Oregon spent funds meant for addiction services on prosecutors, police gadgets

It is Portugal.

Portugal

It's Portugal, but as the article covers, the backstory here is that Oregon enacted just that policy in 2020. They reversed it in 2024 when legislators and their constituents decided it was making things worse rather than better. You can (and the article does) speculate that this was confounded by other factors, but ultimately policies that work in Portugal aren't guaranteed to work as well in Oregon.

Portugal did it nationally. Oregon did it as one state that already had soft enforcement of drug use and a lot of social services, which had already drawn people from other states before the ballot measure. The weather here in the valley isn't as hard to deal with as other places, rarely dropping below freezing or getting too hot. And then the fentanyl crisis hit.

We're not a huge state with unlimited resources. And the law should have handled public use. But digging people out of both addiction and homeless is incredibly difficult, and the longer they experience it, the harder it is. And compounding that: the more services we provide, the more people come from other states to use them. It's not something we can do alone.

Reagan repealed the Mental Health Systems Act in 1981, which had aimed to provide federally funded treatment services for the States. With it being very difficult to institutionalize people and no federal money to treat them, where will they go?