No, they are hurting both tangibles- because they steal and attack bystanders, and intangibles- like ruining neighborhoods, driving down prices, making drugs more accessible to young kids etc.
> Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.
These people have families. They may be parents themselves. They are living in a community, one which has children. Here in Canada, with how things are now going -- I now see young children in the tent camps with their parents.
Public drug use almost certainly encourages children to uptake the behaviour themselves. Children are impressionable. They adopt the behaviours of their parents, of their older siblings, of their older siblings' friends, and yes, even just people they see on the street.
Along with that, simple physical accessibility - the widespread presence of the substance in society - means children will have more access.
When cannabis was legalized in Canada there was a sharp increase in the number of children showing up in the ER from cannabis poisoning. [1] Children steal their parents' drugs all the time, both by accident and by intention. The more proliferate and visible drugs are, the more people walking around with some fentanyl in one of their pockets, the more such exposure incidents will happen and the more such drugs will fall in the hands of children.
I'm pro-legalization, for what it's worth. But this is one of those downsides I'm worried about.
I agree that kids getting access to their parents drugs is a problem (although I don't think that's what the person I was responding to was talking about). It sounds like you might agree that if a parent is using drugs but is still capable of caring for their children, the best thing to do would not be to arrest them but rather to either make sure that they're preventing their kids from getting access to those drugs (by providing them with a safe, for example).
You can rationalize all you want but a bunch of junkies hanging around where you live ruin everything. They make everything dirty, they are themselves dirty, drop needles everywhere and shit on the sidewalk. One junkie jumped up and ran towards one of my buddies in Philadelphia once screaming “I have HIV”. Get your head out of your ass.
I’ve also seen people in the street do wild things in Philly. And yes, homeless people are often dirty because the way don’t have access to running water. And yes, drug users sometimes litter needles (the crime you’re complaining about is littering, which is still illegal).
None of those things are a reason why someone should lose their freedom for using drugs. Prison isn’t a punishment we should throw around to people we find distasteful or annoying, it’s an extremely serious measure.
