I would also challenge your implicit notion here that there is a binary pass/fail solution to societal levels of drug addiction. Like any seriously hard problem there are policies that have been proposed and implemented around that world that have some positive outcomes in some regards and negatives in others. Incarceration (the Drug War) theoretically makes serious drug addiction absent from public life, a positive, but with the result of growing the police state, a negative. Vice versa for Oregon’s policy, now that it’s run for a while. I think we’re recently finding that Portugal’s approach which Oregon based their policy on also does not have better than expected outcomes, although the data is early yet.
That is significantly more than what's recognized as a good sample size.
> What's needed is data on many alternative approaches, what policies _and_ executions taken as one promote better outcomes? > Over what timeframes?
This is where the goalpost shifting happens.
I can not think of a single instance in recent history where a political leader has admitted that a policy they like has failed because it was fundamentally a bad idea.