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ymeskhout  2yr ago (text post)   4284 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E034: An Unhinged Conversation on Policing

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.

In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.

Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]

Links:

About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)

Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)

Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)

The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)

Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)

Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)

Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)

Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)

Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25

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Jeez I'm sorry you have to deal with so much crime. The state I live in in the US rarely sees this type of thing while still being in a relatively nice metro area. You might want to move! I'll tell you where if you PM me.

Does it help if you consider that the idea is to stop people from becoming the guy who pisses on your house, by improving their lives before they reach that point?

Because, like, I get that there's a transitional period between every old system and every new system where thing are turbulent and a lot of annoying things happen. But I think we should be considering what the long-term steady state of that system looks like, not getting hung up on annoying implementation details in the first month.

You are correct that it's wrong to not consider the trade-off and weigh both sides of it evenly. But - are there other potential trade-offs? In areas other than endless compassion and enabling?

You can calculate how much "drug use enabled due to clinics" is worth how much "unsupervised drug use and property crime". It's a reasonable question to ask. I think it's between plausible and likely that - provided someone more like Hoff than like a prison abolitionist administered the program, and tried to minimize growth of the drug user population - free drug clinics would be better than the status quo.

Here's another trade-off: How much loss of privacy, and increased incarceration, is worth how much heroin addiction? Say you can imprison one person for ten years to prevent five cases of (severe) addiction. Is that worth it? IMO, it is. And it's especially worth it when you realize that the benefit of law enforcement is almost entirely deterrence - deterrence of more organized and competent forms of crime that don't currently exist at all, but would naturally evolve without law enforcement. Things like deterring megacorporations from advertising and selling heroin on an industrial scale, or deterring gangs from capturing factories and imposing taxes on their output (as happened in post-soviet russia). I think it's entirely possible to move drug gangs and drug dealing at scale into that category. And after that's happened, harsh policing of drug gangs won't be any more necessary than harsh policing of other rare crime is, just monitoring for new small-scale enterprises and nipping the buds.

IMO the best policy is sacrificing significant privacy in high-drug-use communities, and freedom for those involved in distribution, in exchange for preventing most use of hard drugs. A hundred thousand overdose deaths per year is just ... a lot of death, and signals even more suffering. And when we directly compare the imprisonment and loss of freedoms/privacy to the cost of clinics - being a drug-zombie is still very bad, and being a managed-drug zombie in a clinic is somewhat less bad than being a street drug-zombie, but it's still terrible. And being imprisoned is probably 'as bad' as being a drug-zombie, and many fewer people are involved in distribution than are users. (Plus, if you really were able to entirely clean up distribution, you could quickly free the low-level distributors).

The principle here is that the state, when unencumbered by internal opposition and the details of the last century's procedural respect for rights (but stil lretaining the spirit), and using modern technology, is entirely able to prevent the sale and use of drugs at scale. I'm not sure what form it'd take, but I'm quite confident that computers + monopoly on force > decentralized drug networks if the state is willing to innovate and modify due process. Drug dealers are smart, but they don't have the power of mass surveillance, of spending X% of GDP legibly, of creating new social systems all members of society participate in, of targeted and overwhelming force.

This paragraph will be 'my vivid imagination' and 'obviously wrong and stupid' rather than a practical solution, as I'm not a subject-matter-expert and haven't spend 40 hours reading relevant material, but: We already know which areas have drug problems. To fix the problem, you need (roughly) two things: detailed knowledge of who's selling/distributing the drugs and where and when, and the political/procedural will to arrest and imprison them all. I'm assuming away the second issue (I don't think you need to abolish due process or anything). The first issue is still a problem, though - cracking down on the most open drug markets will just push the trade to less legible areas. So, in the 'bad areas', impose mandatory drug testing (fentanyl, not weed, and the tests that detect if you've used in the last few months) for everyone, every X months. Or maybe put drug metabolite monitors in everyone's toilets, or something. Those who test positive won't be punished at all. Probably, to make this incentive-compatible, an ideal state would pair this with temporary free drugs. But then use the high-resolution information on who uses and doesn't as a seed for using surveillance to identify low level distributors. That gives the enforcement arm enough information to just arrest everyone involved in distribution. Everyone involved gets put into newly built and very nice nordic-style prisons or something. You'd start by rolling this out in one community, see what works and what doesn't, iterate, and then make it larger-scale, of course. This would be expensive. But how expensive? Maybe 2% of GDP expensive, definitely not 10% of GDP expensive. We probably lose 1+% of GDP already to services, treatment, law enforcement, and lost productivity due to addiction, this link (which I do not trust at all) says 2%. And once most existing organizations were shut down, you could scale back all that spending and surveillance.

Obviously, that sucks for everyone imprisoned, and both the users and non-users who lose a significant amount of privacy. But does it really suck less than enabling many current addictions, and maybe minting new drug-zombies, because the free drugs clinic is just right there? I think if you just add up the utils, the loss in privacy and imprisonment of some distributors is more than made up for by the number of addicts getting divided by ten.

(An ideal state would also fix whatever the root causes of the massive wave of addiction are, it's not just drug presence. But the drugs play a large role, and there's significant reflexivity to it, most current addicts would stay addicted even if given the minimum level of welfare or life-purpose or w/e necessary to prevent them from getting addicted initially).

edited note: Also, I'm not claiming any of this is achievable by the current way the US government is structured, or that people should vote for policies similar to this today. Clearly, naive attempts to act on 'just arrest the drug dealers!! how hard can it be!!' have failed, even if the impulse there isn't entirely wrong.

@ymeskhout curious if you have thoughts on my parent comment? Essentially, from first principles I really don't see why the 'war on drugs' is unwinnable, it'd just take sacrifices that are (imo) very obviously justified when compared to 100k overdose deaths per year. However, first principles reasoning goes wrong as often as it goes right, so if my speculation is obviously wrong I'd love to be pointed to something explaining why.

The basic problem is that people love drugs and are willing to pay enormous gobs of money to get them. Other people are more than willing to accept the gobs of cash to supply them. Everything flows from that.

From first principles I agree with you that the 'war on drugs' is theoretically winnable, but I disagree the costs are worth it and also disagree with your cost estimates. The most obvious scenario I think you should consider is the number of prison inmates dying of overdoses. There were 249 overdoses in 2018 which is a mortality rate of 5 per 100k, whereas the population at large had an overdose mortality rate of 20 per 100k that same year.

I don't know if the cohorts are directly comparable but the stats can either refute or support your thesis. On one hand, you can cut the overdose mortality rate by 75%. On the other hand, everyone needs to live in a prison to reach that point.

but I disagree the costs are worth it and also disagree with your cost estimates

I think that management that's competent and willing to innovate, combined with using new technology, would bring down costs and reduce side-effects a ton. People as smart and self-driven as those that've driven SV innovation for the past decade could come up with, try, and iterate on new solutions. I'm not sure what it'd look like - of course - but here's another idea: Mass deployment of improved versions of actually-currently-existing opioid vaccines, which have been under development for the past decade. "Antiopioid immunopharmacotherapies (e.g., conjugate vaccines) that sequester drug peripherally, preventing opioids from reaching targeted receptors in the brain". Current versions seem to last for around a year. Maybe offer free drugs at a clinic for a week if you take a long-acting version of that at the end. Maybe there'd just be an arms race between novel synthetic opioids and the vaccines (which the synthetics would win). But my main point is that it's easy to imagine a stasis where the government's options are to keep doing what it's done for the past six decades, which is a losing position, but it's possible for intelligent people to create new techniques and social systems that change the rule of the game.

And prisons are the opposite of 'competent management and willingness to innovate and experiment'. (effective innovation in coercive government will look pretty different than tech innovation though, it's a lot easier to write a thousand lines of code and deploy it than it is to create new physical infrastructure and train a few thousand people).

But my main point is that it's easy to imagine a stasis where the government's options are to keep doing what it's done for the past six decades, which is a losing position, but it's possible for intelligent people to create new techniques and social systems that change the rule of the game.

Maybe it's easy to imagine it but I don't see any good evidence that it's likely to be implemented. I think it's plausible to expect "opioid vaccines" to get better, in which case cool. But vaccines are a different approach than the enforcement you described in your previous comment.

I didn't bring up prisons as an example of competent management, but as an example of extreme surveillance and enforcement and how much that can reduce overdoses.

Just as a out-of-left-field sanity check: what's your take on the Opium Wars? "Queen Victoria did nothing wrong"? How did the Chinese manage to get the addiction problem back under control? Was it worth the cost?

You're going to love my answer: I don't have enough information on that situation to form an opinion. Short of diving into the particulars, I'd be operating on crude and reflexive heuristic principles (banning drugs is bad, but responding with a military invasion is worse? etc.).

Your remarks hit home, which for me used to be Philadelphia, where we once lived and encountered situations indistinguishable from what you're describing. Day after day, more directly threatening the longer they went on.

On one occasion the police actually did show up and take away the son of a bitch's gun, but they almost missed it because he had shoved it in the back of his pants--which I was able to see from my bedroom window and urgently call the cops about as they were detaining him.

But then he knew that I had called them. And because the gun belonged to his friend (the drug dealer who lived next door to us, who would blast gangster rap while getting a conspicuous blowjob in the front seat of his car outside our dining room window, and whose girlfriend would, when she had had just about enough of his shit, take after him with her own pistol and lodge bullets in our trees), pants boy was released within about 3 hours.

Our entire middle-class, thoroughly integrated community of teachers, veterans, social workers and public employees had been decimated over the previous decade by crack, weed and alcohol. The successful kids of successful black parents had moved away; the unsuccessful, mentally crippled and drug-addled kids of successful parents had stayed home and taken up preying on their own families and everyone else. There was also, in the mid '90s, essentially an undisclosed race war underway in Philly, which meant that efforts to control crime and help those inclined to commit it were both pilloried as illegitimate because they emerged from an external, fundamentally white, power structure. The police were understaffed, constrained by facilities overcrowding and regulations that made arresting and holding people impossible, and no doubt impeded by inadequate training and the usual tendency of cops to default to hyper authoritarianism.

Probably federal underfunding, too, but I guess that's what you get when you lie to the FBI about your crime statistics.

Contrary to @ymeskhout and @guesswho I do feel there is a viable short term policy solution for you and people like you suffering from the problems of crazy homeless: extreme NIMBYism.

It is somewhat the policy within my own neighborhood, and luckily the cops help us enforce it. You can be a homeless drug addict living in a tent. But not near our neighborhood. Cops will pack up your stuff and move it along.

Yes, I know that this obviously just passes the buck along and makes it someone else's problem. But expecting tiny localities to deal with the problem is just dumb and unrealistic. Its Copenhagen ethics on a mass scale. Just because the problem has touched us or vice versa, does not mean it is our entire responsibility to solve it.

People should be allowed to build their own walled gardens. If there are problems that are too big for any single walled garden to handle, we have a central government. If it is not supposed to be responsible for solving collective action problems that small localities can't solve, then what the hell is it for? (I think it is for the collective looting of other people, and thus why I want to get rid of it. But for anyone that hasn't been libertarian gold-pilled, that seems like an important question to ask/answer).

It's not politically viable today, but a much better solution is YIMBYism with well-enforced standards. Want to build 100 new apartments? Go for it. Want to openly screen applicants for looking clean and being the right social class, even if there's disparate impact? Want to kick someone out of one of the apartments for doing drugs, or imprison them for a single instance of petty theft? Go for it. To an extent NIMBYism is a response to communities not being able to more explicitly police their members (and some members not wanting to), and 'don't let anyone in' is a maximally illegible way to keep out the undesirables.

This is fully politically viable in most states. The exceptions where it is not possible are well known and in the news as national failures at preventing crime and homelessness.

Hmm, from the description of their situation I assumed they were an entryist moving into a poor neighborhood far below their inherited SES in order to get on the homeowner ladder faster (which is what I did 20 years ago, with similar results). In which case NIMBYism doesn't work because the whole neighborhood is like that and the police have already given up on it.

If it's a mostly-nice suburb with some homeless people wandering through then this strategy can work (for the people living there, as you say), but that definitely wasn't the impression I got.

The kind of people who get enthusiastic about free heroin are the kind of people who get extremely uncomfortable when I tell them these things are happening to me. They don't want to hear. They are especially discomfited if I seem angry or, God forbid, judgmental.

I don't know if this was directed at me specifically but for what it's worth I think you have every right to be very angry at the situations you describe. The people you describe all have moral agency and are responsible for their actions, even the ones who might be suffering from mental health issues since they're evidently not getting the help they need. You're describing a quality of life deterioration that I would not want to experience. At the individual level, very often the easiest solution is to just move to a more expensive neighborhood and hope that the property values serve as high enough of a filter to keep the undesirables at bay, and I don't fault anybody for going down that route.

But if you were in charge of the policy levers, the solutions are harder to come by. What can the government do to make your "Neighbor" less of a dick? What do you want them to do about the guy ululating? Maybe he can be arrested for communicating what is sort of maybe an indirect threat? If I had to guess, the guy who stole your janitorial supplies was not doing so to ensure his floors remain spotless, but likely because it would be an easy thing to pawn off for $10-$20. What do you want the government to do about that? You potentially could drastically expand police funding but any increase would be best levied first at the serious crimes they're currently ignoring (like gun-toting domestic violence) before any of it can realistically start reaching "stolen broom" levels. I don't know what property tax levels could sustain that increase.

What can the government do to make your "Neighbor" less of a dick?

They can stop intervening on his behalf. If he happens to end up getting beaten to death with a baseball bat after menacing my wife, they can just let the judgement of the natural order stand.

What standards do you want the state to use in determining which homicides it should let stand? There's self-defense exceptions and the like, but your position would require evaluating the deceased character traits.

your position would require evaluating the deceased character traits.

Yes. And this is good.

So what standards do you want the state to use in determining which homicides it should let stand?

Well the evidence would obviously be in favor of the defendant. The state would need to prove the deceased was not engaged in a felony at the time of the offense. Criminal records should be able to be introduced as part of a defense.

More comments

Would you accept a judgment of the natural order where your neighbor has a bigger bat?

This is why we have police, to stop the true state of nature from emerging. But if they intervene only when the state of nature is superior, as happens in the hobo-vs-normal person situation, the state is a net negative in said subset of interactions.

I wouldn’t be opposed so some sort of maritime law of salvage for improperly parked vehicles. Someone blocks your driveway? You get to sell off their catalytic converter.

Letters of Marque for tow truck operators. They can tow and impound any improperly parked vehicle.

Isn’t that how it already works? Or are they required to have a complaint before they can show up?

Back when I was a contractor I was asked to park in private “no parking” zones all the time. It would be quite strange if a third party could come and tow me without either my or the property owner’s consent.

In such cases, the property owner could simply give to you a signed, exemption, to be placed on your dashboard and visible through your windshield for the duration of your visit.

If he fails to do so, and your vehicle is towed despite having permission to park there, then that's 100 percent the owner's fault for bad signage, not the towing company's.

I appreciate that what you actually want is for someone to fix the situation you're already in. That's a totally reasonable way to feel when in bad circumstances, and I don't judge you or feel uncomfortable with you and would genuinely like your life to be better.

What I'm saying is that the situation in your neighborhood is so fucked that government is not capable of fixing it as it is today.

Any attempts to use more police enforcement and harsher punishments and whatever will just make the problems worse, for you as well as for the people you're talking about. We've seen that through decades of 'tough on crime' policies.

The only way anyone can fix a neighborhood like that is by going upstream and attacking the reasons neighborhoods become like that in the first place. You can't fix the people and places that already fucked that bad, but you can try to make sure the next generation is marginally less like that by getting to them before they're that fucked.

So in a sense, yeah, I agree that I'm not trying to help you, right now today. Not because I don't care about your concerns, but because I don't think it's really possible to give you what you want.

But what I am trying to do is intended to help you and people like you who live 10, 20, 50 years from now (among others, of course).

That's the best I think we're capable of.

Any attempts to use more police enforcement and harsher punishments and whatever will just make the problems worse, for you as well as for the people you're talking about. We've seen that through decades of 'tough on crime' policies.

Do we know this? I thought the general consensus was that "tough on crime" policies like NYC's vaunted "broken windows" efforts, while expensive and not as world-shaking as initially billed, did drastically cut down on street crime and enable the revitalization of the city. I thought that the general consensus was that the harsh policies adopted in the 80's and 90's were a major factor in the plunging murder rate in the U.S., which only started upticking again after the recent racial brouhahas (Ferguson, Minneapolis, etc.) put the kibosh on aggressive policing of the poor and disproportionately black communities where most serious crime crawls up out of.

I thought that the general consensus was that the harsh policies adopted in the 80's and 90's were a major factor in the plunging murder rate in the U.S.

I'll note that this is a study area with a lot of motivated actors but the other leading explanations I'm aware of are reduction in leaded gasoline and greater access to abortion. I think there's decent evidence to attribute the plunge to the tough-on-crime policies, but overall I don't have enough info to form an opinion.

The most recent meta-analysis I've seen on lead-crime was this, which as I read it suggests that lead likely was responsible for somewhere between zero and one third - closer to zero in the most rigorous studies - of the crime surge.

Anthony Higney, Nick Hanley, and Mirko Moro, “The Lead-Crime Hypothesis: A MetaAnalysis,” University of Glasgow Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, Discussion Papers in Environmental and One Health Economics series, no. 2021–02, Feb. 21, 2021.

And as for the abortion explanation, my understanding was that the Freaknomics guy's study was pretty convincingly critiqued here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=270126

YMMV, of course.

Thanks, this shifts my belief towards accepting "tough on crime" as the more likely explanation.

You are absolutely correct, and anyone arguing otherwise is doing so because they are unwilling to accept the other consequences of those policies - namely, mass incarceration and ubiquitous intrusive policing of poor black people, drug addicts, and the mentally ill.

I understand how distasteful a "free heroin" arrangement would be, from the standpoint that you describe. Ultimately it boils down to a variant of "do you want to be right? or do you want to win?". I don't like property crime. The cost of shoplifting gets shifted onto me the customer. Stores also respond by putting items behind locks, or just shift their inventory to less valuable things. I would like there to be less shoplifting but I don't see a feasible or practical way to get to that point given the continuing prevalence of addicting drugs. Yeah it would suck to see someone contribute nothing to society and just wait around for their regular heroin drop, but that's preferable to me if it means a significant reduction in property crime. We're already spending money on police, prosecutions, higher prices, etc. it's just a matter of how to spend it efficiently.

Exactly now the Danes come take our stocks and treasure by force while doing considerable damage. If we paid them the damage could be avoided.

Generally speaking, it tends to be more persuasive if you speak with clarity. If you have an analogy, it also helps to explicitly tie it to the argument at hand. So if I was rewriting this I would probably say something like:

Just as paying tribute might embolden the Danes to continue their raids, providing free heroin would encourage the very behavior we're trying to mitigate. For example, XYZ

...or something to that effect, feel free to make modifications!

Thank you. That's charitable.

I was hoping slightly that someone would respond with Kipling's Dane-geld.

Is free heroin for onsite consumption substantially different from methadone for onsite consumption? Is this a particularly methadone resistant cohort?

Based on the research and anecdotes from my clients, methadone is a poor substitute for the opioids it's meant to replace. It's apparently not very good at completely suppressing the cravings, and also causes constipation and sweating. Suboxone tends to get better reviews; side effects are less common and less severe (mostly headache & nausea), longer lasting (up to 72 hours instead of 36), and apparently slightly better at suppressing the cravings.

[There's also a difference in how the two are administered where methadone requires a very strict regimen of daily in-person visits to a clinic and you can get kicked out if you miss a dose, while suboxone can be given as a prescription for home use. Though this is a legal requirement and not inherent with the medications themselves.]

I've seen people successfully cut their habit with either medications, but also have seen way more relapses (though keep in mind that there is heavy sample bias with my work where I generally only see the fuckups). Despite the shortcomings, if someone is trying to quit either medication is way better than nothing. But if someone is still chasing the high, both are disappointments.

Would you anticipate the Free Heroin Clinc accepting clients who are not in treatment or only accepting clients for whom other treatments had failed? Is there a path to being opioid free in these treatment plans?

The Free Heroin Clinics that currently exist in Switzerland are only open to clients as a last resort if other treatment plans have failed. I couldn't find much data on cessation, but also the primary goal of heroin-assisted treatment is the dreaded "harm reduction" buzzword which includes reducing overdoses, reducing crime, and freeing up addict's time to maybe become a normal part of society. Maybe that helps some people quit, but it's perfectly possible for some clients to have no interest in being opioid-free and just remain in the program indefinitely.

The yearly cost FYI for HAT is around $13k/year, or about 3x what methadone programs cost, namely due to the higher staffing required.

If you believe the accounts in this documentary (timestamped 40:50-42:30, CW: conservative propaganda), the addicts receiving free drugs from the government proceed to exploit their higher risk tolerance by trading the clean drugs to their dealers in exchange for (presumably higher qty. of) street drugs. Then the dealers resell the government handouts to addicts elsewhere with lower risk tolerance and no access to free drug programs.

Obvious follow-up questions: Is this just a case of insufficient dakka? Also, even if it's not providing safer drugs to the population it intends to, doesn't it reduce some property crime?

I don't know enough about the Vancouver program but the black market exchange described in the video does not seem implausible to me. I hadn't considered that as a possibility. If it's a concern, one way to mitigate it is to require supervised consumption on site. On the second question my assumption would be that property crime still gets reduced, because whatever drugs the addicts use to barter means they need less money from stealing.

I don't know if I needed to mention this but the core premise behind my argument is that theft generates a ridiculously high deadweight loss. Smashing a car window ($250 repair bill) to steal a cordless drill ($250 retail) that might only net $20 on the street means that the addict is causing ~$500 worth of loss for every $20 they acquire. In that context, it's way cheaper for society writ-large to just give the $20 worth of drugs away for free.

Or… we just ruthlessly police drug use, forcibly imprison chronic drug abusers, and execute drug dealers. You have yet to articulate an argument that such a policy wouldn’t achieve it’s stated goals; you merely oppose it on philosophical and political grounds, which means you’re then forced to come up with these convoluted alternatives to maybe possibly make somewhat of a dent in the problem using non-coercive or minimally-coercive means.

I do think a strong point Kulak made in the debate was that, instead of policing drugs, you policed public intoxication/vagrancy with the punishment being a week in the stocks + caning the drug problem would solve itself fairly expediently, while preserving Scott Alexander's ability to use mushrooms for a mind expanding camping trip.

Sure, I oppose drug enforcement on philosophical grounds because I don't think buying/selling/using drugs should even be illegal. I think people have an inalienable right to put whatever they want in their bodies. Assuming drugs are and will remain illegal then your favored policy will depend on what goal you want to prioritize. Simplifying a lot but:

  • If the goal is to reduce overdoses, then supervised consumption sites
  • If goal is reducing collateral property crime, then free heroin
  • If goal is reducing use period, maybe quadrupling the current drug war efforts? Idk

I pointed out here the issue of drug overdoses in prisons to highlight the costs involved with any kind of enforcement.

The goal I’m trying to prioritize is to reduce use, because that also addresses the other two problems simultaneously. I don’t just want to stop people using drugs because I hate happiness and want to deny people a source of harmless enjoyment. As I stated in the podcast, I want to prevent people from using drugs because I can observe empirically that a substantial percentage of people who use hard drugs become astronomically more likely to commit crimes, and to become generally feral and unmanageable, as a direct result of their drug addictions.

Your argument does not seem materially different from the communist position that if we want poor people not to steal things, we should just give them as much stuff as they want, and then they won’t have to steal it.

I think you articulated your position clearly in the episode. I disagree with you on some empirics: how likely people get addicted, how detrimental drugs are (and of course how much of that detriment is innate vs. a consequence of criminalization), how much non-property crime is driven by drug use, and so on.

The stolen food parallel argument doesn't map. The basic premises for my "free heroin" position is that heavy drug addiction (namely opioids) does two things: makes it near-impossible to hold a real job and makes addicts extremely motivated to get more drugs. Combined together, addicts' ability to make money is significantly narrowed while their risk-tolerance is significantly increased. Ergo, crime becomes the only practical avenue for addicts to fund their habit, and property crime is particularly bad as a "vocation" because of the horrendously high deadweight loss it inflicts on society. The factors I outline are not present in a hypothetical scenario involving poor hungry people.

Those are fair objections, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about implementation. In terms of evidence, Switzerland is the prime case study here. Heroin hit the scene in Zurich in the 1970s and the immediate response of heavy law enforcement didn't pan out. In the 1990s they changed tack and ran a number of randomized controlled trials with "heroin-assisted treatment" (HAT). Once those trials came back as successful, they've implemented HAT into law as part of a broader "four pillars" reform.

Here's a Soros-funded report with a lot more detail. The main takeaways are:

  • The number of new heroin users declined from 850 in 1990 to 150 in 2002
  • Between 1991 and 2004, drug-related deaths fell by more than 50 percent
  • The country witnessed a 90 percent reduction in property crime committed by drug users
  • The country that once led Western Europe in HIV prevalence now has among the lowest rates in the region.

I'd be curious to know if you find any of these results surprising or unintuitive.

I appreciate that you took the time to examine all this, I would share a lot (all?) of your concerns about implementation. The social worker class that would support a HAT program in the US would make for awful advocates because I imagine they would adopt much of the excuse-making and concern-dismissal that you rightfully decry.

It seems to me there are plenty of places that don't have free heroin, still have drug addiction issues, and have manageable levels of shoplifting/property crime.

Like where? What did they do that was so successful?

Some of Ireland's city centres have a very visible heroin problem. This does cause shoplifting, I saw a lot of it myself working in a shop next to a courthouse, a homeless shelter and some gypsy families, but for whatever reason there are far less security measures in supermarkets and the like than I've seen in most other countries I've been to. I don't know what makes Ireland different, though from personal experience the police are fairly vigilant if you can show them evidence of a repeat shoplifter.

Maybe we're at the tipping point and we'll soon join everyone else in having security guards randomly check your bags or having to scan a receipt to leave the self-checkout, but I found it extremely odd when I was expected to do that abroad.

I assume there's a sort of collective action problem but in "reverse", sort of. There are souls brave enough (and thirsty enough for their next hit) to push the envelope in daring heists, and as soon as they demonstrate their effectiveness others would inevitably copy them. For example, videos of organized retail thefts where a dozen or so people loot a store all at once very likely encourages others to do the same, because it's demonstrated as a plainly effective tactic.

People are also very crafty about their hustles and shift accordingly. For example, brand name laundry detergent was a very popular piece of contraband recently in the US because it was relatively expensive, relatively compact, and very easy to unload for cash to damn near anyone.

I'm not going to be able to rattle off comparative statistics or speak with deep knowledge about the differences in policy approach, but for example Mount Gambier in South Australia often gets referred to as "Meth Gambier", yet shops don't lock up items on their shelves.

If I had to guess, I'd hazard that the key difference is that property crime is prosecuted and punished more vigorously. But I don't actually know.

It seems to me that it's mostly the international norm in western countries though. Just about everywhere seems to have drug problems. Few seem to have such severe property crime issues that stores need to lock up items - I've only seen that when I've visited America.

Edit: Dumb question, but is specific deterrence a sentencing factor in America?

I don't know enough about Australia but wherever there are drug addicts, you have to figure out how they pay for their habit. If not stealing, then how else are they making money? Generally speaking their ability to hold down a job tends to be compromised by their habitual drug use. So, how are they paying for their drugs? The only hustles I'm generally aware of are panhandling (very limited), financial fraud (very ineffective), shoplifting, burgling, sex work, and various salvage jobs (including cutting catalytic converters).

By specific deterrence you mean deterring the individual involved? Yes that's an omnipresent sentencing factor.

If not stealing, then how else are they making money?

Ah, this might be a relevant policy difference. The answer here is "Centrelink".

US unemployment benefits are temporary, and thus unavailable to the chronically jobless. Our system is kind of cumbersome and annoying, but does allow the perpetually unemployed to get free money for life. Not a lot of money mind you, but enough that you can afford some drugs if you choose to forgo normal expenses like rent.

I also feel like shoplifting for resale is just not done here? I don't know if that's a misperception on my part, but my impression is that pretty much all the shoplifting that occurs here is people taking things that they use themselves, rather than selling it for drug money.

Obviously drug-fueled crimes occur - I knew a former addict who went around door knocking for donations pretending to be working for the Red Cross - and probably some portion of addicts steal food so they can spend their dole on drugs. But overall it seems to be kept to an acceptably low level.

I also feel like shoplifting for resale is just not done here?

That might be an unstable equilibrium, though.

Thanks, that's really useful context. So Centrelink acts like a UBI of sorts? The closest the US has is what's referred to as "Social Security Disability Insurance" which also acts like a UBI by giving about $700 in cash a month (TLP wrote about this) plus food stamps which is about $200/month. I've heard from multiple addicts in the US that their opioid habit costs about $100 a day, a figure I still find absolutely unbelievable but I found a national survey that corroborated a range of $60-$100/day. That requires a lot of shoplifting to fund. In my case load, I don't think I've ever encountered a client who was stealing items for their direct needs. The typical scenario is stealing things either to attempt a return fraud ("I lost the receipt") or selling it on craigslist or OfferUp (power tools are not suspicious and sell very quickly).

I imagine there's going to be some variation among countries regarding how expensive the drugs are, how much government money addicts get, and how lucrative the "shadow trades" are.

So Centrelink acts like a UBI of sorts?

The big difference is that it diminishes pretty sharply as you start earning your own income. This has some perverse outcomes - e.g. I know part time workers on very low incomes who have turned down more work because the resulting loss of centrelink money + higher tax would basically wipe out their increased income. But it makes it sustainable. And of course there are conditions attached, like you need to apply for a certain number of jobs per week. But there's no rule that your applications need to be any good or take more than the barest modicum of effort. If you stay on it for long enough they make you sit through an online job-finding-advice-course saying things like "Hey, have you considered showering before job interviews?" And of course the money is not great - it's about $375/week (which converts to $240 US).

I'm also not sure of the extent to which the popularity of different drugs matters. The most common drug here (other than pot, which will probably end up getting decriminalised at some point) is meth, which I'm given to understand is substantially cheaper than opioids.

It's quite interesting that you report clients basically never steal for personal use. I did some googling to see if my anecdotal impressions of the situation here were right and found this paper which reports the uses of stolen goods by Australian thieves (figure 2). It confirms my impression that it's overwhelmingly for personal use, with "swap for drugs" coming a distant second, and selling them coming third.

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Sorry for the digression from your excellent comment, but:

I fantasize about breaking the windows of the cars that frequently block my driveway.

Are they there long enough to call 311 (or whatever the equivalent is in your city)? Towing companies will generally be happy to drag a car away at the owner's expense if you can get the cops to first send out someone from parking enforcement and sign off that it's blocking a right-of-way, at which point even if the owner gets to the car before the tow truck does there's at least a fine to pay.

The system still has a bit of an anarcho-tyranny vibe to it - with a civil judgement the best way to enforce payment is a lien saying "pay up first or you can't sell your car", whereas cops (or landlords after some prep work) can say "pay up first or you can't drive your car"? - but it's safer than vandalism and better than seething.

That has resulted in an irate new neighbor calling us assholes and demanding to know why we didn't just call her.

Why "because car was parked here illegally" would not be a good answer?

When in a high-trust environment or trying to build one, it would be customary to resolve disputes with neighbours personally and amicably before resorting to state force.

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