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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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 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

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.

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.

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