I never recommended that taxpayers subsidize drug users. What I have said is that vices are not crimes.
The problem is that they still require income, in the form of cash or valuables, to support other aspects of their lives. How do you think they get that cash? Ask your neighbor who’s house was broken into? Or your co-worker who was robbed at gunpoint.
This problem doesn't change whether drugs are legal or illegal. The states job to punish the crime of robbery not the vice of drug addiction.
If you want to stop crime, incarcerate drug users and let the courts decide who is eligible for treatment and who should do a bullet in county.
Are you actually saying these words?
Incarcerating drug users doesn't, hasn't and will never stop crime. We can't even keep drugs out of prisons let alone off the streets. That is a ridiculous assertion. All drug users do not resort to criminal activity to feed their habits.
The state’s war on drugs, like its war on poverty and its war on terrorism, is a failure, unless you consider turning hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding people into criminals a success.
According to the FBI The most frequent arrests made in 2008 were for
drug abuse violations (estimated at 1,702,537 arrests). These arrests comprised 12.2 percent of the total number of all arrests.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.htmlI personally don't want my tax dollars being used to kidnap and incarcerate any person who's only "crime" was ingesting an unapproved substance.
Vices by themselves are not crimes.
http://www.lysanderspooner.org/VicesAreNotCrimes.htm"Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property — no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property." ~Lysander Spooner