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I used to think like you, but after enough experience with antisocial people, I ran out of fucks to give. Personally, I don't have anything against drug users, indeed I am very libertarian on that issue. For me it's not about the drugs. My attitude is, if you can do hard drugs regularly and still be a nice person, more power to you. Probably would be better to stop doing the hard drugs, but as long as you don't cause other people problems, I have nothing against it.
Basically no-one in the US is poor enough that they actually have to steal or commit violence in order just to survive. Poverty is not what is causing our crime problems. People in the US who steal or commit violence do it not because of socioeconomic factors or even necessarily because of their drug use. You can do hard drugs and still not be a thief or a violent sociopath. Obviously hard drug use does degrade the brain, but it is still the individual who decides to continue to do the drugs even if it turns them into an asshole.
The main thing causing people in the US to steal and commit violence is that they have bad character. Some more, some less, but at the end of the day they have bad character. Which is not to say that your brother was fundamentally or essentially a bad guy, and I am very sorry for your loss. But the thing is, the people your brother hurt by stealing matter as much as he does. We have a bad tendency in this country to focus most of our attention on the antisocial person instead of on his victims. But the victims are important, in fact they are much more important than the antisocial person. Remove the antisocial people from society and society will be just fine. Remove the pro-social people and society would collapse instantly.
Should we call anti-social people "dysfunctional scum" or "biowaste"? Well, it depends on just how anti-social they are. I am perfectly happy with calling thieves and violent people biowaste, human garbage. Is it the best way to have the conversation? May be not, but the terminology is not simply insulting, it is also accurate. At some point it is good to call a spade a space. Some people really are human trash. Your brother at least did some good things, but there are people out there who do nothing good that even comes close to making up for the damage that they cause. The people who are like that, yes, I will happily call them biowaste. I am sick and tired of people like that. The world would simply be much much better if they did not exist. They are worse than literal shit. At least literal shit just sits there, it doesn't hurt anybody unless they step on it.
I am no longer interested in rehabilitation. Due process? Sure, I'm into that. If we remove someone from society, I want it to be for actual reasons, not because some cop made a mistake. But rehabilitation? No. My attitude now is, just remove them from society as soon as possible and if they really want to rehabilitate, they can do it on their own time and using their own resources. I am not interested in giving them a single second of my time or a single penny of my money. There are so many good, kind, genuinely wonderful people in the world that I could give my time and resources to instead. Those are the people who actually deserve it. They are the people who make the world a beautiful place. And in this society, we should talk more about them, and we should valorize them, but as for the anti-social assholes, screw them. I owe them nothing other than my contempt, and the only thing I want to give them is a ride to a cage where they can be kept away from hurting nice people.
Crime is what soured me on legalizing drugs. The thing is that while “broken windows” policing doesn’t reduce crime the reverse isn’t true either — being more lax in policing makes things actively worse. When you could get a longish jail term for marijuana possession, it worked quite well to keep drugs and drug related crimes down simply by what I call “bouncer rules”. Sure, marijuana by itself is pretty tame, but since police knew who were the antisocial drug users and sellers, you could arrest them just for pot and prevent them from doing worse things. What decriminalized drug use did was push the cops away from preventing crime in a sense. You can’t just bust a guy for possession because we’ve decriminalized drugs, so now that cop has to wait until a guy he knows is a drug dealer and a thief steals from another person or a business and even at that, it now has to either involve an injury or a large amount of money. That allows problems to fester and get worse, and removes any incentive to curb the openness of the crime. There are open air markets for drugs— in full view of the public. Shoplifters go into stores and basically loot the place knowing that the cops can’t do anything until they hit $1000 per person. So now it’s impossible to get that element under control because we keep giving away the tools.
Ok accepting this logic ad argumentum, why would we stop prohibition short of alcohol? Why does the line run precisely between Marijuana and Whiskey?
I think there’s room for arguments around where exactly to draw the line on drugs. But I think the harder drugs should certainly be illegal simply, as I said as a way to keep the junkies from stealing and harassing people and from openly doing drugs on the streets. The problem is that as the do gooders continue to move various social norms toward the bottom, it creates a rot and quite often that rot ends up harming those who, unlike the do gooders who just want to be compassionate without a thought that such compassion might be making the problems worse.
I think the worst idea is decriminalized drug use for a lot of reasons. First of all, since most hard-drug users tend to either be thieves or fencing for other thieves, you can keep a lot of street crime down by giving jail time to drug users. You can’t always catch a thief in the act, but finding a dime bag is a decent enough proxy. Having drug use be illegal (and again, I’m thinking more of the hard stuff) also means that drug users will be much less likely to use openly, and if they do, you can arrest them for that. As it stands now, you can’t walk down some streets in major cities because homeless drug users harass people, rob people, shit on the streets, and build huge eyesores of cobbled together houses in the sidewalks. This obviously kills business near those areas because believe it or not, nobody with money to spend wants to go to drug alley for anything. This reduces the value of property within walking distance substantially and creates more poverty and more despair and ultimately more drug use and more crime. The monied flee fairly quickly as crime slowly climbs.
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Are pot users criminal because they're antisocial, or are they antisocial because pot is criminalized? Seems pretty intuitive to me that pot in itself isn't the kind of drug that people steal, rob and kill for. Alcohol is vastly more "antisocial" in that regard.
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Narcan makes legalizing opiates impossible.
Probably. But I don’t see how that deals with the problem of open air markets that exist now and the criminal elements attracted by them. The cops have their hands tied because even if opioids are illegal, most drug offenses are not being prosecuted to the full extent. And the gateway drugs are legal which makes it less of a problem for sellers.
In some of the articles I’ve read on the opioid crisis, cops were using narcan to revive different people multiple times a day in small WV towns. Hard not to think that implies the problem would resolve itself if it didn’t exist.
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Rehabilitation is a modern cheat code word employed to pretend that curing the original sin of (someone else who is really to blame) is what will turn someone into a productive member of society, absolving the criminal/delinquent of their crimes by the magic of blaming someone else and pinky promising that rehab has made the desire to commit crime go away.
In truth crime is simply a balancing of incentive structures, and just because people are bad at making their own calculus does not absolve society of constructing poor incentives to begin with. Criminals may not necessarily understand the meta of rehab program + therapy sessions to get better in-prison treatment and get lesser sentences from DAs, but repeated interactions and information transfer surely leads to convergent evolution. The existence of lenient alternatives to incarceration serve to incentivize criminality, since legal economic avenues are not nearly as socially emotionally or economically rewarding as bipping cowardly suburbanites.
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