> Is it so hard to live and let live?

Only if "live and let live" goes both ways. Junkies make it a drain on their family and social circle to support them. They also mess up the public spaces and make those unlivable (looking at you, SF). If they behaved within limits of socially acceptable behavior, I would support "live and let live" when it comes to drugs.

I guarantee for every "homeless junkie" in SF or any city, there are dozens if not hundreds of functional and semi-functional substance users. Don't get me wrong, the nature of some drugs, especially heroin/fent, meth, cocaine, and alcohol, mean a significant percentage of users are going to completely fuck up their lives and the lives of those around them due to addiction.

It's weird how with illegal drugs we tend to blame the drug and the user, whereas with alcoholics, nicotine addicts, etc we tend to only blame the user. Does your opinion hold, that we should also not "live and let live" with dysfunctional homeless alcoholics? Believe me, they also make a mess of themselves and the neighborhoods they camp out in.

Anyway. Addiction is a beast. But using intoxicants to escape, augment, and/or enhance reality is a basic part of human (and animal) nature. On HN we all love to talk about incentives guiding behavior. Well when your life has been shit and likely will be shit indefinitely (due to health, social, economic, and other factors), perhaps in spite of any effort you are capable of implementing, the incentive to get some kind of enjoyment out of it anyway, regardless of the cost, is pretty damn high.

> with alcoholics, nicotine addicts, etc we tend to only blame the user.

I see alcohol, nicotine, guns etc regulated heavily where I live. So yes, society does take those things seriously too.

> Does your opinion hold, that we should also not "live and let live" with dysfunctional homeless alcoholics?

Of course, if they create public nuisance.

Cars kill and maul people, destroy infrastructure, pollute the environment, definitely mess up public spaces.

Which is why cars are heavily regulated - there are tons of rules about who gets to drive one, how that license can be revoked, a full table of punishments if you break those rules, requirements to buy insurance etc. So you are also in favor of heavy regulation of drugs then?

I won't stand for your right to become a meth head or fentanyl addict. Addiction is a dangerous disease and we should protect everyone from falling into that trap and harming themselves and others around them.

Living in a society is by definition not about granting total independence and freedom.

How about the right to open loot boxes? Play gacha games? Play the lottery? Watch porn 24/7? Jerk off 24/7? Be childless? Be an alcoholic? Play games 24/7? Climb without a safety harness?

No, no, no, yes (with reservations) to the rest of them.

Well the internet is for porn, not gambling. But safety first, then teamwork so

The only one of those that I do is be childless, and I have to say I don't really get why that's in with the rest.

>and I have to say I don't really get why that's in with the rest

Because it's another one of those things that "your betters" think they control about your life, and with the attempted rollback of things like abortion rights in many places is very relevant. Also we're seeing news out of asian countries of fertility rates falling below 1 you should really expect the more authoritarian governments to say "Have a kid or have a problem" pretty soon.

The problem with ordering me to have kids is that I'm a man and I can't do that.

They can't order you to get pregnant, but they can order you to have children.

Plenty of meth heads in China they just never make it into the news. Once a whole town became famous for it.

You do not trade in your freedom for a drug free stable society. You trade in your freedom for nothing, then get the exact same shit but with a fresh lie to your face that it ain't like this.

>Addiction is a dangerous disease and we should protect everyone from falling into that trap and harming themselves and others around them.

Addiction isn't some disease that can strike randomly, the science shows that people who are already unhappy/unsatisfied/deprived are much more likely to succumb to addiction. Addressing the societal problems behind that would go a long way towards eliminating problematic addiction, and conversely banning all narcotic substances wouldn't stop those people from finding other ways to harm themselves, like alcohol, gambling or overeating to fill the emptiness inside.

I'm sorry, but we're never going to fix unhappiness. Nor eliminate addiction entirely. Making it difficult to access the most dangerous, addictive drugs is the only practical method of harm reduction for drug users. I don't see dead people on the sidewalks as a result of their porn addiction.

"If I don't see it, it's not a problem."

Meth and fentanyl are not the only drugs. Most people who "do drugs", especially recreationally, are doing neither of those. Nor heroin, nor crack, nor PCP or whatever other drug is commonly associated with life ending effects.

At the end of the day you have to accept some level of vice or you create a much larger and much worse vice black market.

Having mildly addictive weaker drugs available and cheap helps prevent the development of stronger and more easily smuggalable drugs.

> I won't stand for your right to become a meth head or fentanyl addict. Addiction is a dangerous disease and we should protect everyone from falling into that trap and harming themselves and others around them.

Purdue Pharma[0] has entered the chat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...

> Is it so hard to live and let live?

No, it is easy. As long as the junkies have the same courtesy towards the rest of us.

That's also easy: the junkies just want drugs. They don't care about the rest of us at all. If the junkies had access to the drugs they wanted, you won't see them on the streets, they will be in an institution somewhere, being high. The problems start when the junkies don't have access to their drugs...

> If the junkies had access to the drugs they wanted, you won't see them on the streets, they will be in an institution somewhere, being high.

Your proposal is that we open institutions where people can live, eat, sleep, presumably have all of their needs met, and also do as many drugs as they want all day?

There is no way this theoretical free-housing-with-drugs institution would do anything but increase the number of people abusing drugs and decrease the odds of getting them back on their feet.

Can't pay your rent this month? Well if you get addicted to drugs, you get free drugs and free everything at the Free Drugs Institution...

Want to leave the Free Drugs Institution? Oh you don't have any money to get a place of your own and getting a job while you're in the throes of addiction is hard, so you might as well stay at the Free Drugs Institution...

Every single one of these theories relies on the number of drug addicts remaining fixed, but they always ignore the fact that you can't remove all of the costs of doing drugs without dramatically increasing the number of people doing drugs, relapsing, or stuck in addiction cycles.

I'm pretty sure the free drugs institution is in fact the street, and the drugs are only free in the sense that they're bought with the proceeds of crime. I can't speak for everyone, but the thought of going to live in a more formal institution does not increase the attractiveness of doing drugs for me (and I speak as someone who does like the occasional drug, legal or otherwise, in moderation of course). You could also imagine a path out like halfway houses or that sort of thing, but obviously it's a non-starter in the US.

> I can't speak for everyone, but the thought of going to live in a more formal institution does not increase the attractiveness of doing drugs for me

You presumably aren't the target audience.

There are a lot of people who are working hard to stay clean and keep their addictions at bay because the costs of being addicted are too high: They lose their job, their housing, their ability to support themselves, and their future.

If you offered these people a way to do drugs for free, and a place to stay for free while they did those drugs, the incentives change dramatically.

Drug addicts are also very good at lying to themselves. You'd get people telling themselves they'd only go in "for a couple days" or "for a month or two" who would end up in there for years and years.

Oh, I've been locked in a hospital before; I wouldn't really say that I'm a stranger to addiction. I think the job was the main stressor that caused the addiction. A layoff later and I feel much better. Being chained to that job for healthcare and housing nearly killed me via a few means.

Or...they need money to fuel their addiction which is simultaneously preventing them from finding gainful employment.

That's a huge over simplification IMO! Addiction problems often come with personality traits that correlate being jobless and miserable. As humans I believe we should solve these problems logically, holistically with love and empathy.

The employability of an alcoholic increases dramatically after recovering from alcoholism.

Which institution? Most homeless shelters and mental hospitals don't allow recreational drug use or possession on the premises, and I doubt those policies would change even if drugs were legalized. And most drug addicts can't hold down a stable job to pay for private housing regardless of legal status.

I generally think legalization is a good idea. But junkies are always going to be a burden who live on the margins of society and survive by leeching off the rest of us (crime, welfare, donations).

Just today I read a news story about a junkie who went out in the street in his neighborhood and started shooting at people. Every bit of evidence suggests he was high as a kite. Luckily he didn't injure anyone, just did some property damage putting bullet holes in cars. He ended his existence by taking shots at the police when they showed up.

Some guy stoned out of his mind on weed may be harmless, but this is not universally true with all drugs and all people. And your idea lacks an explanation for who will pay for all these free drugs. What's in it for me, as a productive member of society, to finance those drug habits?

I mean just today I read a new story about a dude that was high on political outrage and went and shot up a school, caused a lot of damage and death. Sounds like politics is pretty harmful.

What's in it for me as a member of the political mainstream if we allow these dangerous political views that upset our social harmony?

Well sure but then you can virtually forget about humanity's best cheat - collective universal health insurance. There has to be a balance between live and let live and just living off other people

I would be ok with people wrecking one's health on the condition that it means they automatically lose any rights to the state's help (health care, housing, any kind of direct cash handouts etc.). I don't think we should other people's stupidity. What's more, it creates a moral hazard (it's ok to wreck my own life, as the nanny state will come to rescue me anyway).

That’s a very fine line to walk. The same reasoning could be applied to speeding (actively endangering others), overeating (actively endangering yourself), hunting, snowboarding, skydiving (or any other activity which increases your likelihood of having and accident and hence burdening the health care system beyond the national average).

I agree, but we should start having this discussion nonetheless. As is now, the state is encouraging dangerous and reckless behaviours, which is contrary of its intentions.

So paying for their prison time isn't a direct cash handout to the prison industrial complex?

As for your point of view I really have to reply with a more aggressive "Too fucking bad, you're paying one way or another". I run into too many people with your point of view that if you just pretend like this wrecked human doesn't exist that they immediately vanish from the reality in which we exist and no longer present a problem to anyone.

One just needs to look at the history of drugs in America to come to that conclusion. People often do crimes they wouldn't do if they weren't hyped up on drugs -- and that affects people who don't do drugs.

Now the question is how do we police it? Throwing drug users in prison doesn't seem like a good idea anymore. We really want to go after the dealers, the people who get users hooked and strung out.

So there are two different things that need to be looked at.

First order crimes. For example drinking, then getting in a crash would be a first order crime of alcohol use.

A second order crime could be something like stealing money to buy your next beer, or running an illegal bootlegging operation.

In deciding how to police the issue, the last thing you want to consider is punishment, and the first you want to consider is harm reduction.

Going after dealers just doesn't fucking work. We've been spending billions on it, and in doing so we have a non-stop line of dealers and manufactures making more deadly and addictive concoctions every day. The more you bust the dealers, the more the price goes up, the more stealing occurs by the users, the and more corruption of law enforcement by the dealers paying people off because of the huge sums of money involved happen. As they say "There was a war on drugs, drugs won".

Agreeing on this one. State should sell any kind of addictive substance, which would immediately yield benefits:

1. (Large parts of) Funding of organized crime would dry up and the state would get extra income via tax

2. Addicts know they can get their fix and hence can take up regular work

3. Substances would be cleaner and thus safer for consumption (easing the burden of the health care system)

Not saying that there are no downsides to this, but the downsides have to be weighed against the upsides and in my book the upsides outweigh the downsides.

> Going after dealers just doesn't fucking work.

I may get downvoted for this, but...

I for one believe that drug dealers are still the scum of society using people's own biology for profit. This isn't any different than the Sackler's. Why do you want to normalize drug dealing?

So the company that makes Doritos is a bunch of drug dealers?

You can hate them as much as you want but you don't solve problems as long as the incentive structure exists for it.

And you do that by ruining the market, by offering free drugs, let the cartells go unemployed.

We've tried basically everything else, let's try this.

We take a thousand square miles of BLM land in the middle of the desert, and turn it into freedrugcity, and ship anyone who wants free drugs there.

Probably cheaper in the long run.

Why shouldn't the state provide free drugs or drugs replacements? This way the state (the society) owns the problem AND the solution, and you don't even need tax payers money since you just erase most of the illegal income sources of the organized crime. The state could also push rehabs, controlling the addiction problem, literally everybody wins, minus the criminals.. Free drugs. Free money. Happier, healthier empathetic society. Or in one word - Netherlands

I believe that already happens every September in North Nevada...

Free as long as you spend 20k on gear and food and tickets and… drugs

As long as there's a fence I'd be willing to try this.

Lets put this in the "Things that sound like good ideas in practice but don't actually work in reality.

So is this a place are interned to and can't leave easily? Well, great, you've created a drug terrorism ghetto.

Is this a place people can freely come and go to? Well, it will likely be "too successful" for a number of the hard anti drug politicians, remember this is supposed to be a failure to show how bad the moral failings of people that even thing about drugs end up in. That and when said politicians kids get caught there they'll have the entire place destroyed.

Also doing drugs probably doesn't mean "crime free for all here", so, um, who's policing the place?