[headgasket]

It’s probably a bad forum for this opinion, but I have a relative struggling with addiction and resulting mental issues ( resulting form substance abuse; he was highly functional and threw it all away), and because of this I made a 180 and think some form of prohibition for hard stuff is the only action that would help us. How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.

[ipnon]

I sympathize, but these drugs are already as prohibited as they're going to get. Possession, manufacture and distribution are punished by years and years of prison time. It doesn't make a difference.

[asdff]

It absolutely makes a difference. I live a five minute walk from a camp of meth users. They smoke it and use needles in broad daylight, right in front of law enforcement. Their camps are a hotbed of drug trafficking, rape, theft, assaults, and prostitution. Some cartels run the camps themselves and demand rent from their victims. If this stuff was enforced these camps would be cleared out and people put in jail, but as it is in my county most people are let off bail and go on to commit further crimes sometimes within the same day (usually the case when picked up for catalytic converter theft or grand theft auto)

[barbs]

The fact that it's criminalized causes those sorts of marginalized camps and cartels to form in the first place. Even if they were cleared out, they would simply move elsewhere.

[asdff]

What I'm saying is that its de facto decriminalized and this is the result. If it were criminalized you wouldn't be able to live like this unhindered and unchecked on any particular piece of public land you can find. If it were decriminalized nominally, nothing would change, because people aren't being criminalized for meth use currently.

[barbs]

I'm not sure what you mean, drug possession is still criminalized? Has been for years, and drug use still happens, it just creates conditions which increase crime and unsafe use.

Unless, do you mean that the laws aren't enforced enough, hence the drug use outside law enforcement? I would argue that increased enforcement still doesn't help the problem, and crime and drug harm increase. Not to mention the public costs of enforcing these laws and imprisoning people on small drug charges with mandatory minimum sentences.

[asdff]

It's criminalized but cops don't enforce these laws, because the DA isn't going to prosecute a homeless person for these laws. Police cite them and release them and then you get stories like this (1) where people might get arrested and released for separate crimes three times in one day. I can find dozens and dozens of stories like this, some more tragic like the final crime of the day being a murder of an innocent victim.

Are these policies helping these people get their lives back on track? I'd say its clearly doing the exact opposite. By offering no consequence to bad behavior, bad behavior continues. If this person was arrested and taken into custody vs released, they'd at least be put into a controlled environment where they would be fed and sheltered and have their medical needs attended to, versus let out onto the street with no direction where they end up right back where they started.

There are costs to the public for sheltering and treating addicted and mentally unwell, certainly, but I'd argue the costs to the public of the status quo are much higher if you were to quantify them. All the petty crime, the emotional toll on innocent people victimized, the price of a life when innocent people are murdered by psychotic people on methamphetamine, the price of ER bills passed on to everyone from someone coming far too late on deaths door with zero insurance, versus the much cheaper price on preventative care that would prevent these situations in the first place, is not a cheap price. But by continuing this status quo this is the price we all bear.

1. https://abc7.com/california-zero-bail-prison-overcrowding-gl...

[trhway]

Even more - it makes for harder kind of drugs being on the market. It is a known phenomenon - harder prohibition leads to harder stuff on the illegal market. That is why fentanyl is in such a wide use.

[DantesKite]

It does in Singapore. Lowest rates of drug abuse in the world.

But they execute you if you have over 500 grams of marijuana so a bit extreme.

[ipnon]

Drug trafficking is a capitol crime in China, but China has an epidemic of methamphetamine and ketamine abuse, to give you one counterexample. My claim is that law enforcement is highly effective in all areas at the scale of a city.

[DantesKite]

That's a good point. Scale changes law enforcement capabilities.

[kayodelycaon]

Difficult to have a measurable rate of drug abuse if you kill all of the people thinking of doing it.

[mgkimsal]

there's the laws, then there's enforcement. enforcement is he harder part, and I don't see any easy wins there. you're right though - much is already "prohibited". it still happens.

[gwbas1c]

> some form of prohibition for hard stuff

I don't know how we could make that work in the US. We already tried alcohol prohibition 100 years ago, and that didn't work. Patent medicines were made illegal, and prescriptions are required, for this reason.

We've already recognized that overprescribed prescription opiates in the early 2000's was a deliberate attempt to bypass these protections and get people hooked.

> How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.

I think it requires a scientific process instead of a political process. IE, the politicians need to encourage medical professionals to keep trying many different approaches until we figure out what works. This will only happen when politicians stop criminalizing addiction.

FYI: All currently legal treatment options in the US HAVE to target ending addiction. Allowing someone to voluntarily maintain an addiction to anything is currently illegal, and means that only people who voluntarily want to stop their addiction are helped.

[mythrwy]

Invent better (less harmful, more desirable) drugs?