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The key thing isn’t the treatment options. Surprisingly opiates are enjoyable and they don’t want to quit and they also don’t want to do it in the environment you describe.
Jailing dealers would do a lot of the heavy work alone. Clearing out the city-center encampments for doing the dope would do a lot. Yes I know you said long prison sentences for dealers but that’s the hard part we have no appetite for right now. Afghanistan solved the dope issue without treatment centers. They just jailed everyone high for a couple months till they were sober.
Also supposedly the Euro countries that did the legalizing thing cleared out the encampments etc. but I don’t see political will in those cities to do that.
Yes, I agree. Clearly strict enforcement is the only real way to solve the opioid problem which is currently killing over 100,000 Americans every year. Every "soft" method has either been ineffective or made the problem worse. But I do think a push/pull might work better than push alone. Giving junkies a way to comply with the law without having to go clean seems like a useful outlet valve for when we do start actually arresting dealers.
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There's something amusingly ironic about Afghanistan, a country the US military helped to ensure produced large amounts of opiates during the occupation, being capable of solving this particular issue.
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