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I consider the whole thing itself as just another aspect of a sick society. It is valuable to go and attempt to rescue some of these poor souls, like a one-man Rittenhouse crusading against urban Covid super-spreaders, but ultimately, it's like bailing out with a spoon.
It's hard to say exactly where charity should be placed, but there does appear to be some more effective approaches to drug containment, namely in El Salvador or the Philippines, we don't necessarily have to throw our hands in the air. 'Aaaah these people are just desperate, no can do, drugs will just keep flowing' Which I suppose would still largely be included in
Whether your child OD's, cuts their genitals, becomes a girlboss dogmom, a journalist, join the reddit volunteers for Ukraine or immolates themselves for or against Israel... It's all some failure of parenting that's unfortunately incredibly common because overcoming the odds requires some serious skills in this century.
It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.
It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.
We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.
If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.
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Sick society, sure, hard to argue with that, but I can't believe a Philippines-style approach makes it any healthier -- what's the evidence that executing however many thousand people there even improved the problem at all? Last I heard, the outgoing Duterte government didn't make much of an attempt to quantify the positive effects the several-year "reign of terror" had on stopping drug crime. Certainly haven't heard the compelling evidence that it worked well enough to justify normalizing the "shoot a guy and sprinkle some meth on him" tactics that police were empowered to use against civilians (and maybe civilians against each other).
I don't know who's laughing about how the need to test our policies to see if they work entails the risk of making people's lives worse, and I'm certainly not seeing how some Judge Dredd approach is so self-evidently superior that it wouldn't need to be empirically evaluated.
Many of us are living proof.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114
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Based on murder rates in the Philippines it looks like it worked. The murder rate dropped from 10 per 100k in 2016 to 4 per 100k in 2021. The Judge Dredd approach also worked in El Salvador which is now safer (with respect to murder) than the USA.
It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.
El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.
High-end organised crime produces mid- and high-level leaders where everyone knows they are guilty of all the crimes, but they can't be prosecuted due to some combination of plausible deniability that they are ordering the crimes committed by their subordinates and the ability to prevent prosecution by bribing or intimidating some combination of cops, prosecutors, witnesses, juries and judges.
If you have a problem with that kind of organisation, going Judge Dredd/Nayib Bukele is going to improve things, even if it violates rule-of-law principles. The same is true to a lesser extent of full-on lawfare - there is a whole load of things which Federal law enforcement does which are tyrannical overreach when done to a small-town doctor accused of overbilling Medicare but which became SOP for good reasons during the period when the Feds were fighting the Mafia.
Policing disorganised crime is harder because effective deterrence relies on distinguishing between the chavs who are actively criming and the chavs who are just chaving.
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