NYCs old tough on crime laws worked I know because I was busted asa drug addict criminal

Growing up with movies like “Bad Lieutenant,” “The French Connection” and “King of New York,” I dreamed of moving to the city once my life had taken a dark turn into drugs and crime.As a seasoned degenerate, I was disappointed almost immediately when my Greyhound bus pulled into the New York Port Authority in the spring of 2013.

The city was surprisingly clean, crime-free, and thriving.I went to Times Square to look for some debauchery — and discovered nothing but thousands of tourists safely enjoying themselves and a variety of family-friendly stores.

Unbeknownst to me, the criminal’s playground of open prostitution and drug dealing was no more.Had I made a mistake by moving here?I had been homeless for most of 2011 and 2012, on Skid Row in Los Angeles and the Tenderloin in San Francisco, due to a nasty heroin and meth addiction.

It was a chaotic adventure of depravity and crime, but after a year and a half, I decided to throw in the towel.My father, a former heroin addict himself, had gotten sober at a halfway house in Florida and offered to buy me out of California and join him in his recovery journey.

I lasted about four months at his halfway house before deciding that I wasn’t done getting high.With about a thousand dollars saved, I caught a bus up to New York where I figured I could live out my own homeless drug-addict version of “Taxi Driver”; it was anything but. Quickly I found myself in jail for jumping the turnstile at a subway station.

I’d never been arrested so fast.I made a mental note to never do it again, and that New York City didn’t play around with fare evasion like I had been accustomed to in San Francisco.

A few weeks later, after desperately searching for heroin, I was stopped and frisked and wound up in jail again.The city just wouldn’t give me a break.

I realized that, unlike in California, I wouldn’t be able to support my habit through petty theft and other criminal activity.On top of this, I wasn’t a...