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I'm trying to identify where we disagree. Yes, there's intersection between property crimes and violent crimes and illegal drugs. Yes, property crimes are not conducive to a functional society. Yes, an efficient fencing market will encourage more property crime. I don't deny that carceral incapacitation can prevent crime, I'm just skeptical about the relative elasticity so to speak. I used car prowling as an example to showcase the wide gap between the supply and demand. Most people know not to leave anything valuable in their car, but enough people forget to make it worthwhile for junkies. And that's true even with the horribly inefficient methods junkies rely on to convert stolen property to cash. You can sentence thousands of drug addicts to decades in prison, but all you need to end up with dozens of car windows smashed up is just one junkie experiencing opioid withdrawal desperate enough to do whatever to scrounge up $10 for a pop. A car prowling rampage plus the hours of work it takes to convert the loot (my clients definitely are not lazy when it comes to scoring drugs) does not make sense in a world where clean heroin is handed out for free.
I think this is where we disagree:
I think that where test policies on the road to hand-out-heroin-to-junkies-ville have been tried, such as SF's open injection sites, or open-access methadone clinics, local incidences of "junkie smashing windows"-type-public nuisances have not significantly fallen or otherwise responded in a way which leads me to believe that broader adoption would be beneficial.
I think that the intersection between crime and drugs is a lot more complicated than (law-abiding person) + (drugs) = (junkie who has to steal to keep up a habit). Moreover, I think that this complexity is deep and broad enough that liberalizing drug policy would not put a significant dent in property crime and public nuisance activity (in particular, and in the spirit of falsifiability, I would expect that verbal harassment and minor assaults would make up any decrease which materialized in property crime, which might not decrease at all).
Personal story time - I don't do criminal law, but I do a lot of permitting and small-fry land use. My firm has a lot of retailers as clients, from mom-and-pop corner stores to national chains, who come to us for help dealing with things like nuisance abatement, or administrative discipline against a license. So I've seen the call-for-service logs, and I can say for sure that for every case that makes its way to your brethren's desks in LA Superior Court, there's literally hundreds of calls for police service that go something like "group disturbance, caller states participants likely vagrant; caller states participants appear intoxicated; all suspects gone upon arrival" or "clerk reported theft of food items" or "susp. smashed shelving when asked to leave 7-Eleven." You're right that we can't put a cop on every corner or incarcerate our way out of that (though that doesn't stop cities from occasionally trying to make private businesses do it for them), but nor does handing out heroin help. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but at the end of the day I don't see any alternative to helping the ones that are willing to be helped, and then just removing the remainder who can't or won't try to rebuild their lives and re-enter society as something vaguely approaching sociable. It doesn't bring me joy, but the alternative is letting them ruin civilization for everyone else, which just isn't reasonable.
His argument goes like - yeah, but those only were "injection sites" or "giving small amounts of heroin", not "as much heroin as you want for free" - if you really could go down to the local hospital and ask for 100 grams of heroin and they'd just give it to you, because heroin is just a chemical compound and we're good at mass producing them, so almost all of the current cost of heroin is because it's illegal - then there'd be no need to smash stuff anymore.
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