Oregon’s decriminalization of drug possession is proving disastrous | Hacker News Reader

Oregon’s decriminalization of drug possession is proving disastrous

city-journal.org

16 pointsBostonian36 comments

> Less than two years later, Oregon is suffering through the predictable results of this experiment: overdoses are skyrocketing, violent crime is rising, and virtually nobody is getting treatment.

This is also true across the country, the vast majority of which have not decriminalized anything.

And if property crimes are rising, the real question is why the people committing those crimes are not being arrested and brought to Justice.

You don’t need to arrest people for drug possession to prevent them from committing multiple real crimes. You need to arrest them for committing real crimes.

Which reveals the real attraction of drug arrests. They are easy. Which allows the police and the prosecutors to goose their numbers and look like they’re doing something, as opposed to solving and prosecuting real crime, which is harder to do.

The article he links to actually refutes pretty much everything the author says.

https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/05/13/overdose-deaths-rose-3...

Oregon had the 5th largest rise in overdoses behind such progressive luminaries as Alaska, Kansas, South Dakota and Vermont. I may be wrong, but I doubt any of these states decriminalized hard drugs over this period.

And the article points out the massive jump in ODs is due to a significant influx of Fentanyl in Oregon, which until recently had been largely an East coast phenomenon.

Hear, hear! Fentanyl has destroyed every city it touches in the same way, regardless of whether drugs are decriminalized or not. The cops don't have the budget to deal with it, all crime rises and huge swaths of the city become uninhabitable/unsafe for everyone. That's clearly the root of the problem.

Another solution might be for heavy federal intervention in finding and dismantling the fentanyl distribution network and throwing everything at them. Those guys need to be jailed for life or killed.

Another solution might be to allow opiate addicts to have access to safer versions (e.g., pharma grade and/or grow their own poppies).

My brother died of a heroin overdose many years ago -- it was illegal then (of course) and the country spent billions on "drug enforcement" but it didn't stop the black market from providing him a dangerous drug with no way of knowing purity.

Drug addiction is a health issue and by criminalizing it we don't make it go away, we just make it more expensive and more destructive to society.

What the fentanyl situation shows is that the real problem with the various decriminalization efforts in the US is that they don’t go far enough.

They also need to be providing legal, vetted, licensed channels that supply drugs to the users so people aren’t using drugs laced with fentanyl.

That’s the quickest, easiest and probably the least likely to succeed solution.

This is not how decriminalization of hard drugs has succeeded in any other country. Heroin abuse is illegal in Portugal, as is the unauthorized posession of fentanyl, MDMA, cocaine, crack, etc. They won't put you in prison, but they'll take you to jail. Addicts are compelled to enter treatment:

https://beportugal.com/portugal-drug-laws/

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ldjif4/the_portugal...

San Francisco is doing all they can to pursue the sort of plan you propose. It isn't working. Drug abuse and related crimes have only gotten worse. "I heard about Portugal on a podcast" drug policy has been a disaster.

Switzerland pioneered this approach, and it has been implemented in Germany, Netherlands, Canada and Denmark.[0]

What does Portugal have to do with it?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

There is a difference between legalizing recreational heroin, as the parent comment and activists like Dr. Carl Hart suggest, and providing maintenance doses in a medical setting under supervised and monitored conditions. Switzerland does the latter.

Portgul is relevant because their program of decriminalization is frequently referenced in media and by US policymakers.

Hear, hear!

Society is just fine with people killing themselves with drugs as long as they are alcohol and tobacco.

The problem is too much money is made off the current situation and most the population has been brainwashed into thinking that making drugs illegal will protect us from them.

IIRC homicides were up 30% nationwide, but 80% in Portland, OR. That seems like it still stands out from the trend. Dunno about other stats, but property crime tends to correlate with open-air drug use.

It seems you’re recollecting numbers from this article.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oregon/articles/2022...

2021 did indeed see a growth in homicides over 2020. But 2020 saw an even greater growth in homicides over 2019. Considering the measure was passed in Nov 2020, it’s pretty likely that the rise of homicides in Portland had causes other than Measure 110.

Yes, looks like the 80% number is from 2021. Here are more recent figures:

>The homicide rate in the City of Portland is up 207% according to a new report released this morning by Mayor Wheeler's office.

https://twitter.com/KATUNews/status/1548387567015383040

Local governments want Portugal’s drug decriminalization results without resorting to Portugal’s methods. It can’t work. Former long-shot gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger has written about this extensively.

>Many progressives believe that Portugal and Netherlands reduced drug deaths by simply decriminalizing drugs, which is wrong

>The Portuguese coerce addicts to quit, and don't allow public drug use, as the architect of the Portuguese approach explained to me:[…]

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/14153458369139220...

I'm guessing Portugal also has a much better social safety net and universal healthcare. IIRC some part of the measure that passed here in oregon decriminalizing drugs addressed the treatment part, but I'm also recalling that treatment isn't well funded.

Thomas Hogan (author) is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He has served as a federal prosecutor, local prosecutor, and elected district attorney

What a shock. A former prosecutor doesn't like this law. Also, the Manhattan Institute was behind Reaganomics and other conservative ideas.

Decriminalization may be a bad idea, but I don't trust the above for an objective look.

Update: How's it going? They're coming up with ways to compel people to go into treatment since not many are volunteering

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/04/oregon-decrimina...

While I don't think that drug addicts should go to "jail" for being found using hard drugs - there should exist some incentive to go through treatment. Some freedoms or state granted benefits could be curtailed. Perhaps losing a driver's license might be a first step.

I wonder if this has saved the state much money. Imprisoning and prosecuting anyone is expensive and a net drain on the state coffers. Even if the people here don’t pay the “traffic ticket” fines, I have to figure the state is saving a lot of money.

Even if they have huge costs for addiction care etc. they must be saving millions by closing down jail space, downsizing the criminal courts, fielding fewer police, and using probation departments less. I would love to know the reinvestment plan.

I'm from Portland. For the record, I don't think this experiment has worked. A PI friend of mine told me that this decriminalization has led to people in Oregon shipping drugs all over the country. It's anecdotal but dealers can just make it seem like they are holding drugs for themselves (which is perfectly legal) so that theory sounds right to me.

But there is a lot more here than this article lets on.

The murder rate was shattered. But that's because Portland had one of the lowest rates at 30 for almost 700k. Compare that to almost any big city. It starts getting to be a dangerous city at 30 per 100k, and Portland is still far from even being in the top 50 most dangerous cities by murder rate.

Also, the previous murder rate was set in the 80s when the population was half what it is today. When the are 180 murders per year that is when we should consider the record "shattered."

If you review the Twitter feed of the Portland police you'll see almost all the murders occur at 2 am and in a few districts like old town. Just saying, if the police spent as much time patrolling those districts as they do screeching on Twitter about how they have to shut down all other police work when a car jacker makes the news, maybe the murder rate would go down.

Also, when I looked, Portland police had very consistent public information about their police results, and it often looked like that was not the case in other places which claim to be working to reduce crime. For example, for months the Lincoln Nebraska page that reported police work was just completely down. I'm not saying the police are creating a false narrative, but they aren't fighting it, and the Portland police are really upset about those protests in Portland that were some of the biggest and most persistent in the country.

I definitely see a huge difference between now and ten years ago in a very very bad way. I never felt uncomfortable in most places in Portland before but now every neighborhood has people in horrible situations, often looking violent. It's hard to know if that's all the pandemic, or decriminalization, or the housing boom. I'm sure it's a combination of it.

We should handle recreational drugs, no matter how hard, just like alcohol.

No one complains that alcoholics are not seeking treatment. Why should we give a shit if addicts don't seek treatment? Why should we force drug addicts into treatment programs when we don't force alcoholics?

We need to also legally sell drugs at liquor stores and drug stores, with an ID check. It would remove a lot of the criminal element.

It sounds like there was no execution put in place. They just lifted the gate and let loose.

What about harm reduction? Testing kits, needle recycling, or even diamorphine clinics like in Canada, assuming they can.

The article is so quick to blame decriminalization, as if it solely lead to infections and overdoses, shame on them.

Maybe not sending people to jail for doing drugs is a good idea, regardless of the outcomes.

Most of the comments here are a product of arrogance. You have no idea what it's like to be a drug addict and you should keep your book arguments to yourself

Just a heads-up:

"City Journal is a public policy magazine and website, published by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research"

This article was written by a person who is so proud to be a prosecutor that he mentions three ways he was a prosecutor in his 26-word bio at the end. So his thesis is... that Oregon should prosecute more people. At least he's consistent.

Actually, it seems like he mentions two ways three times (an elected district attorney is a local prosecutor.)

He is trying to say that he was an Assistant US Attorney (federal prosecutor), an Assistant District Attorney (local prosecutor), and that he held the top DA job somewhere (elected DA). It's really quite a brag.

I don't think we should discount what he says because he's a prosecutor or what you have to say because your moniker is "public_defender".

No, of course not. I think the sibling comments give lots of clear reasons to discount the author (and to credit him). I only wanted to point out that the piece seems very one-sided. And of course I am one of nature's counterbalances to unfair prosecutor behavior, so I was summoned.

I'm joking a little, but to be completely serious, if I wrote an article like this, it would be rightly discounted by everyone unless I explained my perspective sufficiently to offset the bias which is assumed to travel with my role. This is uniquely true for criminal lawyers because we are known professionally for advocating only one side of causes, and it's uniquely pernicious for prosecutors because, though they too are one-sided in their advocacy, they benefit from a mis-assumption that they seek fairness or consider all sides of issues like this.

It will continue and get worse until these cities are no longer held captive by this ideology.

Or perhaps the first cities will bear the brunt of the difficulties as we transition?

Transition to…what?

A society that doesn't view recreational drug abuse or use as criminal.

I don’t even know how to process this.

It is clear that hard drug use does not happen in some isolated vacuum that doesn’t impact society around it. The despair, poverty, mental health, disease, violence and more that accompanies drug use is obvious and in many places out of control.

We can pretend there is some nobility to allowing this but people do not want to live in an open air drug den are moving away, voting against it, or shutting down their business (see: Starbucks recent closures)

The plight of drug addicts has become a convenient hammer with which to beat political opponents and gain retweets. “Look how empathetic I am, offering these victims a safe space to use. I am not throwing them in prison, for I am benevolent.”

The reality of this is now coming back to bite these people because as it turns out, the rest of society doesn’t want to live among the chaos that comes with hard drugs. We can continue to play pretend but civilians in these cities and open air drug neighborhoods aren’t interested anymore.

Drugs are not the problem, mental illness is and drugs are one of the coping mechanisms. Regulating them and having production quality control would go a long way towards reducing bad outcomes.

Obviously what we have been doing for 50 years is not working, time to try some new strategies. Getting hyperbolic about it does not help, you're just participating in the useless talking points.

The suburbs, for those who can afford it.

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