> Namely, housing first and harm reduction are policy failures that have led to an epidemic of homelessness and addiction in every jurisdiction that has embraced them. That’s why Portugal and the Netherlands abandoned these policies in favor of arrest and mandatory treatment.

Just to expand on this, many in the harm reduction camp like to point at Switzerland's harm reduction program, which is claimed to have been directly and immediately responsible for plummeting heroin addiction in the mid-90s. But I recently discovered this sobering analysis: Peter Reuter, Domenic Schnoz, "Assessing Drug Problems and Policies in Switzerland, 1998-2007", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237422443_Assessing... The TL;DR is that heroin usage had already began to plummet before the reforms were even enacted. This is based on the fact that advocates touted precipitous declines in addiction treatment numbers post legislative reform. But there's a multi-year lag between when people begin using heroin regularly and when their lives are destroyed and they find themselves in treatment, voluntarily or involuntarily. Combining the precipitous declines with the necessary lag period, that means the heroin epidemic had already begun to crumble years before the reforms. (Why it began to crumble isn't understood. We know so very little about how these epidemics unfold.)

Speaking of treatment, harm reduction advocates suggest that heroin was decriminalized. But that's a gross mischaracterization. During the 1990s in particular, Switzerland still aggressively arrested and punished people for drug-related crimes, including property crimes, and they enforced mandatory treatment for the worst addicts. There was (and remains) a program for legal heroin prescriptions, but they require mandatory out-patient addiction therapy, and so only a tiny minority (~5%) of addicts opt for legal heroin. Most addicts choose methadone treatment, incentivized by the fact that people are still arrested or otherwise face social opprobrium in the still illegal heroin market.

Drug reform in Switzerland has evolved considerably since the 1990s. In the 1990s Switzerland still aggressively arrested people for marijuana possession. Authorities are significantly more liberal today, but that tells us nothing about the cause+effect of the heroin epidemic 30 years ago. The average age of heroin addicts in Switzerland has crept up over the years as heroin simply stopped being the drug of choice, a process that began before reform efforts.

Harm reduction as a principal remains sound. Few people would defend a system of punishment for the sake of punishment, lacking any salutary effects. Of course our objective should be minimizing overall human suffering. But that principal alone simply does not (and judging by available evidence, cannot) justify removing all social restraints on criminal behavior and the drug markets with which they're associated in a particular time and place. Anti-drug laws can and have routinely been used discriminatorily, but the solution is to address the discrimination and abuse, refining the laws accordingly, not to abandon people to chaos, the consequences of which will naturally fall disproportionately on disadvantaged people nonetheless.

Anyone who thinks that our recent dramatic swing toward extreme leniency regarding opioid addiction and opioid-related crime isn't rooted in racism is fooling themselves. It's no coincidence that the white majority in the U.S. changed course when they began to fear the consequences of over criminalization. And because their fear was largely exaggerated (most advocates are not exactly in the risk group), we ended up with reforms which were more a salve for their own anxieties than actually effective at reducing societal harm or even simply harm to the addicted.