Michael Shellenberger has an excellent article out today. Read this article if you’re here to do the real work for addicts.
Arresting drug addicts in America is the only morally correct position. Dead drug addicts — you see — do not have a chance recover. That’s the thing about death. There’s no do-overs once you’ve overdosed.
Supposedly well-intended drug policy advocates are immorally allowing suffering people to die — this can only change when drug policy advocates are educated unto accountability for their public positions.
Michael Shelenberger understands this assignment. Here’s highlights from the Shelenberger article today titled “Why We Must Arrest Drug Addicts:”
“Progressives blame laws that treat addiction as a criminal rather than public health problem, while conservatives blame lockdowns to covid. Both sides are wrong. The cause of the 100,000 deaths is the normalization of hard drug use and the liberalization of drug laws.”
“America lacks a functioning mental health care system capable of providing people with untreated mental illness and addiction the psychiatric and rehabilitation they need. But the death toll has been rising gradually from 2000, when just 17,000 people died, to 2020, and the underlying reason is the normalization and liberalization of drug laws. The U.S. liberalized the prescription of opioid pharmaceutical drugs starting in the late 1990s. It’s true that the U.S. tightened prescription regulations in 2010, which is when many opioid addicts turned to heroin. But cities and states also liberalized drug laws, including against open drug scenes in cities, euphemistically referred to as “homeless encampments,” where dealers and buyers meet. And American society has gradually normalized and even glamorized the use of pharmaceutical and hard drugs for 20 years.”
“Many progressives and some conservatives will object to this approach by saying that Portugal, Netherlands, and other European nations handled their addiction crises in the late 1980s differently, but they didn’t. Faced with open drug scenes, Portugal and Netherlands also tried the “helping-only” approach of giving addicts clean needles and offering methadone, an opioid substitute, and failed. Addicts took the needles and methadone, kept shooting heroin in public, and dying. It was only after those nations started arresting addicts and giving them the choice of rehab or jail that lives were saved.”
“Drug decriminalization and “Housing First” advocates say that all we should do to help Diane is to give her a free apartment, needles for shooting and foil for smoking fentanyl, and a place where she can safely use fentanyl. That’s the progressive thing to do, according to San Francisco’s Mayor and Supervisors, who are advocating for a place for addicts to smoke and inject fentanyl. But does that seem like the moral thing to do? Of course it’s not. In fact, it could kill her, in the same way that decriminalization and Housing First policies have contributed to the deaths of 712 people in San Francisco last year.”
“The moral thing to do is to arrest Diane. Does that sound mean to you? If it does, then you don’t understand addiction, or you’re in denial about its hold over people.”
“The normalization and liberalization of drugs is killing 100,000 of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, every year.”
Read this article if you’re here to do the real work for addicts.
WeedPress: The Paper Trail 
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