You seem to be acting as though addiction and the issues which give rise to it are somehow not part of society, and therefore should be discarded. Even ignoring why that's wrong, ignoring why letting people slip through the cracks still has an impact on your conception of society...
> How about empathy from your side? I have lost a friend due to addiction despite "care". The best solution is not being exposed to some classes of drugs at all.
Maybe that's true, but the genie isn't going back into the bottle as like 50 years of the 'war on drugs' has so clearly demonstrated.
The war on drugs started 18 June 1971 with Richard Nixon's declaration that drug abuse is “public enemy number one.” At this point, drugs seem more available than ever. I strongly suspect we would minimize harm in the reality in which we live (rather than the pretend reality where drugs don't exist) by acknowledging that.
Think of the War on Drugs like a baked good. Just because we have failed attempting it doesn't mean we go around declaring we'll never try again! It just means we try harder.
Joking aside, look at Singapore for a success case.
Well, the whole world did it, and the whole world failed, for fifty years. Just as it failed with alcohol, a much more dangerous drug than most. [0]
I'm not sure how Singapore fares, but Japan is also known for its hard-line drug policy. This just pushes the harm underground. Just because you don't see it, and society turns a blind eye to it, doesn't mean it's not there. tl;dr: the hardline policy towards drug use in Japan created a massive underground meth problem. [1]
[edit] It doesn't take much research to find out something quite similar is happening in Singapore, too.
> “People think drugs are very hard to get in Singapore, but actually before the pandemic they were everywhere, and even now there are people selling them.” [2]
Hardline policies don't reduce the harm. They just stop people from asking for help.
The overall impact of alcohol on society is not because it is “much more dangerous than most”, but because it is consumed (and abused) by orders of magnitude more people than almost every other drug.
That's partly the case, but part of the higher ranking of other drugs is due to lack of safe access. There's no perfect model, but I would argue alcohol is a drug like any other - with risk of dependence, with health consequences, and with mortality risk. So my question to the parent is: why would we separate alcohol? Would parent be in favor of returning to prohibition?
I think it's fair to say that alcohol does far more harm to the user than psychedelics.
If Singapore is homogeneous, the USA is too. Descendants of Chinese (majority), followed by Malay, and Indian make up most of the citizens. Couple that with the high number of expats from all over the world.
What? The country has four official languages. It is arguably close to the US level of diversity, especially when you consider the implications of how multiracial children are classified and the fact that 70 something percent of the country is put into a vague “Chinese” bucket.
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly in this thread, plus we've had to ask you about this more than once before. We're trying for curious conversation here. Posting aggressively and swipily really kills that.
Having an unexpected/unwanted child sure can, as can STI's like HIV. My point, which I hoped was clear, is that abstinence (whether from drugs, sex, or anything else) is only a workable model at the societal level in theory. In practice we already know that a statistically significant number of people will engage in risky behavior. Harm reduction in the context of sex involves early education, access to condoms, etc. Harm reduction in the context of drugs involves early education, access to quality rehab and mental health services, safe injection sites, etc.
People don’t live isolated from each other. Drug consumption has knock on effect on the rest of the population: traffic props up organised crime, addicts can be violent. Plus there is a direct correlation between social issues and the risk of becoming an addict. All of this is squarely in the remit of the state.
Portugal was previously (1990s) spending money on police, courts, and jails. They had shifted the resources, and it had seemed to be successful until something changed in the past few years.
If you want the freedom from society to use drugs, then you shouldn't rely on society for that.