Bag's Rants

Giving heroin to curb crime. Mmmm. A lot of thought went into that.

An interesting approach, and one that has been suggested before. A top cop advocates that we give Heroin to addicts in a bid to cut down on the crime they do in order to get it. Read here. It's already being tried out in a pilot.

Now it could very well be that this is a 'cure' for this sort of person. An addict could very well stop stealing or whatever if he gets his fix without any issues.

But, and it's a big but, it is totally irrelevant. In the same vein we should give a burglar money to stop burglarising houses. We should give a bank robber money to stop raising banks. The crime would disappear but all that we would be really doing is spreading the load across society rather than have it concentrated in a couple of areas. Extrapolate that to more serious crimes we could bump people off, legally, to stop all the murders. No murders that sounds good until you work out deaths are actually up, and quite a bit I would imagine. It's not really workable beyond a certain level.

Therefore, if you go the other way, which I advocate, we would increase the sentences for the crimes and make them not worth the trouble. They would be too scared to do any crimes in our society.

Of course, to make it any semblance of justice it needs to be real crimes not ones made up by politicians and do gooders. In which case heroin could very well be legal anyway.

In the end I suppose it is another way to get the crime figures down without actually doing anything so it will undoubtably get expanded.

posted by Bag @ 5:29 pm