i'll state this again, maybe a little more clearly this time.

as a social anarchist, my focus when it comes to drugs is about managing resources. i don't particularly care much about saving the lives of drug addicts, as i don't consider those lives to be very valuable. what i care about is minimizing the resources that society wastes on drug addicts, with the aim of redirecting those resources towards more valuable uses. while this may appear to be somewhat similar to the desires of a fiscal conservative on the surface, and i will admit to some common cause with fiscal conservatives at a very shallow policy level, it's really a drastically different perspective when analyzed in any level of detail. so, i will support the supervised injection sites (because it minimizes resources wasted treating drug addicts for hepatitis, and aids) while opposing any grand scheme to sink billions into a national prevention program. targeted schemes to save money (and therefore resources..), though, are a good idea - and i will likely support most of them, as they are articulated.

this is very different than a religious perspective, which has somehow ended up on the pseudo-left in this country, but really belongs to the right, which would be focused on saving the lives of each and every drug addict, in order to save their souls or something. i suspect that most people couldn't really explain why they want to save the lives of drug addicts; it's more of a feeling than a thought. but, if you are to attach it to any kind of thought, it would be a religious one. these people want to redirect large amounts of public resources into saving the lives of drug addicts, with little thought about the resource accounting that such a thing would necessitate, and little interest in whether these kinds of things are effective. they're frankly not likely to understand that saving drug addicts means losing cancer patients; they'll argue that this is a false choice, because they're imagining infinite resources, without really thinking about it.

anarchists are legitimately quite different than even marxists, who are nowadays actually pretty utopian. we seem like we don't fit in on the left. but, we're really what the actual left is. and, the difference is that we've moved past religion.

it really is religion that is the difference, here.