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Notes -
Hold on.
Didn’t we try “tough on crime” over and over again? Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, all spearheading different approaches to shooting the dealers and locking up the addicts. Okay, Nixon had a really confusing stance on remediation, but his admin popularized the “war on drugs!” So what were these guys doing wrong?
@JarJarJedi and @FarNearEverywhere posit that progressive idpol is holding us back from implementing harsh solutions. This train wreck of a wiki article suggests the same…but most of its examples are post 2010. There were massive race riots before Clinton was elected, yet the 1994 crime bill saw huge bipartisan support. Reagan wasn’t deferring to victim narratives. It’s plausible that today, progressives are unwilling to accept the trade off, but that doesn’t explain what happened in the 80s and 90s.
I’m sympathetic to the argument below: America is so damn rich that our drug-addled homeless don’t mind it too much. That demand curve makes it hard to suppress the supply of drugs. Maybe reinstitutionalizing would help make up the difference. I just have little confidence that it would succeed where two generations have failed.
That's not what I'm saying. Harshness of the solution is not the issue. We don't need public executions of weed smokers. At least it won't fix public space decay problems. What is likely to fix it is consistent enforcement of quality-of-life crimes. It won't fix the drug abuse - but it would prevent it from messing up the lives of ordinary citizens not participating in it. However, the society took the conscious decision that the welfare of drug addicts is more important than the quality of life of the rest of the society.
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