I wrote an exact same response to a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19682651
I am not against drugs, I have plenty of friends who are responsible users. I am not for death penalty (I think I know which comment you are referring to, that was a Devil's Advocate).
edit: as per wikipedia [1] there are ~7k homeless people living in San Francisco. As per the same article it is said that SF spends $241M on homeless people. This averages out to ~34.5k$/year ~= $2870/month. I will never believe that average homeless person is getting $2870 worth of goods and services per month. I'm saying that your homeless program is grossly inefficient. The same way as your drug war is an utter joke.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
Hmm. Is that something you do often? Why not just say you disagree with him instead of the need to point out his nationality. That looks like xenophobia at first glance.
You can check my post history to see if I frequently reference someone's nationality in a context where it isn't directly relevant to the topic at hand. I await your report.
See, I'll take your word for it, because I think it is a little creepy checking people's post history.
It's not creepy. It's part of having a responsible and informed dialogue.
I failed to see how this was an informed and responsible dialogue. I think we might have a different perception of those terms.
Indeed, it sounds crazy. In fact, it's very close to the cliché definition of insanity: what you are proposing has been done over and over again, without a single successful example of prohibition in all of western political history.
But more than crazy, what you're suggesting sounds childish, expensive, and complicated. It does not sound like sober thinking about effective public policy to deal with the consequences of addiction.
A contrasting approach which is mature, affordable, and simple, is to legalize all plants and to create a controlled, safe market for plant derivatives like heroin. This will have the impact that is most important: it will disrupt the income stream of the drug cartels and dealers who, as I'm sure you already know, share your policy approach quite passionately.