Seattle has stopped charging people for personal drug possession
What a depressing thread.<p>In one corner, we have people that are absolutely exhausted of the current state of affairs. The trash, the needles in parks, human feces, the tents ... etc. They want <i>someone</i> to do <i>something</i> about it, but it&#x27;s not clear at all what that <i>something</i> really is or who would do it. If it were clear, we wouldn&#x27;t be arguing about it. There are real costs to a draconian reversion to hardcore enforcement. People will get hurt, unnecessarily.<p>In the other, we have people that seem completely convinced that enforcing any kind of norms against anti-social behavior - indeed, outright dangerous behavior - is simply an extension of the War on Drugs, and further criminalizes marginalized people by cycling them through a prison system that seems equally uninterested in actually solving the problem. And there are real costs here, too. People are getting hurt continually by repeat offenders, and by the other social costs of living where parts of the city are unclean or unsafe, or both.<p>I&#x27;ve lived in Seattle since 2011 (with a 29 month cumulative absence for a deployment and then for school), and I think it&#x27;s just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse. I understand the impulse behind it. I really do. But we can&#x27;t keep trying to convince ourselves that this is &quot;working&quot;, unless &quot;working&quot; is really &quot;condition people to think that this is the new norm&quot;. Obviously, I guess I sit in the first corner. There&#x27;s no real middle ground between these two cohorts, as far as I can tell. One group sees the other&#x27;s concerns as reactionary or uncompassionate, and the other see&#x27;s the first group&#x27;s compassion as naive and even a deep enabling of the problem.<p>For me, I don&#x27;t want to live in a city like this. That&#x27;s maybe the only middle ground that exists between the two groups - neither want this. But my sense is that we&#x27;re at a true impasse here, and that, and I&#x27;m just being realistic given the political arrangement here in Seattle, we&#x27;re going to keep doing &quot;more of this&quot;, whatever &quot;this&quot; is. The second camp has clearly captured city leadership, and decriminalization, lax or no enforcement of existing laws, and a general apathy (or maybe it&#x27;s faith) about the situation will guide policy. We&#x27;ll become the next SF, and then wake up one day wondering &quot;how did this happen&quot;?