Another thing. The problem is addiction, so why not more directly target that? Much like with added sugar. We should not put people for years in jail then call them a permanent risk to kids no matter where they actually are after, simply for possessing sugar, but it should not be so cheap. So make the addictive stuff cost a lot of bank by heavy taxation (say 300%, of which 100% then goes to funding rehab and services), make mental health services very easily available by comparison, and if coercive interventions are to be added, make them in a form of actual restraint more than punishment, i.e. the intent is not to cause suffering so much as to physically keep the drug away (e.g. putting people around them and/or working with their surrounding community to literally keep the drugs away from them [incl. by snatching it from their hand if it comes to that] instead of putting them in a dungeon where they are fed food that is intentionally chosen to be dangerous or with rapists that could very well lead to a fatal outcome).
This is a good/interesting way to look at it ... add up the total misery level instead of pretending that in either case "the misery" has stopped because you deliberately exclude one or the other miseries from the accounting.
Punishment does deter things. Whether it is the only thing that can is a different matter. But I think a lot of those who want alternatives need to get out of the "punishment does not deter" narrative, which is about as silly as saying that oil and gas don't provide energy because they are bad for the environment.
I think you need to go further than looking at the total misery, although that is definitely an important first step in preventing false accounting. You need to account for some basic “game theory / behavioral economics / control system”-type stuff: when you decrease or increase one variable, what happens to the other variables?
Applied at a crude level, this tells you that removing punishment misery will cause addiction misery to rise (which is an important refinement - a “total misery accounting” perspective that doesn’t have this included will believe that removing punishment misery would leave addiction misery unchanged, thus improving total misery).
Applied at a more sophisticated level, this gets you analyzing incremental changes in punishment or addiction policy: e.g. this new law adds x punishment misery, how much does it reduce addiction misery by? If the answer is “less than x”, you now have some objective basis for concluding this policy is “needlessly cruel”.
> add up the total misery level instead of pretending that in either case "the misery" has stopped because you deliberately exclude one or the other miseries from the accounting.
You can't do this. It is neither ethical or practical. There's plenty we could do as a society that may hypothetically "reduce misery", but we don't insofar as it violates their rights.
It's not even possible to do. This is highly subjective. For instance, how do you rate the genocide that's baked into prohibition? Does that just not count because you don't respect a part of our subculture? What about people that are now in pain and misery, but we're maybe hurting their health with illegal drugs (although some of them seemed to be doing fine and not increasing their dosages).
Does the fact that they were previously dependent on drugs, somehow negate their pain, or inability to function well. Is being addicted to drugs some kind of weird nightmare scenario, like the matrix, where the subject is always worse off?
So what if you remove the vat of cocaine water by just removing the vat instead of by permanently crippling the other "rats" with 40,000 life-long collateral penalties after a jail where they could easily have been killed inside of?
What if we make treatment basically consist of some sort of genetic or other biotechnological intervention that essentially tweaks the vulnerability? Can't be worse than a jail + thousands of never-terminating under any circumstance collateral penalties.
Someone elsewhere in this HN discussion compared the support of people destroying themselves with drugs to being like providing hospice (palliative) care.
If we legalised all drugs, we would need to protect our communities, not abandon our communities to people destroying themselves.
The trick is to not assume that "feeding" it will solve it but to create alternative actions, doing research to do so while enduring the destruction patiently for as long as that takes.
What if we make it not simple, but "simply" exclude just one solution - lifetime punishment (prison + 40,000 collateral consequences, life imprisonment, or a death penalty) - directed against the persons with the problem, from the mix, and leave everything else as wide open as ever for consideration?
which, governments behave stupidly because that's patiently obvious but what did the US do with that opioid crisis? got rid the method, oxycontin, left no legal supported method, leading to street heroin, and hey guess what we have a huge problem with today.
However, even if there is, why does that mean the answer needs to be the _specific_ extraordinarily-severe-by-nature method of criminal punishment? It seems the article, again, was basically suggesting the problem was there is no sort of incentive AT ALL, when it should be that we should be looking for "neither-nor" solutions that are neither the old method nor "just sit back and do nothing".
> state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
When it should be that addictive use should be seen as a health problem, to be taken care of with treatment, instead of either a "human right" OR something to be treated by intentionally inflicting MASSIVE suffering (jail + esp. the post-jail 'collateral penalties').
