[seanmcdirmid]

Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore? If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?

[gary_0]

The Drug War is massively, massively expensive. You have to pay for all that policing, plus the massive resources needed to convict and incarcerate people. All that pointless, wasteful cat-and-mouse with addicts and dealers. Not to mention people in prison for drug offenses don't pay taxes, and a criminal record makes it even harder to find productive work.

However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.

[jrumbut]

It's also massively complicated and tied into all kinds of things you might never imagine (the education system, the healthcare system, foreign policy, etc, etc).

Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.

One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.

I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.

[WalterBright]

> Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore?

It remains illegal. It's just that the penalties for it are removed. It means no legitimate, tax-paying business will get into it, leaving it for criminal black market operations.

What it needs to be is legalized.

[Gud]

The decriminalization doesn’t cause the damages from drug use, they were already there.

[bnralt]

Right. The line we were being fed for a long time was that ending the drug war and decriminalizing possession was a good thing in its own right. Not that decriminalizing would make things worse if it wasn’t also met by other policies. Sure, people suggested these other policies as well. But I’ve never heard anyone say that decriminalization is a bad idea if they’re not in place (which is appearing more and more likely).

We saw the same thing with drug use in Portugal. Lots of people for years were saying that the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and it was a tremendous success, so we should follow suit. But there was an article here recently talking about how it’s a mess there, and the responses were “Well, of course, because the government didn’t _also_ do XYZ.”

Also, the decriminalization movement seems to overlap mostly with the deincarceration movement. And if you have both, what incentives do you actually have? The above poster said to just threaten them with a fine. That’s what they did with fare evasion here, now people just give false names or ignore the fine.

Honestly, given we’re now seeing things we were told we wouldn’t see by the decriminalization advocates, a lot of this is sounding like “No True Scotsman” arguments. It seems like no matter the failure, someone is just going to come along and say that it’s not a real failure because the government messed up.

[ipaddr]

It sounds like you are picking and choosing what information to accept. You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.

[bnralt]

> You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.

I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.

A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.

This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.

[Kim_Bruning]

The Netherlands also decriminalizes drugs to an extent, but -just like in Portugal- that is part of a larger plan to keep drugs and drug addicts under control. It just so happens that merely treating drug addicts as criminals doesn't give you all that much control, hence. Letting go of control entirely is the exact opposite of what Netherlands and Portugal have been doing.

[rainonmoon]

Sometimes it's worth doing things that are compassionate, moral, and expensive.

[vkou]

> If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?

Just because drug use is illegal doesn't mean that the damage of drugs is free.

You either spend XYZ millions of dollars (in both direct costs and wasted human potential) and inflict untold human suffering by 'treating' that damage through prisons.

... Or you decriminalize it, and spend QRS millions of dollars by treating it through other means.

Society still pays, the difference is in how and how much it pays.

[Nursie]

a) It's cheaper to fund the new resources than it is to continue the pointless war

b) You may be able to tax the activity too, further offsetting costs

c) Ruining lives by attaching criminal charges to activities should not solely be a cost-benefit analysis anyway. Or if it is, it needs to take into account the lost opportunities and lost years of those who are caught up in the criminal system

[seanmcdirmid]

I get decriminalization, let people be responsible for their own choices that don’t affect others. But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions, probably more like trillions of dollars to fix the consequences of those decisions. This isn’t cheap at all, supporting an unhoused neighbor with a fent problem runs around $100k/year just to shelter (before treatment can even start, usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop), sucking the air, empathy, and resources out for the rest of our homelessness problem. And…fent is cheap, taxing it via legalization is a non-starter (the illicit questionable stuff would still exist because the users don’t want to and cannot pay high prices).

If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away. I can really admire countries like China that don’t coddle their addicts and instead apply pure tough love.

[Anticlockwise]

If you're going to make this argument, I really wish you'd make it more explicit. I think what you're suggesting makes cities unlivable. The homeless drug users have to exist in space somewhere. What do you propose to do with these people? There's nowhere to ship them to that's not owned by someone who objects to their presence.

[seanmcdirmid]

It is just really expensive, it would be better if they didn't do drugs rather than just letting them do it and having society responsible for picking up the pieces. If society has to be responsible for paying for these problems, then its no longer a personal decision with personal effect. We as a society have to decide whether we are going to allow hard drug abuse and "pay the bill for that decision" or not.

[truckerbill]

You need to think of it as a system of feedback loops. If you don't stem the input of the cycle of drug abuse by investing a little, your problem gets worse.

It seems people take a moral or 'fairness' based attitude to these social phenomena and that's what causes things like the war on drugs as a form of justice. The idea that everyone is self determined, which in a small way is true of the individual. But if you look at people in aggregate things are more clear, the universe doesn't play by those rules...

[etchalon]

We've tried to stop them from doing drugs through years of state action and penalties. It hasn't worked.

Turns out, drugs are both fun AND addictive and it's hard to combat that with threats of jail time.

[electricmonk]

The point others are making is that it appears to be a zero-sum game, i.e., we're paying one way or the other, so the more compassionate option with better outcomes should win out. As I have seen it stated, the options appear to be to pay for: (i) criminalization and its effects/expenses, e.g., court system burden, incarceration, etc.; (ii) de-criminalization (potentially with legalization/taxation) to offset the cost of keeping cities livable by mitigating its effects/expenses, e.g., treatment and housing for addicts that may become homeless; or (iii) de-criminalization without paying for mitigations, leading to unlivable cities. Your comment reads like you see some way of simply not paying to deal with addicts, while also not having the consequences of a bunch of (potentially homeless) addicts living in society. If that's an accurate description of your point, how does that work? If it's not, then what do you mean?

[Ajedi32]

You can't get addicted to a substance that you don't have the ability to obtain in the first place, or that you could obtain but choose not to because you're afraid of punishment. That's the whole theory behind criminalization: that it's not a zero sum game!

I think you're probably right that the criminal justice system isn't the most effective way of dealing with people who are already addicted, but how do you propose we stop people from getting addicted in the first place if hard drugs are perfectly legal, and the government is actively working to minimize the personal downsides of being addicted to them? Why not become an addict if the only consequence is that it means you get free food and housing for the rest of your life?

[AlexandrB]

I wonder how the societal costs of tobacco, alcohol, and gambling compare to those of "hard" drugs in this regard.

[mrguyorama]

You seem to be pretending that the "pure tough love" option is somehow NOT billions of dollars?

How much do you think we have spent on the DEA, ATF, and 2 million prisoners?

[vidarh]

Have the overall societal costs of dealing with the consequences of drug use gone up due to decriminalization?

Furthermore, you could use the same argument about the effects of a whole lot of other mental health and healthcare issues. It'd be cheaper to let a whole lot of people suffer or die. It'd also be grossly inhumane. Like China.

[Nursie]

> But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions

You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.

The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.

> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop

Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.

Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?

> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.

No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.

> I can really admire countries like China...

That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.

And from your other comment -

> it would be better if they didn't do drugs

Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...

But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.

And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.

[gamblor956]

oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society.

There are plenty of people who really do want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. LA's homeless "crisis" is proof of that; there are literally thousands of shelter beds that go unused each night because almost all of LA's homeless shelters are sober facilities which do not allow alcohol, drugs, or related contraband, and the addicts would rather be on the streets using drugs than have shelter, food, and stability.

[amanaplanacanal]

You are leaving a few things out of your discussion. Shelters won’t allow you to bring your pets either. And they separate families. And the statistics I’ve seen show about a third of homeless are addicts, and a third have untreated mental health issues. There are lots of reasons people don’t go to shelters.

[Nursie]

'rather'

Yeah, that doesn't mean what you think it means when you're talking about people in the throes of addiction.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Addiction is also a symptom of other social issues.

The problem isn't that some people are weak willed. It's more that there are many cultural elements that covertly value antagonism and hostility, and the poor bear the brunt of that.

The rich bear the brunt in other ways. No one much cares if $billionaire is clearly off his head on coke, because he/she has the protective support system that makes prosecution unlikely - even though their decision-making can be ridiculous, self-harming, and catastrophic for millions.

That aside - wealth really doesn't mean they're models of mental and emotional health.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/poverty-homelessness-and...

[kelseyfrog]

It's important to point out that the framing of drug addiction as a weakness of will has an important function - to unburden people from guilt and a responsibility to others.

To be in the position of recognizing a problem and then being relatively powerless to enact change is a powerful motivator in disavowing the problem or responsibility to fix it. It's an adaptive response to avoiding mental discomfort.

And it works - people who don't feel responsibility to others avoid an entire class of mental discomforts. Taking away that adaptive mechanism exposes folks to a level of pain they likely aren't equipped to handle - a reason they developed it in the first place.

[fungiblecog]

people have to pony up to mitigate the consequences of alcohol being legal and many other things...

[bitcharmer]

> damage that decriminalization of X enables,

This is a pretty ignorant comment to see on HN. So far we have strong evidence to show delegalisation causes huge issues and legalization works as expected. Have a look at any country that went that route.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Such as Portugal. Although decriminilisation was part of a wider social shift towards treating drug use a health issue rather than a legal issue.

https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...

[bombcar]

Apparently it worked well for awhile, but WaPo now reports that people aren't as happy with it anymore:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

[clairegraham]

It sounds like a big part of the issue is that Portugal has substantially pulled back on funding after COVID...

"Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. "

Prior to that, the numbers seemed quite impressive:

"By 2018, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. Portugal had the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. HIV infections from drug use injection had declined 90%. The cost per citizen of the program amounted to less than $10/citizen/year while the U.S. had spent over $1 trillion over the same amount of time. Over the first decade, total societal cost savings (e.g., health costs, legal costs, lost individual income) came to 12% and then to 18%."

Source: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...