Punishing people for being addicted to drugs is miserable, and having people be addicted to drugs is also miserable. When drugs were criminalized, the state had to dole out a lot of misery in punishments, but this also depressed the addiction/usage rate, which consequently lowered the drug addiction misery by some amount as well (not necessarily by more than the extra misery that punishment brought, but not necessarily less either).
Decriminalizing removes that punishment misery, so total misery drops significantly. But the behavior it was suppressing - the drug use - rebounds in the absence of punishment, and the misery level creeps back up.
I don’t buy that it’s the handoff to NGOs that caused this. From the article’s description, the NGOs appear to be implementing the decriminalization policy much more faithfully than the police did - needles and supervision are provided by the NGOs “without judgment”, while I very much doubt the police were entirely without judgment in the months after decriminalization.
This is a good/interesting way to look at it ... add up the total misery level instead of pretending that in either case "the misery" has stopped because you deliberately exclude one or the other miseries from the accounting.
Punishment does deter things. Whether it is the only thing that can is a different matter. But I think a lot of those who want alternatives need to get out of the "punishment does not deter" narrative, which is about as silly as saying that oil and gas don't provide energy because they are bad for the environment.
I think you need to go further than looking at the total misery, although that is definitely an important first step in preventing false accounting. You need to account for some basic “game theory / behavioral economics / control system”-type stuff: when you decrease or increase one variable, what happens to the other variables?
Applied at a crude level, this tells you that removing punishment misery will cause addiction misery to rise (which is an important refinement - a “total misery accounting” perspective that doesn’t have this included will believe that removing punishment misery would leave addiction misery unchanged, thus improving total misery).
Applied at a more sophisticated level, this gets you analyzing incremental changes in punishment or addiction policy: e.g. this new law adds x punishment misery, how much does it reduce addiction misery by? If the answer is “less than x”, you now have some objective basis for concluding this policy is “needlessly cruel”.
> add up the total misery level instead of pretending that in either case "the misery" has stopped because you deliberately exclude one or the other miseries from the accounting.
You can't do this. It is neither ethical or practical. There's plenty we could do as a society that may hypothetically "reduce misery", but we don't insofar as it violates their rights.
It's not even possible to do. This is highly subjective. For instance, how do you rate the genocide that's baked into prohibition? Does that just not count because you don't respect a part of our subculture? What about people that are now in pain and misery, but we're maybe hurting their health with illegal drugs (although some of them seemed to be doing fine and not increasing their dosages).
Does the fact that they were previously dependent on drugs, somehow negate their pain, or inability to function well. Is being addicted to drugs some kind of weird nightmare scenario, like the matrix, where the subject is always worse off?
Decriminalizing removes that punishment misery, so total misery drops significantly. But the behavior it was suppressing - the drug use - rebounds in the absence of punishment, and the misery level creeps back up.
I don’t buy that it’s the handoff to NGOs that caused this. From the article’s description, the NGOs appear to be implementing the decriminalization policy much more faithfully than the police did - needles and supervision are provided by the NGOs “without judgment”, while I very much doubt the police were entirely without judgment in the months after decriminalization.