2 ms·

Socially I'm pretty liberal but the idea of providing free hard drugs to addicts is really hard to accept intuitively, despite a lot of evidence that it works b

Socially I'm pretty liberal but the idea of providing free hard drugs to addicts is really hard to accept intuitively, despite a lot of evidence that it works best at a macro level. It's also not a clean win. Open a safe injection site and crime and public disobedience goes up in the immediate community. So maybe society is better off, but your neighborhood is substantially worse off. Or you visit the emergency room with a serious but deemed non-life threatening condition and wait 6 hours because all the EMTs are coming in with fentanyl overdoses. These are hard problems that are charged with emotion. You can strongly disagree with prohibitionists, but it's not fair to entirely discount their viewpoint

P_I_Staker 8y ago
Eh, some of these problems can be written off as happening no matter what you do. The big question is the effect of lax policy on use and/or crime; does it increase, decrease, or stay the same; and by how much? Even this question isn't a simple number, as types of drugs and mode of use can be different. I have gotten into it with people that feel full legalization is a "quick and easy" fix. So you really feel it would be a great idea for anyone to be able to walk into a store and buy fentanyl or crystal meth? You don't see any issues with this? Even in this case we have to talk things like price controls. Do you keep prices low to prevent people turning to crime to fund their habit? Or higher to discourage heavy use? There's no quick and easy answer to the Drugs issue, and I'm sick of people on both sides that like to pretend there is, for ideological reasons.