The Hidden Politics of Disorder
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Before we begin today, that paywall I've been mentioning in recent weeks, it's now there. So starting this week, you have access, everybody has access, to our latest few episodes. Behind that, the archive, you need a Time subscription. If you already subscribed to the paper, then you're all set. You just have to log in. And there's also now an audio-only subscription option for roughly $1.50 a week. That'll get you access to our show as well as all of the other great New York Times podcasts.

If you want more details on any of that, go to nytimes.com slash podcasts. We will put that link in the show notes too. And thank you to everyone who is already subscribed. It means so much to me and to the show. From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. During the pandemic, there was a rise in violent crime. But by 2023, violent crime was back near its lowest level in over 50 years.

But also in 2023, Gallup found 77% of Americans believed that crime had been increasing. Can say this to some media, but I heard it a lot. I still hear it actually a lot in everyday life. When I just talk to people who aren't that political about the things that are concerning them politically, people talk to me constantly about the sense that the place they live is less safe than it used to be and they're mad about it.

This was constant when I lived in San Francisco. The sense that San Francisco is descending into chaos, it was everywhere. I have found it a lot here in New York. I've met people in New York City who are not very political, but they vote. And they've always voted for Democrats, and now they want to vote for Republicans because of this issue alone, because they feel less safe. The fundamental job of the people we elect is to keep us safe, to keep us at least feeling safe.

And you can see that nationally, Democrats feel they have a problem here. In 2020, the party was running on criminal justice reform. People were talking about defunding the police. Now Kamala Harris talks about herself as California's top law enforcement official. It's a very, very different appeal.

And at the same time, Democrats I know and understandably are frustrated by this. I mean, violent crime is down, not up. Why won't people look at the numbers here? Why do they find themselves politically fighting with this phantom? It's begun to remind me of the economic debates we had over much of the last year on a lot of the most important data, the data we were used to using to track the economy. The economy looked really good, but people were pissed.

And you can say that people were wrong, or you could try to ask what the data was missing. And in that case, I think the data was missing something. It was missing the affordability crisis. You can go back to that episode to hear about it. And I think there's something like that here, too. I think something is missing in the violent crime data. And then Charles Fane Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies crime and drug policy, said,

began publishing research and then wrote this great piece on his sub stack. The sub stack is called The Causal Fallacy, which I get and I highly recommend about exactly this question. So I asked him on the show to talk about crime, about disorder, about drug policy, about vice politics, and about how to put it all together. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. ♪

Charles Fane Lehman, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. So when you look at statistics for violent crimes right now, crime is going down. Donald Trump, among others on the right, say those statistics are wrong, they're flawed, they're missing the real story. You're a right-of-center crime researcher. What do you think?

I think crime statistics are never going to be perfect. We have a decent measure of the rates of underreporting. We know that we missed something like half of crimes or that half crimes don't get reported to the police. That's based on surveys of households, so that itself is an imperfect estimate. But

We can reasonably say that the trends that are showing up in the FBI's crime numbers are real, or at least they are correlated with reality. And what those numbers show is that in 2020, there was a big spike in homicide and a big spike in aggravated assault. And that makes sense insofar as an aggravated assault is mostly a proxy for shootings and shootings are just homicides where you miss homicides.

Those rose sort of steadily 2020, 2021. They peak. They start coming down a little bit in 2022, 2023. And the early indicators is that we're close to or at 2019 levels. There's another component, which is auto theft, which is just exploded across the country, is still well elevated over 2019. And that's maybe starting to come down.

But I find those numbers basically plausible. I find them plausible because, A, there are something like 18,000 police departments reporting in some capacity to the FBI. They can't all be making it up. B, because it jives with what you see in individual municipal data. And tertiarily...

You can tell coherent stories about what has happened in the cultural and policy environment over the past couple of years that makes it make sense that you would see a spike in murders and then they would recede. So across those three things, it makes sense to me that we're seeing a receding of crime. Tell me the story that you believe. I think it's hard to avoid noticing that by some measures, the spike in 2020 is the biggest percentage-wise on record.

There are, in my mind, two obvious causes.

Cause one is the COVID-19 pandemic, and in particular, the restrictions imposed associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. So we shut down courts. We closed down schools. We reduced the number of people out in public spaces. So we reduced in general the level of what I talk about as social control of crime, informal, informal. And so as a result, you had less certainty of consequence, less

That's one part of it, and you do see an uptick starting in March of 2020 in, for example, the CDC's numbers for homicides. But the really big spike is in June of 2020, and that is obviously consistent with the protests following the murder of George Floyd. There's a great deal of controversy around homicides.

the role that the Defund the Police movement played in 2020 and in the increase in violence in 2020. But my view is that unlike when we had this argument over the Ferguson protests, what my colleague Heather MacDonald referred to as the Ferguson effect,

In 2014, 2015, today we have some pretty decent research literature that says large-scale protests against the police seem to A, lead to reductions in police officer activity, B, increases in serious violent crime, in particular homicide. And so in my mind, a big part of the story is the public sent the message to the cops, we want you to be doing less crime.

The police responded, A, by being less proactive, B, by, at least in major cities, leaving the profession or departing for less crime-prone departments altogether. And as a result of that, the people who engage in the specific kinds of crime I was just talking about, which is to say the cycle of violence that leads to shootings and homicides, were less fettered in their behavior. And so they took it as an opportunity to take shots at each other.

So that's the story about why it went up. And the story why it went down is, I think, multi-part. Again, some part of it is just what you might euphemistically call burnout. Every time somebody gets shot, there are fewer opportunities to shoot at them. So every time somebody gets killed, there are fewer opportunities to kill them. And people who get shot are often also themselves shooters. So there's some degree of burnout there. But it's also the case that

cities, and again, cities, big cities in particular, where these problems are concentrated, have tried to reverse course on the

public messaging, to a limited extent policy changes that they made in 2020 and really tried to emphasize the importance of public safety. Here in D.C., where I'm recording, you can now get, I think it's a $25,000 bonus for signing on with MPD. I was just in Philadelphia where Sherelle Parker was just elected mayor, essentially on a tough-on-crime, we-need-to-get-crime-under-control platform. There's been a real sea change, and I think that that sea change has...

begat a substantive change in the practice of policing. The police are more active than they were two years ago, and that has had benefits. It's something you see here, too, that Kathy Hochul has functionally flooded the subways in New York.

with armed police officers, with National Guard. There's an almost militarized presence there on behalf of a Democratic governor after a former cop, now quite embattled, won the New York mayorship. I mean, the valence ideologically of policing has really changed. I mean, Kamala Harris emphasizing in interviews that she was the former top law enforcement official, is the way she says it, of California. A pretty big ideological shift.

Yeah. Also, if you look across the country, Karen Bass in L.A., who fended off a tough-on-crime challenger, but since then has had to sort of turn towards a more tough-on-crime image. London Breed in San Francisco. I mentioned Cheryl Parker in Philadelphia. You mentioned Eric Adams. There are these big city municipal figures who are adopting—

both policy but also rhetorical posture that says we will not put up with crime. You talk about Kamala Harris, who obviously is also sort of trying to counter an issue that is generally good for Republicans, is particularly good for Donald Trump, who, say what you will, has been consistent about his views on crime for decades. But it really matters at the local level because voters are attuned to or highly sensitive to crime as an issue. They do not like it.

when they feel unsafe in their cities. And so if you want to do anything else as a big city exec, you have to deal with crime first. When things are good, you think about like a Bill de Blasio in New York, you can get away with sort of a reformist tendency insofar as it doesn't impinge on

low crime. But the second things get bad, people are done with that. It turns out, at least that appears to be the status quo, I suspect, at least since the 1990s. I'm certainly today. Let me use the politics of two places I've lived in recently.

to get at maybe some of the complexity here. So I lived in San Francisco until a year ago, May, and you would have this bifurcated discussion where people on X and in the city would sort of talk about San Francisco as a kind of hellscape. And then you would have earnest liberal-leaning wonks come in and say, well,

look, like San Francisco has a lower murder rate than Jacksonville, Florida. It is less violent than many other big cities. This idea that San Francisco is uniquely violent, that you are unsafe here, it just isn't true. Like we can look at the data and tell you that San Francisco does not look like an unsafe city compared to many other cities that do not get this kind of coverage on Fox News. I moved to New York City and

And something I noticed when I would be talking to people, not who work for the New York Times, but people who just grew up here in other parts of the city. And we were just chatting and they would find out I worked in journalism and was a political reporter.

And they'd say, oh, man, like, I'm done voting for Democrats. And I'd say, why? And they're like, the city is crazy. Like, the subways are nuts. Like, you know, like, this whole place is out of control. And I would sort of, you know, like, look up the crime data and see the same thing. So there's been this strange conversation where, on the one hand, they're in these blue cities where Democrats govern and where there's a lot of media attention. There is a genuine feeling of unsafety, a genuine feeling of something is wrong, and

And then you look at the crime data and, you know, it's lower than it was in the 80s and 90s. In many cases, it isn't that bad historically. It isn't that bad even compared to other places. So you have a sort of theory maybe for what is happening here that explains like the gap in perception and numbers. What is it? Yeah. And, you know, I do want to emphasize first that I think that

many times those perceptions are warranted. People are pretty sensitive to changes in the risk of even relatively rare events vis-a-vis crime. It shows up in lots of ways. And the way that I think about this is like people will pay a big, big premium in rent to avoid living in a crime-ridden area, even though if you go to those areas, your risk of victimization is quite low. And in many places in America, people,

People are responding to the fact that crime is still elevated over a baseline. Violent crime is still elevated over a baseline. That said, the reality is that when people feel unsafe in a place, it is often not responsive to the kinds of major crime that became more prevalent in America over the past four years.

San Francisco is interesting. They do have a, they had a homicide spike a little bit. It is nowhere near the magnitude of other cities. What San Francisco has, though, is this enormous problem with what I would talk about as disorder, disorderly behavior. And this is, in fact, what San Francisco is, like, infamous for. San Francisco is the city where the city government has to issue, I believe, a quarterly report on the frequency of human feces found on the sidewalks.

San Francisco has these very large open-air drug markets. San Francisco has an uncontrolled public homelessness problem, public serious mental illness problem. San Francisco, when I last looked at the data a couple of years ago, measurably had a shoplifting problem. All of these are not what we would traditionally think about as major offenses. They're not—

homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, etc., but they are much more prevalent than those offenses. You are much more likely to be witness to them, to be victimized in association with them. They are much more, therefore, likely to affect your perception of what it is like to live in the city. And so I think often, in the case of San Francisco, but as I have argued increasingly in many other places, for example, here in D.C.,

Where the violent crime level is coming down, there are signs that the level of disorder is substantially elevated. I was looking yesterday at shoplifting data reported by big cities, and there are many big cities where it's up, you know, places that you'd expect, like, you know, New York, but also places that you wouldn't even think about, like Detroit saw a large spike in shoplifting yesterday.

These sort of minor crimes that nonetheless are pretty disorienting to people around us. And I think that those are part of what is driving this perception that crime is a major issue, even as sort of more serious but less prevalent, therefore less likely to be perceived crime comes down. So this tracks my experience. When I would talk to people about what they were upset about, what I would hear about, and also what I myself would experience, right?

were mentally ill people yelling at you and your children on the street, was public drug use, was in San Francisco, feces and public urination were a big problem. Not an unknown problem in New York either. Homeless encampments are big, right? Everything in the drugstore

in some areas of these cities is behind plexiglass now, right? You have to call a CVS to get, you know, deodorant or razors or anything out. That there is a sense of things being out of control, right?

I think it's easy to think maybe this is just the superstar big blue cities. You've done a bunch of work on Chattanooga, which tell me a bit about the polling you did there. Tell me a bit about the studies you did there. Yeah, we, the Manhattan Institute, did a couple of different pieces of work in Chattanooga. One, we did a poll of Chattanooga residents, I think this is back in March, about their perceptions of crime. And what you see in that polling is that just like elsewhere,

They believe that violent crime is a problem in their city. They're worried about it. They don't feel safe at night. They don't feel safe walking around downtown. They are alarmed by what they see around them. And so what I took that polling and said, okay, what's really happening? And I spent a lot of time with the data that the city puts out. And I talked to Chattanooga PD, other leaders in the city, and

And what I concluded was that, like many other cities, Chattanooga saw an increase in violence over 2020, 2021. And, you know, it is important to go back to my point earlier to acknowledge that Chattanooga did not have a major defund the police movement. This is not a...

like a big progressive city that Fox News loves to hate on. When I did a ride along there and I was told, you know, yeah, we can pull people over. Yeah, you know, we have the capacity to enforce against minor crimes. I was like, wow, you do not have the problems that I'm used to talking to cops about.

But even there, they saw an increase in violent crime. And the way that they responded to this specific issue was to deploy a set of strategies that are effective for reducing violent crime. They used what we would talk about as focused deterrence, which is a set of strategies that focuses on identifying the small number of people in a community who drive violence in that community and either inducing them to reduce their violence or incapacitating them.

That appears to have been successful. They really did drive homicide under the violence levels back down to where they were in 2019 in the most recent data. They got it. It worked. They did what the evidence said they should have done, and they succeeded. They also, though, experienced, like many other cities, a decline in their sworn staffing levels. A cop that I talked to when I was there said that they were doing less proactive patrol. And so my argument is that I suspect what happened in the city is that

Faced with resource constraints and dealing with a spike in violence, the police department responded by prioritizing the most serious issues, and it worked. But it came at the expense of they were not doing traffic enforcement. They were less focused on cleaning up the parks. They also saw a big surge in homelessness like many other cities. And so you end up in this funny situation where they did deal with the big problem and people still don't feel safe.

And that's because they sort of let the little problems fall to the wayside and the little problems got bigger and bigger and bigger. What was your evidence that the little problems were actually rising? Yeah, I look at a couple of different indicators. I look at minor crimes, which some of them have risen, some of them have not. Things like drug equipment violations.

I also look at 311 calls, which are, I think, an underutilized source of data on this topic. And they show that calls relating to homelessness, calls relating to litter, trash, et cetera, both have risen pretty substantially. I looked at...

Traffic citations, which is also another underrated component of this, because when you think about how you're behaving on the road is a component of disorder, how you're treating that shared resources related to disorder. And I saw that there had been a decline in traffic citations as well. And those are sort of like diffuse signals. Part of the problem with thinking of disorder is like it doesn't get measured consistently in the same way. But I think the signals tended to point in that direction.

Where do you draw the line here between thinking about crime and thinking about disorder? Many disorderly activities are crimes. Not all disorderly activities are crimes. Sometimes they're sort of nebulously, they could be crime, depending on how the police officer feels at the time. A city like New York has moved away from criminalizing disorderly behaviors. For example, I think in 2021, New York State removed its...

in furtherance of or pursuit of prostitution law. You can no longer be arrested for appearing to be trying to engage in prostitution in New York State. But it's still disorderly behavior to stand on the corner trying to flag down John's

There's a lot of conflict over what we mean when we talk about disorder. It gets tied up in these sort of like thick cultural baggage. Is this behavior disorderly? Is it just something that the rich and the poor vary on or that people's opinions vary on based on ethnicity or race? But I tend to think that we can at least offer a cogent definition of disorder. The definition I like to offer is that disorder is the domination of public space for private purposes.

Think about the different kinds of disorder that we talk about. We might talk about somebody defecating in public. We're going to talk about somebody sleeping in public, somebody playing his music too loud on the subway, somebody shooting up, somebody yelling at strangers, somebody engaging in prostitution or attempting to solicit for prostitution in public. What joins these behaviors in my mind is that they are

private acts. They are things that we would conventionally sort of do at home. This idea that what makes disorder alarming, unique, special, worthy of our attention is that there is a public space, at least in big cities. There are

common spaces, common resources that everyone is expected to share equally. And often disorderly behavior can be identified by an individual making a claim over that, whether it is your use of the sidewalk that is impeded by a tent or your freedom from seeing somebody else's private consumption activity, whether it is drugs or sex. You added a wrinkle to that definition that I've not heard you say before, which is that

Many of these, not all, are acts we would normally do at home. And what that made me think of immediately is that many of these acts are done by people who don't have, in the traditional sense of the term, homes, right? The unsheltered homeless. Obviously, huge problem in San Francisco, in New York, but everywhere, right? Most major cities, not literally everyone, is having a significant rise in unsheltered homelessness.

Is the disorder problem simply the absence of people with homes, people who don't have bathrooms, right? They are now doing things in public because they live in public. You know, it is not uncommon to sort of make exactly this argument. And this is part of the debates over disorder that happened in the 1990s. To what extent are regulations of disorder just trying to criminalize people

statuses, homelessness, poverty, etc. And my response is twofold. One is that we should be able to agree that there are lots of people who are disorderly in public who are not homeless. There are people who are, to use a podcast appropriate term, jerks, who think that it is perfectly kosher for them to light up on the subway or to play music in public or to berate people. That said, it is certainly the case that

Homeless people are a substantial subset of the disorderly population. But there, too, I think that we have seen not merely an increase in the population of people that are homeless, but also in the degree to which people are willing to engage, feel comfortable engaging in disorderly behavior. The

Sort of most extreme examples are the frequencies of public drug use. There's a broad spectrum of the intensity of flagrant public drug use that you see in the United States. In certain jurisdictions in the United States over the past four years, the intensity of public drug use has gotten much more extreme. There was a very big difference between the homeless guy who...

you know, hangs out in front of your local supermarket, who is polite, who is engaging. Everyone knows somebody like this, who's not a problem for the community versus the guy who is yelling in public versus the guy who is shooting up in public, who is sleeping rough and unapologetic about it. There is a big space for that behavior variation, even among the population that is homeless.

Something I've thought about a lot is the difference in the politics of crime and disorder from when I lived in Washington, D.C., where I lived from 2005 to 2018, and then the Bay Area and then New York. And when I lived in D.C., it was unambiguously more dangerous than anywhere else I have ever lived. The homicide rate was simply much higher. Someone very close to me was shot. A number of people I

am also very close to were beaten up on the streets, muggings in the early period in which I lived there. It was just like something that would happen to your friends when you went home from a party, right? It would happen every couple of weeks, it felt like. And yet the politics of it were much less unsatisfactory

unstable, deranging for at least the people in power than what was happening in San Francisco. And my explanation for that over time was that there's something around the politics here, not just of disorder, but of tolerance. Like my sense of the politics in D.C. was that people felt like the government was trying to stop the crime and failing because crime is a hard problem, that the government was trying to stop the drug problem and failing because drugs are a hard problem.

And that what made the politics of this in San Francisco particularly very toxic and continue to be very toxic is

is feeling the government wasn't trying to stop it. That, you know, clearly, or people at least thought it was in the government's power to, you know, do something like clearing out the tenderloin and not allowing it to be a giant open-air drug market. But they weren't doing that. And in fact, they were watching city officials walk by this on the daily. This has, I think, become a big issue in New York, where, you know, you watch people jump the turnstile right in front of a bunch of employees of the subway, right?

How do you think about the role of the government's attitude even holding the problems constant? What I would say is that I think that that response you are describing in San Francisco is touching on something real, which is that it is

offensive to people's sense of civic fairness when they see the government tolerating people's behaviors in certain circumstances, and particularly when they're antisocial behaviors and not otherwise. The great objection I think people, you may have heard from people in San Francisco, is that the government of San Francisco simultaneously was aggressive about requiring people to wear masks

in furtherance of the public health interest and also was actively trying to, in the name of harm reduction, educate people on how to use drugs as opposed to explicitly condemning drug use and or stopping people from using drugs on the street. I think that offends people's basic sense that we all are equal citizens of a city

That part of how a city lives and functions and breathes is that assumption of equality. And I do think that there is, you know, an ideological component there when you talk about how do governments think about tolerance, particularly over the past five years, but really waxing and waning in American civic life, which says these problems, the problem of drug addiction, the problem of homelessness, the problem of dysfunctional behavior, serious mental illness are intractable.

And in fact, it is wrong to try to change them. It infringes upon the rights of the individual to try to do something about this. That the best we can possibly hope to do for people who are living profoundly dysfunctional lives is sort of make them comfortable and hope that they will choose to change on their own. I think about this in the serious mental illness context through the work of

sociologist Neil Gong, who has compared the treatment of, in Los Angeles, seriously mentally ill rich people and poor people. He finds that when you are

On the public's responsibility in seriously mentally ill in Los Angeles, you're treated with an attitude of toleration that they will do what they need to stabilize you, but they won't ever try to compel you to do anything, even suggest that you do anything you don't want to do. What the rich do is that they sign themselves up to be coerced. If your kid is seriously mentally ill and you have the money for it, you will put him in a very restrictive environment because that's what's conducive to his health.

So I think that, you know, that kind of

which is in my mind a kind of pessimism about the capacity of government to address these problems combined with a kind of civil libertarianism had a moment over the past five years and is a constant in American life that is likely to come back. Correct me if I'm wrong. He did the work on tolerated containment or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always thought this was interesting. So as I understand his theory, and I've not read that much of it directly, but I think I read a paper by him,

It's that you have an approach in many of these cities, and you really saw this in San Francisco. I mean, the Tenderloin is just a zone where huge amounts of what are by any measure crimes are allowed. But you can't do that in Pack Heights. You can't do that in Noe Valley.

People live in the Tenderloin. It's actually the part of San Francisco with the – I don't remember if it's the highest or just an unusually high number of children living in it per capita. And you see this in a lot of places, right? Skid Row in Los Angeles. But what you do in Skid Row, you cannot do in Beverly Hills or at least in most parts of Beverly Hills. And so there's this way in which one of the things that emerged is –

That you would sort of concentrate all this disorder in places where the people have less political power to do anything about it. And in doing, you would sort of move it out of the richer areas where they would complain and vote you out of office.

Yeah, and you do see this in a lot of places. I think about a couple of years ago, New York City became the first city in the United States to open what is variously called a supervised consumption site or an overdose prevention site or an overdose prevention center, choose your acronym, which is a place where people can go and consume drugs under the supervision of drug

with Narcan, some of whom have medical training. And one of the interesting things that has happened is the community responses group called the Greater Harlem Coalition, with whom I've worked some, and their response to the OPC, to the supervised consumption site, was not actually sort of shock and horror at the fact that this thing exists,

But rather to say, if you come to our neighborhood, if you get off the train at Harlem 125th Street, you have to walk a couple of blocks and you're there. If you come to our neighborhood, this is already the site of super saturation of these services. And, you know, I think that that creates a great deal of...

community ranker. These are usually poor, predominantly black or brown communities. If you go look at Kensington in Philadelphia, most people on the street in Kensington, I found from my recent trip, are white people from the surrounding area. But most people actually live in Kensington are recent immigrants who just need somewhere to work until to live while they are working to sort of build themselves up. You know, I think these kind of concentrated areas of dysfunction are seen as solutions like

There's this thing in The Wire, Hamsterdam, that is the pivotal example of this. It's like the police's strategy is that you'll be allowed to sell drugs here and we'll concentrate the problems. They think that this will be a solution to the problems of the rest of the city. But actually what you end up doing, in my experience, is you create concentrated dysfunction. And so you get...

economies of scale of dysfunction, that having a couple of guys doing drugs in a place is not great, but having 100 guys doing drugs in a place is how you get a drug market. And a drug market is way more efficient. A drug market is providing a greater variety of services. A drug market is a magnet, and the magnet draws more people in. The place that I've been, that I've seen this most acutely is the downtown east side in Vancouver in British Columbia, which is the sort of skid row of

Vancouver. And the downtown east side has the highest concentration, I suspect, the highest concentration of harm reduction drug treatment services, certainly in North America, possibly on Earth. It is actually the worst place I've ever been in my entire life. It is just blocks and blocks and blocks of people shooting up,

selling drugs, buying drugs. When you talk to people who are suffering the illness there, many of them are coming from the surrounding area. It is a place of profound dysfunction. And it is more dysfunctional because it is concentrated. So it's not just bad for the people who live there. It is also bad for the people that it's allegedly meant to benefit because of the way in which it concentrates and therefore reinforces their problems. ♪

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Things happening in blue cities and to some degree ideological trends among liberals. But there's change here on the right, too, in an interesting way. So you've talked about vice politics, the policies around things like cannabis or

gambling. I don't think other people might put it here, but for reasons I think I would have some trouble explaining, but I'm pretty sure is right. I think the embrace of quite unregulated crypto markets has a tendency in this. I think it's quite adjacent to gambling. And when you look at Trump and the Republicans ran out, you see a lot of this. Trump sitting back to weed legalization proposal in Florida. You have Republican lawmakers floating proposals to legalize gambling, the sort of

Crypto deregulation is quite big on the right. How do you see the changing relationship between the right and not disorder because they talk like they don't like disorder. But I think what you what you define is vice, which seems to be quite adjacent to disorder.

There is in the very long run waxing and waning in the degree to which we are tolerant of addictive, harmful substances or behaviors where gambling is a behavior that is plausibly described as addictive. That we go through periods of familiarity and then rejection and then hostility and then curiosity and then familiarity. And this is really the arc of the history of drug use in American society over the past 150 years that

Today, there are a host of

different vices that we are shifting towards embrace of, in part coming out of a period of hostility. I think we are experimenting a lot more. You've talked about psychedelics. I think psychedelics fit oddly into this. We can get into them if you'd like. Pornography, which is almost the one that we don't talk about at all, even though everybody's high schooler is exposed to it all the time. There's been some great reporting on that. Something like 17 million Americans are now daily or new daily marijuana smokers. A substantial fraction of Americans

Young adults are gambling on a regular basis. And the ones who gamble most compulsively are young men. You can almost tell a story about the type here of people who are consuming a wide variety of legal or dubiously legal vicious substances, who are unattached, who are socially dysfunctional. Those people, it turns out, might actually be swing voters, to get back to your question. Those are people who see something that they like in Donald Trump.

who also see something that they like in the Democratic Party, which has, at least in recent years, been the more vice-tolerant party. And so I think that a move like Trump's to sort of publicly embrace marijuana legalization in certain form reflects a recognition that there is a large part of the electorate who are inert to these substances and who are in play. You can talk about sort of why Trump has gone for that. I think that reflects broader changes in politics

sort of the Republican ideology under him versus 30 years ago. But I do think at root what it is, is this change at the social level that vice is much more common, much more widely available. I think you're also looking at voters who are not just maybe swing voters, but voters in transition. So something that is happening compositionally to the parties that I think is important here is suburban women are becoming very, very, very important to how Democrats win elections.

And in a way, I think Kamala Harris really represents that block, right? She is on the one hand quite concerned about crime and order and safety, a former prosecutor, and also very concerned about equity and that things aren't being done unfairly, right? So there's a tension there between how do you make a community feel safe and how do you make a community and the policing of it actually non-racist, right?

And then on the other hand, you have young men moving quite sharply into the Republican coalition, young men of all races, particularly non-college young men. And those are the people who, as you were saying a second ago, in their lives, cannabis is significant, sports gambling and maybe crypto are significant. Pornography is significant. Now, they don't like crime and they like a sort of tougher presentation of

But they want the things they do to be legal and they do not want to be hassled by the police or anybody else about them.

Yeah, I think that that is right. I do want to emphasize that the social change that we are talking about, the emergence of this population is itself downstream of, if not democratic per se priorities, then liberalizing priorities. Joe Biden is like a pretty old school Democrat on this stuff. He's conspicuously the only 2020 primary Democrat who refused to say he would legalize marijuana, but he is a dying breed in the party.

It is not an accident that the Drug Policy Alliance went to Deep Blue, Oregon to try to decriminalize drugs. So I think it is right that there is this sort of emerging, predictably emerging population who are

personally politically pretty apathetic and so happen to be up for grabs and who the Republican coalition are less worried about getting the votes of. But their existence and their growth is downstream of, again, if not purely democratic politics, then liberalizing policies that have been advanced by

groups that are very much of a kind with those groups that have argued that the criminalization of public drug use is unfair, unjust, and racist. So I think that aspect is really very important as well.

Let's talk about the decriminalization and criminalization of drug use. And this, I think, does move us into the zone where sometimes we're talking about disorder and sometimes we're talking about something much, much worse. You know, as somebody who was pretty optimistic about that and about drug decriminalization generally, and I did an episode with Keith Humphries about this, I think it is working out very, very poorly.

But I am less worried about that than I am about something else, which you've written about, which is the changing shape of the drug problem at its most lethal. And you did this piece some time ago for National Affairs, which is a journal. And you wrote then that the sort of problem we're really facing in drugs has changed, that for most of the arc of how we've thought about drugs, we've worried about addiction, right?

And now, at a rate we've never before really had to apprehend, we're worried about death. Can you talk through that change you're describing? Yeah, absolutely. And I will argue in a second that this is, in fact, also a dynamic that is relevant in the legal or semi-legal marketplace. But

There have been a lot of headlines about the decline in the overdose death rate in the past year. That's something to be celebrated. I'm happy about that. We can talk about why that happened. I think it's less great than people think. But the reality is still that something like 100,000 people are dying every single year from drug overdose death in the United States.

That is a remarkable sea change. The statistic that I like to use is that in the mid to late 1980s, at the peak of the crack cocaine crisis, about three in every 100,000 Americans died from drug overdose. In, I think it's 2021, 2022, the figure was 33 per 100,000. So that's a more than tenfold increase in

In the 1980s, 1990s, 1970s, even go back to the heroin crisis, 1960s, the primary problem was the health effects of drugs. Drugs were simply not that likely to kill you. Today, drugs can kill you. And that is because the drug supply has become much more potent. That represents, in my view, a technological change. People have heard a lot about the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

Fentanyl is like not a new substance. If anyone who is listening to this podcast has had an epidural, they have probably been administered fentanyl.

We've known how to make it since the early 1960s. Fentanyl, though, is a synthetic drug, which just means that it is made from simple ingredients in a lab. You don't have to go in a field. You're not beholden to the growing season. You don't have to worry about spy planes. The precursor chemicals are incredibly cheap. You can source them online, no questions asked. And so it was a superior product on many dimensions that at some point in the past 10 years, it

drug trafficking organizations in the Americas figured out how to synthesize in large quantities and how to move in large quantities. And so the exponential increase in deaths is downstream of A, the spread of fentanyl into the drug supply, and B, another synthetic drug that is under-discussed here, which is methamphetamine, also spreading into the drug supply. The common factor being a transition between

from organic methods of drug production to much more efficient, much more effective synthetic methods of drug production. What we are up against in the current drug crisis is a technological change. I think that's true across the spectrum of prices, that you can understand sports gambling on the phone as a technological improvement over sports gambling in the casino, that you

The high potency marijuana that is causing so many of the problems with legalization is something that has been made possible by increasing efficiency in the legal marijuana market facilitated by legalization that big marijuana growers can just grow better pot, more potent, more high THC pot. And so I think

But across the spectrum of vices of drugs that we use, but also non-drug vices, we are seeing much more potent forms facilitated by modern technology. And that's the problem that we're dealing with. I'm interested in this. I think this is a really fascinating way of framing it because I've heard this and thought about this with things like fentanyl. I mean, you said a second ago that these gangs and traffickers have figured out how to use it and how to move it in large quantities in the Americas. But

The thing about it is it compared to other things that came before it, you don't need to move it in large quantities. That the amount of heroin you needed to addict a city and the amount of fentanyl you need to addict a city at the same level is

what, it's like a hundredth of the amount. Yeah. There are estimates that say the total fentanyl consumption in the United States is sub-10 tons, right? You can move it in a couple of trucks. So that is terrifying, and it's part of, I think, in a way that people don't always recognize why it's quite hard to crack down on the trafficking. It's just easier to traffic baggies. Trafficking marijuana is not that easy. It's a lot of garbage bags of marijuana to keep a lot of people supplied. But

But I'm interested in the way you draw that out, right? I take your point that sports gambling on the phone is more efficient than sports gambling in the casino. Pornography obviously has gotten a lot better and more accessible from when you had to like rent a VHS tape or go to a theater and sit in a little booth.

You know, and there are things that we don't, I think, think of as devices at this level that actually do concern me. The immersive quality of massive online video games and the amount of time people could spend on them has just made them a very different kind of product than when I was jamming on Mario Brothers 3 on a Super Nintendo console.

There is these categories of things ranging from illegal to semi-legal to totally legal that as they get better and better and better and better and more concentrated and more portable and more always available.

That I don't think we know what to do about them. And also they develop constituencies that can defend them under perfectly reasonable arguments. Like, I like playing video games or, you know, ketamine is good for my anxiety and I'm not wildly addicted to it. And so why should I not be able to

get it. I mean, I actually find these issues very, very hard because for a lot of people, these things are part of a good life, not a negative life. And then there are people for whom they're somewhere between life-impairing and all the way up to life-destroying. Yeah, I think that that is correct. And that's the central challenge of drugs and of vices more generally, that the best argument for drugs being widely available are twofold. One is that

People like doing drugs. They're fun. And the other one is that we should leave people the heck alone. And I think those are both like fairly strong arguments in the American liberal tradition. I think like it is not an unreasonable position to take. And the best way to respond to them in mind is to say, look, even though you or I can plausibly use alcohol or marijuana or methamphetamine or heroin or sports gambling safely, we're

There are people who cannot. In any given population of users, the risks of harm are not evenly distributed. And that's true for marijuana. That's true for alcohol. That's true for, as it turns out, heroin. The sort of best estimates are

Only about 30% of first-time heroin users are going to proceed to addiction. I would not encourage any of your listeners to try heroin on this basis, but that's sort of the estimate. The point being that it's a probabilistic thing. And there are real benefits to the consumption of these substances. And the little benefit that I get out of use of those substances, and we can talk about what the regulations should look like, but the little benefit that I get out of the use of the substance is not necessarily worth the enormous cost to my fellow citizen.

I can frame that argument in other ways. You know, I can say that the state has a legitimate interest in a certain degree of, if not abstinence, then sobriety, that addiction impairs our ability to be functioning citizens in a way that the state has a legitimate interest in for stalling. But I do think at root, you're right that there is a trade-off. And the only real way in my mind to get around that trade-off is to say, yeah, it has to be worth it, at least for some substances, at least some of the time.

I find myself more and more confused in this discussion than I feel I've been in the past. But let me sort of try to press on points of it that I'm struggling with. So let's cut off for a minute the most lethal segment of the market, right? The opioids, methamphetamine.

When you talk about many of these other things, some of them are fun and some of them are more meaningful to people than that. On the one hand, the point you're making that both the profits of a lot of this and the harms concentrate on a sub fraction of the population. I've had a lot of people I love have very serious alcohol use disorder and whatever is happening in their brain when they drink is not happening in mine.

This is not virtue. There's something not happening in my brain that is happening in their brain. And so the costs are falling on them. And I've watched those costs fall with incredible force. And then some of these other things, right? You mentioned psychedelics earlier.

They can be fun and they can also be incredibly profound and mystical and people have experiences on them that are some of the most, you know, we know from survey data, meaningful of their life. Or, you know, I both know people for whom ketamine is fun and I know people for whom ketamine is a stabilizing force.

Or as much as I'm sort of down on crypto, I understand that a lot of people in there are in there for an ideological and hopeful view that they're building something that can become a very important technological layer of the future. And so sure, right now, what you're looking at is functionally a currency gambling market and a volatile asset market. But a lot of things begin, you know, as the famous line goes, as toys and later become utilities. And these people see themselves as building the future.

alcohol helps people dance and enjoy each other at parties, right? It's not just fun. It does build community. And I don't really know how to weigh all this. I think just kind of saying, well, it's fun, puts it in a box where, yeah, I mean, if it's just fun, who cares? But these things become significant parts of people's life. Some things we're talking about strike me as much better for people than alcohol, frankly. I'd be much more comfortable with there being widespread access to alcohol

Products with psilocybin in it than alcohol. One of my hopes with cannabis legalization was that you would see a substitution away from alcohol. We've not seen that at all. We've just seen a huge rise in daily cannabis use. I don't know how to balance all that. But what does strike me is we are very inconsistent about it.

Right. And I think that is the core of the issue. And there's something very American about that, that we are very all or nothing in part because we are a libertarian culture. And I don't mean that sort of political thing. I mean that in America, we are much more concerned with individual liberty have been for 200 years. It's part of what makes America, in my view, the greatest nation on earth. But it also has produced challenges, particularly in this space, where

And when you talk about sort of that moderation, that sort of space between, I think that is the thing that we struggle with conceptually. I'll talk about

For example, you talked about psychedelics. In my mind, I am persuaded by the research evidence, the clinical evidence that psychedelics are efficacious for a variety of indications. I think they're good for that. I would like to see more people have access to psilocybin in a medically appropriate environment. I am also persuaded by the evidence from the same studies that says psilocybin and other

Psychedelic drugs are quite dangerous, that they can do real and lasting harm to people, particularly people who have prior serious mental illness. But I think that from a policy perspective, what you always want to be aiming for is somewhere in the middle. Mark Kleiman, the

Public policy scholar has this concept of what he talks about as grudging toleration. He observes this for drugs like cigarettes and alcohol, drugs that we're not going to prohibit. And he extends this back in the 1990s to marijuana. I think it still makes sense today to say, look, the fact that these drugs are legal does not mean that we should not regulate them and does not mean that we should not be

heap a certain degree of social approbation upon them. When you think about cigarettes, as I think a great example, where we have come to a point as a country where cigarette smoking is actually deeply stigmatized. And I tend to think that's good because cigarettes were quite bad. They are aggressively taxed. They are far more regulated. That took a really long time to get to because in large part of these sort of core libertarian arguments. So I think that it is telling to go back to this American paradigm that we

we cannot talk about psychedelics in this sort of medical middle of the road. Instead, we are in Colorado, Oregon, potentially Massachusetts this November, simply going to create low-regulation gray markets or white markets in these substances. That's not the middle of the road. That's a very libertarian attitude. You know, I recognize that there are real benefits to consumption of these substances. I think that the harms tend to fall disproportionately on people

the least of us on the most disadvantaged of us on those who are already suffering from serious mental illness. And so what you want to do is try to find that middle ground regulatorily, not always.

But I think that we really struggle to find that middle ground as Americans. This is not a problem that many European nations have. They're actually, many European nations are quite good at navigating this middle ground, but we culturally struggle with it. We don't know how to go for anything but pure prohibition versus pure legalization. Yeah, and I guess I would add some other things that have made me more pessimistic here than I used to be.

So you're saying that we're quite libertarian nation. I would say in a way where the thing that worries me more is that we're quite capitalistic nation. And what worries me about cannabis, the way it has gone, and I was close with Mark Kleinman. We were friends. He was a fellow blogger. I was at UCLA when he was there. Right. He's like a revered policy mind to me. And his loss continues to echo.

Everything he feared basically came to pass. I used to talk to him about marijuana legalization back when that hadn't quite happened yet. And he would tell me, like, the thing you have to be afraid of is commercialization.

The thing you have to try to figure out how to do is not let this get commercialized because once the genius of American capitalism gets to it, it's going to become so much more potent. It's going to be marketed in all these crazy ways. And he sees with everything, you know, vapes emerge and the sort of early round of thinking about them is, hey, maybe this is a great harm reduction strategy for people addicted to cigarettes.

And now you get them in cotton candy flavors. You know, it's like blue sparkle berry. And they have little like, you know, stars that light up when you smoke them. They've made them into a toy. Right. You cannot invent a smoking device that is more targeted towards children. Right.

than a cotton candy thing that lights up with little stars when you smoke it. It's unbelievable to watch. When I walk into a cannabis shop, and I love getting a package of Caminos, and I'm not a heavy cannabis user, but I do sometimes. But you can walk into that, and you see the potency of what's being offered. And we don't really understand what

of this kind of THC potency due to people. And so as somebody who actually does not just want to see psychedelics made available for medical use, is not just excited about them as a major depression treatment, but actually thinks they are a thing that can be a really powerful part of people's lives, including well people,

When I look at what has happened with cannabis and I think about our inability to regulate these things effectively and what happens when these companies that have been venture funded to the tunes of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and are trying to file patents left and right and are going to try to commercialize and market and alter the subsidies in every way they possibly can to get a market advantage, that terrifies me. You have a piece about how you changed your mind on cannabis legalization. I thought it makes an interesting point because

Which is that we thought, and this was the argument everybody was making, we'd be able to regulate it. And we've not been able to. And part of the reason is that particularly when there's already a powerful illicit market, if you come into something and you regulate it and so you make the regulated price much higher…

And you make the regulated thing harder to get, then the illicit market just takes over but has a lot more supply and has a lot more access and there's going to be less interest in cracking down on it. You've seen that in New York where they are starting to do some crackdowns, but there's a huge number of illegal shops that we just don't seem to have the capability to.

or at least have not yet shown it, of being in these middle places where you can actually regulate the thing and control the market. Because controlling the market would then require a huge amount of enforcement on something you just...

tried to make semi-legal and nobody really wants to do that. Right. And to remind your listeners, I work for a conservative think tank. I'm clearly conservative on a number of issues. And I would say I am in many regards an unrepentant capitalist. I think capitalism is a fantastic system. It's the best system we've created. It's left billions of people out of poverty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. We know. Yeah, yeah. We love those things. But here comes the but.

The point about drugs, I think, is an important one that, you know, the way that capitalism works is it aligns the interest of the buyer and the seller. And that is good insofar as what is in the interest of the buyer or the seller is good for them. In the case of addictive harmful substances, what is in the interest of the buyer is not necessarily to continue to consume the product, even if the seller is willing to sell it to him. But I think that you are right.

Yeah.

The thing that needs to be done to reduce the scale of the illicit marketplace, moreover, is politically deeply unpopular, i.e. do enforcement, arguably more enforcement than is necessary under prohibition because prohibition simply issuing the statement that such and such substance is illegal does a lot of work for you. It forecloses access to credit. It makes it hard to engage with the rest of the market, etc. That was a succinct version of

But I think this dynamic, it's not just a cultural thing.

There are also structural dynamics, structural reasons that it is hard to control markets and vice. The argument that I make in that piece that you allude to is that part of the case for prohibiting something like marijuana is just that prohibition is dumb and dumb stuff works. That once you start regulating stuff, it's a real uphill battle to avoid regulatory capture, to make the regulation exactly what you need to work well. It took us decades, right?

to make cigarette regulation kind of work. And by the way, cigarettes still kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. So it's not like we've done that well. The same thing is true of alcohol.

where there are more alcohol-involved deaths every year than there are all illicit drugs combined. And we regulate alcohol. It took us a long time to do that, too. And so when you talk about marijuana, when you talk about psychedelics, I think you should be alarmed by scrolling on Instagram and seeing an advertisement for ketamine in clinic or at-home ketamine use. I think this death of Matthew Perry... Yeah, I think the death of Matthew Perry really has shaped that discourse as working people up to the fact that even in that space...

There's a difference between people using with their friends in the backyard and set and setting and all of that. And what happens when somebody is selling it to you on social media? I think that is an inescapable part. Well, the Matthew Perry thing was not a social media sales situation. But I take your point. This is maybe a place to bring in that other class I cut out before, which is the drugs that cause in very high numbers death. So these synthetic opioids, increasingly methamphetamines.

And here, too, I find myself very confused on what to do because presumably people don't want to die.

And so one argument for a long time has been that, you know, if you give people safer supply, right, they're not getting things that they don't understand, that they don't know how to dose because the quantity of fentanyl is unknown in it. But on the other hand, you know, I think our experience is if you make things more accessible, more people are going to access them. How do you think about this? It's become a big, obviously, issue.

topic in the presidential campaign, but for all the people talking in the campaign about fentanyl, I've not seen really, frankly, either campaign release a policy that seems to me to be appropriate to the scale of the problem or represent any new thinking in a real way about the problem.

Yes. And I think that's been true for a long time, that everyone is willing to see the drug crisis as proving their assumptions and nobody's willing to see it as the problem that it is because that's much harder. That's a criticism I have across the board.

You know, I think there is, and you've alluded to, a sort of set of policy prescriptions that, to their credit, try to take on this issue of deaths head-on. These are what sort of get broadly lumped under the category of harm reduction. I do not think those interventions were tried have been borne out. The illustrative example is that

Canada has, in fact, implemented safer supply. British Columbia has safer supply programs in addition to a whole host of harm reduction programs, in addition to supervised consumption sites, needle distribution, Narcan distribution. You name it, they've got it. And they also have sky-high overdose death rates. When you talk about something like giving people access to safer drugs, it's a result that probably works in what you talk about as a high-barrier context, right?

If you put people on what's called heroin-assisted treatment, when you give people diacetylmorphine in a clinic, they do somewhat better. Their risk of overdose goes down somewhat. If you make that program too big, though, people start moving product on the street. They start taking the diacetylmorphine from the government and selling it to other people and using the money to score heroin that is cheaper. It's a little bit like

dealing with a public option in drugs. And that has all of the effects of a public option on the price and availability of drugs, but it doesn't really do much to change the underlying drug-using behavior. Because the problem isn't actually knowledge. It's that people are addicted to deadly substances, and they will keep using those deadly substances. So you've talked about the Oregon law and decriminalization there, and I think it's widely seen to be a failure. But there was a study in September that was published by the American Medical Association's online journal

And researchers tried to disentangle the spike in overdose deaths and the sort of coming of fentanyl into Oregon. I think you, among others, have noted that fentanyl has this weird thing where it's been moving east to west in the country. And they said that drug liberalization was actually working better than people think, but that that was sort of wiped out, at least in the data, by the rise of fentanyl. Did you see that study and what did you think of it?

Yeah, I'm going to give you the nerdy answer, then I'm going to give you the big picture answer. And I know the study that you were talking about, this is the study that says the result is confounded by the spread of fentanyl, right? Yes. Yeah. I know the study that you're talking about. I actually know several guys who wrote it and I like them, but I think they're missing the mark. The nerdy answer is that

By attempting to control for the spread of fentanyl in Oregon, you are controlling away one of the channels by which decriminalization could affect overdose deaths. That one model is that the effect of decriminalization on death

is confounded by the spread of fentanyl. But another model is that part of what decriminalization did was exacerbate or induce the spread of fentanyl. And I don't think you can differentiate between the two. So I'm skeptical that that is what that study suggests.

is actually showing. But this gets to sort of a bigger point, which is that what is really telling to me in the literature on decriminalization in Oregon, and actually my read of the literature on decriminalization in Portugal and generally, is that specifically with regards to Oregon, there are at this point, I think, three peer-reviewed studies and

One of them finds an increase in overdose deaths and two find there's no increase in overdose deaths. There has not yet been a study that concludes that there is a reduction in overdose deaths associated with decriminalization. The Portuguese literature is a little more over the board, but I think you can read in such a way that the central tendency is there is no effect of Portuguese decriminalization on overdose deaths whatsoever.

And what that says to me is that the core argument made for decriminalization across the board is that the problem is not really the drugs. The problem is the criminal treatment of the drugs. And I just don't think that's borne out by the evidence. I think that if there is no effect, then what that tells us is that it was never really about prohibition itself. It was always about, I think in my mind, obviously, the fact that drugs kill people.

In different ways, Trump, Vance, Harris, and Walz have all, when I've heard them publicly, made an argument focusing on the ability to stop supply from coming into the United States. That we can do more on the border, we can have these machines, we can increase law enforcement, we can get mad at China, we can get mad at Mexico.

Do you buy in this world where we synthetic drugs that can be made in labs and moved in fairly small quantities? Do you buy that there is a level of anti-smuggling or anti-trafficking policy that could be effective to substantially change the trajectory? You can't do nothing.

And I think that the steps that we have taken to do better at interdicting at the border, the pressure that both administrations, Trump administration and Biden administration, have tried to place on China to reduce the export precursors are sort of necessary but never, ever going to be sufficient to the problem. And that's because you are dealing with such a profound change in the drug supply that

You have to get it right an unrealistic fraction of the time. If you're dealing with such a small quantity of fentanyl crossing the border, you have to interdict it successfully basically every single time. Otherwise, there's no impact. If you are dealing with such widely available precursor chemicals, you have to shut it down not just in China, but also in India, potentially Nigeria or South Africa. It is...

such a dramatically challenging problem. To try to put it succinctly, under this new paradigm, we have to take much more seriously the problem of addiction as such, that it is more imperative than ever to get people off of drugs. That's sort of that thing that we've talked about for a long time, but it was less urgent when we were dealing with people's health. It is much more urgent today when 100,000 people are dying every year.

It's different from the harm reduction model. It's also different from the war on drugs model, which I tend to think gets a bad rap, but was ultimately not all that successful in curbing a host of problems. But focusing on preventing people from getting on drugs through prevention and focusing on getting people off of drugs through aggressive, evidence-based, medication-assisted,

Often, or at least sometimes compulsory treatment is, I think, the best strategy that we have available. If I talk about British Columbia, next door to British Columbia, Alberta, the province in Canada, has a similar drug problem. And they have responded by implementing many of the policies that I would like to see implemented.

The data is still unclear. We don't fully know what it looks like. But the early indications are that drug overdose deaths are going down in Alberta. And I think that that is a sign that if you focus on recovery, you focus on treatment, and you make that a priority, and you say, you are going to get clean whether you want to or not, and we are going to be committed to keeping you clean, you could have a real impact on this problem.

You've described the structural problem here as technological, that we've had a lot of technological advance in drugs without a sort of corresponding advance in human biology or social organization.

I am typically skeptical across a lot of facets of human life that when technology gets better and better and better and better, that you can really do all that much by just kind of trying to change social mores, right? I don't think telling people to grayscale their phones is going to end smartphone addiction. I don't think telling them pornography is bad is going to do much for pornography consumption.

And one thing that I've heard people say is that we do not put nearly enough into trying to create counter-technological advances. So, you know, I've heard people argue for operation warp speeds, but for anti-addiction drugs. We have some things that I know you're skeptical of their long-term efficacy, like Narcan, which can reverse an opioid overdose rate.

There's some early interesting evidence on, you know, the Osempic class of drugs that it might help a little bit for things like alcohol use. Do we need some kind of moonshot program on this set of things? And to accept that prohibition and social sanction and yelling at people and even treatment is just not going to be enough given that the pace of technological innovation in synthetic drugs is not going to go away.

If somebody wants to write the $10 billion check, I'm sure not going to say no, but I am skeptical that we will get there in any appreciable time. Look, we have medication-assisted treatment. We have a variety of medication-assisted treatments for patients.

opioid use disorder. They have gotten better. We now have long-acting injectable formulations, which are just huge. And the spread of those to treatment programs is, I think, systematically underrated, that we should be willing to do much, much more with long-acting injectables. We still don't have any medication-assisted treatment for stimulant use disorder, for cocaine and methamphetamine. We've been trying to get them for years and years and years and years. You

You know, I think the GLP-1 drugs have some potential. There's certainly lots of anecdotes about it. I think what little clinical science we have right now says they might be particularly good for alcohol use disorder, which is great, potentially less useful for opioid use disorder, although that could change. I would be really happy to be wrong. Like, I think it would be great if I were wrong.

But I am by no means optimistic that tomorrow we will discover a substance that cures addiction. If for no other reason than, you know, addiction is a profound and multidimensional phenomenon. It has biological correlates, social correlates. I tend to think about addiction as, in some senses, a rational behavior response to certain set of incentives. And so while we have tools that can blunt that dynamic, it is always going to be

more than biological and so I am skeptical that we will produce purely biological solutions to it. Hi, I'm Robert Vinluen from New York Times Games. I'm here talking to people about Wordle and showing them this new feature. You all play Wordle? - Yeah. - I have something exciting to show you. - Oh, okay. - It's the Wordle Archive.

- Oh! - So if I miss it, I can like go back. - 100%. - Oh, that's sick. - So now you can play every Wordle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles. - Oh my God, I love it. - Actually, that's really great. - What date would you pick? - May 17th. - Okay. - That's her birthday.

What are some of your, like, habits for playing Wordle? I wake up, I make a cup of coffee, I do the Wordle, and I send it to my friends in a group chat. Amazing. Thanks so much for coming by and talking to us and playing. New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com slash games. You don't understand how much Wordle means to us. We need to take a selfie. I want to come back to this issue of disorder. So cities right now are struggling with these problems, but what should the role of the police actually be?

Because cracking down on these kinds of petty crimes or this disorder, it does create problems. Racially discriminatory policing, a lot of contacts between police and often young Black men, sometimes tragic contacts between them. I think that's part of what led to an ideological shift here. So how do you think about that, this idea that the disorder might be bad, but the cost of enforcing it is also high?

There's a really interesting history there, and I don't want to get too in the weeds, but, you know, I think that struggle is not new. The struggle between the benefits of petty crime enforcement and the costs of petty crime enforcement or disorder enforcement, you know.

roll the clock back at this point 50 years, the way that people thought about policing, this is 1970s, 1980s, people thought about policing predominantly as the job of the police is to respond to major crimes,

which they learn about through the emergency call system. They spend a lot of the time in their cars. They aren't really out engaging with the community. And we have such a big major crime problem at this point that why would we even worry about the little stuff? Well, to clock forward 20 years to the 1990s, the emergence of the term that we have not used, but it's sort of germane to this conversation is broken windows policing, which is

Often understood to mean, although I will argue in a second, probably should not be understood as, but it's often understood to mean enforcing against minor crimes is a way to control major crimes.

The adoption of those strategies in some shape or form, I think, is a key component of, at least in some places, the scale of the crime decline that we saw in the 1990s, the dramatic reductions in violence that made American cities livable once again. Franklin Zimmering, the criminologist, has a book called The City That Became Safe.

which is about New York's experience specifically. And he argues the reason that New York in particular experienced such a large decline, even relative to the rest of the country, is because of its adoption of these tactics under Rudy Giuliani and then subsequently Mike Bloomberg. But that, of course, breeds its own backlash because people start to notice that

in some way, shape, or form, these are often very aggressive tactics. There are two objections here. One is that there is something objectionable about the policing of minor behavior per se of going after people for something that just doesn't seem like a big deal. And the other objection is that

In many cases, this activity ends up looking racially disproportionate. If you're a young Black man in Chicago or New York, you spend a lot of your time getting stopped and frisked. So, you know, I think that that criticism of that strategy absolutely has driven changes in policing behavior in some senses. The fight over stop and frisk in New York and Chicago helped drive the entire police reform movement.

The way, in my mind, out of that tension is to go back to what broken witness policing is about. If you go back and read what James Q. Wilson and George Kelling wrote about in the 1980s, what Kelling would subsequently write about with Catherine Coles in his book on broken witness policing…

And what other advocates of community-based policing, people like Bill Bratton, talk about, they are often quite skeptical of the most intensive forms of the strategy. The illustrative example I like to give is that at the end of the Giuliani administration, NYPD was doing 100,000 stop and frisks a year. In the Bloomberg administration, they were doing 700,000 stop and frisks a year. And I don't actually know an NYPD cop who won't say privately that that was maybe a little too many.

But part of the reason that they think the intensity is wrong is that the vision is not really simply we must crack down on disorder and the more disorder enforcement we do, the better. It's rather that

community disorder breathes a spiral of dysfunction that can eventually produce crime, and that the way to undo it is for the cops to be a collaborative partner with the community in identifying problems, remediating those problems, and thereby empowering the community to police itself. That sounds like kind of wishy-washy almost, but I do think it is what

We were trying to get at what the Bratton era NYPD was often successful at doing and is probably the way around this sort of tension that, you know. Let me make this distinction a little clearer because it came up in one of your papers and I thought it was interesting that in terms of different approaches to managing disorder that have been studied, you make a cut here. One set of things had been studied you call, I think, community-based problem solving. Yeah.

And the other is order maintenance. And as I sort of understand it, but you should describe it in more detail, community-based problem solving is actually saying, here is a thing like fare jumping or a park that has a lot of open air drug dealing. And we're going to implement some set of policies to end that thing. And order maintenance is more this sort of

Running after people, stopping and frisking them, just sort of putting pressure on any visible individual instance of disorder. And you say that sort of evidence for the form was a lot better than the latter. So talk me through that.

Yeah, and that claim is based on a recently updated meta-analysis that was published earlier this year, I think, in the journal Criminology that looks at something like 60 studies and says, if you take the problem-oriented approach, you get pretty good results. If you take the aggressive order maintenance approach, you don't get very good results. So the sort of key idea here, I think, is that

We tend to think about crime in terms of individual offenses. So-and-so did such-and-such to whomever. There was a legal consequence for that. But that's actually not how the real world works. Things are never so neatly defined. Criminal categories do not carve nature at the joints.

Much more often, there are humans who interact. They have problematic relationships. There are environmental sources of problems that need to be redressed. There's a sociologist, the founding father of sociologic policing, Egon Bittner, who has a line that everybody loves, which is, the role of the police is defined by the use of force in situations that ought not to be happening, about which someone ought to do something right now.

And that recognizes the sort of problem-oriented nature of reality, that there aren't like discrete crimes. There are problems that have to be solved. And so often when you are thinking about this community-based model, you start by saying, what are the problems the community is dealing with? Is it disorder? Is it violence? Is it drug dealing? And then you say, what can we do to reduce the scope of these problems in

Is it changing something about the built environment? Peter Moskos, he's a professor at John Jay. CUNY has a great book coming out on the crime decline in New York, and he has a great

story from that book about the collaboration between the NYPD and the Bryant Park Corporation to clean up Bryant Park in Manhattan. So much of what they did was not arresting people. It was making Bryant Park more open, spending time and cleaning it up, making it the kind of environment that was more aggressively surveilled by the public in a way that reduced the burden on the NYPD.

This ends up sounding, I think, in some applications a lot like the sort of reimagine the police types. But, you know, the important distinction is that the police are a key part of this. To go back to the Bittner definition, the use of force is going to be necessary to some degree to bring people back into line. Sometimes that means major arrests. Sometimes it means ticketing people. What it means is saying, what is the level of force that we need to apply in order to get the job done?

But I think when you do that, when you adopt this problem-oriented model, your policing is much more aligned with both the community and so your legitimacy goes up, but also with the way that the world actually works. You become much less reactive, much more proactive, and you have a beneficial impact on crime in the process. There's a tension here, though, that I think we've become more alert to, which is, I think you could frame it different ways, but let's call it here between collective benefit and individual cost. Right.

And maybe I'll use here the example of fair jumping in the New York City subways, which is something that I've had a lot of discussions about even just with friends.

And the nature of the discussion I often find is that there's an agreement that it's bad on a lot of levels, including simply that the subway is not getting revenue, that so many people just sort of jump the fare. Right. And the fact that they're jumping the fare, jumping the turnstile in front of sometimes police, at least earlier I was seeing that happen. But certainly subway employees, you know, creates a kind of visual disorder.

But there's a real cost to, you know, police running down teenagers who honestly really aren't hurting anybody that much, right? I mean, yes, like it would be nice for the MTA to get the fare, but it's not the end of the world. And there's a really high cost to these teenagers having a bunch of interactions with the law enforcement system. At the max level, you can get shootouts in the subway, which actually happened recently. I mean, there were other circumstances in that, but still.

And so there has emerged, I think, a seriousness about why you might want to reduce the number of point contacts between individuals and law enforcement. And so particularly when the individual is doing something which is maybe annoying to the rest of us, but it's not actively, violently harmful. I think for a lot of people, there's been an ideological move to say, I would rather take the modest rise in disorder and

I would take a lot of public urination to avoid one unnecessary shooting, for instance, to put that in strongest terms. How do you think about that? Yeah. I think this dynamic plays out across disorder, whether it is fair beating, whether it is street sleeping rough, whether it is public drug use, whether it is public defecation. Is this individual instance really worth it?

And the response to that is, no, it is not in the individual, in the unit case worth it. But disorder doesn't exist in the unit case. That when you leave it unchecked, disorder grows. That one tent left unchecked grows into five or ten. Or Phoenix recently cleared its homeless encampment that at its greatest extent, it's called The Zone. Its greatest extent, it was called, there were something like a thousand people living in it.

That the dynamic of disorder is such that if you think about it on the unit level, you miss that growth. The problem gets big. It's a little bit like my wife is a teacher, and I was talking to her about this the other night, and she said it's just like dealing with late homework. Is it a big deal if you let a kid slide once on his late homework? No, it's not really. But if you let him slide every time, then...

And systematically, he is late, and then that impacts the other students. You get these outsized problems. That said, right, I mean, you know, there are costs of exposing people to the criminal justice system. You can do stuff to mitigate those costs. You can say, we're going to limit what the cops do. We're going to limit the intensity with which people are punished afterwards, whether you get a desk appearance ticket versus you actually get arrested. Right.

There, too, though, I think that you have to be careful to think in what I think about as dynamic systems terms rather than unit terms. Not to foreshadow my book recommendation from later on, but Mark Kleiman talks about the case of the squeegee men in New York City. That there's a big problem in the 1990s where there were these guys who would come up to cars, parked and stopped cars on the street, spray the window, wipe them down, and then aggressively demand money from the guys in the car, from the driver. Right.

And Kleiman says in the mid-90s, the Giuliani administration said, okay, we're going to crack down on the squeegee men. Instead of just like ticketing them, we're going to arrest them. We're going to get through the whole rigmarole. We're going to make this like our big push this week. And what happens is because they're very public about it, they're very aggressive about it, for a short period of time, there's a burst of enforcement happening.

And it turns out that, like, there actually aren't that many squeegee men. They, like, pick them all up. The cost of being a squeegee man goes up, and they just stop doing it. And from there, the problem becomes trivial to enforce. You spend very few police resources on dealing with squeegee men, but also the problem goes away. So in some senses, what you want to do in a situation like that, the thing that minimizes police interaction with civilians over time is not necessarily...

doing very little right now when the problem is little before it gets big. The thing that minimizes police interactions over time is focusing aggressively on the issue in the moment until it is no longer an issue, at which point you aren't going to have those interactions that are potentially risky. So that's like, you know, that's a systems way of thinking about it rather than a unit way of thinking about it. But I think it is better off in the aggregate. But that is easier to think about with squeegee men, right?

than it is with homeless encampments where you don't have enough places for people to live or shelter beds in a place like San Francisco, easier than it is with drug use, which definitely does have a tendency to just reemerge somewhere else. I mean, people who are addicted to heroin or regularly using fentanyl or methamphetamines, I mean, as you know better than me,

They're going to try to figure out a way to get the drugs they need to avoid withdrawal. I could kind of buy this for something like fair jumping, right? I buy the way in which people jump in overturned styles. If they get a couple tickets and, you know, they sort of begin to see this is not going to be tolerated, it could go down quite dramatically. But I think for the things that have tipped a lot of people's feelings of disorder into a place of, you

if not emergency, a highly salient political issue, it isn't that easy. And the cost to, you know, breaking up these homeless encampments repeatedly and, you know, taking people's stuff and, you know, putting people in jail for using drugs. And I mean, those things are real. So how do you think about it, you know, layered up to these more significant problems?

I think that if you want to deal with those problems, the solution is not exhaustively policing or it's not even primarily policing. I don't actually know a police officer who thinks that that is true, that those people need access to treatment. We can talk about what that looks like. But that

In the meantime, their behaviors generate harmful externalities, and you need to do something about them. Open-air drug markets generate violence, disorder, dysfunction. They generate public health hazards. Uncontrolled camping generates violence, disorder, dysfunction, public health hazards. And so when you think about the costs and benefits of

dealing with those issues, you are trying to mitigate the externalities. You're trying to shift people into ways of engaging in those same behaviors that are less socially harmful. You're trying to get people to camp over here and not over there. You're trying to get people to use drugs out of sight rather than in the presence of everyone else. You are trying to make drug dealing more discreet. I also think that

We have evidence that you can successfully reduce the extent of this behavior without spillovers. The canonical example in the drug space is what's called a drug market intervention, where

What you do is you identify in a drug market of sufficiently small size the dealers who are driving the market and you say, we would like you to get out of the game. We were going to shut down your market. We will help you get a new job if you would like to. And if not, you're going to prison for a very long time. And while they don't always work, such interventions in, for example, High Point, North Carolina, an early experiment in Lynn, Massachusetts, have been used.

have had meaningful success in reducing the visibility and the extent of crime associated with drug use without inducing the kind of substitution. And that's the point, right? Like, the role of policing those situations is not necessarily to cut to the root of the problem, to deal with the underlying problem behavior. It's to deal with the public externalities of that behavior, which at sufficient concentration are substantial and deserving of attention.

And then, always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

The first one is a lot of the ideas I've talked about, particularly early in this conversation, come from the work of the political scientist James Q. Wilson, arguably the most influential political scientist of the 20th century, my personal ideological hero. And his collection of essays thinking about crime was really influential on how I think about crime. So I think if you want to understand particularly a right-leaning perspective, but just a social science-informed perspective—

The second book, I was going to plug Mark Kleinman's When Brute Force Fails, which is a response to James Q. Wilson's book, but instead I'll actually go with Mark Kleinman's work on drug policy, his book Against Success, which is...

in my mind, the most analytically sound articulation of how to think about drug policy I've ever read. Just across the board, it is a dense book, but if you want to have this sort of nuanced view on how we optimize between the harms of drugs and the harms of drug enforcement, that's the book to read. And then the third one is a little more fun, but I think, you know, when I talk to

young people, and I'm really still a young person, but when I talk to them about crime and disorder and all of these issues, I talk to them about the history of it because I think they don't remember what American cities used to be like. And the book that I recommend to understand the sort of peak of urban dysfunction in America is Tom Walsh's Bonfire of the Vanities, which is, you know, his send-up of urban American life in the 1980s, and I think is a parody, but is also in many ways true to reality and says a lot about

urban life as well. Charles Fane-Lehman, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samielewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

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