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To go full Draconian here, I’m tempted to think a full South East Asia-style zero tolerance policy for opiate drugs might work here. Anyone caught with anything other than tiny amounts of Fent or H or Tranq just gets fast-tracked for lethal injection. And the police would actively go looking for anyone slinging.
It would produce horrible optics and questionable outcomes for six months, but I think it would dramatically reduce the number of ruined lives, and even the net deaths (including those executed). The present situation is a classic worst-of-both-world scenario where we tolerate antisocial and dysfunctional behaviour and also have no serious social technologies in place (like family shame networks) to rescue people from its effects.
This might be an understatement. I foresee the left quickly labeling the policy as "narcophobic" and proclaiming that we are genociding the drug users. I would even venture as far as saying that it's impossible to implement this policy in the first-world countries.
The Dumb Left might not do that, but the Smart Left and Middle would just run ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even other parts of Appalachia about how Republican's who take money from rich people who own the drug companies that got people hooked on Oxy now want to put your brother, daughters, and cousins to death for getting addicted.
Remember, drug addiction isn't a minority issue anymore, it's a poor people issue, including poor white people, whom the actual reactionary base may not like, but they are still the voting base, and while poor and working class white people may have issues with their relatives who have got addicted to fetanyl, they don't want them put to death.
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Singapore is a first world country with a mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, with drug trafficking so defined as it can be proven by possession.
One of many wonderful things about Singapore.
Not at all coincidentally, their rates of drug use are very low. Which is a pretty solid demonstration that drug prohibition can indeed work if you're serious about it.
Exactly. The homeless problem in Australia has expanded, but generally the times I feel any real intrusion from a homeless person is when they're clearly impaired by some sort of substance and thereby considerably more likely to perform random violence. The Summer of Love was lovely, but why in this Fentanyl-infused era do we need to continue tolerating it?
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Geography matters.
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Why invent something new when you just call it racist?
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