A crazy idea, I wonder if someone tried it: “All illegal drugs should be legal, if you buy them at a special government-managed shop, under the condition that you sign up for several months of addiction treatment.”
The idea is that drug addicts get really short-sighted and willing to do anything when they miss the drug. Typically that pushes them to crime (often encouraged by the dealers: “hey, if you don’t have cash, why don’t you just steal something from the shop over there and bring it to me?”). We could use the same energy to push them towards treatment instead.
“Are you willing to do anything for the next dose? Nice, sign these papers and get your dose for free! As a consequence you will spend a few months locked away, but hey, you don’t care about the long-term consequences now, do you?” (Ideally, the months of treatment would increase exponentially for repeated use.)
Seems to me like a win/win situation. The addict gets the drug immediately, which is all that matters to them at the moment. The public would pay for the drug use anyway, either directly, or by being victims of theft. (Or it might be possible to use confiscated drugs for this purpose.) At least this way there is no crime, and the addict is taken off the streets.
This would be especially useful in those situation where “everyone knows” the place where the drugs are being sold (because obvious addicts congregate there), but for some technical reasons it is difficult to prove it legally. Don’t need to prove anything, just open a sales stand there saying “free drugs” and watch the street get clean.
A crazy idea, I wonder if someone tried it: “All illegal drugs should be legal, if you buy them at a special government-managed shop, under the condition that you sign up for several months of addiction treatment.”
The idea is that drug addicts get really short-sighted and willing to do anything when they miss the drug. Typically that pushes them to crime (often encouraged by the dealers: “hey, if you don’t have cash, why don’t you just steal something from the shop over there and bring it to me?”). We could use the same energy to push them towards treatment instead.
“Are you willing to do anything for the next dose? Nice, sign these papers and get your dose for free! As a consequence you will spend a few months locked away, but hey, you don’t care about the long-term consequences now, do you?” (Ideally, the months of treatment would increase exponentially for repeated use.)
Seems to me like a win/win situation. The addict gets the drug immediately, which is all that matters to them at the moment. The public would pay for the drug use anyway, either directly, or by being victims of theft. (Or it might be possible to use confiscated drugs for this purpose.) At least this way there is no crime, and the addict is taken off the streets.
This would be especially useful in those situation where “everyone knows” the place where the drugs are being sold (because obvious addicts congregate there), but for some technical reasons it is difficult to prove it legally. Don’t need to prove anything, just open a sales stand there saying “free drugs” and watch the street get clean.
Intuitively this seems deeply ethically fraught but I upvoted for demonstrating the virtue of Thinking About Things Every Once In A While