It always jars me when people conflate public drug use, which is fundamentally an aesthetic issue and not a matter of public safety, with crime - as though people getting dysfunctionally high on opioids pose a danger to anyone but themselves. It suggests a very foreign moral system, which is hard for me to understand.
Well, legally, many of those things are crime, and so people call it crime.
But public safety is more than worries about being violently attacked. If you have someone passed out on a narrow sidewalk, you then have to walk into the street to get past them: that's unsafe, and even worse for people with mobility issues. If someone relieves themself in a public space or throws away needles on the street, that's a matter of hygiene and disease.
And although opioid users aren't going to be violent, there are other drugs. Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?
I suppose that not everyone has abandoned the old drug-warrior mindset yet, absurd and useless as that philosophy has proved to be.
> Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?
That certainly is a different situation, and I would feel concerned about that too: but meth has been a problem for decades, while the phrase "drug zombies" has only come into use during the fentanyl era, when you now see people tipping over and passing out and otherwise shambling around unable to fully control their bodies. Those people are out of it, unable to do much of anything but breathe (usually). The fear is really unwarranted.
I suppose it's a good thing, then, that I have no power over you - beyond that which you may have created de novo, by choosing to care about my opinion - and therefore have no means of exercising tyranny.
Calling suffering people "zombies" is kind of offensive; it seems pretty obvious that people who are too high to stand up or keep their eyes open pose less of a threat than people who are fully alert and in control of their faculties would.
You think public drug use is just an “aesthetic” problem? That’s the problem with this kind of “nerd reasoning” that is in HN a lot; it lacks any common sense. Public open drug use is much more than aesthetics and is a safety and draws more crime and it’s drives poverty.
Pay too much attention to common sense and you will find yourself believing that the sun revolves around the earth; it's good at spotting correlations, but when you want to understand actual causes, you need research.
I can see as well as you can that crime, poverty, and public drug use are related - but research shows that your intuitive explanation of causality is backward. It is housing policy which causes homelessness, which causes desperation, and desperation causes addiction - but does addiction cause crime? Not so much as you'd think: drug addicts are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime - which is mostly a function of poverty, a consequence of economic policy.
When someone focuses on public drug use as an issue, they mistake an ugly, visible downstream symptom for the actual disease. It is a matter of unpleasant appearances, not the meaningful problem. Trying to eliminate public drug use by focusing enforcement on the people who are using drugs in public is a cruel and pointless game of whack-a-mole, so long as the policy engine which creates those desperate addicts remains in operation.
