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Comment by dylan604

7 hours ago

If you're going to give junkies their fix, are you going to buy my alcohol too? What about my gambling debts? What about my escort bill for my sex addiction? Shy are you differentiating addiction to drugs?

14 comments

dylan604

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philipkglass  7 hours ago

Someone with heavy, habitual alcohol use can still get drunk on $20 of alcohol. Someone with a heavy opiate habit may spend hundreds of dollars a day on drugs just to maintain. A habituated opiate user could also get through the day with $20 worth of drugs if we allowed opiates to be produced and sold like alcohol, but we don't. So the unemployed junkie needs to beg or steal a lot more than the unemployed alcoholic to get their fix. That's why the parent comment highlighted "illegality of the drugs" as the cause.

  • dylan604  6 hours ago

    If you think an alcoholic stops drinking when they get drunk, then it sounds to me like you don't really understand alcoholism

    • jdprgm  6 hours ago

      I think you missed the posters point. I just checked prices on a store nearby and for the cheap Vodka you can buy a handle which is ~40 drinks for $12. So basically no matter how extreme for $20 you can buy more alcohol than pretty much any human could consume in a day.

ulrikrasmussen  3 hours ago

No differentiation here, alcohol is widely available from legal sources and very affordable compared to illegal drugs.

I come from a country with social healthcare, and here we also heavily subsidize drugs for people who need them because of their own lifestyle choices, e.g. diabetes medicine due to obesity. Why do people who have become addicted to psychoactive drugs not deserve the same compassion?

pstuart  6 hours ago

Junkies and meth-heads are a different kind of animal from your average drunk, and the reality of the proposal that you responded to is a simple economic analysis of investing in keeping them placated or paying for the damage they cause. It's far cheaper to prevent rather than react and repair.

If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.

  • kelnos  2 hours ago

    Ending the war on drugs doesn't mean making all drugs legal. It means removing the stigma and jail time for people who use drugs.

    Some drugs are genuinely dangerous. Many are addictive and will damage the quality of one's life, even if buying and using the drug isn't illegal. Normalizing addiction to drugs as a regular, normal, accepted part of everyday life is not the answer.

  • Henchman21  4 hours ago

    I don't have anything to add, other than my appreciation for this comment. Glad I'm not the only one here that gets it.

Henchman21  4 hours ago

No, you misunderstand, which means I didn't communicate it well: The problem is that the drugs are illegal. I would make them legal so they could be purchased from a pharmacy. The problem with junkies stealing to get their fix is that they're already criminals for the addiction and already people without support in society. So straight up stealing copper from wherever isn't really a big deal. You're already a criminal. You're already halfway down that slippery slope.

But there was a world in which junkies existed when the junk wasn't criminal. People had serious addictions, but kept normal lives, because their addiction wasn't criminal. I'm not trying to solve addiction. I'm trying to end the criminality for substance abuse.

And to answer, no, buy your own booze. Cover your own debts, gambling or otherwise. Sex addiction is made up bullshit. I don't need to differentiate because I am not trying to solve that problem.