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February 9, 2006
Free booze as social policy
On a personal finance blog (of all places) I found a reference to a Canadian study on proving free alcohol to alcoholic homeless men and women.
It seems that "the number of times participants got in trouble with the law had fallen 51 percent from the three years before they joined the program, and hospital emergency room visits were down 36 percent."
Which makes it sound like it isn't alcohol doesn't make you do bad things, you do bad things to get alcohol. Which could go equally well for providing needles to junkies, clean scalpels to secret cutters, and free condoms to high STD risk populations. This amounts to a Pigovian subsidy of safer behaviors to avoid more dangerous ones.
Posted by OneEyedMan at February 9, 2006 11:36 AM
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