Still, I never once considered rounding up all the drinkers, sending them to jail, then disallowing them from ever participating in most of society for the rest of their lives. That's without even considering all the collateral damage, and people hassled for no reason. Worst of all IMO, is a classic critique that dates back to prohibition: Prohibition laws breed contempt for law and order. Peaceful citizens become criminals. Cops become fascists, rounding people up for no reason.
So, I'd say it's pretty reasonable to want to try something else. I'm unconvinced that there's no other option, or middle ground to deal with externalities. I also don't think you're being oppressed, or "living like you're in a third world country", because you sometimes see what's really going on in your city. Perhaps your efforts would be better spent on an anti-littering campaign.
As if that's what we're doing. "Yikes bro", maybe stop straw manning everything I said into some kind of crypto fascist fantasy? Maybe consider that not being able to have your elderly parents take the subway when they visit - because of risk of violence, or you just don't want them around open injection drug use - is a sign that what we're doing isn't working? We've been trying the decriminalization route for a decade at least. Do you actually think this is "success"? Or has real decriminalization never been tried?
> because you sometimes see what's really going on in your city.
And this is the nihilism. Thinking this is normal.
Is criminalizing all drug users the answer though? We have 50 years or so of results there that show that has serious issues as well. Why are we willing to spend 30-40 thousand a year on imprisoning folks at a rate that no other country even comes close to, but not try spending similar amounts of money on actual rehabilitation and welfare programs for the addicted and mentally ill?
It seems worth a shot to me...
I am not advocating this though. I don't see anyone else in this thread advocating this either. I'm merely asking that we at least stop doing the insane thing of just ignoring it and letting people shoot up on the sidewalk or at the bus stop. I'm all for some creative solutions to this, fine, but the only thing that seems to gain traction today is "what we're already doing, but louder".
There's lots of countries where people wouldn't consider needles and feces in the streets to be the "reality of living in an urban area." For example Tokyo or Stockholm (both of which are in strongly anti-drug countries).
Please be honest. No one is that dumb, especially not you. The reason Japan's streets are clean is that they are used primarily by the Japanese. They have different cultural defaults than we do, and perhaps one might say that in this respect they are just better. Japan's cops are actually drastically less aggressive and abusive than USA cops. Also, numerous Japanese have told me that they wished their drug prohibition could be repealed. If that happened, no one would expect Ginza to turn into the Tenderloin.