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In my old economics class, my teacher was fond of saying how every problem in the world can be solved through economics. If you were willing to pay the cost, the problem could be solved.
The issue of Drugs was a particularly costly one, in that in order to end drug abuse; you had to essentially write off the drug addicts. Acknowledge that these people were addicts, untreatable for the most part, give them a nice clean place and all the drugs they could want, and all the ills of drug use would be gone. These people would be written off from society, cared for, but left to rot in their opiate induced trance.
Although the Insite program does not quite go as far as my old economics professor's thought experiment, I can't help but wonder how the underlying principle is really that different.
Yes, users are encouraged into treatment, but aren't monies that could be better used for treatments sites now being used for Insite's funding? Also can you really encourage treatment while enabling a vice? It strikes me this is just the first step towards the world my old prof described. A world where the human life of drug addicts is just another cost to society so as to maintain order. Give the addicts what they want, and organized crime, and disorganized drug use will cease, but the cost is denying that these people are human, and suffering, and need our help.
Perhaps this story is a little to close to me having lost loved ones to drugs. But every time I hear a story of government enabling of drug use I remember a story I heard about Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is the model of order and tranquility; it has embraced the libertarianism of vice, and allows those who seek that destructive path to do so, safely, cleanly, & legally. The picture is quite serene until you notice a tricycle in the picture. Human life has value because it affects all other human life around it. Letting people slowly kill themselves in the name of order ignores the countless lives destroyed along with the actual users.
