Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – it isn't working
wsj.com
wsj.com
- recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the ticket or going to treatment
- funded treatment with $300mm from cannabis taxes
The problem is Oregon took years to decide who to give the treatment money to. Only last year did they actually start funding treatment.
In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.
Essentially drug use was entirely ignored for a couple years.
So is measure 110 a failure? It's too soon to say. Certainly the rollout has been.
One unintended consequence is that Oregon has no law against public drug use, leaving this issue to cities/counties. If they don't have such a law, public drug use is essentially legal, since police used to rely on possession to stop it.
One thing that has gone right is the reduction of the burden on the court system. The state saved about $40mm over the first 3 years.
However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.
Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.
One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.
I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.
It remains illegal. It's just that the penalties for it are removed. It means no legitimate, tax-paying business will get into it, leaving it for criminal black market operations.
What it needs to be is legalized.
We saw the same thing with drug use in Portugal. Lots of people for years were saying that the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and it was a tremendous success, so we should follow suit. But there was an article here recently talking about how it’s a mess there, and the responses were “Well, of course, because the government didn’t _also_ do XYZ.”
Also, the decriminalization movement seems to overlap mostly with the deincarceration movement. And if you have both, what incentives do you actually have? The above poster said to just threaten them with a fine. That’s what they did with fare evasion here, now people just give false names or ignore the fine.
Honestly, given we’re now seeing things we were told we wouldn’t see by the decriminalization advocates, a lot of this is sounding like “No True Scotsman” arguments. It seems like no matter the failure, someone is just going to come along and say that it’s not a real failure because the government messed up.
I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.
A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.
This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.
Just because drug use is illegal doesn't mean that the damage of drugs is free.
You either spend XYZ millions of dollars (in both direct costs and wasted human potential) and inflict untold human suffering by 'treating' that damage through prisons.
... Or you decriminalize it, and spend QRS millions of dollars by treating it through other means.
Society still pays, the difference is in how and how much it pays.
b) You may be able to tax the activity too, further offsetting costs
c) Ruining lives by attaching criminal charges to activities should not solely be a cost-benefit analysis anyway. Or if it is, it needs to take into account the lost opportunities and lost years of those who are caught up in the criminal system
If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away. I can really admire countries like China that don’t coddle their addicts and instead apply pure tough love.
It seems people take a moral or 'fairness' based attitude to these social phenomena and that's what causes things like the war on drugs as a form of justice. The idea that everyone is self determined, which in a small way is true of the individual. But if you look at people in aggregate things are more clear, the universe doesn't play by those rules...
Turns out, drugs are both fun AND addictive and it's hard to combat that with threats of jail time.
I think you're probably right that the criminal justice system isn't the most effective way of dealing with people who are already addicted, but how do you propose we stop people from getting addicted in the first place if hard drugs are perfectly legal, and the government is actively working to minimize the personal downsides of being addicted to them? Why not become an addict if the only consequence is that it means you get free food and housing for the rest of your life?
There are shades of legal and illegal. There's "We're going to lock you up for years for simple possession" and there's "We're giving it away free to kids at the corner store!", and in between those extremes lies a whole multidimensional landscape we could explore.
With harder drugs like opiates, most people are not talking about them being available at the liquor store, but solutions like removing criminal penalties for possession while providing support services, maintenance doses and counselling for those who are addicted.
> Why not become an addict
Is that a life you want? Queuing up outside the medical centre every morning for a shot that keeps the pain at bay?
It's not a life I want.
If you're saying you can't acquire heroine, given 24 hours, I'm afraid I've lost faith in everything else you've said because it's just based on a flawed perception of what world we live in.
How much do you think we have spent on the DEA, ATF, and 2 million prisoners?
Furthermore, you could use the same argument about the effects of a whole lot of other mental health and healthcare issues. It'd be cheaper to let a whole lot of people suffer or die. It'd also be grossly inhumane. Like China.
You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.
The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.
> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop
Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.
Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?
> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.
No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.
> I can really admire countries like China...
That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.
And from your other comment -
> it would be better if they didn't do drugs
Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...
But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.
And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.
There are plenty of people who really do want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. LA's homeless "crisis" is proof of that; there are literally thousands of shelter beds that go unused each night because almost all of LA's homeless shelters are sober facilities which do not allow alcohol, drugs, or related contraband, and the addicts would rather be on the streets using drugs than have shelter, food, and stability.
Yeah, that doesn't mean what you think it means when you're talking about people in the throes of addiction.
The problem isn't that some people are weak willed. It's more that there are many cultural elements that covertly value antagonism and hostility, and the poor bear the brunt of that.
The rich bear the brunt in other ways. No one much cares if $billionaire is clearly off his head on coke, because he/she has the protective support system that makes prosecution unlikely - even though their decision-making can be ridiculous, self-harming, and catastrophic for millions.
That aside - wealth really doesn't mean they're models of mental and emotional health.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/poverty-homelessness-and...
To be in the position of recognizing a problem and then being relatively powerless to enact change is a powerful motivator in disavowing the problem or responsibility to fix it. It's an adaptive response to avoiding mental discomfort.
And it works - people who don't feel responsibility to others avoid an entire class of mental discomforts. Taking away that adaptive mechanism exposes folks to a level of pain they likely aren't equipped to handle - a reason they developed it in the first place.
This is a pretty ignorant comment to see on HN. So far we have strong evidence to show delegalisation causes huge issues and legalization works as expected. Have a look at any country that went that route.
https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. "
Prior to that, the numbers seemed quite impressive:
"By 2018, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. Portugal had the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. HIV infections from drug use injection had declined 90%. The cost per citizen of the program amounted to less than $10/citizen/year while the U.S. had spent over $1 trillion over the same amount of time. Over the first decade, total societal cost savings (e.g., health costs, legal costs, lost individual income) came to 12% and then to 18%."
Source: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
If we're ignoring them now, what's the problem with continuing to ignore them?
It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.
In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)
I also want to emphasize that the tax increases and tort protections that Anglo governments have end up usually costing individuals more than they would under a system that is willing to pay up front for a larger government, but that these costs are hidden in terms of tax garnishes, fees, and other things instead of upfront tax costs.
The entire idea is insane. Let’s make drugs legal and provide treatment for the problem we created.
It’s the same of saying hey! Lawn darts are now legal, don’t worry we will increase our EMS staff during the summer.
Like having drugs be illegal?
I don't think children should be going anywhere near such things without adult supervision, but completely banning sale seems like a wildly disproportionate response.
But throwing a dart high in the air and hitting a wandering 2 year old actually did happen, and there was no real attempt to only their the darts in one direction
I was a nine years old and I tossed it as high and as far as I could. I realized it was coming dangerously close to a friend. Everybody had their backs to me. I yelled, but nobody heard me.
In my memory it landed inches from them, but that could be because I was young and scared shitless. Maybe it landed fifteen feet behind them. All I know is it scared me enough that I have never touched a lawn dart after that.
The "issue" drugs and their users existed no matter what, and decriminalization of them (I suspect) hasn't caused a spike in users of the bad drugs.
I for one, will not try meth or heroin no matter how accessible it is.
Decriminalization says "okay we don't want this stuff on the shelf at Walgreens, but trying to jail people for it isn't working, so let's try something else".
Jailing costs money. Treatment costs money. The question is which tool is better for society and each citizen?
Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
This does seem to be a particularly terrible ‘implementation’ though.
The problem near as I can tell is that people are ignoring the very real needs of the majority to not be miserable, and actively guilting the majority (you’re not allowed to not like these things because that would mean you’re a bad person) and that is winding the spring for an authoritarian backlash which we’ve already seen get very scary.
People care about their emotions, and when pressed will do almost anything to protect them. Including having people March ‘bad people’ off to ovens as long as they can pretend they’re awesome in the process.
Trump gets so much traction for this very reason, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
No, it can't
>Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
That's a horrible example.
I largely agree with the rest of the post.
You mean like providing basic infrastructure to ensure society and commerce can function?
There are plenty of things which can and should require government intervention. Unless you're a hardline anarchist, there's not a lot of wiggle room on this one.
As for drugs, let's be clear, they weren't made legal, they were made to function like traffic citations, with required treatment instead of prison time. Are you going to argue that we shouldn't have traffic citations, because they require traffic court and the necessary infrastructure to process the fines?
One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction.
Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown.
And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine.
So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.
The history of Oregon is grimly fascinating. It was more-or-less illegal for black people to live in Oregon from 1844 to 1926 (although this became complicated to enforce thanks to the 14th amendment in 1868). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
Not that long after that law was struck down, there was a large migration of black families to Portland to work in the shipyards during WW2. Kaiser et all built a factory town a bit north of Portland proper named Vanport. This place is a fascinating bit of history because it was racially integrated with no real tensions. After the war was over most of the families decided to stay.
Then some years later a flood destroyed Vanport. It was clear rebuilding it would result in the same thing in the future. So the wonderful leaders of Portland asked themselves "where can we put these black people?"
They decided on my neighborhood, Albina. At the time it was mostly germanic people here, because they had been forced into this area in the same way decades before in a prior immigration wave. One interesting sign of this is if you check out all of the now black baptist churches, you'll find cornerstones written in german memorializing their construction.
That said, the black community here thrived. They built a flourishing downtown with lots of business, banks that would not discriminate, etc. Note that this was the only neighborhood black people could live in. Overt redlining continued here until the 1970s.
Flash forward to that time and two different projects were deliberately used to destroy that downtown as well as steal a portion of the neighborhood. Building a freeway interchange for one, and the construction of a hospital as the second.
The hospital is particularly galling as they used eminent domain to take people's businesses and houses, paying far below market value, and even worse stole vastly more land than the hospital needed. At the time they justified it as needed for "future expansion."
Just about 15 years ago in this neighborhood you'd find the hospital surrounded by several blocks of either nothing but grass, or grass and just one or two small buildings.
And then Portland got hit with the massive migration wave creating our housing crisis. So the hospital started selling the land to developers to build apartment and condo buildings.
While we definitely needed more housing, it's revolting that black businesses and homes were stolen and destroyed under a lie, only for the hospital to profit off selling the land to developers building housing for upper income folks a few decades later.
We're definitely on the trajectory of progress, but there is still so far to go, and the fight over it is very real.
I hope this helps give people here some context as to why the BLM protests here were so intense. There's real anger and it is justified. Many of the people at those protests either experienced this directly, or are the children of people who did.
[1] https://www.insider.com/how-dogs-are-trained-to-attack-us-pr...
The upshot of this is that you get the trucks on the local roads and thoroughfares anyway, they're just last-mile intermodal or short-haul drayage instead of long-haul, but that doesn't eliminate the perfusuon of 80,000 lb 54 ft metal boxes milling around on streets 7 days a week, streets that were seldom if ever engineered with this kind of abuse in mind.
Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea.
There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike.
Bad execution kills good ideas!
It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding.
The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.
Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...
Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion.
In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility.
The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here.
It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization.
IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.
When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.
I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it.
Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them
Legalization with regulation is the one way to manage addictive substances in a free society. The rest of us are waiting around for you all to stop clutching your pearls so we can do what needs to be done. In the meantime, addicts will keep dying and law enforcement will keep ruining lives.
And black markets will keep getting richer.
> in a free society
I feel these two go together. One reason that we have such a patchwork of messy ineffective policy is because the policymakers are pulled in different directions by a deeply divided society. Just look at this thread - there’s very little clear consensus about what exactly the right answer is. Everybody has an opinion. People vote. Policy lurches.
> do what needs to be done
In contrast, this kind of tough talk is more fitting of a non-free society where sweeping decisions get made by steamrolling stakeholders. The populace gets tired of pusillanimous party politicians, so they elect a strongman who can do what needs to be done. But will the strongman do the right thing? Strongmen don’t have a great track record.
I think part of the problem is that many people suffer no personal consequences from existing policies and they (wrongly) think the people who do suffer somehow deserve it.
2 or 3 decades ago Canada decided to heap big taxes on cigarettes. A black market promptly emerged, complete with drive-by shootings. Canada rescinded those taxes and the black market (and its associated crime) evaporated.
(obviously I'm ignoring the fact that "decriminalizing" doesn't mean the same thing as "legalizing", so those hard drugs aren't legal)
"Under the new laws, which take effect next year, the country’s smoking age of 18 would be raised year by year until it applied to the whole population. Beginning in 2023, those under 15 would be barred from buying cigarettes for the rest of their lives." -NYT
That's the only one I know of. I thought I heard about one other country considering a similar ban?
Contrast with hard drugs, most of the users are not addicts, they are recreational users.
Am I just misunderstanding this sentence, or are you saying that most users of hard drugs aren't addicts?
At the time when tobacco was first sold in the US men were allowed to duel each other to the death. Attitudes about what you can do to and with your body were different.
Smoking opium, long known to be powerfully addictive was legal until the early 1900s, mostly for racist reasons
My presumption is that the commenter was speaking about the US, since that's been the context of the thread thus far.
My dad told me about smokers in the B-17s in WW2. They'd fly at 35,000 feet in unpressurized airplanes. There wasn't enough oxygen to keep the cigarette lit. So what they'd do is take a breath from the oxygen mask, blow it on the cigarette, whereby it would burn like a torch. Then they'd take a puff. The cigarette would begin to sputter and die, whereupon they'd take another breath from the oxygen mask, and the dance would repeat.
After the war, things were pretty bad in Germany. People would follow GIs around, and when they were done with a cigarette, they'd flick away the butt. People would rush to grab the butt, from which they'd harvest a few grains of tobacco. Eventually, they'd get enough to roll into a new cigarette, and sell it.
Market size seems like a better bet, yeah. Plus nobody takes weed as seriously as opiates.
This is completely incorrect.
The taxes remain and have in fact been increased, and the black market has remained, but mostly shrunk as the pool of smokers has decreased due to the increase in taxes and other national campaigns to reduce the amount of smokers.
And sure, cops suck quite often. I am yet to see cops en masse shooting up those reported for ripping others off in one way or another. On the other hand, you have unfortunately very common “drug deal gone wrong” incidents that end in pretty deadly “illegal prosecution”.
In a black market, violence is a competitive advantage in many cases. The most violent has the most ‘authority’ (can assert the most control), so in a competitive environment there are strong incentives to be the most violent. Too violent for other players to want to mess with.
It’s why cartels, warlords, etc. end up becoming so terrible.
Now you see them in the sketchier areas of cities as well.
How is failure or success determined? Did we know what the goals were for decriminalization? Was improving drug purity a goal? Were legal markets supposed to appear? Was it supposed to reduce access to minors? Was some mechanism for connecting addicts to social services to help them supposed to appear?
What would "help" mean in this context anyway? Does it only mean get sober or could it also involve helping addicts continue to use as safely as possible?
I think supporters would say that ending an approach that has failed miserably across multiple generations is a success unto itself. And that the bigger goal was to open a path to a wider rollback of the drug war.
> Was improving drug purity a goal?
Saving lives is always an explicit and implicit goal in public policies around health. Drug purity saves lives. Especially these days.
> Were legal markets supposed to appear? Was it supposed to reduce access to minors?
No. It is basically a government mandate for people to hand their money directly to the criminal drug dealers.
> Was some mechanism for connecting addicts to social services to help them supposed to appear?
To be fair, Oregon has taken other actions to fund services for addicts, like diverting funds from their marijuana tax revenue.
Most people probably want a drug policy that leads to a) fewer dead people and b) fewer addicts and c) reduced crime. Personally, I also think we need to consider liberty as one of the top goals if we're going to judge a drug policy as successful or not. But even in that respect, this law did very little.
It's entirely unclear if full legalisation full will have that effect. Maybe it will, or maybe it will have disastrous effects. It's going to be one hell of an experiment.
You casually dismiss people as "clutching pearls", but that's far too easy, especially when a number of limited experiments have made things worse rather than better. "If we move in this direction it first gets worse and then gets better" is possible, but is going to need a (much) deeper analysis to be convincing.
But no one really knows what will happen. We can guess, but that's all they are: guesses.
I would be surprised if there is a single policy that could accomplish all three of the (a), (b), and (c) goals. I thought decriminalization is meant mostly to tackle (c) in that if having and using drugs isn’t a crime, then the number of drug offenses that end up in the courts should go down.
I don't know if Oregon has any system like that in place right now. If they don't, it would seem like the reasonable first step considering that one of the major complaints seems to be drug use in public.
1: https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/media/publications...
in this case it was a direct referendum passed by voters, overwhelmingly.
the measure itself is quite comprehensive, read it yourself to see if it fits into a roundabout theory
That is very, very much in line with observed behaviors here in Washington state. We had a very strange marijuana legalization process, because it was almost precisely contemporaneous with another popular initiative that dismantled the state-owned liquor regulatory apparatus (it used to be state-franchised liquor stores were the only liquor retailers; Costco and the grocery interests funded a repeal of that and voters were generally quite in favor). The liquor regulator was basically renamed from "Liquor Control Board" to "Licensing of Cannabis Board" (or such) and the machinery was kept around. Extremely odd -- but probably greased the skids for the state to actually adopt the liberalized marijuana policy (instead of slow-rolling it and exaggerating its harms) because it was a new budget and jobs program for the to-be-canned employees.
Presently in Seattle, we have a very similar thing going on with the implementation of mental health and homeless service response for 911 calls for things like high guy in the street or passed out guy in doorway. The politicians are meeting their promise of standing up a small team to go to those calls, but, the police union is insisting that an armed officer go with the mental health responder every time. This malicious compliance protects existing budgets and jobs, and makes the new program destined to fail, because by definition it will always be less economical (due to duplicative efforts).
Short form: never underestimate the bureaucratic/union self-preservation instinct.
But people should be in charge of their own behavior, even if self-destructive.
Does "working" mean it prevents people from using drugs? In that case, throwing millions of people into prison must be a great idea! I call bullshit.
We need to be explicit about our goals! The goal I support is treatment.
Yes, decriminalization is failing to provide treatment. Of course it is! That wasn't its intended purpose in the first place. The purpose was to stop punishing victims with incarceration and felony conviction.
We still need to replace the broken system with a useful one. That means regulated production and distribution of drugs instead of turning a blind eye to the black market. That means programs that heavily encourage treatment, not just "I gave them a ticket to go if they feel like it".
Just imagine if our society put half the effort we put into getting people to drink Coca-Cola into getting people healthcare.
You could read the article.
"People sprawled on sidewalks and using fentanyl with no fear of consequence have become a common sight in cities such as Eugene and Portland. Business owners and local leaders are upset, but so are liberal voters who hoped decriminalization would lead to more people getting help. In reality, few drug users are taking advantage of new state-funded rehabilitation programs."
I think that's the bit you are missing.
Gonna have to correct you here. Measure 110 was supposed to bring decriminalization and treatment. The treatment just never really materialized.
The measure linked the two, they were not treated as separate.
It doesn't matter how or why the treatment aspect of that measure failed: it only matters that it did.
The reality, as clearly laid out by the article, then reiterated by me, then by you, is that drugs were decriminalized and people addicted to those drugs did not receive treatment. We are on the same page here.
What needs to happen now is to resolve the treatment failure.
"Just imagine if our society put half the effort we put into getting people to drink Coca-Cola into getting people healthcare."
Healthcare is our #1 expense and growing bigger every year. We 100% put way more effort and money into it than any other problem our society faces.
That's the problem: the way our healthcare system is currently structured, patients must actively pursue care. I have not seen even an attempt at resolving this problem.
This isn't unique to addiction, either: I would have taken ADHD meds this morning, except that I need to find a new prescriber before I can get any; and to do that, I must overcome the primary symptom of ADHD (executive dysfunction) to even start looking for care. Somehow, being aware of this catch-22 situation only makes it worse.
We already know that people suffering from addiction are the least likely to advocate for change; yet we haven't even bothered to give anyone else the job.
---
> Healthcare is our #1 expense and growing bigger every year.
We already know that the United States wastes an incredible proportion of its healthcare spending. Some comparisons estimate a 20% overhead relative to other countries. Get rid of the insurance model, and we will be in a much stronger financial position.
That doesn't even begin to factor in the added costs of incarceration (which itself includes mandatory healthcare), let alone the secondary costs of an untreated populace who are addicted and impoverished.
So yeah, it's not working because it isn't doing that anymore.
As usual these people didn't learn or "forgot" all the other hard parts.
This particular article doesn't mention it, but I'm getting sick of hearing "Portugal decriminalized drug usage in the 90s and solved the drug problem" - Really? that simple? Even Hollywood westerns were more deep than that.
On of the key aspects to "solve" this problem is also culture, family support, personal responsibility and that's when you hear the tires screeching and nothing will get done or ever work.
Abstinence is not an inevitable consequence of a stable life - plenty of kids from comfortable backgrounds discover they really really like drugs. We need to accept that "getting high" is a basic human motivation that won't go away. The existential realities of the human condition is enough to seek escape. Some of us are born with dopamine regulation issues that doom us towards substance use. Despite being sober for a long time I still had bad cravings for alcohol and nicotine but an adult ADHD diagnosis and medication quieted that insatiable hunger for stimulation... by regular administration of stimulants! The hereditary aspects explained a lot about my family.
IMHO the real solution should be to design better drugs. Consider it the "Steam" argument - we need to outcompete the damaging drugs with products along the lines proposed by David Nutt. e.g.
- no overdose risk or organ damage
- cheap and make available for free so no crime required to acquire
- easy reversal of the effects e.g. with a common product like OJ
- no dependence issues
When you discuss investing in this research, you quickly discover that many of those who claim to be solving tragedies of addiction are actually trying to enforce an ideology that considers getting high to be a moral crime. Even if there were no personal or societal harms they still believe drugs should be violently prohibited. Their ideology actively seeks to cause harm. Of course they are hypocrites getting their stimulation from drink, food, sex, religion, abuse/control of others or whatever they manage to carve out as acceptable.
That there are sharp edges economically and medically is inevitable. Making it less sharp helps, but requires a lot of time, energy, and focus/agreement that is rarely there. And there is no perfect.
Habitual drug addicts don't have personal responsibility, family support, or a community of non-drug addicts to depend on. Forced incarceration in a treatment program is literally their only chance at breaking the cycle long enough to get them support for the underlying issues that led to addiction.
survivorship_bias_plane.png
There are millions of habitual hard drug users that do have some personal responsibility, some family support, some sober people around them encouraging them. They are holding down jobs and paying for their own housing, they've already quit multiple times but have gotten pulled back in. For those people forced incarceration could maybe solve their addiction at the cost of their housing and their job.
Which even trying to agree on what the bigger problem is, near as I can tell, is impossible.
Tents are everywhere. On the side streets, on the interstate right of ways. It's been that way for a decade.
I have to agree, if the secret ingredient to making decriminalization work is enlisting timeless conservative values, we’re toast. A more unlikely coalition has never been seen.
*They* deserve their fate because they are weak, stupid and bad.
*You* have made some bad choices and may work to recover from them.
*I* have merely made a small mistake and deserve a second chance.Measure 110 has some flaws, but the sensible approach is to see what can be done to course correct rather than just go back to the thing that wasn't working.
Scrap the free use drugs laws and invest in clinics for underserved populations with chronic pain management programs and mandatory rehab programs for people who have lost the battle.
https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusi...
After a kid or two, you've done what evolution has selected for, and if walloping amounts of suffering and disability appear after that, well, there's always the next batch. Nobody wants to look too hard at that. People's squeamishness about genetic engineering has always had a whiff of the ignorable about it. It's pretty fun to pat yourself on the back about avoiding "eugenics" when you're healthy and young.
I suppose we could go the animal husbandry approach and just license reproductive age, pushing it steadily up and creating an artificial evolutionary pressure to keep people healthy at greater and greater ages.
Even if you have more specific issues with living next to homeless people, that doesn't mean they deserve to be in jail for drug crimes. They should be given housing.
Even if you did want to throw people in jail for being homeless, only about half of chronically homeless people use drugs (https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaign...), so outlawing drugs wouldn't even solve the issue you want it to solve.
That's a crime on it's own, and it's a crime that most drug users aren't committing.
> ruining neighborhoods
How?
> driving down prices
That's a good thing for people who need to buy homes.
> making drugs more accessible to young kids
Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.
Every US state I've ever been in had people use drugs, smoke weed, completely openly, every club, every corner. Where's the war?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_S...
And your Singapore-style solution is antithetical to a free society.
Without belaboring the analogy, the truth is anyone who wants drugs can get them, right now. So we're not stopping that - but instead we're creating several new kinds of harm. Around marking people as felons, social stigma, loss of income sending people to prison, arrest, and that's before we even talk about how shit the US penal system is. Prison by the way? Full of drugs, and reason for people to want an escape.
Of course making it illegal also creates a black market which is basically the only reason cartels exist.
The reality is it's a mental health issue, and a particularly interesting one - for instance, American GIs addicted to heroin in Vietnam came home and the vast majority of them just stopped using it cold turkey. Fascinating right? [1]
Decriminalization and treating it as a mental health issue -- and sentencing addicts to rehab makes infinitely more sense.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...
The logic is pretty straightforward: You eliminate the source of drugs you eliminate drugs. The problem is the complexities surrounding the word "eliminate".
I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively.
That being said there are other places that legalized drugs and that helped with the drug problem but the logic here isn't as straightforward. It's the complexities that make it work and dealing with complexities is next to impossible. We can't even fully articulate why it worked in these places and replicating it will be hard if not impossible.
The drug war largely didn't work because of complexities. There's so much bureaucracy surrounding getting to the root of the problem and putting someone in jail. Singapore just executes you if you sell hard drugs. You're done. That's an effective deterrent and it is PROVEN to work.
Whether that method is moral or justified is a different story, but in terms of easiest, most effective and most practical method this is the best possible way. The path forward is right there, we know how to do it.
The blocker here is morality and people like you. You likely use drugs and you don't want to be executed. You want to use these things recreationally and straddle the line between abuse and responsible use. Nothing wrong with your viewpoint, but personally speaking, I would completely eliminate recreational/responsible drug use if it meant saving lives and improving society.
I mean it's your right to use drugs, but at the same time I don't want to walk through SF smelling shit, piss and avoiding junkies. So when you're rights infringe on public spaces then that's a problem.
Fun ad hominem.
> I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively.
No they didn't haha.
All of the countries in east Asia have huge drug problems. Japan has incredibly strict drug laws and a horrible meth problem. In the last major outbreak, 2% of Japan was injecting meth intravenously. Drugs are available in Japan, [1] Singapore [2] and China [3]. Exacerbated by the criminalization.
All aggressive prosecution does is push problems underground.
We've tried it your way for like 52 years. Your way has filed. Time to try something new.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xg8q7k/how-stigma-created-ja...
[2] https://www.thecabinsingapore.com.sg/blog/despite-tough-pena...
In Singapore, drug use is illegal, not "illegal." Note, again, the quotation marks.
Perhaps, we could start with nationalizing ~80% of the country's housing stock, requiring permits for which neighbourhood you are allowed to live in, having ethnic quotas for each region to enforce multiculturalism and harmony and common prosperity...
Stable housing, and a stable, harmonous society, with many of your pressing concerns back-stopped by a benevolent autocracy are probably the reason Singapore has low rates of drug use.
It's weird how the US right salivates over a very small, bloody subset of Singapore's social policies... While turning its nose at the ones that actually make it a successful state. It's almost like the cruelty, not the outcomes, are the point...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-drugs-idUSSIN13...
[2] https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/drug-abuse-starts-youn...
Any change you see now is just noise as they're basically at the peak of the amplitude for maximal change. And that's what you're basically googling.
You need to look at relative illicit drug use by population percentage by country:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-...
Also think critically. You will be killed if you attempt to sell drugs there. Does it make sense that the policy is not effective? What the hell is going on?
Don't be just a blind data scientist trying to scaffold the data to fit your view point. If the data doesn't fit the common sense then perhaps you're unconsciously manipulating the data to fit your view.
Also one of your articles shows 0.7% of youths in Singapore have used drugs in the past year. Is that suppose to support your argument? Look up the amount of youths that use drugs in the US. I think the reported number is like 40%. Actual number is likely 70%.
Who would be our ‘strongman’ here that could mobilize such a force, locking down the entire border, searching everyone, etc.?
And is that really any better?
If the war on drugs worked remotely as well as the war on rain, we wouldn't even be discussing it.
This is a great analogy. Rain is drugs and arresting people for drugs is patching roofs. When the government spends resources on anything other than arresting people with drugs (doing roofing jobs) then they are destroying people’s homes (things that are affected by rain or drugs).
It is so refreshing to see a simple and profound insight on this
Opioid epidemic happened because doctors prescribed it as pain killers.
Bro, there was a movie made about how wrong you are on this topic. It's called pain hustlers, it stars captain america and emily blunt. In the movie they renamed the drug to Lonafen, but the actual drug is called Subsys. The drug contains Fentanyl.
In fact, maybe a reluctance to prescribe the stuff is exactly why the guy resorted to bribing people.
According to the CDC, 4% of fentanyl deaths come from prescription fentanyl.
The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.
The real question is if the costs are worse than the problem. We gave up on alcohol prohibition because it was clear it was a net negative.
If people are upset at drug users using drugs in public (which seems to be the thing everyone actually has a problem with) give them somewhere to use their drugs that isn’t in public.
Why can’t they use them at home?
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/09/27/oregon-drug-decrimina...
This is definitely not a decided issue.
* what constitutes "working", and
* "working" for whom?
The article makes it clear to me that the main problem is that since there are no criminal sanctions, there is less incentive to hide drug-taking activity. The streets are now cluttered with filthy, homeless fentanyl and meth addicts. Many right-thinking citizens are upset by how untidy it all looks.
What a surprise that not making an addict's life harder by locking them up has not magically led to them getting clean. The uptake on support services is not what one would hope.
Some people would like to return to criminalisation, presumably because "out of sight, out of mind". I think people with poverty, addiction and mental health problems should be given more support instead.
You also suggest they should be "given more support" what to do if this does not work, and does not keep the rest of society safe?
Did it solve the drug problem, no. This is not enough and such a problem cannot be solved in 3 years, nor can it be solved state wide because addicts who don't want to be harassed by law enforcement will move to states that let them live.
Looks like people just don't care about the drug problem, and its impact on criminality, economy and general well being of their fellow human being. People just don't care there are addicts, they care about seeing them out in public only.
Drug prohibition is in principle incompatible with liberty.
If you want a free society, some things must be legal even if the social impact of allowing them to be legal seems to many people to be negative. There are already laws against many of the things that people blame on drugs. I know that it is tempting to many people to criminalize drugs rather than to try to do a more effective job of policing things that people blame on drugs. But this is the same kind of mentality that would, for example, get rid of free speech because sometimes free speech leads people to commit violence. That kind of mentality is a pathway towards the US becoming like China.
Another issue with the drug war is unfair enforcement. Well-off people have absolutely no problem getting illegal drugs. A huge number of successful professionals do illegal drugs on a regular basis and only rarely even come close to potentially getting in legal trouble. Meanwhile poor people and dealers are probably more likely to get busted.
The drug war, by artificially making certain substances sell at prices that are vastly higher than what it costs to manufacture them, also creates a type of black market currency that enables the activities of all sorts of groups that engage in actually harmful behavior like killing people.
“I pride myself on being a bit cynical, but obviously I was very naive.”
“There is constant problems all over town—it doesn’t matter where you live—with people strung out on drugs,” said Loew, who described herself as a communist. “I pride myself on being a bit cynical, but obviously I was very naive.”
Just for the sake of argument here, supposing someone is addicted to drugs in private, and legalization is at a stage where they can get quality product that they're not going to overdose on easily. Is that actually a problem for society? Like, if you prefer to live a lifestyle where you sleep under a bridge and spend the money you would've used for housing on drugs, maybe that's just a personal choice that's yours to make? The only problem I see here is -- how is it that these drug addicts are funding their habit? I'm thinking through criminal activity in many cases?
I'd be concerned about that falling extra-heavily on homeless people in some way. If someone were already stuck sleeping on a park bench, it'd be kind of unfair to ding them again for not being tipsy or high "back in their own home."
In practice, cops could just arrest for the sort of public drug use that causes problems
The idea stills holds merit in my mind. Yes, it condones drug use and illegal activities, but it also cleans up the surrounding areas. I think it would also serve as a deterrent for the casual trying of a substance that could result in lifelong addiction. Who in their right mind would want to go to such a disgusting place to try something new?
It turns a problem that is currently diffuse to a problem that is concentrated. Like the difference between coal power plants spewing CO2 into the air versus nuclear power plants that leave radioactive waste that can be contained in barrels. Not the greatest analogy, but the point stands.
Restated: perhaps there was wisdom in prohibitions against drugs heavier than nicotine/alcohol? Maybe there was a line that stabilized society in general?
Will there be a sufficient level of "finding out" this side of the grave that will trigger thought?
Maybe the drugs are fulfilling some need, so simply escaping the addiction is counter-productive to their lives. Maybe the rehab to escape the addiction needs to be packaged with other sorts of rehabs that help them obtain healthier alternatives to fulfill those needs that are being met by the drugs.
Quick search online:
> Addiction isn’t as simple a concept as it may seem on the surface. From an outside perspective, addiction can be seen as a simple propensity for substance abuse. However, on mental, physical and emotional levels, there’s a lot more to addiction. From a behavioral perspective, using drugs becomes a way of life. Most friends and social situations revolve around drugs, especially as drugs start to replace former social connections and hobbies. --- https://fherehab.com/learning/mind-motives-addicted-drugs/
So, at least, rehab on building healthy social connections is also needed.
Finding a better solution to the drug problem is unlikely to be as simple as just decriminalizing.
I also wonder if the fact that decriminalization is done in a patch-work manner location-wise is also part of the problem. I wonder if it's easier or harder for homeless people to relocate to places where their activities aren't criminal. They likely have less material things tying them down to a location, but they may also rely more on the face-to-face social ties they already have.
There is funding in Oregon as part of 110 to do more than just decriminalize. Unfortunately that wasn't used for effect.
Part of it is the frustration that drug companies got rich from opioids, yet the addicts got to serve the crimes.
Unless you get to that point you have not decriminalized them enough... And it will clearly fail as it stays underground.
A big problem with American leftism is that it's all young people whose primary goal is looking cool. They think drug users are cool and police are uncool. So if you complain that some guy is smoking crack on the subway, they'll yell at you because they think the act of watching the guy smoke crack is giving them street cred and will get them laid because they're not like those boring suburbanites.
But what it actually means is parents are going to drive everywhere and not take the subway.
People who do drugs in an enclosed space in public are doing an antisocial act and as such are the type of people willing to do other antisocial acts. It's different from simply being homeless.
Due to a quirk in state law, Portland can enforce a prohibition on drinking in public (outside of OLCC regulated establishments) but cannot enforce a prohibition on smoking or shooting up meth or fentanyl in public.
Being the only place in the region where drugs can be abused free from meddling influence can also pull in addicts from surrounding areas, only increasing the problem.
Besides, most states still jail people for petty drug crimes and they have been for 70 years. It doesn't work.
Well, you can make stepwise rational choices all the way down into oblivion and watching your cities and states fall apart. It may be kind and more rational, but you've removed disincentives to use drugs and find yourselves in a society where you've attracted and created the conditions for this behavior to continue.
No matter what your policy stance on the potential solutions, it is not good to be having a society where people are using serious drugs without penalty.
Oh well, lesson learned, especially for people who thought they were liberal. Unfortunately at great expense and pain.
This is a good point. We often see this pathological behavior in training neural networks (HN's latest interest du jour). It's easy to find local minima and think this is the best it's going to get, even if the global minima is in a completely different direction. Given the general danger of a stochastic optimization algorithm which would see us changing the law to increase harm, perhaps stepwise optimization algorithms are not the way one should run a government, yet this seems to be the only accepted political methodology these days. If someone suggests something completely new, even if they have ample evidence or a good causal model, they are often ignored.
Alcohol?
It’s addictive, makes you fat, causes diabetes, screws with hormones, metabolism and sugar levels and costing society a fortune. Center of domestic violence usually, car crashes etc.
What’s not serious about it?
Prohibition worked extremely well. The data is unequivocal: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit.... Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.