“Let's talk about heroin and opioids and fentanyl and crystal meth. We're at the gangsters-with-machine-guns stage of prohibition right now. … One of the things I ask in the book is, why is it so easy to buy drugs, but so hard to hire a hitman?”
Behavioral Grooves Podcast · September 2026
Roth, the Nobel-winning market designer, was on Behavioral Grooves to talk about his book on repugnant transactions — deals some people want to make and others find morally intolerable. He had just compared today's drug prohibition to the American prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and 30s. His own answer to the question: the ban on hitmen has far more social support, so if you ask a stranger how to hire one, someone calls the police, and often the hitman turns out to be an undercover officer.
Transcript
Yes.
Yeah. Which is it? Could you construe that argument into drugs, for instance? Yeah,
let's talk about heroin and opioids and fentanyl and crystal meth. We're at the gangsters with machine guns stage of prohibition right now. And we have lots of overdose deaths. We have a lot more overdose deaths than we have homicides from any sort of any sort in the United States. So one of the things I ask in the book is, why is it so easy to buy drugs, but so hard to hire a hitman? Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. Please. And this is a great story.
Well, and it's a story about how there's more social support for the ban on hitmen than there is for the ban on drugs. And so if I were to ask you, do you know where I could hire a hitman? There's some guy who I want dead. You'd be pretty surprised. But after the cameras went dark, you would look at each other and one of you would say to the other, maybe we should call the police. You know, Am is thinking about killing someone. That conversation with
problems. Yeah. You know, funny
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