Oregon law rolling back drug decriminalization set to take effect
apnews.com
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Education and public health shouldn't require drug money to exist and operate. If they make things better for everyone —they do— they should be funded from general taxes.
They shouldn't be a controversial statement but socialism is still a dirty word in some quarters.
I don't disagree that WoD has failed in its purpose but I'm not sure a public health body has ever been given the means to effectively treat a drugs epidemic.
It clearly hasn't worked. And clearly all the reasons they decriminalized in the first place are still valid. But I guess we're going back to criminalizing it anyway. Hey, maybe human nature has changed in the last few years, and it'll work this time.
Oregon has since poured tons of money into treatment centers and capacity is much, much better. But it unfortunately appears to be too little too late w/r/t public sentiment on decriminalization. Hopefully the next state to try it can learn from Oregon's mistakes and make sure their plan includes ramping capacity beforehand instead of simultaneously.
- decriminalization of drug use
- free access to treatment centers
- lax laws regarding unauthorized camping
that would a large number of dedicated drug users to migrate from out of state to Oregon (or whichever state tries it) from across the entirety of the US.
This would easily swamp any treatment facility capacity plan.
And there's a lot of reasons for this. Measure 110, which decriminalized possession and usage of drugs, envisioned funding treatment with money from the tax on legal marijuana sales. There are a variety of reasons it failed, but the tl;dr is that it took $100 million from other state programs handed it to the state, and said, "Here you go. Create treatment programs." And the state replied, "But how do we do that?" The legislative branches of the Oregon state government is generally incompetent at administering programs it's been running for years (e.g. public defense). They had no idea how to even go about creating a treatment program or what one even looked like.
And Measure 110 also created a weird bureaucratic structure for dispersing the funds across multiple entities. IIRC 10% would go to the cities. And there's some 200+ cities. I'm sure they tried to allocate the money proportionally, but imagine being a small or medium sized city and the government says, "here's $30,000 for you to establish a drug treatment program." What are you going to do with that? Probably look at it, confused, and put it in a bank account where you'll forget about it.
There were lots of other reasons the attempts to establish treatment programs failed. NIMBYism of people not wanting treatment centers near them, for one. For another, few people ever actually expressed interest in treatment, which became a topic of much time-consuming debate about why we're spending this money on programs addicts don't want. And part of that was because the police basically never enforced the part of the law where they would ticket public users. The users would either pay a fine or call a substance abuse hotline. There are multiple reasons the police never felt it was worth their time to hand out the citations, and that's a topic for another time, but the fact that the treatment centers were being funded by tax money that went to law enforcement before decriminalization probably didn't help.
So yeah, can't swamp treatment facilities that don't exist.
That means removing the stigma around the usage, accept that these individuals either will quit using these substances themselves by supporting them, or that they will be users until their (probably) untimely passing by again supporting them.
Making it a police matter is not the solution.
Stick: jail
Was fairly successful in CA while Prop 36 was in effect.
(legitimately curious for more info)
Every time you start innovating, problems will happen. But you can’t quit.
What they did was legendary and right. They just need to tweak the formula a little bit, not go back to the broken, heartless criminalization.
We don’t have the right to tell people if they can’t do drugs. It’s a crime without a victim.
I’ve never done drugs, but I would give my life to see this horrible behavior of “righteous” imprisoning people without just cause.
Good job Portland for trying. Figure out the mistakes made, and try again, but this time better!
If you want to do drugs, you should have to prove you have sufficient acreage to not be a public nuisance.
Three years ago with measure 110 on the ballot, I made the same points I make today with the same people. Back then I was called a radical and today I'm called normal. People need to grow up. Just because a Republican says something somewhere does not mean you need to believe the exact opposite. The truth is that measure 110 is the result of an overly reactionary democrat base that lives on social media and basically became pro drug the moment Trump said something about jail during the Floyd riots.
When I was playing GT 7 (racing) on a simulator, I used to either go hard gas, or hard break.
It’s like a baby. Either they hold something with 100% strength or not at all.
As you grow older, or better at racing, you learn to apply the right pressure to the gas and brake. Very rarely full on.
The same goes for life. Your sort of “grabbing” with full strength. Instead, I suggest a more nuanced approach.
When we are young we just go on or off. But in the area of dealing with “bad” people (we don’t know if they are or not), it’s best to use as little force as possible because you can really hurt people and make life worse. You also get a worse result because police are expensive.
More importantly, each of these people is on drugs because they are in pain. When u hurt them and ignore them, your cutting off an important sense in our communities that’s telling us something is wrong. It’s hard for us to know because we adapted. But for them, they may be more sensitive and can’t handle the suffering so they took drugs.
Society has so many issues we don’t even know. We need to ask God or whoever for wisdom to understand the issue. But going full “brake” when these guys are puffing drugs is overkill and it’s not as effective.
So, yes, it has the right to tell people if they can't do drugs, if they vote on it.
If those people don't like it, they can go live in a different civilization, or in an uncivilized place.
The former don't want me and the later did not exist for the past few centuries.
I don't know about others, but I see points like this and it fairly comprehensively invalidates any other points an entity/organisation/etc makes.
Society absolutely can tell people what what's acceptable and what's not. That's almost the definition of a society.
Also it's very much not victimless. Look at the families and especially kids of addicts. The drain on a govts resources (policing/healthcare). On others in society too (drug related violence, car accidents, etc).
Different drugs should be treated differently (weed vs meth, etc) I do believe.
You don't have to decriminalize drugs. You just have to make it illegal to shamelessly and publicly use drugs. The experiment didn't fail because the premise was flawed, it failed because the implementation was kneecapped. Drugs were legal for thousands of years. But they can't admit they screwed up, so let's just pretend throwing people in prison for consuming substances is the way to go.
California is the most famous example, with checkpoints at all road entryways to check for and control entrance of raw produce. Oregon likewise has checkpoints to check incoming watercraft for waterborne pests.
I'm sure truckers can also tell you all about the various trailer regulations that vary between states, not to mention the weigh stations most states have at border crossings.
As someone who has crossed that border many times in Tahoe, enforcement a) relies on the honesty from the people in the car b) runs seemingly randomly (ie more than half the time there is no checkpoint c) even when running enforcement is applied selectively based on whether you have California plates or not.
I think OP is probably talking about the practical effect of success of trying to control state borders effectively vs what you see which may be mostly for show / best effort. Of course you may be replying to “mass scale” smuggling vs what independent people may try to smuggle.
But I guess the level of scrutiny is way laxer than that at international borders.
My point was how effective would be a policy like the one instituted by Oregon be, when the state can't effectively control the flow of drugs? Wouldn't any progress be offset by "leaky" borders and the free flow of people?
Slow down for the inspection point. Approach the officers. Mostly they just waved me through without checking anything except maybe my license plate with a smart camera. Once they asked me if I had any fruit or agricultural products. One time I answered yes and handed over some apples and said “thank you” and was waved through.
It is nothing at all like a “border”.
Sincerely: Fuck no.
As a taxpayer, I want precisely zero cents of it going towards enabling drug addicts. I would sooner see my taxes burned on another Boeing Starliner.
I think this would work great actually, it will just never happen because it’s too easy to attack politically.
“You’re Japanese internment camping the homeless!” “You’re concentration camping the homeless!” “You’re gulaging the homeless!” Etc.
Drug camps aren't really enabling drug addicts, it is just giving up on them and dealing with the humane problem of just keeping them alive for as long as possible as cheaply as possible.
But I can also empathize with your position, which is more what the Chinese do. Zero tolerance is given to drug addicts, and unless their families pay up for treatment, they are going to work camps until they die. With harsh consequences, people avoid that, even if they are unhoused.
There’s a good summary here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/oregon-dru...
> The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation—and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths.
Opinions about why the policy failed vary, but the rollback is happening because there is wide agreement that it has failed.
There is a lot of politics involved in politicians saying their city has the worst problem. But you are going to see similar problems if you do a one day drive (or take the Cascade amtrack) from Vancouver BC to Portland OR. Drug enforcement in all of these cities (+ Californian cities) is all fairly lax, even if drugs aren't decriminalized, people are still doing fent in public or on public transit without much harassment.
That's actually a disadvantage, and explains why the US will never be able to address the homelessness problem.
If you have one jurisdiction where the approach is to aggressively kick out the homeless and another where they try their best at solving the problem, the would-be solver location will inevitably fail because all the homeless will migrate there. No single city or state can solve homelessness for the entire country.
You need every jurisdiction to cooperate at solving it simultenously, but the prisioners dilemma of 50 states encourages individual states to push the problem onto others, solving nothing and guaranteeing nobody else can solve either it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/29/british-columb...
However, this being america, they would just give people the option of whether they wanted treatment and no one took it.
Further, even if they wanted to no money was allocated to treatment centers and so there was not available.
Collassol failure
However, things like drug decriminalization bring out further extremes, with extreme liberals espousing you should be able to do anything you want (even if you become a hazard to your community) and extreme conservatives feeling you should do what you want and the weak should die and the strong should live.
Only centrists and perhaps realpolitik people see all highly profitable addictive drugs that destroy the lives of the users as not some kind of accident on an individual basis and instead a super successful subscription business model with negative externalities that they would rather not suffer the side effects of as a community. Alas this view seems to not get so much airtime, and just ends up being a matter of fact as things play out.
To all the it's been illegal for over 100 years and it hasn't got any better school of thought people, so has murder. Were we expecting the nature of people to evolve in 100 years?
Seriously wondering from the perspective of choices of how to do things. Do we want to try to get the best result for the most people? How many false positives or false negatives do we want?
And no one did, because no one cares enough. There are more pleasant things to do, e.g. online.
* https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=910846825412517...
* https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/545/748.h...
But the more people say "you're never gonna win" -- the less people care, coming to the current situation.
What duty? Let alone one that the average citizen has standing to sue them over?
Prisons for profit leads to increasing length of incarceration and simply putting in prison people who should not be there.
>"That's what justice is: paying a debt"
I do not believe in debt and punishment. I think it should be about deterrence and rehabilitation. Yes some people are rotten to the core and can't be rehabilitated. So they'll stay behind the bars.