Then society is asked to fork over a lot of resources to rehabilitate addicts as it is their responsibility for them getting addicted. Criminalization of hard drug use in that case is simply an attempt to save money.
The current fentanyl epidemic in drug decriminalized Seattle is an example of how messed up decriminalization can get. The resulting society costs (including a rise in property and violent crime) then lead to a backlash on decriminalization and we should be back to square one shortly in an election or two.
I’m not familiar with what you refer to in Canada. In any case I absolutely don’t want hard drugs to be legalised and marketed like alcohol, I’m talking about something like clinics providing for free in proper doses for those that come seeking. It’s fine to have harsh penalties for those that try to supply outside of that.
Drug rehabilitation costs for fentanyl are very costly and most of those people aren’t coming back even with those resources. They are simply gone.
Rehab isn’t free, and I don’t think we can afford it on a large scale. People eventually have to take responsibility for their decisions, and the no coming back aspect is definitely a deterrent (whenever we encounter a person in crisis, which sadly is often these days, I make a point of telling my 5 year old that this is where drugs get you).
I also want to point out that this is a huge cop-out, pun absolutely intended. If you put in people in prison, you are effectively putting them in rehab unless you're planning on giving prisoners fentanyl.
Rehab is very often the way that people address really serious drug problems, even when they're taking responsibility themselves for the treatment. Saying that rehab is too expensive for the state to bear is effectively saying that these people shouldn't go on rehab at all, because if the state can't afford it, then the broader community of drug-addicted unhoused people definitely can't.
Is the alternative that they just get left on the street? That's not what anybody wants, including the tough-on-crime people. I'm trying to figure out how someone can have a concern about the scalability of rehab and not have a concern about the scalability of prison/arrests, which are effectively trial costs + admin costs + housing costs + rehab costs + probation/enforcement costs.
The way I see it, if you've got someone on the street and they're drug addicted, you have basically two options: you can leave them on the street, or you can pay to get them off of the street. Telling them to have responsibility doesn't really solve the problem, if they're addicted to fentanyl that's probably not something they can fix on their own. In my mind, I see "tell them to take responsibility, it's not our problem to solve" as equivalent to "leave them on the street" -- and I don't think that's what most Californians want.
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Like, some people support criminalization because they think that prison is a more effective rehabilitation. I think the evidence is kind of against them on that, but I at least understand the reasoning. And even those people would agree that as far as rehabilitation goes, prison is more expensive in the short term. They just argue that the long-term effectiveness for individuals/communities makes the long-term cost of prison/criminalization less in the long run. Which is again something people can debate, but it's a very different argument than telling people to "take responsibility" for themselves -- being imprisoned/arrested is pretty much by definition the state taking responsibility for you.
Ah, I think you missed what I wrote above: rehab often doesn't work. I didn't say what we should do afterwards, just that if you get involved in fentanyl, you have a good chance of simply never getting over that.
Rehab is not only expensive, it is not effective. There is also an element of individual choice: given a choice between going to rehab and staying on the streets so they can do more drugs, a lot of people simply don't want to bother with rehab. Throwing resources at these people...we can do, we are doing that, to the tune of ~$100k/year, but much of that is simply not effective because they aren't aligned with what the person under treatment wants. So you don't want to tell them to take responsibility, then what? Force rehab on them somehow since they aren't expected to do any effort in themselves? Can forced rehab work?
Criminalization of drugs is simply because (a) people don't make the best decisions, (b) we all have to pay for those mistakes. If you can't "take responsibility" for your own behavior, society has to take that responsibility for you.
I don't understand how you think that criminalization means we don't have to pay for those mistakes. Putting people in prison is expensive, it isn't free. And then they eventually come out of prison. So unless you're planning on keeping them in prison indefinitely, you have just paid more money for what is effectively a temporary rehab. And if the plan is to keep them in indefinitely... that is very, very expensive to do.
> If you can't "take responsibility" for your own behavior, society has to take that responsibility for you.
But you're arguing we don't have means to do that. You're arguing that rehab doesn't work and is too expensive, and that instead we should put people in prison which will be... permanent rehab? Temporary rehab that also doesn't work? Except more expensive for the state?
The disconnect here is that you're arguing that we can't treat addiction because it's too expensive and doesn't work, and the alternative you're proposing is a system where we either temporarily or permanently take responsibility for someone's entire life, which is both wildly expensive for us to do, and in the case of temporary prison sentences is likely (and in fact when you look at the statistics on rehabilitation after prison, arguably more likely) to have the same outcome.
> I didn't say what we should do afterwards
I don't understand, what we do afterwards is the only part of this conversation that seems to actually matter. People are already on the street addicted to fentanyl, you can either leave them there or the state can try to expend money/resources getting them off of the street and dealing with that addiction. Telling them to have personal responsibility is leaving them there.
Which, fine, I guess, but again I just don't think that's an outcome most people in California (or anywhere else) want, regardless of how sympathetic they are or aren't towards those people.
If you think prison is effective rehab and that it's worth the increased cost, then fine, say that, but again, that's just a very, very different argument from saying that we should criminalize drug use because it's too expensive for the state to take responsibility for other people. Criminalizing drug use is the state taking responsibility for other people on the taxpayer's dollar.
Of course, it isn't free. It is cheaper than what we are currently accomplishing through the homeless industrial complex ($10k/month just for a place to park a derelict RV at a recent project), so let's not kid ourselves that prison is more expensive than the alternatives: it isn't. Someone inside also can get treatments and will find it much harder to acquire drugs (fentanyl is much more expensive in prison and very cheap outside of prison).
> But you're arguing we don't have means to do that.
No, we are arguing about where that responsibility should be taken: when they want to go to rehab (which they may never want), or before they actually start doing drugs.
> People are already on the street addicted to fentanyl, you can either leave them there or the state can try to expend money/resources getting them off of the street and dealing with that addiction.
We have fewer options than that. Usually its a combination of both: the state (actually the city) expends money to deal with the addiction, but they are back on the street in a couple of weeks because they want more drugs and we can't actually force them to let us deal with their addiction (no criminalization = no judge to force rehab, of course).
> If you think prison is effective rehab and that it's worth the increased cost
Prison is cheaper than what we are spending on the problem right now. We've passed that point a few years ago.
I don't think I've heard even the strictest pro-prison people try to seriously make the argument that prison is cheaper than housing for the same time periods of detention. Prison is really expensive, it's in a lot of ways a strict superset of housing. Even just holding people in preparation of a trial and getting them convicted is really expensive. Where are you getting these numbers from?
> No, we are arguing about where that responsibility should be taken
I mean, if you want to argue about that, sure. But my argument is that they're on the street right now and saying that they should have avoided getting addicted to drugs in the past is not particularly useful to the current conversation unless you have a time machine handy.
> no criminalization = no judge to force rehab, of course
Look, this is just a different argument. Are you arguing that rehab does actually work, but we need criminalization so we can force it? I have seen people argue that point, but it's not really an argument about personal responsibility, it's an argument that the state should have even more involvement in rehabilitation than it currently does.
Regarding the cost, of course that should be taken into consideration but I don’t understand how it can be that expensive. Or rather, I understand how it can be but there is no good reason for it to be. The state has all means to commission drug manufacturers to provide it cheaply for this purpose. It is in fact very important that there exists no monetary incentive for any industry to sell drugs to these clinics.
Regarding people not coming back, that is incredibly tragic, yet it’s still better to keep them “contained” rather than leaving them to procure their next fix on their own by any means necessary.
It may be of interest to you to learn there are a number of countries in the world that manage to provide their people with tax funded healthcare at little or no cost to recipients, without excessive taxation and while being generally pretty good places to live.
Not going to get into a long conversation about it beyond just saying that this is a statement that needs a lot of qualifiers and shouldn't just be taken completely at face value. There are significant debates about what is fueling some of Seattle's current problems, and whatever people's ultimate opinions on who is right and wrong about those debates -- the debates do exist and should be taken somewhat seriously.
ISeattle's drug policies obviously have some effect on the rest of the city because of course crime policy will have some effect on a city in some kind of direction, but it's just a hugely complicated topic, and stuff like "a rise in property and violent crime" very clearly have multiple inputs playing into them and pretty obviously aren't solely the result of drug policy in a single city.
I only know what I see, I live in Ballard so most of our crime is driven by that segment of the population. I've caught more than a few prowling my car (I have an open garage). I have to dodge people in crisis often with extra care, I don't want to get a baseball bat to the head like that poor Amazonian in Belltown. I see shoplifting at Target with impunity, I saw a guy run out with two small TVs just a couple of weeks ago.
These people that are doing this look way drugged out. They look gone. It is not regular crime at all.
- There is debate about whether drug policy specifically is the primary cause of the various increases in drug usage that we've seen around the US.
- There is debate about whether drug addiction in cities like Seattle merely correlates with homelessness/crime or whether it is the primary causal effect.
- And there are also debates on various metrics that people use that lead even people who do believe there is a causal effect to disagree with each other about how significant they think that causal effect is.
And some people do believe that it's all a straight causal effect and there aren't any complications and banning the drugs will solve the problem; but there's enough debate about it from enough serious researchers and a large enough number of inputs going into the system that I think it's slightly hand-wavy to describe the relationship between specific drug policies and crime like it's an established and widely agreed on fact rather than a highly contested debate among various researchers.
Instead we're supposed to trust ever-bigger governments (controlled by ever-bigger corporate interests) to make those choices for us, and restrict those scary dangerous freedoms that people once had.
Unless we want vigilantism. Which we really do not.
A tight society with a strict moral code (and it's enforcement in... communal style) would need no police and laws.
Also, we did vigilantism. It’s really, really bad.
Making drugs illegal is a major deterrent to doing drugs. Simple as that.
Half of the US is on some form of amphetamine from middle school onwards. We don't have an issue with people taking drugs. We want them to take the right drugs and pay the right companies for them.
You might have a problem with 'drugs' but that's politics.
Which drugs do you draw the line at? Coffee? Alcohol? Nicotine?
Yes I know about the David Nutt report. It's not remotely objective.
The people wanting to use drugs would view "punished" as anything that gets in the way of them and their drug of choice. Saying it harms no one is to say that the person using isn't being harmed.
I have (though probably used to have more) libertarian sympathies but it seems like that falls down in a large number of hard cases. I don't want to run other people's lives any more then I want someone else to run mine but there's an extreme version of the libertarian argument that equates any help with control.
There will be a demand and there will be people fulfilling the demand. It’s much better to have the fulfillers regulated instead of it being a source of money and power for criminal organisations.
Just look at how well prohibition worked in the US.
Nordic countries are actually rather (in)famously known in Europe as having strict drug laws.
> Making drugs illegal is a major deterrent to doing drugs.
Obviously, but people still do so many drugs, and the numbers are increasing. This is despite relatively very few countries actually even decriminalizing (_not_ legalizing) drugs.
From my own experience living in the Netherlands, weed being legal means tourists come to smoke it, but a lot of the Dutch are just completely uninterested, including teenagers. If you had given me easy to access cheap weed at 16 I would've been blazing all day, but I didn't come from a place where it's legal. Dutch teenagers did. Second order effects such as perception of drugs are a thing that must be considered as well.
As for it being a deterrent, it may be for some, but the measure should not be drug use but harm, and what is abundantly clear is that criminalisation drives up crime, and causes substantial harm up to and including large numbers of deaths.
Keeping drugs illegal given the evidence we have of the harm it causes is deeply immoral.
It is society’s job to make sure people don’t become heroin addicts but we shouldn’t persecute those that do.