The problem is that turning actions which cause no harm (injury, loss, or damage to another) or threat of harm into crimes is perversion of law. The problem is using criminal justice system to attack medical issues is a perversion of law.
A perverse law has perverse effects. We've created massive organized crime gangs by criminalizing things which should be legal.
I like to tease the Swedes. They thought that alcohol was such a social ill that only a state-run monopoly should be allowed to sell it (so no advertising). The corollary is that they thought other drugs were so bad that only criminal gangs should be allowed to sell them.
Harm principle refers to a theory of crime that an action can only be banned if it causes harm to someone. The principle ... says that harmful actions are the only ones that can be banned. The harm principle simply sets a minimal standard for what sorts of actions a liberal can justifiably prohibit.
> The problem is that turning actions which cause no harm (injury, loss, or damage to another) or threat of harm into crimes is perversion of law
Drug use does harm. It harms users and it harms their families. The harms do not cease to be harms just because they're self-inflicted. Nor do they cease to be harms just because some countries have responded with legal regimes that are arguably worse than the problem.
The harms are much worse because of criminalisation.
Refusal to provide clean needles, injection clinics, and safe needle disposal bins causes harm to low wage cleaners who risk needle stick injuries when addicts use toilet stalls to inject drugs.
About one third to one half of acquisitive crime is to fund drug use. That could be drastically reduced by treating drug addiction as the public health problem that it is, rather than as a criminal justice problem.
Illegal drugs are sold by criminal gangs. These gangs rely on the illegality of drugs to make a profit. Legalising drugs would drastically reduce the influence of these gangs.
Your argument that we should treat drug addiction as a "public health problem" is inconsistent with mellavora's assertion that drug use "cause[s] no harm (injury, loss, or damage to another) or threat of harm."
The argument typically isn't that we should treat drug use as a health problem. That would have quite some odd effects on the medical field, if that were true.
Drug addiction should be treated as a health issue. I'd actually go as far as saying "uncontrolled" should be added to that statement. I'm pretty pretty damn addicted to coffee, but don't think I need to go see counseling about it. Treating everything like it's black and white is what got us into this mess.
Irresponsibility and malice cause harm. There are many actions an individual could take that may harm people close to them. That's life, but the actions themselves aren't the issue. There's nothing inherent to drug usage that is harmful to others, unlike say, violence. In egregious instances of drug use where there is harmful effects like mistreating children, there are already laws to cover those. Those laws, again, are intended to address irresponsibility or malicious intent.
If a single person with no children decides to do drugs every now and then, but otherwise lives a normal life, what harm as been done? Heck, even if that person is married and has children, what harm as been done? Drug use itself isn't directly harmful to others.
I'm genuinely curious, what relevance or bearing does this have to the linked article? Is it supposed to imply something about the PM? Not hating, just honestly unsure.
Us, not very much, because we still use the criminal justice system to treat medical problems. But we are getting a little smarter, repealing some of the marijuana badness.
Totally, half the trouble with the recent conflicts between the police and the policed here stem from the fact that law enforcement has had all the social problems that we've abdicated responsibility for dumped at their door.
Likely Law Enforcement Officers but their statement applies if it's Low Earth Orbit. Anything would be well above the general population if done in orbit!
"...about half of American adults believe that marijuana use should be legalized...". I find that strange. In Uruguay, 64% was against legalization.[1] Not that they cared strongly. It was legalized anyway and now most people don't care.
Portugal also apparently saw statistically significant increases in both homicide and drug mortality, relative to rates across Europe.
"Decriminalization" generally implies deregulation of the demand side of drugs, but not the supply side (deregulation of both is generally "legalization"). That's problematic; it takes a burden off the criminal justice system, but many of the externalities of drug prohibition are closely tied to the supply side.
Even after decriminalization, you still have the problem of giving the monopoly of an entire market to outlaws. This can be fixed with legalization of (heavily controlled) production. But, sadly, this still is politically unpalatable in most places.
Be careful reading those numbers. Under our rules, any death in which the corpse is detected to have drugs in the bloodstream is registered as "induced by drugs", regardless of whether it was actually the cause of death.
For example, in 2013, of around ~200 deaths "induced by drugs", only 22 were actually considered overdoses.
That's problematic; it takes a burden off the criminal justice system
It doesn't just take a burden off the criminal justice. It also, and in my opinion, much more importantly, allows the users to seek help without fearing being imprisoned, and having a criminal record marking their lives.
The data gathered here: http://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html don't particularly support this claim, at least with regard to homicide (I'm still looking for data on drug mortality).
Drug decriminalization policy was introduced in Portugal in 2000 and was legally in effect as of July 2001. It is reasonable to assume that police enforcement efforts of drug possession laws were scaled down over the first six months of 2001.
Two years later, the murder rate jumped from 1.1 per 100K population (110-120 murders per year) to 1.4 (140-150 murders per year), wobbled around a bit, peaking in 2007 at 1.8 (185 murders per year) after which it dropped back to the 1.1 - 1.2 range (110-130 murders per year) which is difficult to distinguish from the 2000-2002 value.
In the rest of Europe murders mostly declined over the same period, dropping by about a factor of two in Spain (1.4 to 0.8 murders per year) and either dropping slightly or remaining steady, except for Greece, which also saw a bit of bump mid-decade.
So on the face of it, the murder rate in Portugal did jump two years after the drug policy came into effect, and Greece-which saw no such change in policy--saw a similar bump that was unlikely to be caused by Portuguese drug policy.
Furthermore, without change in drug policy, the rate in Portugal has dropped back to what it was before, and is comfortably in the middle of the European range, from lows of 0.8 for places like Germany and Spain to highs of 1.9 in Belgium, with France and the UK both in the 1.1-1.2 range where Portugal currently sits.
So there is no strong case to be made on the raw statistics alone that changes in the murder rate in Portugal have been strongly influenced by changes in drug policy. It is clear that the murder rate in Portugal increased when most of the rest of Europe was decreasing, but so was the murder rate in Greece. Given the two countries have economic similarities (small nations on the European periphery) that suggests--but does nothing like prove--that economic factors might play a role in the murder rate.
Based on the timeline I would suppose it is related with the massive financial crisis that Portugal plunged in that time period, culminating in the 2011 bailout.
At least as far as it can be observed from my first hand perspective most homicides in Portugal are passional in nature: mostly conjugal but many derived from disputes between neighbors or rival groups. It is very rare to see drug motivated murders.
One thing that is very clear in these past 10 years in here is that decriminalization allied with social and medical intervention by the government (needle exchange programs, methadone clinics) had two very visible effects in the drug use dynamic in this country, one direct and one indirect.
The direct one was to reduce the risk of death and disease among the drug user population. HIV among this group was reduced in 30% [1] for instance.
The second effect was indirect. The drug of choice and most problematic (considered an epidemics in the end of the 20th century) was heroin. But as the government started to treat people the drug lost its mistic of a rebellious and dangerous pleasure and became a "hobo drug" for a few poor toxicodependents that depend on the government for their next fix. And that change of perception is (IMO) responsible for the rapid decline of heroin use that followed this policy.
All things considered I believe most portuguese see the effects of the decriminalization as a positive thing and, at worst, it had no negative effect in the health of the overall society.
Police enforcement efforts of drug possession laws were never scaled down. They still have to see if users are carrying less than the 10 days consumption max. quantity to decide if they charge them as dealers or send them to psych evaluation.
> Yet there is much to debate about the Portuguese approach to drug addiction. Does it help people to quit, or does it transform them into more docile drug addicts, wards of an indulgent state, with little genuine incentive to alter their behavior?
Who the f* cares. It makes their lives better where nothing else has worked so far.
This is like saying, I beat my disobedient kid because I'd rather have a bruised disobedient kid than a non-bruised disobedient kid.
Whether or not someone living addicted to drugs is existing in a state of moral decline is a personal judgement call and it's no business of the state's, so long as that addiction isn't affecting the lives of others in a significantly negative way.
Only a wishy-washy equivocating, journalist can write, "everything about the new system appears to be working and it's making the lives of all better but is it really a good thing."
The question at hand wasn't "Does it make lives better?". The question at hand was "Does this help people quit?".
So, who the fuck cares? People who want to know if Action X advances Goal Y or Goal Z, both, or neither. Like me, for instance. I want to make the lives of people better, but I also want to be able to connect cause and effect in a way that makes it possible to predict the effects of policies.
Why is quitting drugs an implicitly desirable goal?
"...or does it transform them into more docile drug addicts, wards of an indulgent state..."
My point is that this question is nearly pointless to ask. If someone lives their whole life addicted to drugs and leads a productive full life, what does it matter, other than the bad taste that seems to leave in some peoples' mouths.
Asking the question is significant because it bears directly on the question of resources, which tend to be finite. If legalization has the effect of dramatically reducing addiction rates, then its costs can be expected to drop over time as lives are improved and addiction rates drop. If the latter scenario is the case and addicts are becoming wards of the state, then costs cannot be expected to decrease over time, and addiction rates will not drop. How might other lives be improved with those resources?
In either case, it's important to know what effect the programs have actually had. Without that, it's impossible to assess programs. A program you cannot assess is one you cannot improve or learn from.
It also matters because costs must be balanced against benefits in making decisions. Thus is the bloody calculus of government.
Then it comes to this, it depends upon why you are posing the question. If you are a researcher and it's important to you to isolate factors that can decrease addiction in the name of science then that is one things. But my feeling is this question is usually asked because it can be used to poison the well of this kind of policy.
Asking this question in this context seems to me not an exercise in good science but an attempt to score a point for opposition based on people's generally icky feelings about addiction.
The questions need answers, regardless of the reasons behind them. It's not a good idea to attempt to cut off answers because you suspect the person seeking them may be impure.
I don't care if the questions come from the purest of motives or someone's generally icky feelings. I want answers, and provided they're accurate, then I can make up my own mind. I do not accept this ideological filtering.
My point isn't that we should "filter" the question. It's that the author, by posing this ideologically loaded question and addressing it in no quantitative way nor addressing why it is a question of import regarding this policy is either being naive or intellectually dishonest.
If I'm writing a piece about the merits of almonds upon your diet and my findings are that almonds are good for you in every way but at the outset of my article pose the question, can we really continue to consume a substance from which deadly cyanide can be derived?
Then my intent is clearly a rhetorical flourish to lend a false counterpoint to my narrative. The science establishing almonds as safe to eat is so overwhelming that raising this false doubt, even temporarily in the minds of my readers is irresponsible.
If you genuinely wish to know the objective factors that contribute to addiction, I'm all for it. Shit, I'll pay taxes to help you get that information because I agree it's important. But if you wish to use worn out cliches in order to make your writing seem more even handed and thus bolster the arguments of those not interested in objective knowledge but interested in advancing their own morals via public policy then I will call you out.
Given that the New Yorker is often a political publication, I thought that the context of why the question is posed was obvious and not in need of being explicitly explained.
By raising the possibility that the reflexively conservative might be correct, a compelling case is made to all that research is in order.
Yeah, this is a common argument against drug legalization: "But are we really helping the addicts?"
The sooner people accept that addiction, like violence, will probably just never disappear completely, the better off they'll be. We're looking at a policy of harm reduction, not the fantasy that we can cure addiction. Some people will always be on the outliers. The question is, do we criminalize their behavior and add an entire criminal subculture or do we accept it in order to reduce the overall harm to society and the addict?
The question isn't "Are we really helping the addicts?". The question is "Are we helping the addicts as best we can for a reasonable investment of resources?".
> This is like saying, I beat my disobedient kid because I'd rather have a bruised disobedient kid than a non-bruised disobedient kid.
Hear, hear. It doesn't just improve the lives of drug addicts, it reduces crime (and not just the crime of possessing/consuming/selling drugs)and improves public health. I won't go so far as to say legalizing drugs is a Good Thing, but it's certainly the Least Bad Option.
Yeah, I support full-drug legalization, but I don't think that pretending that locking up junkies currently does nothing positive for society will do us any favors. In the current system, they account for a large amount of property crime and even violent crime. Locking them up isn't pointless, even if it does nothing to cure their addiction it does stop them from robbing others to pay for their addiction (for as long as we keep them locked up anyway).
Now, I believe that full legalization will reduce or eliminate the harm to society caused by junkies, but that should be the talking point that is hammered on. Not "jailing junkies doesn't cure them".
The cost of incarceration is almost certainly higher than the losses from property crime (including violent crime), but it's distributed more evenly-- a fraction more taxes is less objectionable than a friend being mugged.
I am not certain that the cost of incarceration is higher than the cost of the property theft and damage by drug addicts. Cost of incarceration seems to vary between 15 and 40 k$/yr in countries like Canada, USA, and England. Property theft and damage costs vary widely depending on the individual addict, and can be between 0 and 1000000 $/yr. In my city, there are many drug addict thieves who have been convicted of hundreds of car thefts each, and that is probably only a small fraction of the number they have committed. It is also common for these criminals to break a car window (costing hundreds of dollars) to get a few dollars that were sitting in the car; this can add up to a lot of damage very quickly if one needs to make as little as 50 $/day to feed an addiction. Another common income source for these people is to steal items like computers, cameras, and bicycles, which they sell for as little as 5% of their purchase cost; this can cost 1000 $/day for a 50 $/day habit, adding up to >350 k$/yr (roughly 10 times the cost of incarceration).
I should add that I am in favor of full legalization of all substances (including the elimination of the requirement for a prescription to obtain pharmaceutical drugs), but I do not pretend that this will reduce the harms which inhere to drug users, or the rest of the citizenry.
Yeah, particularly when junkies get into things like copper theft, their cost to society can add up really fast. Things like destroying commercial AC unit to steal $100 of copper, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damages in one night alone.
Destruction of property value is huge as well. Think about how much your home (or apartment building) is worth today. Now think about how much it would be worth if the neighborhood or apartment building were occupied by large numbers of junkies. Nobody wants to live next to a meth lab.
Yes, I understand that. I support full legalization, not merely decriminalization (which leaves production and distribution in the hands of criminals).
>Only a wishy-washy equivocating, journalist can write, "everything about the new system appears to be working and it's making the lives of all better but is it really a good thing."
The "making people dependent on the state" argument is also the standard conservative critique of things like unemployment benefit, so it's an argument that an awful lot of people seem to agree with. I expect that is why the author reaches for it so easily (I'm not necessarily saying that the author is a conservative, just that it's a popular way of thinking about these types of issues, hence why the author offers it as 'balance').
"Whether or not someone living addicted to drugs is existing in a state of moral decline is a personal judgement call and it's no business of the state's .."
And that is the fulcrum on which the debate balances. People who believe it is the state's job to "take care of its people" will criminalize drugs, alchohol, and homelessness, applying the power of the state to "fix" those things. For people who believe the state's responsibility ends where the actions of its citizens doesn't infringe the rights/health/safety of others, will legalize drug use, assisted suicide, unlimited "camping", and liquor stores.
Once you get into that argument, one will say a drug addict doesn't "choose" to be addicted, they are just sick. And if they were sick with Cholera would you object to us arresting people who dumped raw sewage into the street? Why object to us arresting people who prey upon these sick people?
The challenge is of course that there isn't a truly "good" solution yet. Once we can "cure" addiction do we then spin off recreational drug use?
Just to be clear for those who do not read the article, "decriminalized" does not mean "legal". It means that while personal drug use, and possession for personal use, are still illegal, they are not treated as criminal matters. You go before a commission which can send you to treatment, or levy a small fine, or do nothing.
Dealers still get treated as criminals and go to prison.
63 comments
[ 596 ms ] story [ 1816 ms ] threadI think that's the problem with criminalizing personal drug use; treating it as simply a crime.
A perverse law has perverse effects. We've created massive organized crime gangs by criminalizing things which should be legal.
I like to tease the Swedes. They thought that alcohol was such a social ill that only a state-run monopoly should be allowed to sell it (so no advertising). The corollary is that they thought other drugs were so bad that only criminal gangs should be allowed to sell them.
http://definitions.uslegal.com/h/harm-principle/
Drug use does harm. It harms users and it harms their families. The harms do not cease to be harms just because they're self-inflicted. Nor do they cease to be harms just because some countries have responded with legal regimes that are arguably worse than the problem.
Refusal to provide clean needles, injection clinics, and safe needle disposal bins causes harm to low wage cleaners who risk needle stick injuries when addicts use toilet stalls to inject drugs.
About one third to one half of acquisitive crime is to fund drug use. That could be drastically reduced by treating drug addiction as the public health problem that it is, rather than as a criminal justice problem.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-cost-of...
Illegal drugs are sold by criminal gangs. These gangs rely on the illegality of drugs to make a profit. Legalising drugs would drastically reduce the influence of these gangs.
Keeping drugs illegal doesn't seem to be working.
Drug addiction should be treated as a health issue. I'd actually go as far as saying "uncontrolled" should be added to that statement. I'm pretty pretty damn addicted to coffee, but don't think I need to go see counseling about it. Treating everything like it's black and white is what got us into this mess.
If a single person with no children decides to do drugs every now and then, but otherwise lives a normal life, what harm as been done? Heck, even if that person is married and has children, what harm as been done? Drug use itself isn't directly harmful to others.
[1] In Spanish, sorry: http://historico.elpais.com.uy/121218/pnacio-682703/nacional...
"Decriminalization" generally implies deregulation of the demand side of drugs, but not the supply side (deregulation of both is generally "legalization"). That's problematic; it takes a burden off the criminal justice system, but many of the externalities of drug prohibition are closely tied to the supply side.
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...
http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/drug-decriminalisation-portugal-...
For example, in 2013, of around ~200 deaths "induced by drugs", only 22 were actually considered overdoses.
It doesn't just take a burden off the criminal justice. It also, and in my opinion, much more importantly, allows the users to seek help without fearing being imprisoned, and having a criminal record marking their lives.
Drug decriminalization policy was introduced in Portugal in 2000 and was legally in effect as of July 2001. It is reasonable to assume that police enforcement efforts of drug possession laws were scaled down over the first six months of 2001.
Two years later, the murder rate jumped from 1.1 per 100K population (110-120 murders per year) to 1.4 (140-150 murders per year), wobbled around a bit, peaking in 2007 at 1.8 (185 murders per year) after which it dropped back to the 1.1 - 1.2 range (110-130 murders per year) which is difficult to distinguish from the 2000-2002 value.
In the rest of Europe murders mostly declined over the same period, dropping by about a factor of two in Spain (1.4 to 0.8 murders per year) and either dropping slightly or remaining steady, except for Greece, which also saw a bit of bump mid-decade.
So on the face of it, the murder rate in Portugal did jump two years after the drug policy came into effect, and Greece-which saw no such change in policy--saw a similar bump that was unlikely to be caused by Portuguese drug policy.
Furthermore, without change in drug policy, the rate in Portugal has dropped back to what it was before, and is comfortably in the middle of the European range, from lows of 0.8 for places like Germany and Spain to highs of 1.9 in Belgium, with France and the UK both in the 1.1-1.2 range where Portugal currently sits.
So there is no strong case to be made on the raw statistics alone that changes in the murder rate in Portugal have been strongly influenced by changes in drug policy. It is clear that the murder rate in Portugal increased when most of the rest of Europe was decreasing, but so was the murder rate in Greece. Given the two countries have economic similarities (small nations on the European periphery) that suggests--but does nothing like prove--that economic factors might play a role in the murder rate.
At least as far as it can be observed from my first hand perspective most homicides in Portugal are passional in nature: mostly conjugal but many derived from disputes between neighbors or rival groups. It is very rare to see drug motivated murders.
One thing that is very clear in these past 10 years in here is that decriminalization allied with social and medical intervention by the government (needle exchange programs, methadone clinics) had two very visible effects in the drug use dynamic in this country, one direct and one indirect.
The direct one was to reduce the risk of death and disease among the drug user population. HIV among this group was reduced in 30% [1] for instance.
The second effect was indirect. The drug of choice and most problematic (considered an epidemics in the end of the 20th century) was heroin. But as the government started to treat people the drug lost its mistic of a rebellious and dangerous pleasure and became a "hobo drug" for a few poor toxicodependents that depend on the government for their next fix. And that change of perception is (IMO) responsible for the rapid decline of heroin use that followed this policy.
All things considered I believe most portuguese see the effects of the decriminalization as a positive thing and, at worst, it had no negative effect in the health of the overall society.
[1] http://www.dn.pt/inicio/portugal/interior.aspx?content_id=43... (in Portuguese)
Who the f* cares. It makes their lives better where nothing else has worked so far.
This is like saying, I beat my disobedient kid because I'd rather have a bruised disobedient kid than a non-bruised disobedient kid.
Whether or not someone living addicted to drugs is existing in a state of moral decline is a personal judgement call and it's no business of the state's, so long as that addiction isn't affecting the lives of others in a significantly negative way.
Only a wishy-washy equivocating, journalist can write, "everything about the new system appears to be working and it's making the lives of all better but is it really a good thing."
So, who the fuck cares? People who want to know if Action X advances Goal Y or Goal Z, both, or neither. Like me, for instance. I want to make the lives of people better, but I also want to be able to connect cause and effect in a way that makes it possible to predict the effects of policies.
"...or does it transform them into more docile drug addicts, wards of an indulgent state..."
My point is that this question is nearly pointless to ask. If someone lives their whole life addicted to drugs and leads a productive full life, what does it matter, other than the bad taste that seems to leave in some peoples' mouths.
In either case, it's important to know what effect the programs have actually had. Without that, it's impossible to assess programs. A program you cannot assess is one you cannot improve or learn from.
It also matters because costs must be balanced against benefits in making decisions. Thus is the bloody calculus of government.
Asking this question in this context seems to me not an exercise in good science but an attempt to score a point for opposition based on people's generally icky feelings about addiction.
I don't care if the questions come from the purest of motives or someone's generally icky feelings. I want answers, and provided they're accurate, then I can make up my own mind. I do not accept this ideological filtering.
If I'm writing a piece about the merits of almonds upon your diet and my findings are that almonds are good for you in every way but at the outset of my article pose the question, can we really continue to consume a substance from which deadly cyanide can be derived?
Then my intent is clearly a rhetorical flourish to lend a false counterpoint to my narrative. The science establishing almonds as safe to eat is so overwhelming that raising this false doubt, even temporarily in the minds of my readers is irresponsible.
If you genuinely wish to know the objective factors that contribute to addiction, I'm all for it. Shit, I'll pay taxes to help you get that information because I agree it's important. But if you wish to use worn out cliches in order to make your writing seem more even handed and thus bolster the arguments of those not interested in objective knowledge but interested in advancing their own morals via public policy then I will call you out.
By raising the possibility that the reflexively conservative might be correct, a compelling case is made to all that research is in order.
The sooner people accept that addiction, like violence, will probably just never disappear completely, the better off they'll be. We're looking at a policy of harm reduction, not the fantasy that we can cure addiction. Some people will always be on the outliers. The question is, do we criminalize their behavior and add an entire criminal subculture or do we accept it in order to reduce the overall harm to society and the addict?
Hear, hear. It doesn't just improve the lives of drug addicts, it reduces crime (and not just the crime of possessing/consuming/selling drugs)and improves public health. I won't go so far as to say legalizing drugs is a Good Thing, but it's certainly the Least Bad Option.
Now, I believe that full legalization will reduce or eliminate the harm to society caused by junkies, but that should be the talking point that is hammered on. Not "jailing junkies doesn't cure them".
I should add that I am in favor of full legalization of all substances (including the elimination of the requirement for a prescription to obtain pharmaceutical drugs), but I do not pretend that this will reduce the harms which inhere to drug users, or the rest of the citizenry.
Destruction of property value is huge as well. Think about how much your home (or apartment building) is worth today. Now think about how much it would be worth if the neighborhood or apartment building were occupied by large numbers of junkies. Nobody wants to live next to a meth lab.
Copper theft, at least in England, tends not to be addicts because it doesn't fit the lifestyle.
Not criminal does not mean legal.
I see your point...
The "making people dependent on the state" argument is also the standard conservative critique of things like unemployment benefit, so it's an argument that an awful lot of people seem to agree with. I expect that is why the author reaches for it so easily (I'm not necessarily saying that the author is a conservative, just that it's a popular way of thinking about these types of issues, hence why the author offers it as 'balance').
Which, in this case, exists in opposition to different kinds (or degrees) of "making people dependent on the state".
Namely, the forced-dependence of the imprisoned.
And that is the fulcrum on which the debate balances. People who believe it is the state's job to "take care of its people" will criminalize drugs, alchohol, and homelessness, applying the power of the state to "fix" those things. For people who believe the state's responsibility ends where the actions of its citizens doesn't infringe the rights/health/safety of others, will legalize drug use, assisted suicide, unlimited "camping", and liquor stores.
Once you get into that argument, one will say a drug addict doesn't "choose" to be addicted, they are just sick. And if they were sick with Cholera would you object to us arresting people who dumped raw sewage into the street? Why object to us arresting people who prey upon these sick people?
The challenge is of course that there isn't a truly "good" solution yet. Once we can "cure" addiction do we then spin off recreational drug use?
Dealers still get treated as criminals and go to prison.