> if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave
What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?
> probably save money in the process
That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.
* Less crime because people who are addicted to drugs do not have to raise instant money for their next fix,
* Getting open, visible drug use off the streets and into a controlled supervised setting (this is not strictly part of safe supply though, but an orthogonal related service),
* Making drug use safer for the users by ensuring quality and consistent strength. Fentanyl, orphines and nitazenes are killing lots of people, and they exist on the market not because of demand from the users but because they are easier and cheaper to manufacture and smuggle than heroin.
* Making it easier to help the drug user by removing the burden and stress of obtaining the drugs. This is often an endless cycle of stress which leaves no room for getting help.
* Making it possible for drug users to be functional members of society. Not all people who are addicted to drugs need to stop, for some the safer choice is to accept that they are dependent and work around it. Taking opioids to prevent withdrawal is not incompatible with holding a job and contributing to society, committing crimes to get money for the next fix is. For many people who are addicted to opioids, abstinence programs are not the best option because the rate of falling back to using is very high, and once that happens the risk of fatal overdose is also very high due to decreased tolerance. I won't quote concrete numbers because I cannot remember them right now, but last I heard the rate of failure in abstinence programs was well above 70%.
* By supplying the drugs from sources that have no financial incentive in keeping the drug users on the drugs, you can ensure that users are exposed to all public offers to get help with their addiction or any underlying socioeconomic factors that are probably contributing to why they have become addicted in the first place.
Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate. I believe that to be true, and I think that a much better way is to address the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime. It doesn't mean that we should stop at the safe supply, because that would indeed be the cynical approach, we of course also have to help people overcome all the problems that are probably keeping them in their drug addiction, such as mental health issues and homelessness.
We have to address the root causes of drug use and addiction and ultimately accept that current addicts may stay that way, but over time we have fewer people becoming addicts.
> Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate
Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.
And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.
To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.
> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime
From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.
The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.
The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.
One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.
You'd think reducing crime and saving money in the process would be enough incentive, but it turns out that can be a hard sell on a public that's been trained to relish in seeing violence applied to people presented as bad. I've found that there are people so keenly keyed to said relish that they'll just dead refuse to believe that supportive approaches to drug addiction can be cheaper than coercive approaches with better results to boot, and that's kind of tragic honestly.
What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?
> probably save money in the process
That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.