Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo'd out of some Libertarian ideal (let alone a Scottish one). It's poo-poo'd because it's seen as an ineffective fix for addiction. This is largely true, but the activists forgot that a lack of drug enforcement can ruin city centers.
Reform should start in our incarceration system not in crime enforcement but I digress.
America is unable to figure out its systematic prejudices, therefore cannot adopt “tough on crime” policies (like Singapore’s)
Do you really think Singapore doesn’t have systemic prejudices?
America's always are.
Singapore is less violent only because the minority communities aren’t able to actually fight back, not because they don’t get smacked down. By the police.
Conflict is inevitable when there is both misaligned incentives and either hope of victory, or such a lack of hope that there is nothing left to lose.
Singapore is a good example of having-enough-to-lose-it’s-not-worth-fighting, and no-hope-of-success-in-getting-anything-else. Not an example of no-smackdowns-occurring.
Much of the black/police and black/black violence in the US is caused by many of the communities being in the nothing left to lose state. At least for many of its members. And having enough tools at their disposal to cause violence, with a weak enough set of policing to not actually subjugate the communities entirely.
Singapore is a small island with a quite authoritarian (defacto) dictatorship (I still love you Singapore, despite this! But you know it’s true.) with extremely heavy arms controls. Seriously, if you read the gun laws and saw how heavy enforcement was, you’d understand.
Literally the best ‘bad’ folks can muster, even with concerted effort, is the occasional starter pistol, modified air soft gun, or some knives. The police have machine guns.
Those bring down a lot of said drug problem... Externally.
The west's approach is kind of the opposite: actively go after the sources of drugs, and to leave the users relatively alone. On a moral level this is appealing because the users are victims. However on a practical level it doesn't seem to work as well because it's swimming against the economic current.
We have slowly realized this doesn't really work.
Instead we are moving towards harm reduction but that's easier said than done and I think we will see a new approach towards drug selling.
In the case of drug enforcement, the idea was to decriminalize and destigmatize drugs so that persons addicted to them could seek treatment and rehabilitation. Problem is, that also requires public money be spent on rehabilitation programs. It's cheaper for the state to just get people high and let them die.
Same thing with "defund the police", which had an implicit "and use the money to fund mental health programs" at the end of it, along with prescriptions to fund deescalation training for whatever cops we still needed. All the Twitter activists heard this, they chanted "defund the police" as if everyone else had too, but that memo didn't reach the desk of any of the mayors who actually tried these programs. To make matters worse, a lot of city police departments took this literally, deliberately, to discredit anti-police activism. So the cops effectively punished the city for speaking out against them.
The underlying problem is that communicating these problems in a way that's succinct enough to resist malicious interpretation, without it coming off as a way to dodge the blame for your own problems, is very difficult. You are not entitled to make others think or speak the way you do. Concepts you invent will be reinterpreted however people like unless you drown them in so much French that only your own apparatchiks can understand them[0]. In other words, these are shibboleths - terms that exist solely for an in-group to identify themselves to one another.
Here's the thing: this is great for MEGO[1] and terrible activism. When Louis Rossmann wants to point out how companies are retroactively changing the deal, he doesn't say it's wrong to do that, he says the CEOs have a "rapist mentality". When Cory Doctorow wants to talk about how Internet platforms get worse and worse, he talks about "enshittification[2]". These coinages work because they leverage the listener's existing understanding of those concepts. Semantic drift works to their advantage: someone misusing "enshittification" to refer to, say, inflation, rather than the gradual demise of Internet platforms, is continuing the analogy.
[0] More generally, habitual insistence on the use of one's idiolect - especially one crafted to motte-and-bailey your unsavory opinions - is a sign of an abusive personality. Yes, that's a dig at RMS.
[1] "My Eyes Glaze Over", aka "disguising heinous shit behind boring language"
[2] Enshittification is a particularly funny one, because it's exactly the sort of fancy French word you'd expect, but with a nice Anglo-Saxon swear word in it.
I take your point about the capacity never having built but the activists also have to admit that the “seeking” also never happened and we simply haven’t solved that problem (how do you solve addiction for someone who doesn’t want it solved? You can’t)
But we should, now, save our cities.
This is just not true:
>> Subsidies for drug treatment are by far the fastest-growing major component of federal spending on drug abuse. Advanced by many policy makers as the key to curbing drug use, federal expenditures for drug treatment have risen by 341 percent since 1986 -- 20 percent faster than the total drug budget, 30 percent faster than spending for drug law enforcement and 700 percent faster than overall federal spending. This year, the federal government will spend more than $1.1 billion on treatment. (These figures exclude spending for drug treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Owing in part to the extraordinary success of drug testing and other drug prevention programs in the military, spending has grown much more slowly in the VA than the overall rate of government spending.) And Drug Czar Bob Martinez is calling for more spending on education and treatment
Like most things, you can't just throw money at it and expect it to magically get better. There are a ton of resources out there but there needs to be willingness on the participant. Since there's no stigma attached to public drug use and normalization of being an addict, there's even less pressure for people to get treatment so the money is pretty much wasted on every growing bureaucracy and the administrative class
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-case...