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Notes -
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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