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Notes -
I wish I had advice to give, but I don't. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to expand on part of your post. I largely feel the same way about drug laws, though not with as much conviction as I used to. Over the last several years we have seen some huge strides in drug policy liberalization. Oregon is probably the largest and most notable. Initially, these decriminalization measures seemed really promising! We were finally going to run a proper experiment on this!
Except that's not what happened. At the same time that the drug laws were loosened, enforcement of all manner of public nuisance laws and public intoxication laws fell off a cliff. The same jurisdictions that decriminalized various drugs have adopted catch-and-release policies for all but the most violent of people that are on drugs in public, and now these places are practically held hostage by huge numbers of dangerous drug-addled vagrants.
It didn't have to be this way! We could have decriminalized possession without simultaneously legalizing being a menace to the public! What the hell happened? So, now, the experiment will ultimately be called a failure and we'll have to start the prohibition cycle all over again. I don't have much hope for us getting it right on the next go-around either.
Intuitively, I agree, but I’ve been thinking about stuff Scott mentioned in this post and its response.
You’ve got all the same factors as legal drug use. Being mentally ill in the privacy of your own home isn’t a crime; it’s wandering around and shitting on sidewalks or threatening businessmen that’s illegal. But the default state of psychosis or whatever is rather correlated with shitting and threatening. As soon as the individual is out of direct supervision, any relapse is likely to end up in the same behavior.
Well, being addicted to heroin is closely correlated with being a menace to the public. It doesn’t matter if private, quiet heroin use is legal if enough users end up committing all the public-menace crimes. As with psychosis, you’re left collecting these people in your external support network, trying to clean them up, and eventually letting them out to make their own choices again.
It’s doable, but it’s not free or easy. Nor is it established like involuntary commitment. At best, some subset of the normal prison system is designed for detox and rehab. Co-opting that is bad optics at best. Far easier to mutter something about “better support” than to implement it.
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The problem is, it did have to be this way, not because of the policies, but because of the people.
You put hippy-dippy bleeding hearts in charge and got hippy-dippy bleeding heart policy, which meant no punishment at all. If you wanted techno-utopia, you needed to vote for techno-utopians, and I know enough about Oregon to know that the bleeding heats outnumber to utopians by overwhelming numbers.
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I think you have one group of people trying to solve a problem at the tails, while some more radical people think the problem is closer to the median. Basically police reform vs abolition.
Strangely, the radicals may sometimes have a better idea of the scope of the problem than the normies. If both sides agree too many people are in jail and one wants to solve it via letting out people caught with marijuana (because they saw some horror story about some kid being trapped for months because of a joint) they'll hit diminishing returns much faster than the people willing to have much laxer standards
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This is the story of America.
There is a very old and very respected tradition of people on death row being granted their last meal of choice before their execution. It's a remarkable gesture - it is a tradition from a society that will allow someone they have decided is not fit to live the dignity of a good meal before they are put to death.
Then one guy ordered a crap ton of food on Texas's dime and then didn't eat any of it. As a result, the judge ended the tradition, and as of last I checked Texas no longer offers prisoners on death row a last meal.
What I love about this story is that it's one of the most perfect microcosms of America - here is a wealthy, powerful society that treats even the people they decide to kill under their laws with some manner of respect, with the leeway to even consider this in the first place, and because of the individual freedoms allotted to every single one of them, they have to account for the edge cases where someone plays defectbot. And you can't even blame the defectbot for it, because going out kicking and screaming and full of spite is a right that is also allowed to the man playing defectbot. Worse, there were probably multiple ways that the ill effects of the man playing defectbot could be minimalized - it would have been trivial to set a budget cap on the last meal, and the tradition could be honored without throwing the whole thing out.
But no, everything has to be this way. I have zero faith in the American justice system's ability to decriminalize possession, or indeed the American state's capacity to apply punitive measures against criminal possession. You could say this is because of bad actors. But an American society that is permissive of these things doesn't have bad actors, simply actors exercising their individual freedom.
Change can come, when a critical mass of American society with suitable amounts of power decides that no, it is no longer permissive of these things, and that the drug-addled vagrants should not be allowed. Then they'll go back to locking them up in sanitariums or prisons, or finding other similarly ugly measures. The experiment doesn't matter anywhere near as much as this - there's no end of ways you can obfuscate or hide results that are unpalatable to certain interest groups.
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