“My cousin died because he made a choice to try heroin, got hooked on it and made a choice to share needles, contracted hepatitis, which turned into hepatoma.”

“My cousin died because he made a choice to try heroin, got hooked on it and made a choice to share needles, contracted hepatitis, which turned into hepatoma.” Fixed that for you. Truly sorry for your loss, but people make choices, and those choices have consequences. Can we hold these two things to be true at the same time: 1. No one is forcing people to take these drugs. The choice to start is theirs. They are ultimately responsible for their choice to become addicted. 2. We should view an addict’s behavior through the lens of addiction, not the lens of a rational person making destructive choices. Addicts won’t respond to incentives like a normal person will. We need to find ways to make it extraordinarily costly to start using drugs. This is how you prevent the crisis we’re in currently. That means prison time for users. Heroin and fentanyl pour across the border due to demand for it. New users dabble in it because the perceived cost is low. If people understand that possessing or using means automatic and significant jail time if caught, then people are much less likely to even dabble. Ultimately, people will still try it regardless, get hooked, and eventually get caught and sent to prison. And that’s a good thing. That means there are less users who are on a path to homelessness, overdose, and dependency on family, friends, and government programs. It also means less users out there to persuade others to start using. If we’re not going to run mental health hospitals with involuntary commitments, then prison time is what you’re left with. Prison terms for using are five times as long as it takes to get users clean. Once they get out, if they’re caught again, the sentence is ten times as long as it takes to get clean. Each consecutive offense ratchets upward. The result is twofold: users have ample opportunity to get clean and stay clean in prison, but most importantly, we create a society in which we simply do not tolerate drug use. It’s really that simple. We are going to have as much drug addiction and use as we’re willing to pay for. If you lower the cost of using, you get more usage. Free usage sites with free needles and less risk will, and already has, resulted in more usage. The fact that people won’t recognize this is mind boggling.