> Both parts need to change. The "they aren't hurting anybody so leave them alone" people need to understand that they are hurting themselves and need to have t

> Both parts need to change. The "they aren't hurting anybody so leave them alone" people need to understand that they are hurting themselves and need to have their freedom of choice taken away. One of the big functions of involuntary commitment to mental hospitals in pre-1950s America was for parents to put away their "troubled daughters" because of social behavior they did not approve of (promiscuity, friend circle, etc). You get glimpses of this in memoirs from the era (the most recent one I have read that comes to mind is Herbert Huncke's autobiography). This continues today for rich parents who send their children to be involuntarily committed to "residential centers," "boot camps," and certain rehab programs. This is a slippery slope that social reformers, busybodies, religious fundamentalists, etc have used to label any behavior they do not approve of, but cannot convince legislators to make against the law, as "hurting yourself" and grounds for taking freedom away. You are already most of the way down the slope by advocating for locking away drug addicts. Don't forget that Nixon's administration ramped up the drug prohibition as a way to break the civil rights and anti-war movements: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/. Today a similar policy will just be used to target leftist collectives and human rights groups, anarchists, the groups that sprang out of the Occupy movement, left-wing hackers, etc. Involuntary institutionalization starts as a way to help the mentally ill, progresses through to oppression of women, and ends up as a tool of political repression (as it did in the USSR, and currently still does in Belarus).