Oregon undoes groundbreaking drug decriminalization law | Hacker News Reader

Oregon undoes groundbreaking drug decriminalization law

theguardian.com

26 pointsrntn21 comments

Decriminalization unfortunately gained steam at exactly the same time that a drug that legitimately did need to be made illegal started becoming popular and cheap to manufacture.

Fentanyl is just plain bad news. It's not a coincidence that we started seeing an explosion of homelessness and fentanyl use at the same time. And unfortunately progressive advocates for drug policy reform and homelessness basically have to ignore this reality, because it makes their preferred policy positions untenable.

If they admit that fentanyl is a major driver of homelessness, then it's impossible to defend a "housing first" approach to homelessness. You can't just give an addict a free apartment in a big city and expect everything to work itself out. Fentanyl throws a big wrench in that.

Neither can you just stop enforcing drug laws and expect that society will be better off as a result. Because fentanyl fucks people up, and fucked up people do fucked up things, and that's why we have police.

Housing first and decriminalization are great policies when the worst thing you have to worry about is cocaine or heroine, and the access pipeline to them is fairly limited. But America's pharma companies were all too happy to create a bunch of new opiate addicts with oxycontin and the like, and then cut those addicts loose so they had to get their fix somewhere else once their prescriptions ran out. This addiction pipeline just didn't exist with earlier drugs like marijuana, cocaine, etc.

Unfortunately these policies came onto the scene about 15 years too late. We do need enforcement as well as treatment, and we should be making pharma companies pay for it.

Do people deliberately seek out fentanyl? Or is it what they get when they seek heroin or other drugs?

I assume you have data that backs up your claim that a non-trivial percentage of homeless got hooked, legally, on opiates before turning to fentanyl? Please link it.

Oregon got trapped in the same pit that swallowed mental health care in the US after Reagan. For years mental health professionals had been advocating for closing the big, unhealthy hospitals and switching to a community-based group home model.

Reagan never saw a budget cut he didn't like (except for defense), so he jumped at the chance to cut funding for mental hospitals. He skipped over the part about opening up community-based group homes, and provided no money for it. Result: an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental health conditions.

Decriminalizing drugs should be paired with treatment and support, but that costs money and people still have a the old "drug addiction is a moral failing and people should just say no" mindset. Without sufficient money to treat drug addiction and support addicts while they are treated, decriminalization simply fails.

Reagan was 40 years ago. There have been plenty of presidents and politicians of other political orientations who could have changed this, nobody has. The existence of the problem benefits them more than solving it does.

> Reagan was 40 years ago.

Yeah, and it turns out it's quicker to create a problem that will cascade for generations than it is to fix it. Who would have thought.

Over the past 40 years, we've had a series of presidents and state/local leaders who are allergic to spending the money necessary to solve social problems.

You aren't going to solve mental health and drug addiction without spending money on treatment. You aren't going to solve crime without both spending money to arrest, prosecute and imprison the criminals in prisons that actually rehabilitate criminals AND spending money to address the root causes of crime such as poverty and poor education.

None of this is particularly appealing to politicians when there are corporations that you can give taxpayer-funded handouts to in exchange for campaign donations and help building your personal fortune. If the problems aren't solved, you can just blame everything on the other political party (even if they haven't won an election in your area since before WW2) or the politicians who came before you.

> spending the money necessary to solve social problems

There's a certain idealism descended mainly from Rousseau that humans are inherently good and if they commit crimes or act in dysfunctional or evil ways, it's because society has corrupted them. It follows that money and govt programs can correct all these problems (in reality, some vague maternal care instinct that often manifests as letting vagrants run roughshod over public spaces, if your community Walgreens is bare and you can't buy basic toiletries cause the DA stopped prosecuting theft you have no right to complain because this is simply late-stage capitalism, don't ya know).

Meanwhile innocent people are routinely violently attacked by truly evil criminals who should be locked away in jails or worse. CS Lewis also treats this subject as a matter of medicalizing morality in "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" [1], where he argues that far from being sophisticated and humane, humanitarian notions of "sinfulness" (crime, drug abuse, the now commonplace social-justice attitude toward "thought crimes", etc.) ends up being dehumanizing and deeply disturbing:

> Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

[1]: https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pd...

Even if you're a hardcore Calvinist who believes in total depravity, you can still have compassion for the individual. To be specific: while the inability to outwardly uphold the law is inherent, the gospel provides for love and compassion towards the fallen. Also, those notions of "sinfulness" are human constructs. Drug abuse, for example, as a moral failing, is a judgement. But drug addiction is not a moral failing, it is a disease that can be treated. There are many things we now know are treatable diseases that in the past were considered signs of moral failure: leprosy being an obvious one.

> If the problems aren't solved, you can just blame everything on the other political party

Exactly. This is why problems like crime and drugs never get solved. They are too valuable as election issues. Or maybe they are fundamentally unsolvable, but a lot of places seem to do better than the USA on these.

We used to have wars to keep the population of young uneducated males in check and out of mischief, but now that the military is all-volunteer that doesn't work as well as it used to.

Why does every community program need to be funded and administered out of Washington, D.C.?

It seems people have confused decriminalization with a solution to mental health/addiction crisis. It’s not. It was always about not criminalizing a health issue and not making these peoples lives much harder to reclaim by giving them a record.

Still, even as an advocate for decriminalization, there’s some good improvements in this bill.

110 was about both. The rollout wasn't what we'd hoped for. :(

The article says that opioid overdoses exploded under this legislation, but the impression I've gotten is that that isn't the real driver of this change to the law. The major complaints I've heard are around public drug use. Basically, we don't want to see it, we don't want tourists to see it. Without judgment on that issue, I wonder why they made possession a misdemeanor, rather than public use and distribution. That seems like a less controversial step.

I thought the theory behind the original legislation was that we're admitting that criminalizing drugs doesn't stop people from doing them, but it does put a lot of non-violent criminals in jail or prison, ties up the legal system, and costs tax payers a lot of money. I like decriminalization as an approach, and I wish we would do a better job of addressing addiction at the root rather than relying on the threat of punishment. Despite what I hope is only a short-term spike in deaths, I am still more optimistic about decriminalization combined with social and mental health programs over criminalization, at least in the long term.

I like that they attached funds for treatment and court programs—$21 million doesn't seem like enough to me, but certainly better than nothing.

> The article says that opioid overdoses exploded under this legislation

It actually says the opposite:

> Oregon has seen a 1,500% rise in overdose deaths since the pandemic started, the steepest increase in the country, according to recent federal data. In 2022, almost 1,000 people in the state died from opiate overdoses. But research has so far showed no correlation between the rise in overdoses and decriminalization.

Overdoses have risen everywhere since the pandemic, and Oregon's rise (like the rest of the country's) predates Measure 110. There's no evidence of any causation between the two.

I think one of the elements at play here is the appeal of not facing criminal charges for use. Because Oregon opted for early adoption, Oregon became a hotspot. It makes some sense that this would create a disproportionate response, and draw in both high-functioning and low-functioning users as well as their counterparties e.g. dealers. Any read taken from Oregon can't really be representative of what a uniform policy would look like if deployed nationally.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/people-addiction-simply-gro...

I think that's an interesting take and it's a pattern that I, too, experienced as a young adult. Tossing users into categories of addiction is pretty trivial because, in essence, the current definitions preclude non-addictive use because use itself is illegal and addiction indicates - legally - that actions in violation of the law are characteristic of addiction. All of this really requires an intimate understanding of the individual which is something I don't expect a system-wide approach is ever going to be meaningfully successful at. And additionally I think it serves the point to realize that everybody has a unique relationship with substances, the one-size-fits-all, which is more or less what we have, is only going to exacerbate the severity and elongate the course of suffering inflicted on individuals who would otherwise naturally and of their own volition course-correct because they're put through the same meat grinder as the smaller handful of extreme cases.

It's masterful projection, but I bargained drug use for a steep enhancement in my quality of life and a potential future that was less bleak and otherwise easier than a gambling on success and failure in a more challenging and less hospitable existence which would allow me to continue my substance use pattern. In other words I cleaned up for a decent job. There's a lot of places where that simply isn't an accessible option - creating those opportunities is a win-win though. I think that may be the best modality.

The war on drugs has been proven to be a failure for decades over and over again. Using the criminal justice system to address what is fundamentally a public health problem is both expensive and ineffective. It's remarkable how wedded lawmakers are to this ideology despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Not only that, but Measure 110 wasn't even fully rolled out in the first place. It's clear that this is move is ideological.

> Allen also acknowledged that, nearly two years after Measure 110 passed, the availability of addiction treatment, including residential treatment beds and medication-assisted treatment for people with opioid use disorder, is “inconsistent” across Oregon’s counties.

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/09/20/oregon-measure-110-dr...

It's gobsmacking how lawmakers will keep trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver and go "we're just not using an expensive enough screwdriver!"

> what is fundamentally a public health problem

You see a public health problem, we see a crime problem.

Maybe to you, throwing them all in prison doesn't "work". But if there are fewer psychotic homeless and streets are cleaner, it works well enough for me :)

[dupe] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570444

The unpopular opinion is that most homeless are addicts who like the lifestyle (no work, easy access to food, and enough to get by) with a small percentage being mental health victims who need institutionalization.

And I don't blame them either. Id move to california too and camp out. Working sucks.

Until the enablement of this lifestyle is curtailed, the crisis will continue.

I'll take the downvotes too. Even when I lived in San Francisco even the most far left friends I had held this opinion.

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