Heroin addicts suffer in ways difficult to describe -- before they die. They should be helped by whatever means we can find. It is past time that Presidential candidates started taking note of the heroin epidemic now spreading across the country. It's also the politically prudent thing to do, since one of the most ravaged states is the first primary state, New Hampshire. The LA Times has the story.
It's obvious that among the first things we should do to fight heroin addiction is incapacitate those who feed it -- the dealers. This is not rocket science. Yet there is pending in Congress a bill that would do the opposite -- put dealers back on the street sooner than they would get there under present law.
This is not just ill-considered policy. It's crazy. It's also inhumane. If you're trying to counteract the effects of poison, you don't decrease the costs of being a poison merchant. But that is exactly what sentencing reform legislation would do.
Many libertarians want to legalize drugs, but the country, by a huge margin, does not, and this is especially true of heroin and the other hard drugs. The reason is simple. Americans have learned what hard drugs do. By a 2-1 margin, they want Congress to increase the measures taken to keep dealers off the street, not put them back there earlier.
Presidential candidates, senators and representatives, are you listening?
Bill: Have you had any success getting access to or providing a link to this recent poll ORC you keep citing?
You can want to legalize drugs and also want to keep dealers off the street. If drugs are legalized, and you take the money out of dealing, you'd have less drug dealers. With less people pushing drugs, you might even have less addicts, though that might be getting a little optimistic.
Yeah, just a theory, but I think the basic logic is sound.