Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: The basis for abstinence objectives is not straightforward to elicit since health and other risks associated with heroin use have not been clearly spelt out.Some long-term addicts have reasonable health and it is not clear that heroin damages vital organs.A possible argument against addiction is that heroin dependence is intrinsically undesirable.However, it can also be argued that the main health and legal problems associated with dependence are a consequence of criminalising drug use rather than dependence itself.The argument is that, because heroin is illegal, people commit crimes to obtain expensive supplies and may suffer health problems where supplies are of poor quality.Furthermore, to libertarians it is not obvious that the purely private pleasures yielded by narcotics should be penalised by law.Such sanctions penalise a state of being, not the costs heroin use imposes on society through crime and poor health.Such costs can, in principle, be managed efficiently by pricing health services correctly or by utilising full-liability sanctions on crimes.It might be that some social groups choose to have social freedoms restricted to avoid the possibility of bad situations developing or because it is believed that some poorly-informed individuals (the 'young' for example) may make bad choices with serious, irreversible, long-term consequences.This raises questions as to who should constitute the relevant decision-making group.However, having raised the controversial question as to whether addiction is harmful, we now bring the discussion closer to political realities by pragmatically supposing it is: a society with fewer addicts is assumed preferable to one with more.Abstinence is worth pursuing.Reasons for seeking harm-minimisation by limiting health costs and the costs of crime contingent on heroin use are simple for even libertarians to uncover.It is impossible (or difficult) to recover these types of costs by levying efficient prices for health care or by fully recouping crime costs through fullliability criminal sanctions.Health care is commonly regarded as a 'merit good' that should be priced at less than its cost, while drug user budget constraints, and uncertainties in criminal detection and prosecution, limit the potential for fullliability damage recovery from criminals.Note that pursuing abstinence and harm-minimisation targets typically involves two independent objectives.Trying to minimise harm through public provision of heroin can advance harm-minimisation objectives but, by reducing the costs of addiction, can reduce abstinence levels.Similarly, pursuing strong abstinence objectives by imposing stringent legal sanctions can perhaps increase the harm caused by heroin by raising heroin supply prices and causing additional overdose deaths.It is only if abstinence objectives are entirely achievable that harm-minimisation is also automatically ensured.Otherwise, there is a trade-off between these aspects.
Author: Harry Clarke
Language: English
Topic: Criminal Law and Policy
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2595822282