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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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