> That's the point being debated and that seems to chafe people the wrong way for some reason.
It chafes because it's a common argument for doing nothing at all, or removing all agency from people in the situation. That removal of agency is absolutely a bad thing. I'd argue that people who feel they lack agency in their life are much more likely to attempt to escape that life through drug addiction.
It also grossly over-represents the number of drug addicts in the population of poor people, most of whom would just benefit from the extra money, and is used to falsely equate the two groups.
Could you point to someone who has advocated that? IME it's a strawperson.
> is VERY easy to give an abundance of support for addiction
My understanding from people who work in that field is that it's very hard. The evidence seems pretty overwhelming: Lots of addicted people and despite efforts around the country, over decades (centuries?), in communities desperate to solve the problem, nobody has found a way to do it. If you have the answer, you should share it.
YouTube is laughable as support for addiction.
> it's most often that rich families meet inter-generational demise.
Are you saying that children in wealthy families "most often" end up poor?
> It is much easier for us all to be poor, than for us to all be rich; we can take comfort that "we just got dealt a bad hand, it's not our fault".
> If you just make being high all day and acceptable and low cost life decision
It's possible that you may think that being a homeless addict with a drug prescription is an 'acceptable low cost life decision'.
I, personally, don't see how adding 'with a drug prescription' suddenly makes it particularly attractive and low cost. From all I can observe, living in that sort of situation is still utter misery and shit. Can't say I feel one bit of envy for it, when I drive past the onramp tents even if the drugs were free.
On it's face this seems really counter intuitive to me.
Drugs cost money. Not having money doesn't somehow force you to use drugs.
Where the opposite direction seems obvious: The cost of maintaining an addiction and the reduction in reliability from drug use can result in being unable to work, increasing your poverty.
>perception of drug addicts as weak and deserving of their fate
I think you're right but the reasoning is one step removed from the conclusion.
Drug addition is a poor people problem (in part because it takes resources and support to break the cycle).
Opiod (and meth for that matter) addiction skews rural and therefore white.
A lot of people take the attitude that poor rural white trash are poor white trash because they live in a dying town with no industry and refuse to relocate to somewhere they can more easily scrape by. The catch is that the people making these judgements generally have a very different set of values than the people they're judging.
When you take the attitude that the situation that leads one to easily become an addict is the fault of the addict then it's hard to have sympathy for addicts.
There's also a lot of (well meaning) "optimism to the point of stupidity" in assessing how effective firearms legislation is as an avenue to reduce violent crime and how easy it is to make a driver-less car that can effectively share the roads with vehicles operated by people
> if we cured this problem(drug addiction) we would only be creating other problems.
Like what problems, that they could then hold a job? Drug addicts can't hold a job. Their only interest/activity is drug seeking. This is why they are homeless.
I don't pretend to know how to cure drug addiction, but treating it as an economic problem is like giving cough drops to a lung cancer patient.
> It's not obvious whether drug addicts with adequate means of procuring a steady supply would be more dangerous to society than ones in desperation.
It would definitely be worse for them, if we moralistically care about their well being. They would also probably still need housing and food given to them, as their addiction would often prevent them from prioritizing those things with the UBI they got. UBI isn't a panacea to these problems, at least.
> But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions
You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.
The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.
> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop
Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.
Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?
> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.
No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.
> I can really admire countries like China...
That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.
And from your other comment -
> it would be better if they didn't do drugs
Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...
But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.
And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.
> There have always been drug addicts and drug users, and there always will be.
And surely we could do more work to understand why people fall into this hole, and make societal changes to help those who want to beat their addiction do so more reliably. It’s absolutely misinformed to suggest that addiction isn’t a real problem or that doing anything about it is somehow beyond our control.
>When an addict reaches that point, they are almost certainly costing society resources. Not just being non-productive, but everything from social services to law enforcement, they are costing the rest of us resources which would be better used as an investment in our collective future. Society has a legitimate interest in the problem.
I won't disagree or agree.
My point is addiction isn't something people can just rationalize themselves out of by sitting down and thinking of a "greater good".
> Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets.
I don't know about you but I don't know anyone who fell into drug use and homelessness who had happy lives. I think people who are homeless and or addicted to drugs are addicted to drugs because there lives are not good. If you improve economic and social conditions for people, drug abuse becomes less of a problem because people do not need to cope with difficulty in their life in the same way.
> The issue of treating drug addiction as a health issue instead of a crime is a tangential topic, but enforcing the law when a drug addict commits a crime is not (e.g. mugging, theft, assault).
To me it's not tangential, but rather the core of the issue.
Let's take the druggie. I agree with you that 'removing consequences' of crime committed to acquire more drugs is a terrible idea. Justice to the people affected is important.
However, if this consequence is jail time, a criminal record, or any other form of punishment that doesn't benefit both the addict and those affected by him, we're only sweeping the problem under the rug, and we're not acknowledging the complexities of addiction and the dignity of the human behind the 'druggie'. Furthermore, it's likely that said addict will become a worse problem for society down the road. It's lose-lose.
There are plenty of solutions where the addict's crime have consequences other than simply punishing them that are more effective, less dehumanizing, and ultimately better for society as a whole.
On a more... ethical level, I feel that where we fundamentally go wrong in these situations is that we forget that being poor, being an addict, and even to a degree being a criminal is not just a simple matter of choice. I've personally known many addicts, criminals and poor people, and I can say with full conviction that the vast majority of them were good people who made mistakes that were not 100% their responsibility. Instead of bickering over how much responsible they are, accepting this reality and trying to approach it with compassion for all sides should already improve many things. Hell, if more people would just go a bit below 100% it'd be a good start.
I think I'm a pretty good person, but putting myself in the position of my addict, poor, or criminal friends, with the same environment, parents, friends, and choices available, all of them mostly out of their control, well, I'd likely make those same choices.
And applying everything I've learned about willpower, group dynamics (groupthink), peer pressure, and whatnot, makes me even more convinced that punishment is not only a solution that doesn't work, but morally wrong and detrimental to society as a whole.
> The real issue here that people don't seem to want to face is the WHY. Why do so many people want to check out of life completely by abusing medicine
People start using drugs for different reasons. It's not correct to say that everyone starts abusing drugs as a form of pure escapism. A lot of drug users start because they're simply seeking recreation and someone is nearby to make drugs available to them. It's as simple as that.
> You are broken because society is broken.
Variations of this concept are frequently used by drug addicts to justify continued behavior. "It's not my fault, it's society's fault!". Taking ownership of actions and consequences is one of the key pivot points in helping people get control.
> There are almost always deep-rooted issues that the addiction hides,
All crime is a consequence of deep-rooted personal issues.[1]
Part of the purpose of making something a crime is to put somebody on notice about when personal choices are likely to result in intolerable injury to the public and, hopefully, induce them to reassess their needs and expectations, including recognizing their need for help. And that's the logic of making drugs like heroin illegal.
I think I understand your point, but it's a point that is really difficult to articulate coherently. There are many subtleties in arguments that propose more compassionate--for lack of better phrasing--public responses to addiction. And it starkly exposes some paradoxes at the heart of human legal systems, including notions of volition and accountability. I think that's why it's such a difficult public policy issue. But if don't appreciate the inherent tensions at play we'll never understand why the other person doesn't agree with whatever proposal we put forth.
[1] Where issues == dysfunction, otherwise we're just restating a more general truism that all behaviors are consequences of each person's history and state.
> What I've never understood is why anyone does drugs to begin with, under any circumstances.
Poverty and the lack of opportunities to participate constructively in society do really fucked up things to human psychology. The current wave of opiate addiction frequently occurs as the result of prescribed pain medication.
>Why even try it? I feel in the media everywhere it is said how terrible it is.
The signals people pick up from their peer groups have a much larger impact on their behavior than media ever could.
>No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.
People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.
That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.
>they just suffer the consequences of their addiction
No, their family and society as a whole suffer as well. I'd even go on to say that drug addiction is usually more destructive towards others than towards the addicted individuals themselves.
I'm not advocating for keeping the so called "war on drugs" up, but let's be real here, people.
>>Why should your drug use, or anyone else's, create obligations for other people to support you, treat you, and help you overcome addiction?
Suposing that it doesn't, doing nothing would be a hell of lot cheaper and easier than what we are doing now.
Opiodes are derived from cheap agricultural products. A tablet of herion needn't cost more than asprin. The explicit goal of federal enforcment agencies is to raise prices by restrict supply. You and I are spending a fortune on that project, and it's not helping anyone except the sprawling profession of drug-warriors, and the black market gangsters. Ok, maybe it helped HSBC a little. Kind of ironic, isn't it?
This is one of those things that makes me wonder why we even have economists if no one will listen to them.
Go get a cup of coffee, fire up youtube, and listen Milton Friedman's talk "Socialism & The War On Drugs."
> Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.
I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?
> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?
I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).
It chafes because it's a common argument for doing nothing at all, or removing all agency from people in the situation. That removal of agency is absolutely a bad thing. I'd argue that people who feel they lack agency in their life are much more likely to attempt to escape that life through drug addiction.
It also grossly over-represents the number of drug addicts in the population of poor people, most of whom would just benefit from the extra money, and is used to falsely equate the two groups.
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