Doesn’t it often seem as if Harrop’s entire route to intellectual policy formation is through reaction to inconveniences in her own life? There’s probably nothing unusual about that (except the author’s ready access to a newspaper audience), but thorough consideration seems to get lost in the mix. Who cares, she implies by omission, if the mugger were to buy so much celery-priced crack that he, his girlfriend, and her tweenaged child all died of overdoses? Who cares if more people could afford (financially and emotionally) to try it?
Consider: if drugs were free with a stipulation of treatment, wouldn’t that treatment imply a limit to the free drugs? And wouldn’t those who wanted more than their limit still turn to the neighborhood drug dealer (who would now have the new acquisition channel of fraud on the public dime)? It’s as if Harrop deep down understands that one must at least account for the likelihood that legalizing and cheapening drugs — particularly the kind that most often lead to subway muggings — will increase demand, which she doesn’t want, so she fills that gap with a socialist scheme that is doomed to cause more problems than it solves.