"Lojack in everything" is really cool, could push us towards a theftless society. We still have a lot of work to help people escape drug dependency, though.
Suboxone helped me get clean. I was a heroin addict for 6 years, and have been clean for two now. It doesn't work for everyone, but it's allowed me to get back to work and get my life on track (whereas programming on Methadone is near impossible).
I think consumer goods getting cheap relative to real property and other non-stealable things, and expensive things becoming online services with activation components, already is pushing the returns to theft down. Certainly, ATMs, credit cards, ACH payroll, etc. has pushed the returns to theft down (vs when people carried a lot more cash, or kept it in their homes...)
Prescription painkiller overdoses used to hover around the number of overdoses from heroin. In a few short years, they increased sixfold.
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health...
http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/PainkillerOverdoses/index.html
http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in-brief/prescr...
http://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2013/07/presc...
"Lojack in everything" is really cool, could push us towards a theftless society. We still have a lot of work to help people escape drug dependency, though.
Planet Money had an episode on Suboxone, a pill used to treat addiction, that was a pretty alarming look inside the insanity of US drug policy: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157665908/episode-...
They see Suboxone as a sort of "miracle drug," a few people object to that description: http://www.thefix.com/content/trapped-suboxone
Either way, the podcast does a great job at illustrating just how complicated and intimately political pharmaceutical manufacturing has become.