There’s a value somewhere in the horrors of untreated addiction getting first-hand visibility. The true cost of policing, prosecuting, and jailing end-users must be enormous, maybe it will rally people to demand those resources get put toward direct outreach to try to address the root causes of the issue.
Maybe it’s a feature, not a bug.
If that's a feature, it's a costly one, at the expense of ceding the public square to the substance abuse crowd. This LA Times story about the decline of the Metro system since the pandemic almost brought me to tears. I've enjoyed the lines and stations mentioned in the story, and I can see why they're deserted now.
