Oh wait...
If people who sell Heroin die, then there will be less victims who will get addicted to such products.
Consumers who get addicted to Heroin are essentially poisoned (and nearly condemned to death) by their dealer.
It takes some time, but it would cleanup the whole situation, without putting the blame on regular consumers (who are eventually, step by step, pushed toward finding solutions to their addiction because sourcing the products is more and more difficult).
Yes, murders happen, even in peaceful societies. No matter if you have strong laws.
Now if you get rid of dealers, then, not only you have less drug issue, but you also have less murders due to less gang fights (as an interesting/bonus side-effect).
So, double benefit.
This much repression and zero tolerance of drug usage percolates to the rest of society and other civil liberties that most people in the West would say they want full freedom to partake in. (Including soft drugs)
This is only a problem if "policing" these crimes actually removes them. All evidence shows that unless you just intend to permanently lock up all homeless people (therefore giving them....housing), policing drugs and poverty doesn't fix the problems for anyone
> Billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been given to nonprofits to improve homeless conditions
True. The west coast has a massive homeless problem. And a progressive government. So they invest in trying to fix it.
> but they’ve only gotten worse
Housing inequality has also gotten massively worse over the last several decades. And in general many other social programs have gotten defunding (Such as mental health support)
And in general North America-wide drug usage is only going up and indicators of despair are going up.
Western society has problems and we are not dealing with the root causes. Middle-class millennials have resigned themselves to never owning a house, and never being able to retire. While they have a social safety net from their boomer parents, it's not yet a crisis. When the boomer parents spend all their accumulated wealth to survive the last decade of their lives, it will become a societal crisis.
But the early signs are already being shown by the lower class.
My point is that we don't know HOW MUCH WORSE the problem would be if those organizations weren't in place. For all we know, they are dramatically reducing the rate of regression.
> while the nonprofit operators grow rich.
[citation needed].
This is an absolutely ubiquitous conservative talking point but the only evidence I see of it is that people working for these non profits make living wages (good, shouldn't they be able to?), and the CEOs of these companies make comparable money to CEOs of profitable organizations. Which...is good, isn't it? Don't you WANT to be able to hire the best people for these roles, and don't you need competitive comp to be able to attract it.
> People exploit loopholes in the safety nets to get money for drugs.
Drug addicts will do almost anything to do drugs. The root causes of drug addiction may be character weakness (they're not, but we don't need to have that debate today) but once someone is addicted, it doesn't matter what happened - they have a medical disease, and treating it as anything but does not help anyone.
But if we want to help people not become drug addicts we need to deal with the underlying societal causes of despair.
> These are all unintended consequences of poorly conceived policy making.
You're right. For instance, one terribly conceived policy is policing this problem and spending millions of dollars to lock up people in jails and prisons for this instead of just spending money on socialized subsidized housing.
A social safety net from housing to universal basic income will dramatically reduce the problems in questions.
But even in the most progressive cities of North America, this is just not on the table. And instead when people speak about "bad policy" what they're really saying is "I want to see MORE police".