> If we pushed even half of the money spent policing the war on drugs into homelessness support, mental health services, and addiction counseling and harm minimization like needle exchanges, we’d see a huge reduction in harm.

This point seems plausible, are there any sources that might prove it?

Also your point about racial discrimination might be a good utilitarian argument for it's better to let those racially discriminated against free alongside some folks who were also upto other crimes... The replies have definitely given me more food for thought.

The go-to example is Portugal, where drugs were decriminalized, and death rates went down. Not without challenges though, as they are now seeing issues with public drug taking and associated crime (which could be more about pandemic homelessness since we see that in US cities too). I think the harm reduction results are clear here but you also need to do the part where you invest more broadly in social programs (and with sufficient funding for homelessness services, taking a zero tolerance approach to public intoxication seems perfectly acceptable to me). See https://www.cato.org/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-port... on harm.

There is lots of evidence supporting needle exchanges as good for harm reduction. See Scotland, Netherlands, and many other EU countries.

Another one to watch is Oregon, where they did the decriminalization bit, but I think without the shift in funding to social services. Haven’t dug much here. (I think “reduce policing, increase social services” is the most sympathetic interpretation of what the moderate Democrats were thinking when they initially supported the “defund the police” slogan, which is now associated with more radical policies that are toxic to the center.)

There is a risk of “no true Scotsman” in the following point, but this is really an extremely radical policy proposal, at least it looked so until a couple years ago; there aren’t actually good examples end-to-end. So I think we need to employ epistemic humility and do local iterative experiments to prove it out (the advantage of the federal model in the US is a federal decriminalization would result in 50 natural experiments as states passed their own laws.) I don’t want to concede too much uncertainty though, the harms of criminalization are objectively very high, so you’d need to measure very high costs from the proposed new policy which I’m very skeptical that you’d see.

>No. Criminalization does more harm than benefit.

>For the vast majority of drug users that are not addicted, this is obvious.

I'm pretty sure a couple decades of effectively legalized oxycodone and hydrocodone use shows this view is not correct.

But recreational use of those drugs isn't legalized and the highest death toll from opiate use comes from people who move from the pharmaceutical-grade drugs to unregulated street drugs.

You can call for both legalization and high regulation… that’s literally what prescription drugs are.

Legalization & certification of quality is a good endpoint, if you can buy cheap heroin of good purity and stable dosage, no need for underground sources laced with fentanyl of variable purity.

I’m here for the FDA regulating what is on the label matching what is in the pill. But there is so an argument for optional certification; it might end up that the steady state cost for FDA compliance leaves room at the bottom end of the market for Mexican underground labs, and I’d rather have US above-ground labs filling that niche (because there are other recourses for egregious behavior like lacing oxy pills with Fentanyl if your supplier is in the US, which are not available against cartel labs in Mexico). It’s an empirical hypothesis though, you might not see prices high enough to matter with FDA compliant labs.

Another temptation to resist is taxing the drugs to pay for social services, “sin tax” in this case would again leave the door open for illegal labs. Again you can tune the parameters when you have evidence from the market.

My point is that we effectively did this for a couple decades with oxycodone and hydrocodone… the result has been disastrous.

We can probably keep more existing addicts alive by full legalization, but we pretty much invite a huge wave of new folks who will spend the rest of their lives with an opiate dependency.

As a sibling noted, I think the takeaway from oxy is a lot more complex. I don’t think many people are dying from prescription meds, I think most are dying when they go to the black market to service their addiction when they cannot get prescriptions, or cannot afford them.

For example if you want oxy, it’s very expensive on the black market, and so many end up taking fentanyl instead, which is more dangerous even if you have known purity medical grade, and is extremely dangerous when purchased on the black market with variable and unknown purity.

So in summary, I really strongly disagree that “we effectively did this”. The decriminalization program has not been seriously tried for opiates anywhere outside Portugal (where it didn’t cause an increase in usage, and did result in decreased harm).

I agree with you but there are pathways for decriminalization and legalization ala cannabis in states that have fully legalized it. There is still a difference between the "medicinal" products which require something resembling a prescription and recreational ones which are sold to anyone of age. Those recreational products still undergo testing and regulation.