Oregonian here. Living through Oregon’s experiment with decriminalization was tough. The law was flawed and ultimately failed, but did succeed in demonstrating why legalization, along with regulation, and taxation are the only real winning way to solve these problems. Look at our Cannabis programs. Massively successful and pumping millions into our public programs. Sure, Decriminalization reduces arrests but it leaves dangerous, unregulated substances in the market. Where legalizing and regulating recreational drugs ensures safer, controlled products, reducing health risks. Without the tax revenue from a legal market, there’s no funding for vital public health initiatives, like addiction treatment, or education programs. Oregon’s approach missed this by a long shot, leading to huge gaps in our support systems and funding. Also, regulation promotes real social justice by allowing those who get hit hardest by the total failure that is the "war on drugs” to benefit from better legal opportunities. This backstep is horrible for sure, but decriminalization wasn’t enough and without a plan to move further forward it's the only last-ditch effort to fix the problems the weak policy has caused. The better way forward would be restructuring the decriminalization to include some form of legalization along with regulation and most importantly taxation, but I won't hold my breath waiting for common sense to have a place in US state or federal politics.
> Without the tax revenue from a legal market, there’s no funding for vital public health initiatives
Education and public health shouldn't require drug money to exist and operate. If they make things better for everyone —they do— they should be funded from general taxes.
They shouldn't be a controversial statement but socialism is still a dirty word in some quarters.
I don't disagree that WoD has failed in its purpose but I'm not sure a public health body has ever been given the means to effectively treat a drugs epidemic.
> Supporters of decriminalization say treatment is more effective than jail in helping people overcome addiction and that the decades-long approach of arresting people for possessing and using drugs hasn’t worked.
It clearly hasn't worked. And clearly all the reasons they decriminalized in the first place are still valid. But I guess we're going back to criminalizing it anyway. Hey, maybe human nature has changed in the last few years, and it'll work this time.
Part of the problem (as I understand it) is Oregon didn't really have the actual treatment capacity to make their decriminalization approach work when the law first rolled out.
Oregon has since poured tons of money into treatment centers and capacity is much, much better. But it unfortunately appears to be too little too late w/r/t public sentiment on decriminalization. Hopefully the next state to try it can learn from Oregon's mistakes and make sure their plan includes ramping capacity beforehand instead of simultaneously.
People say that treatment is the solution, but a fentanyl or meth addiction is like being involved in a terrible car crash. You give people back surgery and physical therapy and accommodations at work, but it's extremely expensive and most of them will never be the same afterwards, and a lot of them die. This was the situation in the 60s with cars, and it's the situation today with serious drugs. You have to prevent the car crash and you have to prevent addiction to these drugs, or you wind up with a ton of broken people that we can't really fix.
Yes, and a huge part of that is treating users of heavy drugs(coke, opiates)while they are still functioning individuals.
That means removing the stigma around the usage, accept that these individuals either will quit using these substances themselves by supporting them, or that they will be users until their (probably) untimely passing by again supporting them.
I wonder if its partly an issue when there is a combination of :
- decriminalization of drug use
- free access to treatment centers
- lax laws regarding unauthorized camping
that would a large number of dedicated drug users to migrate from out of state to Oregon (or whichever state tries it) from across the entirety of the US.
This would easily swamp any treatment facility capacity plan.
There's a nugget of truth that Oregon's decriminalization drew people to the state. However, free access to treatment centers wasn't part of that. Badlucklottery is correct that Oregon did not have the treatment programs, even for the people already living in the state.
And there's a lot of reasons for this. Measure 110, which decriminalized possession and usage of drugs, envisioned funding treatment with money from the tax on legal marijuana sales. There are a variety of reasons it failed, but the tl;dr is that it took $100 million from other state programs handed it to the state, and said, "Here you go. Create treatment programs." And the state replied, "But how do we do that?" The legislative branches of the Oregon state government is generally incompetent at administering programs it's been running for years (e.g. public defense). They had no idea how to even go about creating a treatment program or what one even looked like.
And Measure 110 also created a weird bureaucratic structure for dispersing the funds across multiple entities. IIRC 10% would go to the cities. And there's some 200+ cities. I'm sure they tried to allocate the money proportionally, but imagine being a small or medium sized city and the government says, "here's $30,000 for you to establish a drug treatment program." What are you going to do with that? Probably look at it, confused, and put it in a bank account where you'll forget about it.
There were lots of other reasons the attempts to establish treatment programs failed. NIMBYism of people not wanting treatment centers near them, for one. For another, few people ever actually expressed interest in treatment, which became a topic of much time-consuming debate about why we're spending this money on programs addicts don't want. And part of that was because the police basically never enforced the part of the law where they would ticket public users. The users would either pay a fine or call a substance abuse hotline. There are multiple reasons the police never felt it was worth their time to hand out the citations, and that's a topic for another time, but the fact that the treatment centers were being funded by tax money that went to law enforcement before decriminalization probably didn't help.
So yeah, can't swamp treatment facilities that don't exist.
The second any state or city or whatever non federal entity pours the enormous resources necessary to rehabilitate opioid or meth addicts (if even possible with sufficiently high probability of success), other locales will send their addicts to there and reap the rewards of lower taxes.
My eyecrometers measured dozens of people arrive in the rooms, state they avoided jail under prop 36, then stayed clean for more than a couple of years. That was just my observation attending 2-4 meeting weekly in a region with over 1000 weekly meetings. Wasn’t the same for everyone on that program of course. During that time we were starting new meetings to accommodate new people. We aren’t growing at the same rate any more.
I was just looking for what "success" means to you. I don't know much about the proposition, so I don't know what it entails, or why you would define it as "successful".
I don't always have the same metrics of success as everyone else on the internet, and so finding out how people are measuring a successful program off of an internet comment is difficult.
Why not enforce criminalization but invest in better "Nordic style" prisons, which put rehabilitation and treatment at the forefront. Increase safety for the inmates in the prison so they can rebuild themselves instead of societal retribution. IMO prisons are grossly underfunded.
Vanishingly few people are put in prison for mere possession or use of drugs. It's mostly either for dealing, or for committing other criminal actions due to being high or in order to get money for their next high.
>We don’t have the right to tell people if they can’t do drugs. It’s a crime without a victim.
I don't know about others, but I see points like this and it fairly comprehensively invalidates any other points an entity/organisation/etc makes.
Society absolutely can tell people what what's acceptable and what's not. That's almost the definition of a society.
Also it's very much not victimless. Look at the families and especially kids of addicts. The drain on a govts resources (policing/healthcare). On others in society too (drug related violence, car accidents, etc).
Different drugs should be treated differently (weed vs meth, etc) I do believe.
Away from normal productive people by any means necessary. Who cares about them, I care about the normal people being harassed and having their quality of life go down. People like you are what have made cities a mess and unlivable.
There are many victims of addiction besides the OG. Children, relatives who try to help them, tax payers who pay for the fallout, emergency rooms, etc. What we don’t have is a sane treatment facilities. You can’t punish people for this, it won’t fix many of them. Letting them surround public parks and harass passers by isn’t a solution either. We have to put research and manpower into treating the source, the addiction and circumstances that got them there.
I agree with the principle of what you’re saying, do drugs but only if you can contain yourself away from society. The problem with that idea is it’s only a matter of when the dope fiend sells their acreage for more supply.
That's what police and nails are for. We just need to be comfortable incarcerating people who commit crimes. I cannot understand why this is such a controversial take in Oregon.
Three years ago with measure 110 on the ballot, I made the same points I make today with the same people. Back then I was called a radical and today I'm called normal. People need to grow up. Just because a Republican says something somewhere does not mean you need to believe the exact opposite. The truth is that measure 110 is the result of an overly reactionary democrat base that lives on social media and basically became pro drug the moment Trump said something about jail during the Floyd riots.
When I was playing GT 7 (racing) on a simulator, I used to either go hard gas, or hard break.
It’s like a baby. Either they hold something with 100% strength or not at all.
As you grow older, or better at racing, you learn to apply the right pressure to the gas and brake. Very rarely full on.
The same goes for life. Your sort of “grabbing” with full strength. Instead, I suggest a more nuanced approach.
When we are young we just go on or off. But in the area of dealing with “bad” people (we don’t know if they are or not), it’s best to use as little force as possible because you can really hurt people and make life worse. You also get a worse result because police are expensive.
More importantly, each of these people is on drugs because they are in pain. When u hurt them and ignore them, your cutting off an important sense in our communities that’s telling us something is wrong. It’s hard for us to know because we adapted. But for them, they may be more sensitive and can’t handle the suffering so they took drugs.
Society has so many issues we don’t even know. We need to ask God or whoever for wisdom to understand the issue. But going full “brake” when these guys are puffing drugs is overkill and it’s not as effective.
You don't have to decriminalize drugs. You just have to make it illegal to shamelessly and publicly use drugs. The experiment didn't fail because the premise was flawed, it failed because the implementation was kneecapped. Drugs were legal for thousands of years. But they can't admit they screwed up, so let's just pretend throwing people in prison for consuming substances is the way to go.
So states can have borders. The California border is notoriously monitored and they will make you do a full customs inspection sometimes and toss contraband.
States can control their borders so long as they don't trespass Congress's sole authority to regulate interstate commerce.
California is the most famous example, with checkpoints at all road entryways to check for and control entrance of raw produce. Oregon likewise has checkpoints to check incoming watercraft for waterborne pests.
I'm sure truckers can also tell you all about the various trailer regulations that vary between states, not to mention the weigh stations most states have at border crossings.
> California is the most famous example, with checkpoints at all road entryways to check for and control entrance of raw produce
As someone who has crossed that border many times in Tahoe, enforcement a) relies on the honesty from the people in the car b) runs seemingly randomly (ie more than half the time there is no checkpoint c) even when running enforcement is applied selectively based on whether you have California plates or not.
I think OP is probably talking about the practical effect of success of trying to control state borders effectively vs what you see which may be mostly for show / best effort. Of course you may be replying to “mass scale” smuggling vs what independent people may try to smuggle.
Thanks for the clarification, I've never heard about US states controlling their borders before.
But I guess the level of scrutiny is way laxer than that at international borders.
My point was how effective would be a policy like the one instituted by Oregon be, when the state can't effectively control the flow of drugs? Wouldn't any progress be offset by "leaky" borders and the free flow of people?
I’ve traveled out of CA 6 times since 2021. This is a California checkpoint:
Slow down for the inspection point. Approach the officers. Mostly they just waved me through without checking anything except maybe my license plate with a smart camera. Once they asked me if I had any fruit or agricultural products. One time I answered yes and handed over some apples and said “thank you” and was waved through.
Pretty sure it’s not at every border crossing. The one by Tahoe is “famous”, but I don’t think there’s one if you cross over via 182. At least I don’t remember one last time I did so.
It is unlucky to correlate with the start of the horrible fentanyl epidemic and a huge increase in unhoused. Correlation isn’t causation, but given the huge cost of fent treatment and the low success rates of such treatment, the other side of decriminalization is unlikely to see much implementation.
One advantage of having 50 states with various laws is that we don’t need to just speculate about this stuff. The fentanyl epidemic and increased homelessness impacted many places, but the evidence is that it was much, much worse in Oregon.
> The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation—and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths.
Opinions about why the policy failed vary, but the rollback is happening because there is wide agreement that it has failed.
> One advantage of having 50 states with various laws is that we don’t need to just speculate about this stuff.
That's actually a disadvantage, and explains why the US will never be able to address the homelessness problem.
If you have one jurisdiction where the approach is to aggressively kick out the homeless and another where they try their best at solving the problem, the would-be solver location will inevitably fail because all the homeless will migrate there. No single city or state can solve homelessness for the entire country.
You need every jurisdiction to cooperate at solving it simultenously, but the prisioners dilemma of 50 states encourages individual states to push the problem onto others, solving nothing and guaranteeing nobody else can solve either it.
That isn't really much evidence though: unhoused, who are more likely to get addicted to fent, have long migrated to west coast cities due to mild weather and social services, ever since the late 19th century when the meme was a classic hobo with a bindle hopping a freight train to San Francisco. You will see similar horrible affects of fentanyl in Vancouver BC as well, so we don't even have to speculate if American policy is to blame.
I'd encourage you to read the article. This is something that has been studied in depth. It's true there was an increase in visible homelessness in cities across the west coast (although, at least in SF, this has since declined) but drug overdoses have been much, much worse in Portland than in other west coast cities.
The article is paywalled so I can only get through the beginning. I live in Ballard (Seattle) and every other day there is a fent overdose. SF is having the same problem, as are LA and Vancouver. It might be worse in Portland (though maybe just relative to population), but it is bad across the entire coast (Seattle's problem is worse than Portland's because Seattle is more populated than Portland).
There is a lot of politics involved in politicians saying their city has the worst problem. But you are going to see similar problems if you do a one day drive (or take the Cascade amtrack) from Vancouver BC to Portland OR. Drug enforcement in all of these cities (+ Californian cities) is all fairly lax, even if drugs aren't decriminalized, people are still doing fent in public or on public transit without much harassment.
At this point having federally funded "drug camps" where folks are housed, fed, given regular opioids, and live out their days is probably more humane than anything else we can come up with, at least until until someone develops some kind of semi-permanent methadone.
> There's millions of things we could or need to spend tax dollars on and you suggest enabling drug addicts?
Drug camps aren't really enabling drug addicts, it is just giving up on them and dealing with the humane problem of just keeping them alive for as long as possible as cheaply as possible.
But I can also empathize with your position, which is more what the Chinese do. Zero tolerance is given to drug addicts, and unless their families pay up for treatment, they are going to work camps until they die. With harsh consequences, people avoid that, even if they are unhoused.
If there is a huge stigma against being a drug addict, you better believe that people will think a lot harder about it when offered drugs at a party. There is a lot of personal choice involved, so I totally get that we don't want society to enable behavior, there has to be consequences so someone decides not to get addicted to fent.
Is it really enabling them if they are forced into camps? It would get them off the streets (and out of our way) in a way that would not be as directly mean to them as jail. I suspect it would not be as expensive as what we are trying now, as long as it was actually a drug camp and not a luxury hotel.
I think this would work great actually, it will just never happen because it’s too easy to attack politically.
“You’re Japanese internment camping the homeless!”
“You’re concentration camping the homeless!”
“You’re gulaging the homeless!”
Etc.
Being forced anywhere starts to sound like jail, except it would be a free for all in there. How would the policy force anyone into a camp without guards? Why would this work great?
I think this is unfortunate failure but at least they tried something. I hope they comeback with a multifaceted solution in whatever iteration comes next.
Normally one might consider the political spectrum to go from the liberal stance of "It's all society's fault that you are how you are" to the conservative stance "It's all your fault you are how you are", with the practical situation being somewhere in between on a case by case basis.
However, things like drug decriminalization bring out further extremes, with extreme liberals espousing you should be able to do anything you want (even if you become a hazard to your community) and extreme conservatives feeling you should do what you want and the weak should die and the strong should live.
Only centrists and perhaps realpolitik people see all highly profitable addictive drugs that destroy the lives of the users as not some kind of accident on an individual basis and instead a super successful subscription business model with negative externalities that they would rather not suffer the side effects of as a community. Alas this view seems to not get so much airtime, and just ends up being a matter of fact as things play out.
To all the it's been illegal for over 100 years and it hasn't got any better school of thought people, so has murder. Were we expecting the nature of people to evolve in 100 years?
Seriously wondering from the perspective of choices of how to do things. Do we want to try to get the best result for the most people? How many false positives or false negatives do we want?
Meanwhile Seattle where hard drugs are still illegal has become an absolute 4th world shithole near the center, with passed out drug addicts strewn around Benaroya Hall. I literally saw a police officer watch a guy shoot up heroin and do nothing. Is this “progressive”? Is this good for the public? Where do we draw the line, if anywhere?
Because public (voters) don't care enough. Like, did you file a police report? Did you film the police officer doing nothing? Did you sue the police for not doing their duty?
And no one did, because no one cares enough. There are more pleasant things to do, e.g. online.
Well in SF we have been made apathetic to filing reports by YEARS of soft on crime policies. Like prosecutors simply releasing repeat criminals, who go on to victimize everyone all over again. The only value to filing a report is insurance - but who is going to pay the deductible for something stolen out of your car that is worth less than the deductible? I personally don’t blame the officers at all - I blame the state legislators, city leaders, and city attorney offices.
The point is not winning. The point is keeping checks, and publicity. Knowing they might get sued, even winning, is enough. How they are gonna talk to their neighbors who read about that case in a local newspaper?
But the more people say "you're never gonna win" -- the less people care, coming to the current situation.
Who paid for the police job? Who will do the police job? Who will have problems with police and law because of the job? Can you calculate risk/reward for police and for volunteer?
This is not “democracy”. People don’t want this, and therefore the will of the people is being ignored. It’s just that all candidates they can realistically elect in Seattle are OK with it, or worse. Why, I have no idea.
I was shocked visiting downtown Seattle recently, as there was an entire block or two near the art museum that was completely taken over by drug addicts. Most seemed to be on fentanyl, as they were standing hunched over as I’ve seen elsewhere. I saw security guards around but they didn’t care. And I saw a police SUV drive by, so they definitely are aware it is happening. We ended up moving two blocks over to find a way around without having to walk through all that.
Putting aside the cynical jab, as a general principle, there is nothing wrong with putting prisoners to work. There is a difference between chattel slavery and indentured servitude. The latter is a perfectly legitimate punishment to pay off the debt to society that justice demands. Why you or others think this is wrong, I don't understand. That's what justice is: paying a debt. When working, at least you aren't just rotting in prison, but contributing to some social good, perhaps even learning a skill. That is one problem with our prisons, the rotting. We throw people into what is a savage factory and forget about them, letting them rot in a nexus of gangs and thugs. Because punishment has three ends, viz., retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence, work meets all three criteria to one degree or another.
>" there is nothing wrong with putting prisoners to work."
Prisons for profit leads to increasing length of incarceration and simply putting in prison people who should not be there.
>"That's what justice is: paying a debt"
I do not believe in debt and punishment. I think it should be about deterrence and rehabilitation. Yes some people are rotten to the core and can't be rehabilitated. So they'll stay behind the bars.
