> As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances...

And yet our cities are being destroyed by having a mere 2-10k junkies in an extreme state of decay, using the hardest drugs and living, robbing, and dying in the streets.

> many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in

That'd be hard in this case. They're already on all the drugs they can get, but especially the hardest. But they also don't need hard prison, they could be kept in a wet paper bag if you gave them their drugs. Initial cleanup wouldn't be hard.

> What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine),

Those aren't the drugs that are being abused in the street-drug camps. (Not to minimize meth, but it's no Fentanyl...)

And even without blockers, there is regular assisted detox which is better than death.

> and not everyone can get access to those blockers.

We'd make sure they could though, that being the point. For the price we spend on clean needles we could give every junkie their blockers. Jail and programs are cheap compared to dealing with the ongoing mess, crime, and death.

> The US has [...] virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs

Canada and other countries are also having this problem, but even the USA spends a lot on social programs. The people are just getting tired of those programs being counter-productive such as the "safe" drugs supply and decriminalization.

> US jails don't detox people with blockers

We're talking about fixing things though, so that could change as easily as anything else. Certainly more easily than hiring enough ambulance attendants to continually revive the dying.

> Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective.

Yeah, jail never polls well. That's why it's not an option though. There are many laws they're breaking, even leaving out any drug and drug-predicate crimes, and the sentence for those easily covers any authority needed to require, and time to administer, the treatment.

> It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs

No, though. Or not the related crimes, such as possession and public intoxication. They use the criminality for force you into treatment. But you don't come out with a criminal record for the drug crimes, so if that was all you did it is sort of decriminalized... Michael Shellenberger interviews João Goulão, head of Portugal's drug program, who says with a chuckle that the legal force is part of the voluntary program.

> I think this conversation also goes to why the term 'addiction' is often no longer used. Detox is one thing, but teaching someone how to deal with stress takes more. When I was a heavy tobacco user, the habit part was a distinct and big part of the overall "addiction." It was one thing to get off of nicotine, it was another to learn that the way to deal with stress was not to go

We're talking about street use of fentanyl though, where you've got at least a 25% chance/year of death. That they don't reach full recovery through one intervention isn't a problem. Once we've saved their life, and the lives and prosperity of people they were dying near, we can get to work on their stress.

Also, the people who want to redefine the terms and reshape the conversation are, to a large part, the ones who have gotten us where we are.