bikes disappearing from under your butt if you only gaze elsewhere for a minute. Their violence is mostly internal. The real impact is from the thousands of these people who need a revenue stream to keep subsisting while trying to surf their high one last time, ride that they'll preferably have slowly on a sidewalk or crossing a street with their pants midway through their calves.

I pity those people, their life must be horrendous, and they don't get any help getting out. But I don't recognize their right to fuck themselves up to a point that it's a nuisance for everyone, and it becomes everyone else's problem to unfuck them.

If you replace them by state sponsored products, you'll just keep the same trend. The only way is to a) break the cycle that makes the problem worse, by making it illegal (prison is not an answer but at least allow cops to confiscate) and breaking the procurement chain and b) fix the existing problem by introducing real programs that get those people out of their addiction, rather than just helping them live through it.

And yeah I know that neither are possible, it's a simplistic point of view, but the policy of just letting things be a vaguely supporting it has only made things worse, and just saying "screw it, nothing can be done, just go with it", that doesn't sound like a winning stance to me.

It’s pretty damn easy to solve this tbh. Yes, you imprison people, push them out of your cities and confiscate all drugs. You don’t have to change the laws, just enforce them, it doesn’t matter if you’re addicted to drugs, taking a dump on the street has a criminal penalty.

    > Not half-measures like
    > they've done in BC &
    > Portugal.

Are you actually aware of what Portuguese drug policy is like, or are you just going by the popular North American misconception that they just decriminalized everything and called it a day?

The actual Portuguese drug policy is draconian in a way that would be unimaginable in the US or Canada. The decriminalization is only a small part of it.

Portugal didn’t fully fund treatment, and in the past few years they’ve seen a reversal of their early successes. Oregon is going through the same thing.

Recognizing that drug addiction is a health issue is progress, but that means you actually need to fund treatment.

Decriminalization has never been about compassion or freedom. It just is an easy escape from social responsibility allowing parts of the population to indulge into extremely detrimental behavior to themselves and others. The rest can just look away "because it is legal".

Yes, alcohol is bad too. Yes, weed is bad too.

Alcohol criminalization didn't go so well though.

The need is for a nuanced policy that recognizes that people have bad habits, vices, and addictions, and that you can't stop them from that or else they'll just do it harder, like a petulant child. But there's a difference between all alcohol must be legal all the time, and limiting sales to no hard liquor, beer and wine only at certain times. And then, what do people see as the government's role in all this. How much should be up to the government and how much should be cultural norms enforced socially?

Yes, but clearly that was a different situation, where you had large non-addict populations still wanting to consume. With heroin there aren't any occasional users, who shoot it twice a month and are totally clean otherwise.

Alcohol is bad, sure, but just because it is a socially acceptable drug, doesn't mean you should allow other drugs to become socially acceptable as well. Just because it seems near impossible to get criminalize one bad thing, doesn't mean that all other bad things should be decriminalized.

In the end I don't see drug decriminalization as anything more than a political class who creates severe misery, because they are utterly unable to help with the underlying problems which push people to drug use.

The idea that all heroin users are addicts that can't just stop has been known to be false since at least the 1970s. The heroin addicts you notice are by no means the only heroin users (nor the only addicts).

One can argue over ratios, but the addiction rates for heroin are low enough it's sometimes prescribed for post op pain in the UK as an alternative to morphine.

People often fall into the trap: A is bad, but B is bad too. B is allowed, so therefore A must be allowed too. When put in this abstract way, the irrationality of it is clear. But when it's an emotionally vested topic, the lines suddenly blur.

The powers-that-be are indeed unable to help with the underlying problem, but there's more to it. Politicians want to be seen as doing good. The myths surrounding good drug use have been pushed for a long time, and the combination with the prospect of the very hard task of eliminating drug trade and the social class aspect, means that for many --in particular progressives-- legalization becomes an attractive option.

> With heroin there aren't any occasional users, who shoot it twice a month and are totally clean otherwise.

There aren't?

It'd be interesting to have further discussion beyond just parroting a flawed experiment from almost 100 years ago though. DUI has caused very high mortality, although funnily some people here will suggest that we abolish the "driving" part instead.

In my country (Indonesia) where alcohol is frowned and restricted culturally, DUI rates is almost nonexistent compared to developed countries. Although we "replaced" it with sleepy driving which also caused lots of deaths, so maybe we do have to abolish driving after all.

The irony is that alcohol prohibition did actually work. It increased health, reduced violence in the home and on the street, increase safety for women and girls, decreased deaths and increased economic wealth amongst other benefits. It also (needless but I have to say it) increased organised crime which in the end overwhelmed the positives.

Those policies never take into account that part of the population which gets affected by the drug users' behaviour. I was recently approached and threatened with extreme violence by a person who looked like he was on drugs and had an unmuzzled dangerous breed of dog with him, not on the leash. The dog was chasing after joggers and he was chasing after the dog, promising people that "if you ever follow me I'll slice ya". He picked on me too and listed the things he would do to me while his dog was too close for comfort. Central London, broad daylight. Compassion for drug addicts is a hard sell, because there are so many of them and they show no desire to change because "I'm an addict, I can't help it".

I'm not familiar with the history and details. I'm for decriminalization of drugs but I think that only helps if you also provide meaningful help in getting free of addiction.

I'm for decriminalization because if you can't admit you have a problem and need help without being charged with a crime, it's a barrier to getting clean. I'm also generally for "It's your body. Put what you want in it."

I am not criticizing this change in policy. I am also for holding people accountable for their behavior and not excusing bad behavior generally based on "Poor baby. Has an addiction."

We don't say chemo patients are excused from behaving appropriately, though we do make allowances for the fact they are probably grumpy and not at their most diplomatic because they are miserable. I believe addiction frequently has an unrecognized medical component and people are literally self medicating, often for an issue that doctors have failed to identify. I believe if you find the underlying cause, they can stop.

Anyway, just trying to give context here. Decriminalization should not be code for "Let's let assholes claim the rules don't apply to them at all and excuse all their awful behavior."

> I'm for decriminalization because if you can't admit you have a problem and need help without being charged with a crime, it's a barrier to getting clean. I'm also generally for "It's your body. Put what you want in it."

Like literally... this is usually the case even in places where drugs are actually still illegal. In the US at least. For example, my state of Oregon decriminalized drugs. This did... nothing in terms of legal process, other than to eliminate any court appearances (police can't jail you so you don't show up in court). While Measure 110 was being implemented I was on the grand jury. Essentially, the status quo before the bill was that people would be held pre-trial. They would go on 'trial' or take a plea deal and be sentenced to recovery. That is what went on before decriminalization. Then suddenly one day, police could no longer hold them and everyone stoped showing up to court. I think I read today that the drug courts went from thousands of cases to a few hundred per year. That's thousands of people slipping through the cracks.

> It's your body. Put what you want in it.

The problem is when you let others deal with the consequences - which is by and large what's happening in Vancouver.

> It's your body. Put what you want in it.

What happens after? If you become an addict and steal shit from my car to pay for more shit you want and now need to put in you?

Making people addicted is the opposite of making them free. People have understood this very well for a long time now.

he means the good drug addicts, the ones that stay home and paint avant-garde masterpieces high on expensive high-quality heroine

Stealing is what is illegal. Your reasoning is very dangerous, as you can link whatever you want. For example, it's common in the US to blame certain videogames or movies after mass shooting: by that logic illegalizing the videogames solves the shootings. Or we need to illegalize some videogames because they might cause shootings.

When people think drugs and addiction they immediately think of heavy opiates. But there are a lot of drugs that cause mild to no addiction (and certainty less than alcohol or tobacco), and low harm: LSD, for example. Nobody steals shit from your car to do some acid.

The difference between video games and smoking fentanyl is like between a chair and an electric chair. If you don’t see it, we have nothing to talk about.

And you are doing exactly what I said: straight to the most powerful opiod available. Fentanil is bad, lets outlaw shrooms, LSD, MDMA, marihuana... But leave out alcohol because...? Ah, yes, because when it was ilegal, mafia, violence and damages related to them were worse than ever.

Also notice how heroin and fentanil are currently illegal. Everywhere. How is it going? I guess there are no addicts, or people stealing cars to get their fix. Because that only happens when they are legal, isn't it?

Somehow we know that ilegalization solves nothing or create worse problems like mafias and linked violence, and still believe that it's the solution.

To be fair, we do this for a lot of other stuff as well. For instance, driving over the speed limit does not harm anyone per se, it's only when this leads to a traffic accident that harm is caused. You could just as well say: let's not have speed limits, let's only criminalize harming people in an accident, and then it's everyone's responsibility to drive at a responsible speed (and maybe in case of an accident, you would need to prove in a court that you drove (ir)responsibly and who was at fault). But we know this doesn't work in practice.

We don’t criminalize production or possession of a car capable of exceeding the speed limit. The penalty for exceeding the speed limit is basically so minor as to be an administrative rather than criminal action in most cases. And that penalty only applies in public spaces (no speed limit on a drag strip).

If we were to apply a similar model to drug use, production and sales would be legal, possession would be legal, use in private spaces would be legal, and we’d fine (not jail) people for being high in public spaces or high risk situations.

Which is almost exactly what we do with alcohol. And aligns fairly well with a lot of other suggestions people have made around taking production and supply out of the hands of criminals.

Driving a car doesn’t make you an irrational car driving addict who can’t function without driving and will do basically anything to drive more because not driving hurts so bad and driving feels so good.

People on r/fuckcars might not agree with you.

I wasn't aware the leading experts came from a subreddit comprised entirely of children and recent GED graduates

We don't? Then why do we enter the comments?

There are only a handful of drugs that turns you into that king of zombie. Mainly opiates that ilegalization itself made so powerful.

Before being ilegal, the most common opiate was opium. It has about the same strength as codeine, about 1/10 of morphine. Some people took it daily for decades, and they were fully functional, not zombies.

Only after ilegalization we see people taking fentanil. Because it's easier to smuggle 10,000 doses of fentanil (1 gram) than 20 doses of opium (2 gram). The same happened with coca leaves vs cocaine: were coca leaves are legal, only a few use cocaine. And some people chew coca leaves all their lifes without too much problem. Certainly less than an alcoholic.

Alcohol is legal. But it's ilegal under some circumstances (driving). Or it's not tolerated on some places (work).

There are a number of low risk drugs, like LSD, that are very ilegal. In fact, they were made ilegal on false premises, like "they led to suicides" or "you'll stare at the sun". Often people make a big bag of drugs, from LSD, shrooms and marihuana, to heroin and fentanil, put them in a bag and stamp "ilegal because some of them are very bad" on it. Sorry, what? Ban the worse of them, and leave the less harmful out. I'm personally for full legalization, but I get that some people want to ilegalize at least the worse opioids.

To go back to your speed example: yes, speeding is bad. Yet we put a limit reasonably high that allows you to use the car. We didn't outlaw car usage altogether! We know there are traffic related deaths and injuries every year, and still we are allowed to drive: we study the problems, we try to fix it, new regulations are in place... We try to get a balance between the risk and the benefits. But the current discourse with drugs is "going in a car at 5mph in the highway is very, very, very harmful". Except alcohol: that "car" can go at full speed.

In theory I'm also for decriminalization, but in practice it doesn't work. Some drugs are so intense, can't compare to your Friday night beer. See the heroin epidemic in Amsterdam during the 70s, some neighborhoods became completely uninhabitable and an emergency status was declared. It just doesn't work.

"The Dutch Hard Drug Epidemic, 1972–Present" https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep42912.9

"Heroïne-epidemie in Nederland" https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%C3%AFne-epidemie_in_Ned...

> In theory I'm also for decriminalization, but in practice it doesn't work. Some drugs are so intense, can't compare to your Friday night beer.

The question is simple, really: "Do you really want your kid to have free access to Tranq?".

Answer that, in all honesty, from the bottom of your earth.

My enemies aren't the dealers or the consumers. My enemies are those saying every single drug should be freely accessible to my kid.

Drugs that are legal for adults are typically illegal for children. Alcohol and tobacco are both legal for adults in the US and illegal for children.

Saying adults who are generally functional should generally have agency over their own body is not saying "Anything goes!" and is not saying "Let's actively seek to turn kids into addicts!"

A lot of arguments against decriminalization are posited as extremist, worst case scenarios.

I said from the start that I don't know what the history is for the jurisdiction in question and ended with my firm belief that decriminalization should not be code for giving assholes a pass on any and every shitty thing they want to excuse or justify.

Seems like something went wrong in BC and they are trying to course correct. I'm fine with that.

In California, you can’t drink on the beach.

Except we all do, but we all try to hide it.

But I think it works out because while we’re all doing trashy things, overall the beach doesn’t look as trashy.

I feel like the law exists with everyone knowing it will be broken but working exactly as the law intended. Win-win.

The problem with stuff like that is that you'll still have the law enforced, just in a haphazard way. So everybody is doing it, and most aren't any worse off for it, but some end up with their lives ruined, largely at random.

There is no world where laws exist that are not subject to that problem. Cops fucking plant drugs on people.

Just because all locks are breakable doesn’t mean that you stop using locks.

It does mean that maybe throwing people in prison for possession is not the brightest idea given how likely it is to be just some random guy who really didn't do anything that everybody else wasn't doing.

After decades of decriminalized drug use, people are finally fed up with it, see through the limitations of compassion that is largely driven by political ideology and are voting for stronger laws.

Yet I question whether we will see actual enforcement.

It's mindblowing that you think compassion is a political ideology and not, you know, a normal human emotion that motivates people to push for certain policies.

A cynical person would never push for (largely unpopular) compassionate/harm-reducing policies.

Of course the boundless compassion of the kind that permits public spaces to be littered with needles and fentanyl smoke is driven by a political ideology, come on.

It’s mindblowing that you think compassion means letting s hoard of people absolutely destroy areas of a major cities and not, you know, an over correction to “war on drugs”-like awful policies.

For the individual drug user things might be “better”, but for cities/society they are absolutely not.

Yes, I was reflecting on this recently, it feels like public drug use (as well as homeless encampments, aggressive panhandling etc) is putting the rights of the individual drug user well above the rights of society, which seems incongruous for the people that support it.

It's a bizarre inversion to say that enabling a small antisocial minority to terrorize the majority and strip away their enjoyment of public spaces is "compassionate."

There is nothing compassionate about seeing someone destroy their life and their sanity and refusing to help them by jailing them.

I'm curious what studies you have seen that jailing people helps them improve their life or stay off drugs. From what I can tell, that is not the case.

"The theory of deterrence would suggest, for instance, that states with higher rates of drug imprisonment would experience lower rates of drug use among their residents... higher rates of drug imprisonment did not translate into lower rates of drug use, arrests, or overdose deaths."

[0]https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...

Perhaps if prisoners actually received the drug treatment they needed. "To be effective for this population, treatment must begin in prison and be sustained after release through participation in community treatment programs. By engaging in a continuing therapeutic process, people can learn how to avoid relapse and withdraw from a life of crime. However, only a small percentage of those who need treatment while behind bars actually receive it, and often the treatment provided is inadequate."

[1]https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/criminal-justice

But as things currently stand there appears to be "higher rates of substance use disorders in prisons and jails compared to the total population."

[2]https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2024/01/30/punishing-drug-...

It improves everyone else's quality of life and it means they have the potential to access services. The individual homeless are certainly stakeholders but they are neither the only one nor the most important

harm reduction doesn't work when somebody actively/constantly seeks harm. we've put the personal liberties of a small group of people addicted to hard drugs above the rest. that is the misplaced compassion I'm talking about that hasn't worked.

Harm reduction sounds like putting padding on a rope noose so your skin doesn't get itchy when you break your own neck from a ceiling beam.

There hasn't been decades of decriminalization though? There have been decades of extremely harsh enforcement, far exceeding that applied to, for example, alcohol, fraud, sexual assault, ...

What there has been is decades of "maybe years in jail for drug use is excessive?", to which some places said "let's have less restrictions on drug use than we do on alcohol" which is absurd though I suspect less harmful in the long term, but many have doubled down on punishment.

That is ignoring the demonstrable bias in enforcement of drug crimes, that meant that even in heavily policed and restrictive areas the drug laws primarily act as a method to criminalize specific social groups (drugs used by the wealthy generally have lower penalties than those use by everyone else, enforcement of drug crimes means that despite every study on the topic showing little racial split in use, the overwhelming majority of people in prison for weed use in the US are black).

Treat drugs the same way we treat alcohol: taxed, regulated, age restricted, etc (and please get people to stop smoking joints at concerts. I don't understand why people who would never consider smoking a cigarette inside then light up a joint in a crowded hall.)

> decades of "maybe years in jail for drug use is excessive?",

Which is why we have a massive network of treatment and diversion programs often initiated by courts directly. It's been a long time since we've had a true "black and white" enforcement regime.

> drugs used by the wealthy generally have lower penalties than those use by everyone else

Wealthy people smoke crack too. What they can afford is to insulate themselves from the risk by being several layers removed from the transactions.

> Treat drugs the same way we treat alcohol

There are dry counties. There are states with specific ABV prohibitions in certain products and with dispensing limits in establishments. Some states have state operated liquor stores. The way we treat alcohol is not homogenous.

Then we'd have to get into product safety, licensing and liability concerns. What process should a "herion shop" be required to submit to before opening?

> Wealthy people smoke crack too.

Do you mind linking to some data on this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Rob_Ford_crack_vid...

Possibly my new favorite HN reply

Truly bash.org (RIP) worthy

It’s possible decriminalizing works but it’s also been combined with the absurd no policing of public places at all policy in these cities.

If people want to shoot up at home that’s fine. But there’s no reason we need to have large meth/fentanyl encampments with violent and severely mentally ill people on the streets in addition to that.

If you have too many chaotic policies that build up on each other it’s gonna end poorly as we’ve seen

Decades? Are you still talking about British Columbia, Canada?

The grandparent might be referring to various degrees of decriminalization, not just the more recent experiment of decriminalizing possession of 2.5 grams of drugs and the allowance of drug consumption in public spaces that was backed by the BC court injunction last year. For example, Insite (a supervised drug injection site which opened 21 years ago) could be considered an early step in decriminalization, including acquiring a legal exemption allowing it to operate.

Insite can almost be seen as a medical clinic. A hospital OR is a "supervised drug injection site" where you can be legally knocked out with propofol and fentanyl.

Yes, in the same sense that a street drug user could almost be seen as an amateur anaesthesiologist subjecting themselves to a controlled dosage of opioids for medical purposes. But despite that, street drug use and supervised injection at Insite would both have been criminal offenses if not for changes and exemptions made by legal system to allow them. That's precisely what "decriminalization" is, and a large part of this is the idea that drug abuse should be seen as a medical matter rather than a criminal one.

medical clinic is an interesting choice of words.

One might think there is a licensed medical doctor prescribing hard drugs without fear of prosecution, free from law enforcement.

Chinatown residents would certainly disagree whether it has been beneficial for them. Yaletown residents certainly disagree

Insite opened over twenty years ago: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/insite-20-ye...

Insite may not have been a 'de jure' decriminalization, but it was definitely a site where the government acknowledged the laws were not to be followed as written, and was a 'de facto' decriminalization.

> Decades? Are you still talking about British Columbia, Canada?

Ain't that the real scary thing though? That's it didn't take decades but mere years for things to turn to shit?

To me real evilness is the supposedly compassionate ones, who not only refuse to see evil but also encourage it.

"evil", "good" are terrible words. Religious trickery to fend of questions like "what?", "why?".

Tell what you object to or what you support and why and then you can have a conversation and possibly arrive at some solutions or at least some knowledge.

When people make this point they usually refer to Vancouver, Seattle, Portland (OR) or San Francisco. What they do--and waht all politicians do--is completely ignore the root problem: unaffordable housing.

Lack of affordable housing is the number one cause of homelessness and it's not even close (eg [1]). California, in particular, votes in measures to fund housing the homeless but it doesn't really get spent. Why? Because residents, developers and politicians do everything they can to resist building anything to house the homeless in any capacity.

We have decades of long-term incarceration for minor drug possession to show this is not an effective strategy. That's what led to drug decriminzation after the crime panic of the 1980s and 1990s. Decriminalizing drug use is good. If people don't want to see it (which I get), maybe they should do something to house such people, particularly because homelessness itself is a major cause of drug abuse as such people turn to self-medication.

[1]: https://caplinnews.fiu.edu/lack-of-affordable-housing-a-lead...

I’m really in favor of the opposite: zone for fewer jobs. Set limits on headcount per sq ft. Limit zoning of anything that provides jobs to be no more than local housing. If the locals want to keep their residential density, fine, no more commercial development.

This is such a bad idea, I nearly spit out my coffee, which I drank several hours ago.

You want to build a building? Sorry, there's too many jobs in this area already, so you can't hire people to do that.

Seriously, please draft a law to enact this policy. It sounds hilarious.

>Lack of affordable housing is the number one cause of homelessness

Homelessness isn't a monolith. Treating someone who gets evicted after job loss the same as mentally ill drug addicts is making the problem worse. Homeless assistant programs are successful at helping people who accept the help.

The drug addicts you see on the streets are engaging in destructive antisocial behavior. Sadly the only effective remedy for this behavior is to be roughed up by police and thrown in jail.

No, homelessness is not a monolith.

But lack of affordable housing is still the number one cause.

We only claim someone's problems are entirely due to drug use when they hit skid row. We don't predict homelessness for millionaire rock stars who go to rehab repeatedly.

Drug use doesn't cause homelessness. Lack of housing causes homelessness.

The real solution is: We need to fix the housing crisis.

Lack of affordable housing is the reason people might fall into despair and then drugs, but the people who get into drugs are basically a lost caused compared to the ones that don’t. The drug addicts…you can throw millions at just one case and make no progress in getting them back in their feet, the non-drug addict just needs housing.

At that point, isn’t a moral judgement, just an effective use of limited resources (do we burn money trying to treat drug addicts who try to cook meth in the housing you give them, or do we spend $2k/month getting that non addict an apartment so they can get a job).

A. I think that's a vast oversimplification.

B. I would like to address the housing crisis per se as a first line of defense rather than wait until people are homeless and then try to decide who merits help and what the cost-benefit ratio is and etc.

For many people, if there was enough affordable housing, this whole argument about their merits and defects and etc wouldn't happen at all. There would, no doubt, be other arguments but my research indicates lack of affordable housing is the primary issue here.

You would discover two very different problems between those where housing costs too much but were functional otherwise, and the other problem of completely non-functioning people where even cheap housing is too expensive since they can’t hold even a minimum wage job.

The only debate right now is whether the first category mostly leads to the second category (and vice versa if the second mostly comes from the first). That is should we just treat the categories the same or not, then more affordable housing would help if most people in category two are coming from one. If the assumption is wrong, we will still see people on the streets even if housing is affordable.

The other part of the debate is whether these problems are local or national, which has implications in how homeless programs are funded and where the affordable housing should be built. If all of the country’s homeless decides to move to SF, Seattle, LA for their affordable housing, the program will obviously fail.

Let me try this one more time and then I give up:

You: "Let's throw a bunch a people off a cliff and then assess who is worth saving afterwards!"

Me: "Let's stop throwing people off a cliff. If we stop doing that, we can stop arguing about who is too broken to save and whether or not it's a personal character defect that they ended up more broken than others who got thrown off the same cliff."

You didn’t even read my comment, so I give up. Ok, everyone just come to Seattle for their affordable housing, because DoreenMichele doesn’t want to think about the problem and would rather just throw half baked solutions at it.

Oh you don't understand? It's simple--BC's lawmakers were presented with the option of either making housing affordable nationwide or criminalizing drug use in their city. Darn lawmakers always picking wrong!

Housing is affordable in many cities where people don’t want to live, at least in the states. If everyone wants to live on the west coast though, is it even possible to just make housing more affordable on one place until everyone lives there? If not, it basically means you induce more demand with lower home prices, so you wind up trying to fit a hundred million people in a few big metros.

Lawmakers can’t magic up affordable housing, especially at the federal level. I get people have crazy ideas, but this is the craziest. We could do what Singapore or Austria does with a residency system, though, but progressives don’t like that either.

Hope it was obvious but I was being sarcastic. Suggesting we simply "fix housing" is akin to suggesting we just "eradicate poverty" when confronted with widespread, immediate famine.

Eh, either way my comment would have been the same. This is a wicked problem in the classic sense.

And then everyone clapped.

Me: "Thanks guys!"

I wish there was a sane and humane way of shutting off the infinite supply of out-of-state (and, increasingly, international) transients. Our homeless programs here in Portland are absolutely overwhelmed with people who arrive here daily from all across the country. Recent arrivals have been either a plurality or an outright majority of our homeless population for many years now.

I’d absolutely choose going all-in on affordable housing over a return to the war on drugs or doubling down on catastrophic decrim. But without limits on in-migration for social programs, the idea seems frustratingly doomed from the start.

Isn't that what you have a Federal Government for in the US? Naturally if just one city starts some programs it can't take on the entire US population of homeless people.

The solution to this in-migration should be clear. These programs need to be offered in every single city in the entire country. People need to pay more taxes to fund social programs. I'm clearly not American ;)

A federal solution is the only solution that has any chance of working. But I don’t see it as working without restrictions on migration, like a residency system of some kind. Not everyone gets to live in affordable Santa Barbara housing, obviously, some people have to live in Toledo or even Gary. Anything that isn’t market must be restricted in some way, even the USSR didn’t let everyone live in Moscow even though most wanted to.

Not sure how the USSR is relevant, in the USSR people had no freedom to choose anything.

But your point is valid. That said there's still probably enough friction in the system such that someone living in a certain place isn't just going to move to Santa Barbara. Moving is expensive and has uncertainties. People coming today to places like Portland or Vancouver, BC, are desperate. If they had some basic support where they're currently living they would be a lot less likely to take those risks.

Yes, but there are people where there is not much more friction than the cost or donation of a greyhound bus ticket, who we are talking about in this story. There is also a trend that people move to where their addiction isn’t going to get them thrown in jail, social services are better, and they won’t freeze to death outside in the winter.

I’m not sure if people would stay put in say great falls MT if the support was better. But even among the well to do housed, they often move from these towns because the economic opportunities are better in larger richer cities. People have freedom of movement in the USA and mostly use it across the economic spectrum.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the people on the street doing drugs have other issues. I live in Vancouver. People have mental health and other problems that aren't related to their housing status.

The problem isn't simply housing costs. The problem is the lack of a social support structure. Shelters, access to (mental) health care of various forms, addiction treatment etc... Even in "socialist" (ha) Canada you're mostly on your own. BC used to have more money for those things and at some point in the early 2000's those budgets were cut with pretty immediate impact on the homelessness situation. That said housing should be part of the solution but it all boils down to the attitude that you don't need to take care of ($$$) your neighbor. Each to their own. Worse in the US ofcourse but still.

When I came to Vancouver ~23 years ago I was absolutely shocked by the homeless situation. I've never seen anything like that. It's much worse now. Again, boils down to are members of society willing to take care of each other- or is it each to their own and ignore the people who are down. House prices were 1/8th of what they are now but there was no shortage of drug addicts on the streets. North Americans seem to generally be ok with having a mix of worse than the 3rd world alongside middle class and well off. Nobody cares about what goes on in their city. I guess not trending on TikTok.

Often the mentally ill drug addict you see today was the person evicted after a job loss yesterday. Homelessness hurts people.

I’m calling bullshit on this one. Too many examples on YouTube of folks interviewing homeless folks en mass and finding that the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning. The “functional” heroin users you may claim exist are almost always functional enough to not be homeless.

Houston for example simply throws your ass in jail if you’re doing drugs and houses you if you aren’t. They claim to have solved homelessness, and they have in that the actual folks you’re talking about end up housed or in shelters every night.

Being married to an immigrant who actually had to struggle in a third world country with almost no social or economic mobility has left me with almost no sympathy for the homeless in America. Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

> Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

> Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If these folks were screwed up from the beginning doesn't this mean they had no hand to play from the start?

There are many, many folks in third world countries that don't make it through life too well either. Life is pretty doomed for you if you're just born in Sudan right now for example. Yet some, very few, of them will succeed in extirpating themselves from the situation.

Statistically there will always be people who fare better than others, through a combination of sweat, blood, and luck. I don't know if it's fair to have "almost no sympathy" for the ones who were too stupid and unlucky to be winners.

TIL extirpating is a word!

Still I think you meant extricate.

Yes I did. Thanks.

This reeks of the American brain rot that views poverty as a personal moral failure. Some might couch it as "wealth is the result of hard work and talent". The latter is known as the myth of meritocracy. Those are two sides of the same coin.

Luckily, we have studies we can rely on rather than feelings or Youtuber anecdata eg [1]:

> In many instances, substance abuse is the result of the stress of homelessness, rather than the other way around. Many people begin using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with the pressures of homelessness

[1]: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless

I know it’s just more anecdata, but that just does not match my experience at all. I’ve known over a dozen people who have struggled with this over the years, become homeless, had drug overdoses, and several who’ve died.

Every single one of them had a home when they started using the hard drugs, and many had a home through most of their addiction, and only became homeless after the addiction had progressed to severe levels.

If most people have personal experience like mine, then maybe there are issues with the research (people blaming their personal failings on things outside of their control, for example)

> If most people have personal experience like mine

This seems anecdotal too. Very meta.

In any case, I'd rather trust actual research rather than a random HN user and what they feel most people's experiences are like.

It is silly to think that question is one that can be investigated by scientific inquiry. The only thing that study (which you haven't linked to) reveals are the opinions of those who funded it.

> the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

Those aren't mutually exclusive, and furthermore, they likely have major overlap.

> Sadly the only effective remedy for this behavior is to be roughed up by police and thrown in jail.

As clearly evidenced by decades of this very successful strategy.

Arguing that a random homeless drug addict with negative net social utility is entitled to housing on some of the most expensive land in the world is completely bonkers.

All human life is valuable. Measuring people's worth through "social utility" is such a fucked way to look at the world.

And yet you do it every day when you decide who to associate with and invite into your life and home.

Why can't the community do the same thing you do personally?

Should we kick out our children from our home who misbehave? Or do we try to teach them, and help them and let them grow.

Many (most?) of the homeless you see around you are your community. They don't need to be invited into the city because it's their home too.

I live in SF and I know homeless people who have lived on the same street corner longer than some of my coworkers have lived in the city (or even the country). Many of the people who experience such misfortunes - even drug addicts who behave poorly - are long-time residents who once helped make the city the place it is. Sure their behave causes issues, and society needs to do something, but implying they don't have a claim to be helped in their own city is unfair.

> Should we kick out our children from our home who misbehave? Or do we try to teach them, and help them and let them grow.

The second one. Over and over again. And when they are adults and we've given them a few more chances, we should then cut our losses. Many families go through the heartbreak which is trying again and again and failing. I don't judge those families, and know a few of those personally. And this is people's blood relatives. Extrapolate from that what you will.

If someone in my home is daily screaming at me, shitting on the floor, stealing things and threatening children - they're going. Roommate, relative, doesn't matter. They're out, or I am.

Someone's claim to live in a good community ends when they start actively destroying that community day after day. You get the community you work to build; you don't get to live in my wonderful community every day while you daily do horrifying things to ruin it.

This is the only way good communities can exist.

They only have net negative social utility at the moment, they have the potential to be productive citizens.

Plus, productive citizens need to share a society with the drug addicted homeless. That society is going to be more peaceful if the needs of those homeless are met.

Some of those people were around before it became some of the most expensive land in the world. Why should people be pushed out of their communities?

Because some people view privilege of any kind critically. Also, especially in North America, being some place first has not historically proven to be a sufficient claim.

Who would've thought that a lack of available housing implies fewer people in housing?

maybe the people downvoting you have some kind of skin in the game and are benefiting from the housing shortage

Portland is substantially cheaper than all the other areas and has a worse drug problem, so it doesn't seem correlated at all.

Portland was ranked #21 in the most expensive places to live [1].

[1]: https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/best-places-to...

Yeah, but compared to SF, Seattle, and Vancouver?

Not just unaffordable housing, but homelessness and addiction is a nationwide problem. Only a few cities try to do anything at all, while the rest of the country just pushes them toward those cities. No matter how much money a city throws at the problem, there’s no way it can ever deal with it at the volume necessary.

what comments like GP ignore is that there has been housing provisions for homeless/drug addicted population in the past and each time it did not alleviate any of its residence from their afflictions, instead these free housing units became just another bazaar, a place to do business.

98% of homeless people are addicts or mentally ill people. They can't hold a home no matter how cheap it is. Affordable housing won't stop homelessness, because drug addicts and mentally ill people will consume themselves and in the process lose everything including their housing.

I’d be mentally ill too if I had to live on the street.

I honestly never understood why, if I opened a beer in English Bay in Vancouver, I'd get approached in a matter of minutes to stop/throw away the beer and yet, sometimes a few meters from me, we could see people openly using drugs and doing all the things you can imagine in open air without any repercussions. People completely out of their minds, screaming, walking in the middle of traffic...

I've come to Canada from Brazil, so I know a thing or two about violence, so it saddens me to no end that here I have to tell my wife not to go on certain streets in the middle of downtown due to rampage drug usage by users. And not even bad downtown, fancy Vancouver downtown close to Yaletown and West End.

It is about time that this is addressed. These people need help but the way to way to help them is not to just let them use drugs and stay on the streets every single day.

There are some establishments in downtown Vancouver that I don't even go to anymore simply because of the normalization of open drug usage in Vancouver.

Something needs to change and I thing this is a good start, at least to get this people somewhere where we can then start working on getting them treated or properly helped.

The real reason is that you drinking a beer is easy to deal with at every level of escalation.

The homeless using drugs in the street are not.

Same reason normal, middle class people in decent vehicles get pulled over for expired tags or burnt out brake lights, yet the shit boxes with 3 tires and a plastic bag for a windshield keep on rolling.

One is likely to provide revenue to the local government. The other isn't.

Revenue? I thought the goal was public safety...

Why did you think that?

Ha! I actually let out a huge laugh when I read that. Good one.

If this wasn’t a cynical joke, I sincerely beg you to cover your eyes, plug your ears, and never again ask how the sausage is made.

The older I get, the more I can empathize with Cypher from the first Matrix movie. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

LOL. We actually have strong evidence that vehicle safety inspections do absolutely nothing to reduce accident rates and that's why 13 US states don't do them.

And yet, my level of danger to society is also close to zero.

This happened with me right after they reverted the pandemic decision to allow alcohol there and I didn't know. I was drinking in good faith like I did for several months when they allowed it during lockdown.

Still, it is very frustrating that the beer would warrant a couple of park rangers to approach and enforce, while just a few meters away someone was doing hard drugs visibly completely out of their minds and screaming at passer byes.

As someone who doesn't live in an area with a similar liberal law regarding drug use the article was very confusing to me. Perhaps you can help me understand.

The article keeps talking about "problematic" drug use, but I don't understand what that means. When is drug use problematic and when is it unproblematic? They claim that from now on they'll be able to arrest people who disturb the peace, but then aren't there laws already that already make it illegal to disturb the peace, irrespective of drug use? Is there a special kind of problematic behaviour that is not OK when consuming drugs, but is OK otherwise?? Having no experience with the situation, this all feels quite strange.

Same thing with hospitals: can't they just restrict the unmonitored use of drugs within medical facilities rather than some ambiguous notion of problematic use?

Overall, reading the article makes me feel that some people don't like seeing crackheads consume in public (which I understand), and since these people vote, a law is passed that had no head nor tail. I don't see how the law addresses the root of any issue.

I would classify unproblematic drug use like the majority of people who get high at home, house parties, or ravers rolling on X. Basically not being a nuisance to the public during/after they consume. Very subjective opinion though, so it’s hard to draw a line.

Problematic: it causes problems not just for you, who are choosing to take the drugs, but also for others. Perhaps that's because you've been on meth for 5 days and are now raving mad in the streets. Perhaps you've taken fentanyl in a public park and are leaning like a zombie on the playground. Perhaps you've fried your brain and are unable to work, only able to aggressively panhandle to feed your addiction.

But then why not make the problematic behaviour itself what is illegal? Aggressive panhandling should be illegal, regardless of whether the perpetrators were on drugs. It makes people, particularly those that are vulnerable to violent crime, unsafe. Make being raving mad in the streets illegal too. I am surprised that there isn't already a law in BC that does. With regards to being a zombie on public benches, it's hard for me to assess why that is problematic. On the other hand making drug use on children playground illegal seems like an elementary rule to me.

What I mean is that none of these issues seem to be really well addressed by the broad sweep of a "don't be problematic" law.

The issue isn't that there's no laws covering these transgressions. It's the lack of prosecution that's the main issue. Even if you arrest someone for aggressively panhandling they'll be released without bail that same day. This eliminates the incentive for police to do anything since the core issue is unresolved and they still have to process the arrest.

Right. So creating a new law won't change anything then? They should rather work on making sure the existing laws are being enforced.

How do you compel a prosecutor to bring a case forward, if they know the judge is likely to dismiss the case. It's a weird situation honestly where the laws exist, and police can enforce the law, but the judicial system turns a blind eye. It's a systemic issue starting at the federal level.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-bail-refo...

The article you link doesn't seem to be about the thing you're talking about. It's about whether the suspect is detained pending trial, not about whether they're ultimately convicted or acquitted.

Now of course, you could make the argument that detention pending trial is important because the actual sentence from conviction is too temporally remote from the criminal act to serve as an effective deterrent, but you didn't make that argument. If that's what you mean, you should state it explicitly!

Or, the article seems to also imply people aren't being found guilty or sentenced harshly when it talks about people "cycling in and out" of the justice system, but it doesn't seem to say this explicitly, as the focus of the article is on pre-trial detention. If what you're saying is in fact true, it would have been better to find an article that directly supports it.

(Although, wow, the numbers in there are ridiculous. 77% released on violent offense + breach of conditions??)

Prosecuting the negative behavior that comes from drug use is seen as being as bad as prosecuting the drug use itself. Yes, shoplifting should be a crime with consequences if you are rich, housed, unhoused, clean, or an addict, but the moment the city police crackdown on shoplifting they are accused by some people of going after homeless drug addicts.

They just put a new playground in at the Ballard Commons here in Seattle for the very reason you mention. It is publicly more acceptable to ban and actually prosecute anti social behavior near a playground with kids, than other places. This is the same commons that turned into a drug encampment for a couple of years during the pandemic, and the main reason they decided to put the playground in…

I see. Thanks for the explanation, it makes sense how the law on playgrounds would backfire.

It's still confusing to me that to prevent being accused of targeting homeless addicts they'd make homeless drug use illegal so to speak.

As a complete outsider, it's an interesting situation to try to understand. I appreciate the patience of people in this thread replying to my naive questions.

Drug use is already mostly decriminalized here, and there has been lots of problems as a result, the same ones they have in Vancouver and Portland. Instead, we are trying to prosecute the other stuff, like shoplifting, running around naked and threatening people with knives, etc…the playground helps with that, in that even drug addicts don’t want to freak out kids.

I am also from Brazil and have been in Vancouver for 10 years. This is a big exaggeration, both on the beer and the "areas to not go" (unless you mean some parts of East Hastings).

Vancouver is one of the safest cities in the world, and beers are now legal in many parks. I never saw a police ticketing or complaining someone having a beer on a park.

I do support this change in policy.

You must not get out often. The police roll down kits beach on ATVs looking to give out tickets for open alcohol throughout the summer.

Just go to English Bay on a sunny day and open a beer in the sand and see. Alcohol is prohibited there again since several months ago and being actively enforced.

Or check this https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/05-31-2021-update-regarding-t... and https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/new-lawsuit-targets...

I lived on Chilco & Nelson for many years... people simply have Starbucks cups with beer inside or other equivalent methodology of "wink wink". As long as you aren't being an ass there's zero problem..

> I honestly never understood why [...]

I can think of an explanation. Your addiction levels are likely to be very different. And therefore your body's ability to avoid your substance is likely to be very different from theirs. It doesn't seem unreasonable to receive more punishment when you have more control over your negative behavior.

> It doesn't seem unreasonable to receive more punishment when you have more control over your negative behavior.

This sort of thing never ends well

> It doesn't seem unreasonable to receive more punishment when you have more control over your negative behavior

I think it should be the opposite. Because I am superior, I should receive less punishment. Inferior people should receive more punishment so they are incentivized to become superior or disappear.

I can't tell what you're going for here (is this serious or sarcastic?) but I was just trying to explain a potential reason, not endorse or reject it.

I've often wondered what would happen if I plopped down on the steps of SF City Hall with a 6 pack and started downing them... ought to test it sometime.

Thailand is rolling back is rolling back it's legalisation of cannabis. Even though the industry brought in over a billion USD, it will be banned at the end of the year, citing protection of health of the youth after concern about the rapid chaotic introduction. Medical use is kept.

The Thai population seems to approve of the reversal. I think many places will be watching carefully after seeing how the experiment goes.

That's absolutely not the same situation and is irrelevant here.

Homeless people injecting heroin in bank vestibules, bleeding on the street, or smoking crack on sidewalks != middle class people smoking cannabis at home.

But Thailand is an extremely conservative country, and this decision is ultimately rooted in a moral judgement, not based on impact to the rest of society:

> “We drafted this law to prohibit the wrong usage of cannabis,” said the health minister Cholnan Srikaew, reported Reuters.

> “All recreational usage is wrong.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/10/asia/thailand-cannabis-revers...

I live in Thailand.

A roll back of the weed laws isn't entirely conservatism even though you are correct in that Thailand is a deeply conservative country.

The reason it's being walked away from is the same it was passed in the first place, politics. The previous election was even more of a sham then the most recent one. In order to win the junta party had to form a coalition with a party which favoured legalising weed, it's implied for personal monetary gain.

However the political landscape changed massively following the recent election where the progressive youth party won a majority but was denied government though the senate system setup by the junta to prevent exactly that outcome.

As a result though the previously very powerful populist party Phue Thai has returned to power and even brought their leader out of exile. Said leader is extremely anti-drug and is the primary reason why this law is now being revoked.

Weed usage is also just not popular among Thais. They prefer alcohol and kratom and see weed usage by tourists as mostly just a nuisance.

Thailand is a great case study of legalization being haphazardly rolled out without a framework.

Germany is still proceeding with legalization and Canada's legalization has largely been a success.

Victoria BC is the only place I've walked past someone smoking heroin out in the open on a busy city street. (Last October.)

I’ve seen this in Vancouver, Portland, and SF. Not saying it isn’t worse in Victoria, just that all these cities have a similar political leaning and policies, and have induced the same criminal behaviors.

Did the policies really induce the criminal behaviors?

Do sidewalks induce people to walk to the store?

Maybe induce is the wrong word? I’m not sure. What’s your perspective?

Yes. In Portland, the surrounding counties have much lower rates of issues.

every population center on the pacific coast is like this from Vancouver to San Diego

I've seen people smoking heroin on the subway, in the park, and various other public places in Oslo and yet public drug use isn't decriminalised here. Once you hit a certain low, you just stop caring, I suppose.

You see it occasionally in London, the usual deal is to pop into one of the old red telephone boxes for a toot.

I don't understand the Western approach to drugs. If what you value is individual liberty and the principles of self-ownership and not punishing victimless crimes, you decriminalize drug use. If what you value is the elimination of the individual and societal harms of drug addiction, you jail users and execute dealers like Singapore. The half-measures taken by Western governments seem to combine the worst aspects of every possible approach, both disrespecting the individual and failing to protect society.

Individual freedom should be restricted where your actions begin to harm the quality of life for others. Meaning camping on public sidewalks and parks, injecting drugs openly, panhandling, and other nuisances. Children shouldn’t have to walk through drug addict encampments on the way to school.

So drug use is OK as long as you can do it off the streets?

And of course, some drugs are more okay to do in public than others.

Some drugs lead to a lot more of anti social behaviors in public than others

Yes? Like shitting is OK as long as you do it in a toilet, and not on the sidewalk.

Drug use is ok as long as you are not harming/impeding the public.

Children shouldn't be afraid to walk down the street because it is filled with zombified addicts.

We don't allow public nudity, hate speech, etc etc.

You should be allowed to do as you wish in your private residence, as long as you are not harming society.

Seems like more of a homelessness problem than a public drug use problem.

Are we going to enforce public drunkenness laws too?

Public drunkenness laws are often more enforced than some of the drug laws (to be fair, some drugs just turn you into a comatose zombie).

We can point to homelessness, mental health, lots of things are related. However, the key is that the public need to be protected first, AND then we need to solve the other issues.

If public drunkenness was an issue and we had drunk people causing public safety issues, than yes, we would enforce public drunkenness, but that doesn't seem to be the issue.

Of course. I fully support weirdo silicon valley types taking drugs out in some desert far away from other people. Please just keep it there.

I find it notable that you threw in panhandling and "other nuisances" right up there with doing drugs in public. They don't seem comparable.

Why? The point is that it's all behavior that causes people to fear for their safety. I could care less if someone is on drugs or a drug user. What I do care about is public spaces being not safe because of the behavior of people in them.

Panhandling makes people fear for their safety?

Yes. Homeless folks are often erratic and dangerous to others.

So are teenagers, but I suspect you don't get spooked when they try to sell you candy bars or nag you for a signature.

There's value in being discerning about one's fears, and it's probably best to get a handle on the less justifiable ones before sending the state after people.

Normal teenagers are much less likely to assault you, in my experience.

And it wouldn't be reasonable or fair to judge all teenagers like those who are likely to, would it?

No. Of course not. Teenagers in an environment that is healthy where they are acting like well-adjusted human beings requires little to no scrutiny. Teenagers acting hostile and physically dangerous, yelling at passersby, and threatening violence deserve attention and scrutiny. In my case, the same pattern of thought and observation goes for homeless folks.

Somebody doing drugs behind the Walmart doesn't bother me. The endless stream of people at the gas station who "just need some money to get home" does bother me.

Some would argue their quality of life goes down more from not being able to get high in the street than everyone else's does from watching it.

Ultimately it's more a property rights issue imo.

>> injecting drugs openly

How does someone injecting drugs openly harm the quality of life for others? I can see it for the other things you mentioned.

Is it just, "I don't want to see that"? Because there are many things I don't want to see.

Not saying we shouldn't throw people in jail for drug possession. I'm OK with that. But if you're going to criminalize injecting drugs openly, you've got to live up to the fact that you're not a libertarian anymore.

Navigating around discarded needles is fun, even better when you have a curious dog that likes to sniff around.

If you want to enforce littering, enforce littering.

It would have the same effect as the drug laws?

Enforcing laws has a different effect than not enforcing laws.

What I mean to say is that when you start arresting homeless drug users for littering and public defecation and removing encampments due to environmental issues (which Portland has started doing since they can't just do it for being homeless), the same activist types come out and accuse the city of the same things as the drug legalization people.

You can say "oh well just enforce public disorder laws" and I actually agree with you, but the same groups behind drug legalization do not.

I spoke at the Portland city council hearing on this issue on Wednesday and the majority of groups there were criticizing the city's approach to removing individuals who were leaving needles or blocking sidewalks or setting up drug tents on school property.

The drug legalization is a dog whistle for what they really want.

It's easier to understand if you see people as divided rather than unified in a single direction. Stuff like this are the compromises between the 2 halves.

> victimless crimes

There's a grey area between 'completely victimless' and 'there was an individually identifiable victim'. Some things harm an undefined number of people by harming a collective resource. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

These aren't 'half-measures', they're a recognition of nuance.

I don't understand it either really, but this is about drug use in public spaces. In principle the focus isn't really even the drug use, it's the public order issue of having a bunch of people behaving badly in a public space. For some reason we've given all the power to people who want to abuse public spaces in the false name of compassion.

We've definitely tried the Singaporean approach for decades in the US during the war on drugs. There's people currently serving life sentences for possessing a meager amount of Marijuana. It turns out it's far more complicated than "just throw them in jail and the problem will fix itself." Singapore is almost the polar opposite of the US (and to a lesser extent Canada) and what works there won't necessarily work here because of that fact.

> We've definitely tried the Singaporean approach for decades in the US during the war on drugs. There's people currently serving life sentences for possessing a meager amount of Marijuana.

That’s not the Singaporean approach. The Singaporean approach is executing people for drug crimes. The US has never (to the best of my knowledge) executed anybody for a drug crime, as opposed to drug-related murders/etc.

Not saying the US should emulate Singapore - I personally believe the death penalty is immoral and should be abolished - but the US has never adopted Singapore’s approach

Fair enough and some how I don't think that's the missing piece here given the number of drug users and dealers we've locked away for extended periods of time.

If life imprisonment is not a deterrent then why would the death penalty be?

I don't think anything is much of a deterrent, because that overestimates the extent to which criminals are rational agents.

But there is a massive difference between life imprisonment and the death penalty – with life imprisonment, there is always the possibility of some day getting out due to a commutation, a change in the law, etc. Whereas, once someone is executed, they are dead.

Many of the problematic drug users get arrested frequently, including for violent crimes. It doesn’t need to be a deterrent to “work”.

By that logic life imprisonment would work.

Because a good amount of people on life imprisonment end up ... leaving jail. Also, there is a quiet movement to end life sentencing in this country, including releasing people. There's no movement to 'undead' people that has any scientific merit.

> The Singaporean approach is executing people for drug crimes.

No, that's not the Singaporean approach.

The death penalty is reserved for very few circumstances - smuggling large quantities or dealing in large quantities.

3,101 "drug abusers" were arrested in Singapore in 2023. Only a few were executed and they tend to be high profile smuggling cases.

Drug users are usually sent to mandatory treatment (basically prison + drug treatment). There are plenty of users who end up getting caught several times.

Even dealing in small quantities of drugs results in prison, not execution.

https://www.cnb.gov.sg/docs/default-source/drug-situation-re...

> The death penalty is reserved for very few circumstances - smuggling large quantities or dealing in large quantities.

Last year, Singapore executed a woman for possessing 31 grams of heroin. [0] Who considers 31 grams of anything a large quantity? Well, in Singapore, trafficking over 30 grams of heroin is considered a "large quantity" with a mandatory death penalty – and all the prosecution has to prove is possession, once that is proved, trafficking is legally presumed.

This is the amounts, possession of which gets you mandatory death penalty in Singapore: 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine, 250 grams of meth, or 500 grams of cannabis. [1] Those amounts aren't large, they are trivial. They are kinds of quantities that small time drug dealers would possess, but large scale drug traffickers would scoff at. As of August last year, there were 50 people on death row in Singapore, and only 3 of those had been convicted of murder, the other 47 had been convicted of non-violent drug crimes.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/28/singapore-woma...

[1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/singapore-announces-plans-...

> Those amounts aren't large, they are trivial.

Those are quantities no user would reasonably have in their possession. Even small time dealers could skirt under those numbers.

Note these are counted as the "pure" amount, not like the US where they include the cuts.

So 15 grams of heroin would be >1,000 doses. 250 g of meth would be 10,000 doses.

And sure most of Singapore's death row are drug offenses, but Singapore has almost no crime otherwise, so comparing it to murder (<10 per year) isn't a good comparison.

Singapore is very harsh for drug smuggling, but drug use or small time dealing? They do treatment and short jail sentences.

> Even small time dealers could skirt under those numbers.

Just because a small-time dealer could skirt under those numbers, doesn't make someone who exceeds them not a small-time dealer.

Particularly consider there is a mandatory death penalty for possession of 500 grams of cannabis – and that says nothing in terms of "purity", low THC or high THC it is all the same.

According to [0] a "pound" of weed in California costs between US$200 and US$1400, depending on quality and potency. US marijuana dealers define "pound" as exactly 448 grams (as opposed to the modern Anglo-American avordpouis pound of 453.59237 grams). So, given that, the price of 500 grams works out to between (lets round up a little) US$225 and US$1565.

You think under US$2000 of marijuana is "too much" for a "small time" dealer to possess? No. You'd need to possess a lot more than that to count as a large scale dealer, or even a medium scale one. Yet Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for it. Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for small-scale marijuana dealing.

[0] https://www.vibebycalifornia.com/the-cost-of-cannabis-how-mu...

I don't disagree that the marijuana death penalty is excessive.

But I wouldn't compare the Singapore drug market to the US one. They are nowhere close to the same.

Costs are way higher and users are lower in number. You don't see seizures of tons of cocaine like you do in the US, it's likely hundreds of grams.

If they set "dealer quantities" of those drugs to be the same as the US, nobody would be a dealer.

> Costs are way higher and users are lower in number

According to a 2023 Straits Times article [0], 3g of cannabis in Singapore costs S$50, which is about US$37.

So a death penalty quantity of marijuana would cost about S$8300, which is about US$6100. (Probably less than that actually because, as with everything, the larger the purchase the lower the per-unit price.) Still nowhere near being "large scale".

[0] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/buying-cannabis-onlin...

Well, I don't think Singapore sets the death penalty based on dollar value of drugs.

And you ignored my comment on quantity.

Nobody is dealing in multiple kilograms of marijuana in Singapore. But that's super common in the US.

The government looked at what quantities users typically have versus dealers, and set the limit accordingly.

> And you ignored my comment on quantity.

Because, we are talking about a government killing people – I myself will say murdering people – over a plant. All your quibbles and defences are just irrelevant when you look at the big picture of what they are doing.

> All your quibbles and defences

We're not talking about a defense of the law, we are talking about Singapore's rationale of why they came up with those quantities.

And I would have thought when I said "I don't disagree that the marijuana death penalty is excessive." it was pretty clear I don't agree with it. I personally feel that killing someone over smuggling is absurd. Jail them if you feel they need punishment, but killing them isn't justice.

You also have to actually do it and not just say you're doing it. There's no point in jailing people for marijuana possession while parts of the government are selling cocaine to generate revenue.

I sure hope drugs include alcohol in this context? It's quite strange how, where I live, a drunk driver can keep their driver's license, whereas a tiny trace of drugs costs people their driver's license and lands them in jail. Obviously unrelated to public spaces, but it goes to show the favoritism in drug legislation.

Discrimination and favoritism are not by definition bad. E.g., I favor vegetarian over meat, wit over insult, health over sickness. I do agree that driving under influence, as well as dangerous driving, should lead to clear punishments, in particular regarding the driving license.

encouraging drug usage leads to societal deterioration by the very fact that these substances degrade the brain, so the person that is using them. it should have never been decriminalized.

You can’t drink alcohol publicly so you shouldn’t be able to do drugs publicly. I live in BC - it’s ridiculous. I seriously do not care anymore it needs to end now.

Find a way to better address the source of the issue for future generations. It is too late for these people.

And before someone thinks they are clever - wait until you either have kids in the area, or walk a dog. It’s complete horseshit.

The source of the issue is that opioids exist.

Opioids are useful but they have literally been a thorn in the side of mankind's existence since their discovery by Europeans (arguably even before). They have caused no end of trouble. People criticize Asia for its handling of drugs but they do that because they've been through exactly this. Literally exactly this just a few hundred years ago. They fought wars over it and it arguably caused the Communist revolution in China, and the ending of an almost 5000 year old unbroken polity. These are smart, accomplished , compassionate cultures and they've basically all settled on the same solution.

Interesting argument!

Weakness is the root of all failings. Don't know how to fix that, though.

Drugs are bad. For you personally and for society in general.

Period.

Only ignorant or malicious people bring arguments against it.

Yes, this point can itself be taken too far and radicalized. There are no idiot-proof ideas.

Sorry to disappoint dear downvoters.

But i speak both from experience (personal and some brilliant friends lost to drugs) and common sense.

And this should be reflected somehow in legal and social norms.

The following are drugs [0]:

* Heroin

* Meth

* Crack

* Cocaine

* Cannabis

* Cigarettes

* Alcohol

* Coffee

* Sugar

There is also fat and salt which while necessary to life, are also habit-forming in the excess and negatively affect humans.

Pray tell where you would like to draw the line of which drugs you would ban for the benefit of society.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug

> A drug is any chemical substance that when consumed causes a change in an organism's physiology, including its psychology, if applicable

This is not a serious argument. Are you suggesting the distinction between heroin and salt is arbitrary, on the scale of good-vs-bad for humans and society?

No, I'm saying that the balance between "<substance is so harmful in it's effects that it's beneficial to society to eradicate it outright>" and "<substance is harmful to the individual but in a free society we have body autonomy>" is a spectrum.

On one extremes we have substances that people would pretty universally agree which of the buckets they'd put them into.

But where in the middle the balance shifts from one to the other is fairly controversial. Heroin decriminilization is controversial. Banning excessively large soda drinks is controversial.

Everyone agrees cigarettes and alcohol are harmful, and probably wouldn't be legal if they were invented today but noone seriously suggests criminalizing them.

My point with OP that treating all "drugs" so black-and-white is harmful without more nuanced discussion. Do they believe cannabis be illegal but cigarettes legal? I don't know.

Are you ignorant or malicious? )

Yes, alcohol and cigarettes should be controlled too. They are as bad to society as marijuana etc.

And one day we’ll also realize how harmful uncontrolled and excessive sugar in every product is too.

Jokes aside, the line is much more clear than drug defenders and beneficiaries are trying to frame.

Did you know of anyone who sent their life down the toilet due to coffee?

At the same time how many people you think are dying every day from diabetes, obesity and lung cancer?

Not to mention all people who ruined their lifes because of alcoholism, marijuana etc.

What other “nuances” do you need?

> Not to mention all people who ruined their lifes because of alcoholism, marijuana etc.

Thank you for making my point for me.

Are we talking about criminalizing alcohol? Should we be?

If the line is clear, please draw it. Show me which on this list what you would criminalize, which you would ban (but not criminalize), which you would regulate, and which you would allow completely unregulated.

I might actually agree with your list entirely!

But most people that call things "drugs" without nuance also include marijuana without any nuance. And either don't include alcohol for cultural/subjective reasons or DO include it, without consequence to the reality of prohibition.

It is a gradient rather than black/white

Higher the severity of the drug -> the more controlled and frowned upon it should be.

And more importantly it should be a widespread common knowledge in society that there are no harmless drugs. There are always tradeoffs (even with coffee).

And all addictive or destructive drugs should be banned except some narrow exceptions for specific reasons (like psychodelics reasearch in psychaitry etc.).

How exactly it is implemented - depends on the specific context. No universal solutions.

For example in the middle east gashish and weed were historically much more common than alcohol, so it doesn't make sense (and will not work anyway) to impose severe punishment for it there.

While it would definitely benefit western/northern countries to prevent spreading of it and instead allowing alcohol for adults etc.

The only thing that will work is if you get rid of the reasons why hoards of people do drugs in the first place.

That is likely incredibly complex - beyond the ability of any government (many of which actively contribute to the destruction of society and increased drug/suicide rates) - and very expensive.

Catch and release. I was (and still am) a proponent of decriminalizing small use and non-distribution; or at least something else.

But certain class of drugs are just too much.

US and Canada should invest more in finding a treatment for opioid addiction. A drug that cures heroin addiction would save so many lives and helps people reach their true potential.

There is a treatment for opioid addiction, it's called methadone. It works very well and it takes a very long time. The US actually did exactly what you said, it was American doctors and universities who developed the programs now used around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_agonist_therapy

Are alcohol restrictions combined with this law, or unhinged?

This is not a problem British Columbia has. Alcohol consumption and selling is already quite restricted in BC.

I mean, { may I have / may I not have } a beer in exactly all the places where someone else { may | may not } enjoy non-alcohol drugs?

If it's not consistent, what is the rationale?

A beer is not as addictive as Heroin. Drinking a beer is not going to ruin your life.

Fantastic news! So, in British Columbia, may I enjoy one next to someone who is doing heroin, and is allowed to? (Getting tired of clarifying my unanswered question.)

As far as I know, there are only a handful of places in Vancouver where you can have alcohol in public. https://vancouver.ca/streets-transportation/alcohol-consumpt...

So, the answer is: no. People smoking meth today do so freely in and around the Skytrain stations where alcohol is not allowed.

It is consistent after this change, yes. Or even better for beer, since there are parks you can have a beer.

Instead of making it legal to consume drugs in public spaces, they need only have made it necessary for the law enforcement to prove that a person is a drug dealer rather than a user - example: by the weight of drugs being carried, by showing evidence that a person was actually selling/distributing the drugs etc

OK. But only if you include tobacco and alcohol.

And caffeine!

would drinking coffee make me shit on the sidewalk, while others are looking at me?

If you have a sensitive stomach, it might...

This. My best friend in high school is now living on the streets somewhere in LA, stealing ("boosting") whatever he can to fund his Starbucks macchiato addiction.

And sugar

Tobacco are fairly quickly being outlawed all over the world. In my country you can not smoke in public spaces, rented apartment, restaurants, mass transits, or the work place (unless there is designated smoking areas, which the work place is not required to build and basically no new building have). That mostly leaves streets, private own homes, and private cars, with the later two shrinking significant in second hand value if a smoker owned it. It should also be noted that all tobacco products is plastered with warning labels, and the tax is more than 100%. It is estimated that tobacco will be more or less eliminated within current generation.

Alcohol is taking a bit longer time but consumption has been shrinking fairly fast the last decades. Very high taxes and strict laws regarding who can sell it, where, when, and to whom are also already in place. There is also laws against production for personal use.

The way that people describe degenerate behaviour online baffles me.

They are humans just like you and I. They can choose, as you and I do, not to engage in this sort of nonsense.

To pretend that they are somehow some sort of different species and can't help themselves is abhorrent to me.

are they running out of outside places?????

Finally they are doing something sensible. Get rid of the injection houses too, please.

The previous US system was ideal: drugs are punished, but the rich get away with it. What this meant what that if you had sufficient assets to take care of you, you could get away by using those assets. This is a smart system. We do it for accredited investors.

Let me post a bond and I'll be fine. People act as if these things are addictive, but at various times I gave up tobacco and oxycodone and alcohol quite easily. Even after being administered fentanyl I didn't try it again despite easy availability.

I am clearly superior in this respect and should not be constrained by those who don't have these skills.

I'm aware sarcasm translates terribly through screens but just wanted to throw in a word of caution, it's very much possible to be prescribed opioid painkillers after a terrible accident and still get "used" to them. (Fortunately it was quickly recognized and tapered off.)

Haha, I know. That's why I was on the fent and on the oxy. It's really easy to stop.

I still don't know if any of those things actually happened or if you were being sarcastic.

And I would never deny you the sweet pleasure of that uncertainty.

I think I like you. :)

he says fentanyl is easy to stop, so obviously sarcasm

I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but I unironically agree. I'm not some prude. If you really are capable of drug use, go for it. I think it would be fine to develop responsible systems to allow responsible people to use it in a safe manner. Usually this would mean rich people with land or yachts. Please take your LSD trips on international waters somewhere. I don't care

And that's the beauty of it. If you could not tell if it's satire or not, then you join the ranks of all those who cannot tell whether I've used the drugs or not. That's America's true condition to use drugs. There must be no externally detectable effect you can observe.

And that's exactly how it should be. I will sometimes read articles attempting to deflect from the problem of street users by claims that successful people somewhere use drugs quietly without anyone knowing. I honestly don't care if all these people are high as a kite. I really only care about people on the street ruining the cities.

>That's America's true condition to use drugs. There must be no externally detectable effect you can observe.

Well said, though I'd use language with a bigger tent: "That's America's true condition to use intoxicants."

As for the wit, its a fun game you play here with other commenters. Everyone reading through this would likely enjoy the long form of this from The Onion, 20 years ago:

Drugs Now Legal If User Is Employed

>"If you are paying taxes and keeping your yard tidy, we're not going to hassle you if you come home from a hard day of work and want to enjoy a little pot or blow. But if, on the other hand, you're one of these lazy, shiftless types hanging out on the street all day looking for your next high, we're coming after you."

https://www.theonion.com/drugs-now-legal-if-user-is-employed...

You're just describing "living in a society". The more extreme the behavior, the less tolerance there is for someone doing it publicly. There's a non-zero number of coprophiliacs in the US, but as long as they indulge in their fetish in the privacy of their own home nobody really cares.

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