Apropos the subject and the interminable disagreement over punishment vs. tolerance vs. ?? comes this article from the Dec. 4 NYT:
Amsterdam Has a Deal for Alcoholics: Work Paid in BeerBy ANDREW HIGGINS
AMSTERDAM — After more than a decade out of work because of a back injury and chronic alcoholism, Fred Schiphorst finally landed a job last year and is determined to keep it. He gets up at 5:30 a.m., walks his dog and then puts on a red tie, ready to clean litter from the streets of eastern Amsterdam.
“You have to look sharp,” said Mr. Schiphorst, 60, a former construction worker.
His workday begins unfailingly at 9 a.m. — with two cans of beer, a down payment on a salary paid mostly in alcohol. He gets two more cans at lunch and then another can or, if all goes smoothly, two to round off a productive day.
“I’m not proud of being an alcoholic, but I am proud to have a job again,” said Mr. Schiphorst, the grateful beneficiary of an unusual government-funded program to lure alcoholics off the streets by paying them in beer to pick up trash.
In addition to beer — the brand varies depending on which brewery offers the best price — each member of the cleaning team gets half a packet of rolling tobacco, free lunch and 10 euros a day, or about $13.55.
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The idea of providing alcoholics with beer in return for work, he said, was first tried in Canada. It took off in the Netherlands in part because the country has traditionally shunned “zero tolerance” in response to addiction. Amsterdam now has three districts running beer-for-work street cleaning programs, and a fourth discussing whether to follow suit. Other Dutch cities are looking into the idea, too.
The basic idea is to extend to alcoholics an approach first developed to help heroin addicts, who have for years been provided with free methadone, a less dangerous substitute, in a controlled environment that provides access to health workers and counselors.
“If you just say, ‘Stop drinking and we will help you,’ it doesn’t work,” said Mr. Wijnands, whose foundation gets 80 percent of its financing from the state and runs four drug consumption rooms with free needles for hardened addicts. “But if you say, ‘I will give you work for a few cans of beer during the day,’ they like it.”
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To my way of thinking, the moral aspects as such, divorced from the consequences of an addiction, are red herrings. The real problem isn't that people use, it's that people who use can cause real havoc when they get out and try to do things like drive. Secondarily there is the problem of besotted users lying in the streets, too sh*tfaced to do anything else, making scenes, scaring (or assaulting) passersby, and making the place look like an asylum instead of a decent neighborhood.
That would suggest that a primary focus of the punitive approach should be based on the consequences of a user's actions, while using, and not the act of using by itself.
Another problem, it seems to me, is that penalizing mere possession, let alone using, necessarily forces users into a world inhabited by criminals - and not just people who are breaking the laws against possession, but people who engage in all sorts of wrongdoing, like theft, extortion, fraud, etc - and as such causes more of them to become criminals themselves - again, aside from the mere possession/use - which simply causes more grief on all sides.
A third problem is that, because possessing and selling are illegal, there are no controls on what sort of adulterants might be added to any particular substance - after all, if the seller cuts his "stuff" with something that isn't apparent, then he has more "stuff" to sell and makes a higher profit; unless purchasers carry around their own little mini chemical testing labs, they don't have any way to really know if the "stuff" is cut or not, and so it comes down to their appetite for risk. Also, there are no controls on sellers trying to do things like selling to minors.
There is also the matter of the degree to which a substance incapacitates the user: a pothead who sits around with a few others and tokes up is not nearly as incapacitated as a long-time heroin user who lies comatose after shooting up. In other words, heroin is, in a certain sense, more serious - more dangerous - than pot and therefore arguably requires more careful attention to the users.
As to the matter of the government selling intoxicating substances to people: Virginia has a
Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the "ABC". Distilled spirits can only be sold at ABC stores and, by the looks of their website,
http://www.abc.virginia.gov/, they are quite adept at advertising the wonders of their products to consumers. I lived many years in Virginia and I don't recall hearing too much noise about the immorality of government selling hard liquour - and advertising to beat the band by the looks of it - so I have to question a little the rationale behind the arguments that government selling other intoxicating substances is fraught with the sort of moral peril that apparently doesn't apply to alcohol.
I don't really have any answers here, just thoughts and opinions, but it does seem to me that the old paradigm of moral approbation coupled with criminal penalties doesn't work; it clearly didn't work with alcohol during Prohibition and it doesn't seem to work with these other substances either.
