The point of the criminal justice approach isn't to save the lives of those who have already taken heroin, but to save the lives of those who might be considering taking heroin.
The harsher the punishment for heroin use, the more likely people are to get it into their heads not to fucking start taking heroin in the first place. On the other hand, if you make heroin addiction a free ticket to lots of health care and attention and "poor schnukkums" then you actually incentivise people who are already having a bad time to get on the heroin-addict train.
When I was a kid and I read about the Prisoner's dilemma in the context of morality, I was always confused. Surely the moral thing is to confess if you're guilty. If you're guilty, and your accomplice is guilty, the right thing to do is confess to the police so that you can be rightfully punished.
As an adult I understand that this isn't the point of the story, and the police-and-prisoners aspect of the story is completely extraneous to the point trying to be made. Still, I can't help but think that the police-and-prisoners is a bad example of the broader point, since there's always a third set of interests (that of the police, and of society in general) which is callously (and immorally) tossed aside in the phrasing of the problem.
> What are you going to do when they start taking drugs again and die?
Shrug my shoulders. Those things are banned because they're dangerous, and if people die while using them it's not like we didn't give them enough fucking warning.
We've had this in Australia for some time and I think it's abominable.
Western civilisation is founded on the rule of law. Obey the law and you do fine, break the law and you get punished. When you start saying to people "Hey guys, we know you're breaking the law, but go ahead and fucking do it in this room, we don't mind, you won't get arrested or punished"
Here's a better approach to drug users: catch them, sentence them to mandatory cold-turkey rehab, don't let them out until they're clean.
Think up better arguments, that might convince people. Examine your own opinions, to see whether they're actually right. Examine your opponents' opinions, to see whether they're right too. Maybe come up with new ways of thinking about the issue which are better than the way anyone's thinking about them at the moment. And then start talking.
People in politics should put less thought into HOW CAN I SPEAK LOUDER and more thought into how they can think of smarter things to say?
They'll enter somewhere and kill infidels, it just won't be the United States. It will probably be Europe, or Australia, at least until those places start imposing similar bans.
I reluctantly support this policy. Islamic terrorism has become sufficiently decentralised that we can no longer fight it with the means we've been using. Either we turn our own countries into police states where everybody is constantly monitored and searched, or we just do it at the border, where we're not actually impinging upon anyone's rights (note: nobody has a right to enter a different country as a guest).
Treat Islamic terrorism like a disease. Either we all walk around in full protective gear all the time, or we simply quarantine the disease in the areas where it exists. That sucks for the uninfected people who live in the area, but... I dunno, being born in most places at most points in history has kinda sucked anyway.