Drug wars and drug addiction, black markets and homelessness, in Seattle and elsewhere

This is the third of three posts on the twin problems of trying to reduce drug addiction and to reduce large-scale incarceration as the primary response to addiction.  

In my post yesterday, among the sentences I excerpted from Nicholas Kristof's NY Times column entitled Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs were these: "As I see it, the problem is that while Seattle has done an outstanding job halting the war on drugs, it hasn’t done well in financing the war on addiction. It closed the law enforcement toolbox without fully opening the public health toolbox."

Following his article, lots of the online comments pointed out that drug addiction, related crime, and homelessness has remained very visible in Seattle.  Some of the letters point to a video called “Seattle is Dying”.

Which brings me back to my post on Friday, which I titled

Clean needle exchange programs may be both helpful and harmful, which briefly reported on a recent NBER paper by Analisa Packham. on the effect of syringe exchange programs (SEPs). 

She concludes "I find that SEP openings decrease HIV diagnoses by up to 18.2 percent. However, I present new evidence that SEPs increase rates of opioid-related mortality and hospitalizations"

So... the headline to Kristof's piece is overly optimistic.  Drug addiction and its collateral damage are a giant problem, that we don't now how to solve.  It seems to me (in cases like this more generally) that experimentation is in order. We have a pretty good idea about some things that haven't worked very well, and we need to find policies that work better  Persistent black markets (which have survived decades of war on drugs) make clear that criminalizing markets needn't succeed in making them go away.  Nor does simply de-criminalizing them.

I anticipate that dealing with addictive drugs will be one of the important market design issues of the next decades.