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.
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).