The Washington Post has a story by longtime liberal columnist Courtland Milloy that displays pretty much everything that’s wrong with the soft-on-crime approach to our epidemic of drug overdose deaths. …

The problem with this take on things is not that it’s complete hogwash. It’s true that we can’t entirely arrest our way out of our drug problem. It’s also true that, given the stakes, prevention and treatment are worth trying, even for all their failures and limited effectiveness. The problem, in a nutshell, is that it views the criminal as the passive vessel of adverse social forces without will or direction, and thus without responsibility for his behavior. As long as the people running our justice system operate from that belief, we’ll continue to get the backlog at the morgue we’re getting now.

[Seems to me that we’ve been trying the non-incarceration strategy for at least the last couple of decades. Many states even legalized or at least normalized marijuana to supposedly focus law enforcement on the prohibition of dangerous drugs. Has that worked? The short and accurate answer: Nope. — Ed]