The obvious question to ask is if the rampant drug abuse and overdoses in SF is due to decriminalization or something else? And has decriminalization made the situation better or worse?
I would argue that to prevent unintentional overdoses the best thing to do (other than improve people's lives so they don't feel a need for substances that could be harming them) is to legalize these drugs, make them pure, clearly label them, and educate people on how much of a dose in what circumstances would be an overdose.
That alone would greatly reduce the harm, and be much more effective than making/keeping these drugs illegal and forcing their users to play the lottery with a mystery drug of unknown purity and dosage every time they snort or inject.
That's not to mention the harm of being shot or assaulted by the police during an arrest for drug use, your life being ruined by a felony conviction, possibly getting raped, tortured or murdered in prison, being kept out of the legal economy afterward you get out (if you get out) because of a felony conviction, etc..
I’m actually not sure how anyone knows this for sure, I haven’t seen the evidence first hand. But according to our board of supervisors 80% of the Walgreens robberies are tied to organized crime. The gangs get money and power from selling drugs that are decriminalized, and then find new ways to make more money like robbing stores.
Also, the same line of thinking that doesn’t think you should penalize the addict for doing something wrong like taking drugs in the first place, is easily extended to also saying we that robbing a store is a minor offense and we shouldn’t penalize anybody for that either.
The stated intent of decriminalization, redirecting resources from enforcement to treatment, switching to a public health strategy, is harm reduction.
We still don't know what will reduce use and abuse. Whatever the merits of the War on Drugs, it manifestly failed to reduce either.
Public health systems have shown they can do a pretty good job given a miracle vaccine to work with. Short of that, not so much. And unfortunately we don't yet have a shot that cures drug abuse.
A little more specifically, I don't think the lack of availability of rehab programs is what is the problem here, and that's about all public health could offer.
This has to be a joke, right? Which countries?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-19/norway-to...
If anyone find it more than a bit ironic then we agree.
This is quite a straw man, not wanting to decriminalize all drugs is not the same as thinking the War on Drugs is a good thing. (And it's not like there is one particular policy that on its own constitutes the "War on Drugs", so this is a very vague statement anyway).
It's also interesting to me that in many other arguments, the liberal/progressive side likes to (rightly) highlight other countries that have done a better job and present an example to follow. Not so with drug laws, because there are no such clear examples of success. There are countries with much less of a drug problem than the US which have much harsher drug penalties (like Japan and Singapore). Then there is the most popular example on the other extreme, Portugal, where it is not at all clear whether their decriminalization policy worked or not [0].
US society clearly seems to be moving in the direction of legalizing less harmful substances like weed and relaxing criminal penalties for small scale possession, which I believe are good things. But I don't see any reason to believe that decriminalizing everything would make things better. At the local level, US cities where opiates are effectively decriminalized like SF have horrible outcomes when it comes to drug abuse and overdoses.
[0] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets...