Here’s a drug control policy I’ve always wondered about:
Government-sold “illegal” drugs, but only for people who can show that they are already taking (or maybe that they are addicted to) those drugs from an actually illegal source. So, for instance, if you’ve been buying heroin from a drug dealer you could go to a government-run clinic and basically get a note authorizing you to buy heroin from the government. It would be sold at roughly street value and you couldn’t take it off the premises, perhaps. Treatment and methadone and whatnot would be provided for free or at low cost. Obviously the specifics would vary depending on the drug.
But the real point of the plan isn’t treating the addicts (though that might be a nice side benefit), it’s to undercut drug dealers. Drug use (or so I understand) follows an 80-20 rule. That is, 20% of drug users account for 80% of drug use. It’s the hardcore users who keep the drug dealers afloat. If you provided these hardcore users with their drugs then the market for illegal drugs would largely collapse. It would become much harder to find a drug dealer to get started in the first place as most of them are forced out of the market. Ideally, the clinics would mostly be empty and the mere fact of their existence would be enough to permanently cripple illegal drug sales.
The users would have every reason to go to the clinics, since paying the same amount for a drug as you would on the street but with no risk of arrest and no risk of dangerous adulterants is a strictly superior alternative. (And presumably most addicts don’t actually want to be on the wrong side of the law.) But by making it that only users who reach some threshold qualify (working that out might be harder than it looks, IDK), you preserve most of the disincentives in our current system that keep people from getting started in the first place. It’s still expensive, illegal, and a little dangerous. So drug use would still be hard to get into but it would be easier to get out of.
You’d also want to be careful about incentives – the people running the program shouldn’t benefit from more people buying drugs from their clinics – but that’s beyond the scope of talking about the basic idea. And it might work better for some drugs than for others, but I think it’s an interesting idea, and if it’s been proposed elsewhere I haven’t seen it.
spiralingintocontrol said: This has actually been done IRL: theguardian.com/society…
Well, if it’s not an original idea, at least it’s a possibly sensible one.
According to this Vice article on the Netherlands from a few years later:
It was in the 1990s when the Netherlands started a program that provides long-term addicts with free government heroin.
In practice, this means that addicts are allowed to inject or smoke heroin three times a day in a solemn, no frills room in a building run by municipal health services.
Combined with a specified care program, it has been responsible for almost the complete disappearance of heroin addicts from public view.
In the United States, heroin is on the rise like it’s 1983, while an ever-shrinking group of Dutch addicts is only getting smaller and older.
In a 2002 study, there were an estimated 25,000 addicts in the Netherlands (out of a population of more than 10 million), but only about 2,000 were considered hardcore addicts, according to the Central Committee on the Treatment of Heroin Addicts.
Heroin use under the age of 40 is practically non-existent, according to Amsterdam’s health services.
In 1992, more than one million needles were exchanged for clean ones in Amsterdam alone, according to the city’s Department of Health. In 2013, it was less than 200,000.
In 1985, nearly 100 percent of methadone patients were aged below 40. In 2014, almost all of them were older than 40. Aid programs are so abundant, it’s now hard to find an addict who hasn’t been in touch with one.
Interesting that they provide it for free though. Might reduce property crimes, but the article implies that that makes it harder to quit altogether.
how society dealt with mind-altering substances certainly won’t be considered a high point of 20th century civilization, let’s put it that way.