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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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Notes -
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.
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).
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.
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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.).
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