By James Lileks
Sunday, July 12, 2026
The city of Minneapolis has a problem with open-air drug
markets. Main cause: permitting open-air drug markets. Now they’re cracking down. In announcing this new effort, the
ever-earnest mayor, Jacob Frey, said: “This past month I visited [the] Little
Earth [housing project], and I learned that there were four children that had
stepped on discarded needles and required HIV prevention treatment.”
You would think this would be bad, but you have to
balance the “problems” of punctured kids with the harm that might befall the
needle-strewer if the authorities were summoned. Said one city councilperson, reacting to the news of a crackdown: “Today, the City of
Minneapolis and Mayor Frey announced a strategy that I consider the city’s War
on Drugs. Let me be very clear, this approach will criminalize homelessness,
criminalize those struggling with addiction, will worsen people’s life outcomes
by giving them a criminal record that follows them for years, and will only
expose our undocumented neighbors to deportations.”
Criminals getting criminal records? Well, we can’t have
that. Deporting illegals who are doing fent in the playground? The Statue of
Liberty would drop her torch and bury her head in her hands. Kids stepping on
needles is the price we pay for a tolerant and compassionate society, and hey —
it’s not like they can’t treat HIV these days. What we must do is address the
structural causes for carelessly strewn needles. We must chew gum before we can
even think of lacing up our shoes to walk.
This sympathy for the anti-social sorts flared up on
Twitter/X this week, as one of the perennial debates flared up like a coal seam
fire hosed with gas: what to do about miscreants who light up a joint in the
subway. The answer, of course, is nothing.
If you must do something, ask him politely to cease his
anti-social activity. This has the highest potential for a stabby reaction, but
who knows? He could say “deucedly bad of me, old man, I’ve let myself down.
Oughtn’t have breached the social contract with such flagrant disregard. Thank
you for bringing me back within the fold of civilized behavior with the
gentlest of verbal nudges.”
What you do not do, under any circumstances, is
hold the rule-breaker accountable and advocate for consequences. Everyone else
in the subway car — service workers heading off to their second job, mothers
with children — should put up with the rich, aromatic smell of cigarettes or
weed, because asserting some sort of civil norm is cruel to the smoker. You
absolutely cannot alert the authorities, because it’s likely The Agents of the
Carceral State who show up to assert the power behind the bourgeois “quality of
life” statutes will kill someone. According to the pro-miscreant caucus on X,
when the cops show up, it goes like this:
Cop #1: Buddy, put
out the cigarette.
Smoker:
[Penetrative expletive] you.
Cop #2: (sighs,
looks at partner) Is it your turn to shoot him? I think it is? I shot the last
one. I remember because I was doing the paperwork and ran out of ink.
Cop #1: No, I shot
the last one. Remember? We caught him putting gum under the seat and I told him
it was against the law and he just looked at me funny and I shot him? Remember?
The deaf guy?
Cop #2: Oh right.
(shoots smoker)
Happens a dozen times a day. Now imagine when those
blood-maddened civil servants have carte blanche to enforce the basic rules of
public decorum all the time in the subway. Or even above ground in Minneapolis
or San Francisco or Philly, where the open-air drug markets do brisk business.
An absolute fascist dystopia. Sure, it would be nice if transit was safe and
the streets were clean and the kids could cavort in the playground unpierced,
but not if it’s for the wrong reasons.
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