It surprises me that more people don't take the comfortable chair at Starbucks.
There are only two comfortable chairs, and I can basically always get one of them.
This seems kind of true across locations, wherever comfortable chairs are still offered.
Why? Do they not feel like they deserve it? Do they actually prefer the hard chairs?
By the by, just right now I requested the restroom code, and as I heard the answer, someone slithered behind me into the only vacant room. 🤔
If he already knew the code, that's fine. But if he didn't, he should have restrained himself and let me go first.
We'll never know which one it was.
Let's talk about drugs.
A lot of people conflate "heroin etc are dangerous" with "so go ahead and lock them in a jail cell".
False dichotomy.
The war on drugs is starting to crack! with cannabis legalization falling like dominoes and now magic mushrooms decriminalized in Denver.
Often though, people will lean on the lack of harmful effects of these specific drugs, rather than any overall ethic or principle. (i.e. the principle that people own their body and you can't kidnap them because of what they decide to put in it)
So you get to smoke pot more conveniently, but there's still a lot of horror going on out there.
Even people who use drugs will sometimes talk about how they don't want heroin to be sold at the grocery store.
It's my belief that consistently not kidnapping people would settle in a way that's much better and more drug-free than it is right now.
And the scare stories people have about drugs flying around aimlessly are exactly what they create with prohibition.
I doubt it would be sold at grocery stores. (Grocery stores wouldn't want to be associated with it.) It would be sold by niche services with all eyes and scrutiny on them to make sure they're doing everything they can to lessen and minimize the chance of addiction and the chance of it going to children.
Or even if it happened in the back corner of a few grocery stores, who cares. Don't shop there.
The way things are now -- random crackheads down the block having a viable business model -- is the perfect climate for addiction and drugs being sold to children and to people who shouldn't have it.
When you bring it into the light, it improves.
It suffocates the crackhead down the block, "here child, try this" business model.
And in the long run there's less and less addiction, perhaps to the point of these harmful drugs not really being a thing.
Fair? Not so crazy?
Better outcomes flow from treating people peacefully. Bad outcomes flow from initiating violence.
Why this can be difficult for some people to intuit, I don't know. But I realize that it is.
So okay. Then just make it illegal to sell at grocery stores.
Why is there ever a reason to lock a user in a cage?
(A cage where, btw, some would allege it's easier to get drugs than on the street. And where you're surrounded by the worst people and have less to live for besides reaching for whatever high you can get.)
Punishment
Well, we need to scare people away from using it, some will allege.
It's unfortunate that people speak the language of punishment. It's a vicious cycle where, then, punishment is what they understand and becomes the way to guide their behavior.
So while I wish people raised kids differently and didn't hit and threaten and punish and make them so fluent in this...
(Instead, you should reason and help talk them thru the long term consequence of their decisions.)
I understand that some adults, at this point, respond to punishment more than to anything else. And so maybe it's reasonable that, playing it as it lies, the threat of punishment and physically restricting them is a good way to steer people away from drugs.
I don't know. I doubt it. But I'll give the benefit of the doubt for the sake of a thought experiment..
So then why not create a separate, non-violent offender prison?
Comfortable beds, wifi, activies. Maybe opportunity to work and make money. Anyone who behaves violently is separated (or I guess delivered to the regular prison, if it was bad enough).
Supervision where they've lost their freedom (allegedly for their own good) but don't have to live in hell.
If it's for their own good and you accept that they haven't hurt anyone, why not make the terms as comfortable and humane as possible?
Why send them to live amongst killers and rapists?
And if you don't agree with what I'm saying (at least to the point of 🤔 "hmm, interesting, I'll have to think more"), then you don't actually care about them and about helping them to improve.
You get off on punishing people, on saying BAD and watching them suffer.
And "well, heroin is harmful y'know" is just your way of pretending that there's a real reason, other than that you have a demon burning inside you and that you like hurting people.
Or at best you're a coward and want to rationalize whatever the prevailing power structure says is right.
The drug addict needs help, but you need more of it.