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
Apparently I got out before it got really bad, too
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.
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.
I'm sorry, it's just not that simple.
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.
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.
There has never been one :)
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 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.
Nice idea, I like it too.
Anything I can think of ends up either too authoritarian (no path to redemption) or too chaotic (see the article above).
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
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 can’t speak for others, but that’s a step too far for me.
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
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.
Want to fix this? Start with the problems in society that lead to it.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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?
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".
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
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...
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.
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.
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.