Well, let's do that.
A typical crack/heroin addiction costs about $300/day. If funded by stolen goods sold for 10% of their value then an addict has to steal at least $3,000 a day or $21,000 of goods a week.
Think about that!
And drug addiction is a cruel master; even ignoring property crime issues, we need to try to help addicts back to health.
Now, there are two approaches to dealing with this reality -- harsher criminal sanctions or moving the problem from criminal law to medical treatment.
It is clear the problem cannot be ignored.
We've seen how well harsher criminal sanctions work; they don't.
But Portugal has shown that the other way works. It's time we follow Portugal's lead:
Portugal's Drug Policy Pays Off
http://fxn.ws/yypZH9
These days, Casal Ventoso is an ordinary blue-collar community — mothers push baby strollers, men smoke outside cafes, buses chug up and down the cobbled main street.
Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a "drug supermarket" where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneak into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts — some with maggots squirming under track marks — staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.
At that time, Portugal, like the junkies of Casal Ventoso, had hit rock bottom: An estimated 100,000 people — an astonishing 1 percent of its population — were addicted to illegal drugs. So, like anyone with little to lose, the Portuguese took a risky leap: They decriminalized the use of all drugs in a groundbreaking law in 2000.
...
Here's what happened between 2000 and 2008:
— There were small increases in illicit drug use among adults, but decreases for adolescents and problem users such as drug addicts and prisoners.
— Drug-related court cases dropped 66 percent.
— Drug-related HIV cases dropped 75 percent. In 2002, 49 percent of people with AIDS were addicts; by 2008 that number fell to 28 percent.
— The number of regular users held steady at less than 3 percent of the population for marijuana and less than 0.3 percent for heroin and cocaine — figures that show decriminalization brought no surge in drug use.
— The number of people treated for drug addiction rose 20 percent from 2001 to 2008.
...
In Portugal today, outreach health workers provide addicts with fresh needles, swabs, little dishes to cook up the injectable mixture, disinfectant and condoms. But anyone caught with even a small amount of drugs is automatically sent to what is known as a Dissuasion Committee for counseling. The committees include legal experts, psychologists and social workers.
...
Health workers also shepherd some addicts off the streets directly into treatment. That's what happened to 33-year-old Tiago, who is struggling to kick heroin at a Lisbon rehab facility.
Tiago, who requested that his first name only be used to protect his privacy, started taking heroin when he was 20. He shot up four or five times a day, sleeping for years in an abandoned car where, with his addicted girlfriend, he fathered a child he has never seen.
At the airy Lisbon treatment center where he now lives, Tiago plays table tennis, surfs the Internet and watches TV. He helps with cleaning and other odd jobs. And he's back to his normal weight after dropping to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) during his addiction.
After almost six months on methadone, each day trimming his intake, he brims with hope about his upcoming move to a home run by the Catholic church where recovered addicts are offered a fresh start.
5 comments:
Harsher laws or medical treatment? Sounds like a winner for medical treatment until we realize that Trudeau's charter makes the latter impossible unless the junkie wants treatment. The reason we have so many junkies is the 80's experiment with de-institutionalization of mental patients because of charter violations and the quaint idea of treatment in the community.
How do you propose to get these people into treatment and keep them there if they do not want it? To me, that's where harsh laws are necessary because the only way to force treatment now is through the criminal system.
First of all, deinstitutionalization was a international movement. What happened in Canada happened everywhere else in Western World. Second, by the time Charter of rights in freedoms had taken effect deinstitutionalization had long since begun. Indeed, deinstitutionalization in Canada goes all the way back to the 1950s. Looking at a local example, the number of beds in Riverview in 1976 was less than half of what it was in 1956 and the average stay was significantly less. Third, this was a process overseen by provincial governments and not Federal governments.
As for the notion that forced treatment is somehow going to work you have got to be kidding. If memory serves, the failure rates for treatment are something like 85% to 90% as it is. Forced treatment is an oxymoron. For treatment to have any chance of working the person in question has display a willingness to get off drugs.
Look, with regard to many hard core heroin addicts, there is no hope. Many are going to remain addicts for life. Consider UCLA's longitudinal study. Researchers looked at the what happened to 581 male heroin addicts committed by the courts to the California Civil Addict Program between 1962 and 1964 at an average age of 25.4 years. 33 years later, 284 were dead, and 40% those left alive had admitted using heroin within the last year. Framed this the way, the question becomes how do minimize the harm they are doing to themselves and to society.
Portugal's decision to decriminalize all drugs has radically reduced court costs and has helped reduce the spread of HIV and Hep C. However, it is still not addressed issue of associated property crime. Switzerland has. So successful have heroin maintenance programs been in this regard, 68% of Swiss voters voted to keep them in place.
"We've seen how well harsher criminal sanctions work; they don't"
You have been preaching this horse shit for years.
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE EVIDENCE THAT HARSH SENTENCES DON'T WORK?
Where is the fucking evidence? Quit trying to play God Morton.
Again, give me the fucking evidence. You keep saying the same fucking things over and over and over, yet don't provide one shred of evidence.
Where the fuck is it? Or shut your fucking mouth.
I'm sick of you cultural Marxists playing God.
And I am sick of your foul, insulting and stupid comments!!!!
Very interesting post. I believe we can make enormous improvements in crime reduction, homelessness, health costs, etc if we start to get smart on dealing with some of these social conditions.
Different experiments show what can be achieved. Now we need to build public support and bring in a government that is prepared to move on them. The costs need not be large and could well be more than covered by reduced costs in other areas.
Doug
Post a Comment