The thing is, there are three categories of illicit drugs:
- relatively harmless / have established use: a lot of the "home grown" drugs fall under this category, they are usually low-price as they are mass products. Marijuana and diverted pharma pills, mostly.
- stuff that is extremely fucking dangerous, like fentanyl, its even more strong cousin carfentanyl, meth or self-made stuff like krokodil (gained from boiling codein cough medicine). Extremely simple to make in general, extremely potent, extremely hard to wean off.
- stuff that fuels organized crime, aka cocaine (almost exclusively grown/refined in Southern America) and heroin (which comes to an overwhelming degree from Afghanistan's poppy farms).
The large cartels almost exclusively focus on the latter, as there's a ton of money to be made smuggling that, which is a very real problem as the cartels can offer sums to corrupt officials even in Western countries that pay good money to border control staff. A boat full of cocaine can make hundreds of millions of dollars, while no one cares about a boat full of weed - not worth the effort.
In most countries ganja isn't legal either.
Cocaine in contrast, you need 300-ish grams of leaves to make 1 gram of cocaine, and a ton of chemistry afterwards to extract and purify it.
When you look at the production line of something like high fructose corn syurp, you could industrialize the process in to the range of $10000 per ton pretty easily.
Again, it's the black market that turns it into the million dollar range because of the risks involved.
these are, in many cases, just other drugs given out in low doses and by prescription.
vicodin and percos are just opiates, and fall into the latter two categories.
no one gives a shit if grandpa is giving a couple of viagras to his homies or sharing his cholesterol medication.
It doesn't matter that the social sciences have found that rehab works WAY better than prison [1]. It doesn't matter that incarceration is WAY more detrimental both to the individual and society [2]. Nope, sinners need to be punished.
If we want a better society, make drugs legal and send public funds to public rehab rather than private prisons.
Let's leave prison as a last resort for people that are actually dangerous to society; Not your uncle who grew weed in his backyard.
[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug03/rehab
[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/05/13/mentalhealthimp...
Between 60-75% of homeless people are not on any drugs or alcohol. They are just homeless. In addition, Housing First initiatives have seen sharp drops in addiction.
But to that, I'd also point out that "refusing help" is hardly the reason seattle/portland have so many homeless people. A lot of these people have been priced out of apartments. Some have suffered from mental health issues (or have developed mental health issues after becoming homeless).
My son's teacher's aid was temporarily homeless while being fully employed. She was simply priced out of living anywhere. Do you think that was a result of substance abuse?
The attitude of your post is actually part of the reason homelessness is so bad. It's the view that people are homeless because they did something wrong to deserve it. Addressing homelessness requires compassion and funds. You can never make it go away all together, but you can relieve it simply by giving people a place to exist.
While housing is the solution to true majority of homelessness (like your individual income experience with the teacher), people like the individual above above make valid observations. They’re pointing out problems that, at the very least, get intermingled with consequences of homes being unaffordable for all. This need not be a value judgement on their character. It is a value judgement on actions, which is something that not only is fair (all are in control of what they choose to do), but necessary for a functioning society (how else do you morally compel folks to follow laws and determine responsibility if not by one’s actions?).
The solution is to both make housing affordable to every person *and* ensure everyone who needs it takes it.
If you're talking about working people being priced out of homes in stupidly low-density cities (which places like Seattle and Portland are), the greater part of the solution is just building more so that supply rises to match demand.
Artificially suppressing the supply of homes via government action (restrictive zoning) then helping the people who lost homes as a result via government action (social services funded by redistributive taxation) is just so wasteful that I don't even know where to begin.
Just like building more lanes to match the demand of traffic, yeah?
Expanding roadways are an example of induced demand, which means that for some class of things, as it gets cheaper (or qualitatively better/less costly, as in the example of traffic), more people consume it by shifting preferences from alternatives, and in the end it's just as pricey (or qualitatively poor) as before. Is your point that as housing gets cheaper in a place, more people will be housed and eventually the equilibrium goes back higher?
If so, isn't that the goal? More people are still housed than before.
I was actually in downtown Seattle last night (not seeing Taylor Swift though). These people who line the streets are not in shelters because the shelters do not let them use drugs. They are in tent cities overdosing off fentanyl whilst virtue signalers like you scream that there isn't enough housing.
Across Lake Washington in Bellevue, where the median rent price is 50% higher, there are none of these drugs addicts, so if it is a housing problem, why are they all centered in Seattle? Because Seattle City Council, King County all allow it to happen.
It seems you are simply saying that there should be no refuge... Al least not 'amongst' society.
Not the folks struggling to get housing (just build more and give it away for operating/maintenance cost, don’t recoup capital investment ). Just the few 10-20% of the highly visible ones with mental health problems (and the like 3% that are just asses- every large enough group of people has got ‘em!).
Just because the solution can be expressed simply doesn't mean it's "easy".
I'm neither and addict or ex-addict. But I am an ex puritan/teetotaler. I'm well aware of how they think, preach, and talk about this stuff. I'm living proof that it's not beyond them, but the fact is you have to abandon your puritan/teetotaling beliefs to actually understand the problem.
But the majority of drug use are home-grown. [1]. Take marijuana out the picture (home grown) and Oxy, Prescriptions and other (home grown) drugs prevail.
Criminalising weed is a failed policy, which thankfully is being slowly dropped.
Less impressive is that the drug machine that created the oxy crisis is more or less ignored.
[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/