Sam Quinones is Wrong Part II

After Sam Quinones talked to Burlington's mayor about the wonders of incarceration for treating addiction, Maia Szalavitz and me were invited to offer a counter-narrative.

The author Sam Quinones recently Zoom’d into a CommStat meeting hosted by Miro Weinberger, the Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, to discuss the city’s struggle with substance use and homelessness. Usually these talks concern opioids and how to prevent overdoses and expand treatment. But the city’s conversation has lately shifted to methamphetamine, which is being linked to crime, expanding homeless encampments, and, according to a strange New York Times story, rampant bicycle thefts?

If you read my last piece on Quinones, you probably know what he already said, that a scary new version of meth is causing a rise in homelessness, violence, and mental health crises. And also a pathological obsession with bicycles. That’s pretty much what he said to Burlington’s mayor and city officials. Quinones said that “all fentanyl users die” if left on the street and that meth will “derrange” them before that. For Quinones, that means there’s a very real need to incapacitate people—to protect them from themselves. So any response to the current phase of synthetic drug use in America must involve an expansion of courts and jails.

“Jail has always been a place where people have gained sobriety,” Quinones said. “The evidence is so clear. You need a place where we can put people where they cannot leave.”

He refers to jail as “a blessed respite from dope.” This vacation for drug users must begin with their arrest, he says, acknowledging that his idea “runs contrary to conventional wisdom” to end the drug war. Expressing his own annoyance with all these radicals, Quinones says ending the drug war is basically a “commandment” nowadays, a rigid orthodoxy that people aren’t allowed to question anymore (he says, questioningly from his wide-reaching platform).

“The drug war failed not because we used law enforcement. It failed because we only used law enforcement. That was only the tool,” Quinones explains. “My feeling is we need to use elements of the leverage that law enforcement can provide. Re-thinking jail is essential in all this.”

It’s extremely tiresome to hear people like Quinones frame America’s status quo drug policy for the last several decades as something bold and new and against the grain. Over 1 million people are arrested every year on drug offenses. Trying to arrest people to get them to kick drugs? That’s called the drug war!