RE: The Question of Universal Basic Income and Drug Abuse
As a recovering alcoholic I enjoyed the section on What Is Addiction?
To me Addiction is a health issue, be it whether we focus on emotional health, mental health, physical health or a combination of all three. In my case I was a functioning alcoholic for 39 years, and I had some pretty good jobs to help support my habit. It wasn't until I could no longer function as I was that I began to take the health side of addiction seriously and get my butt into treatment. Now I'm clean for 10 years and enjoying life again.
To this day when I hear addiction discussed I appreciate it when I see people beginning to realize that addiction is a health issue. And, just like any health issue, we can choose to ignore it, or do something about it. Like unemployment and poverty, it will not go away on it's own.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience here. Yeah it's pretty crazy how we treat a health issue as a matter of criminality, like we can just make something illegal to fix a problem. It's the same logic as supply-side thinking. Just make the supply illegal and demand will fall, but that's bullshit.
Max security prisons are a great example. Drugs are not allowed there. It's even an area completely surrounded by walls. There is a demand for drugs though and that demand results in supply reaching where it should not be able to. Demand is king.
To reduce supply, demand must be reduced, and the only way to do that is to create the environmental conditions where people decide they don't want something, and would prefer something else.