where have you been? we do put drunk drivers in prison. companies fire alcoholics.
in prison all addicts go thru detox because they can’ t get alcohol or drugs. that is a helpful aspect of prison for these people. they have no choice but to get off whatever they’re on.
Drunk drivers. Not drunks. We don’t arrest folks for having a few bottles of booze with the equivalent intoxicating power of 25 grams of pot. There’s no large quantity of booze you can have in your liquor cabinet that creates a presumption that you were going to engage in a felony by selling the stuff like there is with any of the psychoactive substances that weren’t popular in Europe c. 1776. You don’t get arrested for having a wine cellar if your house is within 1000 feet of a school.
Companies fire folks whose drinking affects their job performance.
How about applying the same standards to other psychoactive substances we do do alcohol? If activities you undertake while under the influence endanger public safety, that, the endangerment of public safety, not the use per se, should be a crime like drunk driving. If using affects your job performance, you’ll get fired, not because you have some metabolite from whatever you were amusing yourself with on the weekend turn up in your urine.
Okay, so once they’re detoxed in prison and they’ve lost their job, and can’t find another one because of the pervasiveness of criminal background checks, what then? Clean and sober and on the dole, or more likely back to the drugs or booze because their life sucks thanks to being turned into criminals by your jackbooted nanny-state approach to what should be a public health problem, rather than a crime problem. How, precisely, does this help their family, whom you aver to be their “victims”?