If these drug addicts worked a job and paid for their own drugs fine, but they don't, they rob and steal and commit crimes against law abiding citizens to feed their habits. So tough shit, go to jail, go directly to jail.
Rob and steal? Go to jail for robbing and stealing. Where's the problem? (Btw, if drugs were legalized and sold at CVS next to the aspirin, that might have a positive impact on the crime rate, don't you think?)
I don't see why. If a person doesn't have money for their drugs because they are too Fd up to work or can't pass drug tests, what's stopping them from robbing and staling to get legal drugs instead of illegal drugs?
But the same argument could be used to make alcohol, expensive sneakers, and a host of things people kill other people for, illegal. Moreover, if a $100/day illegal heroin habit equaled in quantity of heroin $3 worth of legal farm - raised heroin, processed by Del Monte, packaged and sold next to the cigarettes, it's easy to see, to the extent crime is driven by addicts feeding their habits, the massively positive impact on the crime rate legalizing heroin would have.
Then you would have to legalize gray death, heroin and fentanyl.
The druggies will always be a step or two ahead of you with bigger and better highs some ending in death.
Alcohol is always used as if bad behavior can be used to justify horrible behavior.
If we cannot convince people that they really can get through the day without being high maybe the better thing to do is let them go. Stop absurd justifications that heroin is just like alcohol. Stop running around with narcan and rushing overdoses to the hospital. Just let them go. Protect yourself and your family. Shoot to kill. They won't sober up.
People are funny. Because they have always known condition A, conditions B - Z must be wrong. Do you know where the first anti-drug laws in the world were passed? Right here in the US. And not too long ago. So in all of human history, from one end of the globe to the other, among all the thousands and thousands of human groupings that have existed, with the exception of a penis, no human ever thought to make it a rule that there were some things you couldn't put in your mouth or you'd be punished. (God, on the other hand, was downright prolific with dietary proscriptions). But no human ever said, hey look, hemlock. Poison. Let's make it a law you can't put this in your mouth. Everybody always assumed humans could manage their own ingestion as well as cows and coyotes and butterflies do. Until we came along. We Americans decided we needed to declare some things against the law to eat.
And what were those things, you ask?
Well, things that are bad for you.
Oh, so like raw sewage?
Well, no. It isn't illegal to eat raw sewage. It was more like things that are bad for you, but that are pleasurable and that you want to do anyway.
Oh, you say. Then, heyyy, are you one of them Puritans?
Why yes. Yes, I am. I hate the idea of others experiencing pleasure. I want to paint a big scarlet P on your forehead and rip that cigarette out of your mouth.
But even the Puritans couldn't come up with the idea of making it illegal to put certain things in your mouth (it is, after all, a pretty outlandish idea when you think about it) all by themselves, even though opiates and coca derivatives were widely available--even to little kids!--next to the licorice barrel in every General Store in the country. (Nor did the country fall into a stupor while these drugs were legal and available everywhere. On the contrary, that's when we built this ******* place.)
No, it took some good old-fashioned xenophobia to enlighten the nation's scolds to the possibilities in making drugs illegal. Back when there were far too many Chinese popping up in San Francisco, efforts were begun to make San Francisco not so goddam welcoming. Laws were passed prohibiting behaviors particular to our yellow brothers, one of which was smoking opium--a pleasurable activity sometimes enjoyed right out in the open where God and everybody else could see it. And there you have the very first anti-drug law in human history. Wasn't exactly public health related.
Fast forward to today where you just KNOW heroin HAS to be illegal. It's got nothing to do with the propaganda the government's been bombarding you with since you were a sperm wiggling around in your daddy's balls. You just KNOW, don't you?