That’s… what I’m arguing? There’s a hard problem to be solved with uncertain paths toward a solution — or uncertainty of what “solved” means in this case, maybe, depending on whether endemic is an acceptable outcome — and every attempt at a solution that doesn’t work out, or doesn’t work out sufficiently well, is data added to the project of getting better outcomes for all. I’m not entirely sure what you’ve read in my comment but I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t view things plainly.

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.

Taking results at face value is silly when your sample size is 1.