[helaoban]

Your question could be generalized to “Do members of a community have a responsibility towards that community.”

The answer is obviously yes.

Responsibility assumes that conditions can be changed by those responsible, otherwise the concept of responsibility is void.

I can direct this reflection at myself in various domains and come to the conclusion that I am falling short of my responsibilities in many ways, but it’s also true that people who walk by the worst of SF’s blocks everyday to pick up there 200k+ salaries are telling themselves everyday “not my problem”.

[ars]

If you actually cared you would work to criminalize all drug use, prosecute even minor offenses, and give food to mentally ill people daily.

None of that is beyond reach but the voters of SF don't want those things.

[yellowapple]

Adding yet more criminalization and prosecution is ineffective, as can be seen across the rest of the US; looking at per-capita numbers instead of absolutes, the diversity of interstate drug laws seems to be well-represented in the rankings: http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.ht...

The largely-untried approach is to assess why people are being afflicted with mental health issues and why people are turning to drugs, and to actually address those underlying factors. Drug abuse and mental illness are symptoms of a larger problem, not the cause. That larger problem is likely the one producing other symptoms, like the majority of adults under 30 living with their parents, or 11% of all Americans being at risk of eviction.

[gettodachoppa]

People turn to drugs because they are addictive. Once you start, it's hard to stop, and it can easily lead to drug abuse. Drug abuse and the lifestyle that it leads to will exacerbate mental illness.

The issue is that the US half-asses its drug enforcement policies. Everything is a leaky sieve full of inefficiency. They have a mostly unprotected border with Mexico, that they're too scared to lock down for political reasons. They have drug dealers that they won't arrest, or put in a revolving door policy, because they're afraid of being called evil by the privileged members of NGOs and academia. Investigating, arresting and putting on trial criminals is extremely expensive and inefficient because there's 50 million legal checks to deal with.

Look at Singapore for an example of how an all-out war against drugs can be effective, and produce a safe society. 98% of the citizens of Singapore support those policies because they have some of the safest streets in the world. Their children can safely be out at any time. Why should they let the criminal 0.5% of the population keep them terrified like in America? It should be the other way around. They get criticized by westerners for their use of the death penalty for drug dealers, such as in this short clip with visionary Singaporean PM Lee Kwan Yew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXAOZwvv04, who handles it admirably.

The US is violent and dangerous because it tries to give as much freedom as possible to its citizens, and protect their constitutional rights to a high degree, even when this comes at a high expense for the rest of society. I am not saying I want this to change, I like diversity of thought and government, and there's something endearing about how different the average American is compared to other nations. This diversity of thought allows us to learn lessons about the effect of policies and culture. For example this is why I like the USA's 2nd amendment and wish to see it protected, even though I wouldn't want everyone to be armed in my country.

[Gud]

People don’t turn to drugs because they’re addictive (and many aren’t). They turn to them because they’re fun and because they help relieve pain and anxiety as well as other mental issues.

Please don’t turn more countries into police states, it’s really not required to fight drug abuse.

There are many nice places that have liberal drug laws(Netherlands, Switzerland), clearly authoritarian state control is not required.

The US is not violent because it grants a lot of freedoms(which tbh, it really doesn’t). It’s violent because the ruling class don’t give a shit about poor people

[yellowapple]

> People turn to drugs because they are addictive.

People stay on drugs because those drugs are addictive. That says nothing about why they felt inclined to start using drugs in the first place - that underlying cause being "I'm broke and starving and freezing and can't afford actual treatment for the illnesses/injuries I'm racking up and I need something to take the edge off".

> Look at Singapore for an example of how an all-out war against drugs can be effective, and produce a safe society.

There are all sorts of confounding variables in that equation, chief among them being private land ownership being basically nonexistent; 80% of Singaporeans live in government-subsidized flats. Even this hasn't solved homelessness in Singapore, either.

> The US is violent and dangerous because it tries to give as much freedom as possible to its citizens

The US is violent and dangerous becuase its socioeconomic safety nets and mental healthcare systems are absolute dumpster fires compared to pretty much every other "developed" country.

[aaomidi]

Literally ignoring the most basic facts about this just to push an ideology. Wack.