I and plenty of others who grew up in drug infested towns consider lock them up to be a positive. Addicts are often dangerous and large concentrations of them more so. Locking them up means they get sober and might stay that way. They also tie up important emergency services. Those personnel are also negatively affected. It wears on EMT’s going to the same houses and seeing the same thing again and again. It burns good people who used to have a lot of sympathy out. They can either get sober or not. If they don’t want to stay sober they can go sit in jail or forced rehab. That is a solution. At least there they are way from the rest of and quite frankly lessening their influence on the youth. Because one of the worst things about drug addicts is the influence they have on kids. My town and lots of others got a lot better when we started locking them up. We broke chains of addiction and saw a lot less of our youths dying to being influenced by bad people. An addict who tries to act like what they do is good/fine and tries to rope in others is a bad person who does belong in jail. Sympathy tends to die when narcan becomes a common phrase and your emt’s are saving people who they honestly just don’t want to save anymore. That’s more heartbreaking then anything. Seeing good people (emt’s) broken like that.

The addict who gets clean and stays clean the 1st time? Good on them, probably a result of not knowing what they were getting into. The rest? Lock them up in some form. They really aren’t worth caring about and flat aren’t fixable. They care more about their drugs then the people they hurt. That person isn’t a victim and a lot of addicts who do stay clean do so because they don’t buy the I’m a victim mentality. That hurts people.