LarrySanger.org

Remarks on the drug crisis

As a drug-legalization libertarian, watching this video wasn’t easy:

It’s a highly opinionated piece of propaganda; but it is also extremely persuasive. Thinking about this might make me moderate my position on drug legalization. I bear a few things in mind, which I will list simply:

  1. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle are being garbage dumps full of drug addicts.
  2. This is portrayed as a “homelessness problem,” when the vast majority of the “homeless” are in fact drug addicts.
  3. Most can’t escape addiction without help.
  4. Meanwhile, it has become fashionable for many big city and state government politicians to essentially permit all the bad behavior that enables the homelessness-due-to-drugs problem: not just vagrancy, of course, but also public drug abuse and selling, stealing, and even robbery and worse. This is all, apparently, in the name of sensitivity and compassion.
  5. If that’s true, it doesn’t seem very compassionate to me.
  6. Is this problem the consequence of legalizing drugs? Because if so, I’m not sure I’m in favor of that after all. I mean, good lord.
  7. Maybe the problem can be solved by jailing for drugs only when a person commits even a relatively petty crime (such as vagrancy on private property).
  8. Watch the video all the way to the end, when it starts talking about the Rhode Island drug rehabilitation program. I can’t say that I’m totally convinced it works as well as they say it does (this is a very biased piece of propaganda, after all), but if it does, this should be implemented nationwide.
  9. New York cleaned up its act after Rudy Giuliani started enforcing the little quality-of-life laws. We should start thinking that way about the homelessness and drug addiction problems.
  10. I have a great deal of pity for the drug addicts. Past a certain point, you can’t blame them for how they are. They really do need help. If this is what more or less free-and-legal drug addiction looks like, their lack of control becomes a problem for all of us, if it results in conditions like those San Francisco and Seattle are facing. And then it makes a lot of sense to get those people help as part of how society responds to their crimes.

Which of these claims is wrong? I’m not committed to them; but if they’re true, they’re a very serious indictment of our current systems.

by

Larry Sanger

“Internet Knowledge Organizer.” Currently President of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, started Wikipedia and various other educational and reference sites. Ph.D., Philosophy, Ohio State, 2000. [read more]

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5 responses to “Remarks on the drug crisis”

  1. Seth Finkelstein

    Larry, I think you’re running straight into the problem that Libertarian-type ideologies fail badly with situations where there are both extensive externalities, plus it’s absurd to model individuals as anything approximating rational economic actors. Just a few quick observations:

    Your point number 4 is painfully mistaken. The US has a very high rate of incarceration and associated brutality compared overall to other first-world nations.

    Point 9 has no factual basis. It’s something many people think is true because they would like to believe it is true (especially right-wingers). But “broken windows” theory policing is, as a factual matter, at best highly dubious.

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-problem-with-broken-windows-policing/

    “But in cities where Broken Windows has taken root, there’s little evidence that it’s worked as intended. The theory has instead resulted in what critics say is aggressive over-policing of minority communities, which often creates more problems than it solves. Such practices can strain criminal justice systems, burden impoverished people with fines for minor offenses, and fracture the relationship between police and minorities.”

    I can’t write a dissertation in a comment box. Social problems are complex systems. Just take as a general rule, that mean-spiritedness and punishment tend not to help miserable people cope with self-destructive behavior.

    Reply
    1. Larry Sanger

      Those are some simplistic and ill-informed criticisms of what you accuse of being simplistic and ill-informed, Seth.

      Re point 4: we’re talking about Seattle and San Francisco, whose policymakers apparently agree with you that high incarceration rates are a problem, and so by practice police very leniently. If you had watched the video you might get this point.

      Re point 9: the “broken windows” theory still has plenty of credible defenders, but yes, it’s contentious.

      I find it strange that you say that social problems are complex systems and then offer a simplistic, blanket dismissal of “punishment.” A more nuanced view would say that punishment has its place, and would then try to reason toward a delineation of that place. Surely you’re not saying nobody should be incarcerated for anything; but oh no, that would be “punishment”! Also, if you had watched the video, you’d learn that ultra-progressive Rhode Island is taken as the model for how to treat “miserable people” as they “cope with self-destructive behavior,” i.e., having a mandatory medicine-based, (what looks like) inpatient drug rehabilitation program.

      The other options are (a) continue to allow these unfortunate people not only to destroy themselves, but also to destroy their neighborhoods and local economies, or (b) lock ’em up and throw away the key. I agree that (b) is the wrong approach. If the only way to solve the “homelessness” and concomitant local crime (and quality of life) crisis, borne of drug addiction, is to rehabilitate the drug addicts, maybe that’s what we should be doing. This is as much rehabilitation as punishment.

      Reply
      1. Seth Finkelstein

        I think it unreasonable to expect watching an hour video for writing a comment on a blog post. My remarks were addressed to the points you were putting forth, not the video in any case. Regarding point 4, don’t confuse the concepts of “better than average in a relative sense” with “good in an absolute sense”.

        Now, sigh, one of the great pains of Internet discussion is that when one writes a qualified statement, basically the qualifier is utterly irrelevant for replies. Case in point: “Just take as a general rule, … tend …” versus “Surely you’re not saying nobody should be incarcerated for anything”. It’s explicitly avoiding making such an absolute statement. But no, “would say that punishment has its place, and would then try to reason toward a delineation …” is exactly a perspective I’m opposing, as that’s just too tempting to start coming up with rationalizations and justifications for brutality. That’s what I’m trying to address in terms of “social problems are complex systems and then offer a simplistic, blanket dismissal of “punishment.” “. As an analogy: I’m not a philosophical pacifist in terms of war. But once one admits military action might ever be justified, every war-monger is claiming their adventurist cause is WWII redux, and that the burden is on critics to disprove an imaginary welcomed regime-change of liberators being greeted with flowers.

        Complex systems means in part that even if addicts go through mandatory rehab, they got addicted in the first place for some set of reasons. After they get out of rehab, unless those driving reasons change, they have a high chance of relapsing. And then right-wing campaigners will proclaim that rehab doesn’t work and more prison is the only answer. This is predicable. It’s the sort of trap I’m advising to avoid.

        Reply
  2. Paul Quirk

    At some point, we must come to terms with the reasons drug addictions occur in the first place, on the basis of both why these drugs exist and why people feel it necessary to use them. We also need to question why certain drugs like alcohol are often glamorized when it is killing more than 88,000 people in the US every year. When our culture glamorizes the likes of Steve Jobs as a supposed “Genius,” who was in reality an acid-dropping loser who lucked out by befriending an accomplished HP engineer (Woz) and nearly bankrupt an otherwise profitable company. There is no longer any stigma when the heroes we worship are themselves drug addicts, and those drugs now look like an easy path to success and happiness. The problem, as I see it, is that we live in a culture that constantly makes people feel as though they’re not “Good enough.” We stigmatize the burger flippers and labourers and anyone who doesn’t drive a car that’s newer than 5 years old. The problem is inherent in our very culture.

    Reply
    1. Larry Sanger

      You’re right that drugs (including alcohol) are glamorized–but, obviously, only by some. But this is interesting: I don’t have any close friends who do any drugs (that I know of) other than drink, and maybe a little pot, and not many of my acquaintances (off hand) glamorize drugs as far as I know. (Maybe they just keep it from me.) Apart from wine, beer, and whisky connoisseurs, drugs are at best a guilty indulgence for a very few of my friends. I know that in more “sophisticated” (not in any good way) circles, maybe in more urban and coastal areas, there still are professionals who indulge. You’re also surely right that Hollywood and the music industry glamorize hard drugs to an extent.

      But this documentary is about a different (but related) drug scene, the street drug scene where maybe drugs are “cool,” but the surrounding society looks down on the users with mixed horror and pity, and don’t regard them as a cool at all. I grew up on the edges of that sort of scene and saw some pretty awful things. To be sure, the young druggies I knew growing up thought they were very cool smoking pot and, no doubt, sometimes doing harder stuff (yes, acid–not an uncommon drug where Jobs and I went to college, Reed in Portland).

      Do people turn to drugs because they don’t feel they’re “good enough”? That suggests that drugs are an escape–a common observation–but in particular, an escape from the sense of ordinariness. I don’t suppose that’s wrong, but surely the lives of most people are no more ordinary than they were in centuries gone by. If we indulge more today, it might be simply due to greater availability: common cheap drugs of today were just not available in centuries past. The wastoids of today would have been mere drunks in previous generations, perhaps.

      But the one thing we don’t seem to contemplate so much anymore, maybe because it’s extremely uncool to do so, is that many (maybe most) of us lack any restraint in the form of the fear of God or hellfire or the shame of the (respected, religious) neighbors knowing about a dirty secret. I guess those of us over a certain age barely remember that, as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, what the neighbors would think about dirty habits such as drugs and overindulgence in drink was still a major restraining force in Western society. (I think it still is, in other places in the world, like Japan.) Even if not all of us glamorize drugs, we do avoid openly criticizing drugs. Beginning with the drug culture youth of the 60s and now all but highly religious people today, taking drugs is regarded as a choice we can shrug at, at least in our neighbors and acquaintances. People close to us, to be sure, we might try to restrain. But these efforts to restrain are surely more difficult because the lack of much general sense of shame in the broader society.

      All of this is just a very long-winded way of saying that many people now feel more or less free to indulge shamelessly.

      For people with little self-control, ambition, or social (especially family) restraints, that sense of license is enough; they become addicts because drugs are the most exciting thing they can do with their lives.

      Reply

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