Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today

is Judge Glock. He's a contributing editor of City Journal, and he's the senior director of policy

research at the Cicero Institute. Judge lives in Austin, Texas, and he researches budgetary reform,

housing, homelessness, and other issues.

His writing has been featured in Politico, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,

in addition to the great work he's been doing for City Journal.

His latest essay for the magazine, subsidizing addiction appears in our summer issue,

and it's about how publicly funded welfare programs

have incentivized drug use and other antisocial forms of behavior. On another note, Judge

has been a critic of the recently passed Chips and Science Act, having earlier criticized the legislation in a

city journal article, which we published in the spring.

Anyway, Judge, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me on, Brian.

So in the 90s, as you recount in your essay in the issue, Congress ended a federal program that classified

drug and alcohol dependence as a disability, disqualified addicts to receive welfare payments.

Addiction specialists, Americans generally, observed that the program really did incentivize

addiction.

Yet bureaucrats and welfare advocates have since worked to restore substance abuse as a condition

for receiving welfare payments.

So today, benefits programs continue to reward

drug use. So I wonder if you can describe the origins of this phenomenon, the subsidizing of

...