I was going to throw the term “A Modest Proposal” in the title, but that would be too cliche.
My question is, why don’t we have specific parts of the county where any drug addicts can go and get their drugs for free from the Government. They could be like the brothels in Nevada, places where you can go where you can commit acts that would normally be legal. Legalize drugs in CRACKTOWN, HEROINVILLE, LSDLAND, EXTASYCITY. Let any addicts go there to live and enjoy the use of their drugs of choice.
That way, drugs would be legalized, but soceity costs would be lower.
Um, if the drugs are being provided “free from the Government,” how exactly are the costs to society lower? If the government is providing them, suddenly we’re all paying for them, through taxes. Or are they going to magically conjure these drugs from an alternate dimension?
Legalize them and let people pay for their own goddamned drugs, IMO.
For the same reason that you pay for a street sweeper for the city: it keeps the sidewalks clean.
Seriously: you pay tax dollars for a stadium you don’t use, swimming pools in which you’ve never gotten wet, parks in which you’ve never walked, benches on which you’ve never sat, and sculpture you’ve never liked. When you think of it as a quality of life issue, it’s not such a stretch.
Plus, once those areas got saturated and really, really awful, you’d have a great argument against trying drugs in the first place.
This isn’t utterly absurd, except perhaps for the government paying for the drugs. In Holland, they have set up areas where the government will not arrest heroin users, and provide clean needles.
I don’t think it’s worked out well, but maybe the concept can be re-worked.
Why make it work? Let it happen, and get as degrading as it possibly can. Then an equalization can occur: those who will do the drugs and live that wretched lifestyle will be segregated and getting what’s important to them, while serving as a much better example of how bad drug addiction can be than Nancy Reagan or William Bennett. Were this modest proposal to be carried out, I suspect that such safe areas wouldn’t be that large at all. Smaller, probably, if federal and state services, like water, electricity, and police were withdrawn.
Let’s have a Devil’s Island of sorts so that those who’ll go there will go, and leave everyone else alone.
I don’t think the OP meant that the government should shower these people with free drugs. I think he meant that the government should sell the drugs to them.
If manufactured in large numbers, clean drugs wouldn’t cost too much for make and the addicts would be willing to pay any price, anyway.
Think of it this way: A pack of smokes is 2/3 of an ounce, and costs ~$.5 to produce. They are sold, on average, for $2-$3. A pack of marijuana, 2/3 of an ounce, could be made for the same or less than tobacco. Yet people would willingly pay $20-$30 for 2/3 of an ounce of high grade, legal, marijuana. That’s pennies less than $20-$30 in pure tax profit for each pack.
Why, oh why, don’t we do it? Tobacco is more addictive and worse for you! But… tobacco has lobbyists and money. Marijuana has neither.
In a post to my mandatory military service thread that somehow got deleted or wasn’t posted (nevermind it took me like 2 hours to compose) I related a story of a bailiff that had this selfsame “idea”, only in his version, any drug user that left the designated drug-use area with drugs would be executed on site. :shrug: Oh well… I guess we’re getting there, slow as it may be.
A consideration that is irrelevant in quality-of-life arguments; you’re paying simply to satisfy NIMBY. True, it’s noxious to outright support an addict’s habit, but if we’re going to play “A Modest Proposal: The Board Game”, let’s do it right.
As eloquently described above, the drugs the government could produce would be extremely cheap. I think the societal gains, economic and intangible, would easily offset what little expenditures the government would have to make. Heck, they can run it as a need-based financial aid. The poor who cannot afford to buy their drugs, would have them provided by the government. This expenditure by the government would be more than offset by the decrease in crime, property values in parts of any city, and loss of worktime. Those who have money, can buy them, with their price also helping offset the costs to those who are poor.
The costs would be more than recouped by the government. If you have a problem with your tax money being used to supply drugs to people, think of what you are gaining when those people are not breaking into your homes, are not committing crimes, and are not a huge drain on your insurance.
How is paying for NFL fans to watch their team in a tax-funded stadium, or paying some smelly jerk to sculpt “I Hate NAFTA In Tin Cans And Popsicle Sticks #147,” any different from paying people to go somewhere else to do drugs? Either way you’re paying your tax dollars for people to engage in pursuits of dubious social value.
Reading this thread I was thinking ‘Yeah, but a lot of drug users would choose to stay where drugs were illegal but obtainable and you didn’t have to worry about crackheads constantly trying to steal your stuff’ - but if they are selling high quality pot that cheap there, I may have to change my mind!
The answer to this, of course, is that anyone caught outside the zones doing drugs is tossed in a paddy wagon and dropped off in the center of the zone. Then Richard Dawson hosts a real-life version of “The Running Man”.
The concept has already been done in Switzerland. There was one park where people could go and take heroin. They could not be arrested in this park.
When people begtan to O.D., and lying in the park dead for several days, They concluded it wasn’t such a great idea after all.
I don’t think the government would be making these drugs so much as companies… I remember reading that tobacco companies have contingency plans to produce marijuana cigarettes if its ever made legal… and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for a pharmaceutical company that’s already making fentanyl or even just oxy/hydrocodone to start producing recreational heroin… I mean hell the stuff they’re producing already is being used as such (http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/07/19/Delaney.debrief.otsc/index.html)
I truly think this world would be a better place if every alcoholic smoked pot instead.
I thought that was the Netherlands, where they still have a very real legalistic “gray area” when it comes to this
Aside from people lying dead in a park for a number of days I see another potential problem.
Is a new problem created when the people of Cracktown start having children? Now we have children living in Cracktown being taught (either implicity through example, or explicity “Here son! Light’er up!”) that doing drugs is a great way of life. I think it’s pretty obvious that kid’s living in Cracktown will have a much higher exposure to these kinds of substances and therefore a much higher use rate then the average American teen. Am I overlooking something?