[bee_rider]

This hypothetical person will either smash windows and go to an apartment, or smash windows and go sleep somewhere in public. If they are already at the point of smashing windows, then there’s some element of desperation or misanthropy that makes me prefer that they spend their night somewhere private.

Anyway if we’re designing hypothetical people, we can come up with sympathetic ones too, so it seems like a wash policy-wise.

[ehvatum]

Don’t be a tool. A heroin addict’s motivation to acquire heroin is infinitely greater than a heroin addict’s motivation for anything else in the world.

[bee_rider]

What is the link between “make sure they sleep on the street” and “prevent them from breaking windows?”

It isn’t a matter of whether or not I’m a tool. The proposed solution is just unrelated to the problem.

As you say, if someone really wants heroin, they’ll get heroin. So, making their life miserable won’t stop them from getting it. What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?

[seanmcdirmid]

Isn’t it a moral hazard? The nice thing about living in Ballard is I can point out to my kid what happens when you do fent, at least. If there are no consequences for behavior, what’s the disincentive for not doing it? “We will coddle you while you OD on fent” doesn’t sound appealing to me.

[bee_rider]

I had to do some reordering hopefully it is OK. I think all I’ve done is group your ideas together, rather than change anything you said.

> Isn’t it a moral hazard? […] If there are no consequences for behavior, what’s the disincentive for not doing it?

There are still lots of downsides to becoming a heroin addict so I think letting them get out of the public eye is fine.

> The nice thing about living in Ballard is I can point out to my kid what happens when you do fent, at least.

It is your responsibility to parent your kid I guess, but I’d be wary of this sort of thing. What if you accidentally show off a corpse to your kid? That could be pretty traumatic, right? Also, is it really a good lesson, that it is OK to talk about people like that? They are people, not objects of derision.

> “We will coddle you while you OD on fent” doesn’t sound appealing to me.

This is one of those things, right? It is often the case that the right policy decisions don’t fit in with our personal moral inner monologue. It is what it is.

[seanmcdirmid]

There are plenty of disincentives to doing drugs, but they are pretty abstract compared to seeing the guy in front of you splashed out on a bench. It makes it real. Lots of my behavior in life was doing things that my parents didn’t do, basically using anti examples rather than pro examples. The lack of much of a social safety net in the states means that making good decisions is even more important than it would be other countries.

If we consider countries like China, where there really isn’t much net at all, drug addicts are rare because they can’t survive very long, and that creates a feedback loop against being a drug addict.

We don’t have corpses in Ballard, just a lot of fent addicts who hang near the park. They get free food at the church next door, and there was an encampment at the park for about two years that we had to walk by often.

> This is one of those things, right? It is often the case that the right policy decisions don’t fit in with our personal moral inner monologue. It is what it is.

Your comment specifically asked what good could it do, it didn’t specify moral inner monologue correctness:

> What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?