But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like transgender, guns, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab? Should we require drug tests for homeless people to receive government help like SF CAAP payments?
Decriminalization isn't legalization. Legalization would mean controlling purity, and strength where the drug is licensed to be sold.
Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.
Beyond that simply throwing people in prison doesn't mean that we reduced the number of drug addicts. It just means you don't see them anymore.
Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison.
Drugs will always be a part of the human experience. People will continue to use them whether it's legal or not.
The other side of it is most cities don't spend much money on harm reduction strategies or treatment options because of the stigma associated with drug users. Tax payers look at them as subhuman and don't do the math.
It costs more to let a drug addict run around town stealing and breaking things, or getting sick and going to the ER, than it does to mandate they spend some time in a State funded mental hospital.
Prisons also cost a lot. It costs a full time job's worth of money ~35k to imprison 1 person per year.
Not only did you take a potential worker out of the work force, but now you're sinking a full time jobs worth of money into keeping them in prison.
For a murderer, that seems worth it because they literally cost the world a full time worker and maybe more. But for a homeless drug addict it really doesn't seem worth it to me.
Daily drug use may actually be the correct way for some people to maximize the integral of happiness over their lifetime. Especially for those at the bottom with limited prospects. I don't think most of HN can fathom what it's like to actually be completely useless. You're delusional if you think the homeless problem is a bunch of software engineers who tried heroin once, and left FAANG to get high every day.
> Should we require drug tests for homeless people to receive government help like SF CAAP payments?
This is a great idea. If you want society to invest in you, you have to take basic steps to be a worthy investment. But even this is predicated on the idea that what these drugs users are doing is wrong, and that they should instead do something that lets the rest of us reap the benefits of their productivity. Who are we to demand someone be more productive for our own benefit? We're right to want something in exchange for our investment, but there's no place to stand and say a drug user is wrong for not taking the deal.
For too long, San Francisco and California more broadly have rejected The Stick in favor of The Carrot -- and they didn't improve the balance, they just through it out of balance in a different direction.
If folks want to fry their brain on whatever, I think that's their right. They don't have the right to do that on the sidewalk in front of my house, in the park where kids play, on the subway, etc. SF and CA lost the plot.
Or are those people simply the most visible?
I mean, how can you tell if someone is a functional user - you can’t, they look just everybody else, you know?
It’s not about the substances themselves, it’s the way that they’re used - and abused. It’s helplessness in the face of addiction that’s the problem - addiction will drive the afflicted to trade the rest of their life to get a fix.
I think this is dealing with the problem far too late for it to be effective. Rehab treats the drug as though it's the problem. The drug is not the problem. The person using the drug is trying to manage some sort of stress or situation that they otherwise can't deal with. If you get a person off drugs but don't address their health, home-security, childhood trauma, abusive relationships, etc. At best they're simply going to shift to dealing with that issue through some other way: Food addiction, sex addiction, video games, abusing a loved-one, etc. And if it's not obvious, this is a repeating cycle.
We need to do a better job of taking care of people in our communities. Before they end up using drugs (or other types of dangerous coping mechanisms). If we can't get to them before, we need to pick them up and start taking care of them. The trouble is (at least in the US), our approach to community support is contrary to our sense of individual freedoms - we don't want the government to support struggling individuals at the cost of individual freedoms (see healthcare, food and housing subsidy, etc)
Is this true? The US consumes a lot of hard drugs, but my perception is that most users not have their lives fall apart as a result. Curious if there are estimates on the % of e.g. cocaine users who are recreational vs those who eventually end up on the street as a result of their use.
As far as what to do, half of this is cultural. People in the US need to grow up, we can’t have a nation of people who require perpetual care of their community, there just aren’t enough “adults” to go around anymore. The US is super rich compared even to other “first world”/G20 countries, even so-called poor people in the US have US dollars to get drugs smuggled to them, creating endless human misery outside the country as well as in.
Fraught with opportunities for abuse but not arguably more than the current situation and at least the rest of us can have our public spaces back.
This isn’t even remotely true. The number of people in SF who use marijuana, cocaine, LSD, ketamine, MDMA, GHB, 2-CB and/or a laundry list of other substances would astonish you.
The majority of them successfully hold jobs: many of them highly paid ones as tech company engineers and execs.
What you associate with “not living like normal adults” is poverty plus opiates.
Programs that address homelessness (like housing-first, or work training) will also reduce drug abuse/deaths. And upstream stuff like really buying into building housing stock will also help with homelessness.
Part of the whole package of drug legalization is that if you actually dismantle the war on drugs machinery, you will have a huge budget to direct to social programs that can reduce the upstream causes of drug abuse, not just providing treatment after the fact. It sounds like Oregon didn’t get those programs in place yet.
That is the primary argument against legalization / decriminalization. MJ legalization has led to a 20% increase in use already. It's a very good argument.
The only argument I have for legalization is the current situation we have with Mexico (and Guatemala, etc). Our inability to not control/treat drug addiction has led to a fundamentally destabilized country in a de facto civil war (against cartels we trained in the School of the Americas, an entirely different nutso side). Those cartels are supported by the economics of illegal drugs.
Not just that, with the fall of our puppet regime in Afghanistan, we will be enriching the Taliban regime by paying for the output of their poppy fields.
What is mindblowing is listening to all my right leaning relatives scream at the top of their lungs about the illegal immigration flood, but they are the ones supporting the side that most opposes dealing with the drug problem in a constructive way.
IMO the fundamental way to fight illegal drugs is to decriminalize, replace the supply / undermine the economics with medically or governmentally supply (at prices that undercut mafia economics), and make treatment zero-cost available as part of the drug availability.
Of course that will probably lead to something like Purdue Pharma and painkillers / Medicaid fraud.
But the War on Drugs has to end.
If drugs were legalized country-wide then SF wouldn’t have the concentration it does and it would seem like a nice place.
Most people who use drugs function like completely normal adults or eventually get bored or reduce usage as they age. You are seeing the fringes.
As the article mentions, Measure 110 specifically prohibits recepients of funding from requiring abstinence in their programs. I'm not a psychologist, but it's probably a lot harder to get people to stop doing drugs if you aren't allowed to tell them to stop doing drugs. Hard drugs have to be seen in a negative light in the social zeitgeist, period.
On the other hand, the sheriff's quote basically says "we don't think these rehab programs will work, so we aren't going to give tickets to drug users." That's just as counterproductive as anti-abstinence.
The criminal-justice reform side of Measure 110 is pretty good. Small amounts of drugs shouldn't be punishable with incarceration or huge fines. IMO the asinine rules for rehab programs, and the broken bureaucracy surrounding them, seem like a good place to start.
What we could do is shift our priorities from turning the country into a feudal system pressure cooker scenario and provide opportunities and resources for most.
No wait that’s just crazy. On another thought maybe we should just make harsher punishments for drug users and “clean the streets” by moving all the homeless to jail cells at $80k/year/person in taxpayer money.
Because mentioning a similar UBI amount is also crazy.
Legalizing and quality controlling drugs would also help - but the problem there is that we live in a advertising-driven consumer society. Alcohol, tobacco and sugar-laced soft drinks are all unhealthy, but that's a profitable enterprise, so people are incentivized to block public health campaigns, restrictions on sales, etc.
At some point, the problems become so deeply entrenched and societal in nature that passing laws and setting up government programs doesn't really help. For some reason in the USA, a lot of people are really miserable and their only relief is to turn to drugs and alcohol. That's the more fundamental problem.
Tackle the issue at the root: mental health.
It's an error to focus too much on the substance (illegal drugs) when alcohol, legal drugs, food and many other forms of abuse and dependency can lead to similar or worse outcomes.
Let's go build a 10-acre island that is full of free housing and free drugs for anybody who wants it.
If people want to do drugs, that's one thing.
If people want to turn the few nice outdoor spaces in the city into their personal camp - that's a separate issue.
You also don't need to be like SF and stop enforcing all crimes just because you make drugs legal.
Not to mention "works" and "worth it" are not quite the same thing.
You should make the negative behaviors associated with drug abuse illegal and force those people into rehab.
Use all the drugs you want until you go to break some other law, then you get arrested and don't get to go home until you're clean.
On the other hand, the philosophical stance I agree with is that one human being does not have the right to dictate what another human being does with their own body, so long as they are an informed adult.
Our unwillingness to truly commit to our beliefs and values, whatever they are, gives us the worst of both approaches.
The parallels in Van, SF and Portland are striking, except now it’s not Heroin it’s Fentanyl.
Here’s a good primer: https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/portugal-heroin-decrim...
I agree with this statement, but it should only hold true in your own home, on your own property, or on the property of someone who is amenable to whatever behavior you are engaged in.
>Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab?
Very simply we cannot have a functional society if we don't have rules about what behavior is allowed in public spaces. Just because every adult should be free to do drugs that doesn't (or at least shouldn't if we want a functional society) give license to these adults to break the rules we have set up for public spaces, whether or not their rule-breaking is a result of their drug use. I don't believe anyone who isn't breaking the rules of our public spaces should be locked up or forced into rehab for their drug use. But if they are stealing, harassing others, vandalizing, doing drugs on public property or engaging in a variety of other illegal behaviors, then they should be arrested and offered the choice between jail and rehab (in a locked facility).
I have a close family member who has been addicted to heroin for most of their life and they are in their late 60's. They go to a clinic and receive methadone which they can then go outside and trade for whatever else. Basically a flea market of intoxicants and they are found around every major rehab clinic.
The problem is they are so used to being in a stupor most of the day that reality is something they cant handle anymore. When they become sober they are faced with a loud, bright world of sensory overload along with physical discomfort, pain and headaches (I had addiction issues so this is my perception). You want to go back to lala land and forget about all the bullshit seemingly clawing at you.
These extreme cases become hollowed out vessels - the person becomes a kind of animal that knows only one thing: defend the mind against reality. They don't care about family, friends, jobs, hobbies, ad nauseam. They need SERIOUS help - help that I don't think we can provide as how do you rebuild a human mind and life?
Legalize it, produce it in pure dosages of known substance and dosage, and encourage people to get treatment. That's the best we can do. It was the solution to alcohol prohibition and history will show that it is the solution to the bulk of negative externalities from drug prohibition. We'll always have problems stemming from substance use, as consciousness modulation appears to be a drive inherent to humans as a species, but we are choosing as a society to inflict a far greater harm upon both individuals and the society collectively by pursuing a policy of prohibition, including destabilizing our second biggest trading partner into a near-failed narcostate.
Many drugs are incredibly dangerous, addictive and harmful, but that's still a wild overstatement.
The point isn't that using some of these substances is "fine" but that it should be treated as a public health problem (like smoking) not a criminal problem.
Lots of people get pushed into harder options, when it becomes a race to the bottom. Meth and hard opioids are massive problems in the US.
AFAIK most similar counties have lower usage of meth, and fent, though I’m sure opioids are in the picture. Don’t underestimate how many of these cases are deaths of despair, due to our cultural issues, not just poverty. I suspect we’re seeing the costs of our toxic culture, income inequality, and lack of safety nets.
Oregon IMO was set up for failure. Decrime is overrated. In some ways it may be the worst of both worlds. Even moreso when you do it during a drug poisoning pandemic… that’s a really good time to start distributing verified product.
I'm still baffled at how this argument makes it anywhere paste high school. Living a single second makes it plain obvious that no, you don't do what you want. Living in any type of society or even the most basic and smallest community will tell you that
Got a cite for that? I doubt it's true.
We're seeing the same problems with drug prohibition that we saw with alcohol prohibition. It's time for the government to stop destroying people's lives.
Citation needed.
Seriously though, the amount of unsubstantiated opinions that get thrown around as facts on HN whenever drugs are discussed is ridiculous.
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults
It is definitely not "most". There are people who are highly prone to drug addiction. Add on depression or lack of a stable life/job/community/friends/family and the risks go way up.
There are tons of people who do plenty of drugs recreationally, and it is safer than alcohol for many.
This distinction allows us to keep alcohol legal, but punish people for getting into bar fights or urinating on the sides of buildings.
We could legalize all drug use while criminalizing illegal behavior around it, such as shoplifting, littering, etc.
Might not work but what if we just tried that. Only make things illegal that overtly affect other people negatively.
The problem is that is has now manifested into default legal possession and consumption. That was not the idea.
What should happen is that if you’re caught doing drugs like meth, fentanyl, etc. you either go to rehab, or you go to jail.
Instead, at least here in Portland, the police LITERALLY doing absolutely nothing. Partly because they are genuinely understaffed, partly because they despise the voter base (understandably so). That still doesn’t excuse the complete lack of enforcement.
This isn’t specific to just drug use either. Day time camping is illegal now in Portland. The police won’t enforce it. Stealing a vehicle is illegal in Portland. The police tell you over the phone it’s not worth looking for your stolen vehicle and they refer you to a Facebook group that tracks stolen cars (I shit you not). Traffic stops, missing tags, no insurance, etc. anything related to traffic is unenforced to a laughable degree. I know people who haven’t registered their vehicles since 2020. They somehow still have a valid drivers license.
How I see it is the main problem exists because the dog and pony show is allowed to persist. The reason it persists is because we humans like to believe things are simple. That we'll ignore any evidence of complexity to justify such simplicity. And that when complexity is added (such as in conspiracy theories) the basis is functionally equivalent to "wizards did it." The whole "if it weren't for <insert opposing tribe> then everything would be great." Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The problem is that the simplicity of a lie is unbounded, but the simplicity of truth is. There is a minimum floor for critical thinking and knowledge required to understand truth. That the precision of the understanding of the truth is proportional to that floor (thankfully this usually asymptotically approaches full precision).
So what do we do? We don't let people sell us the snake oil of simplicity. We don't let non-experts wildly conjecture about things without demonstrating understanding (which would turn them into experts). We ourselves stop personally pulling things out of our asses and make assumptions. Especially when there is evidence to the contrary. We ourselves seek out possible counter arguments to our own predispositions rather than expecting others to do it for us. We ourselves stop being lazy.
I suspect this is a tall order. I suspect this is possibly one of the many great filters. I don't suspect that this is an impossible task. I do suspect such a notion can be codified into localized groups and propagate through the system due to no groups being adjoint to any other group (can be pockets, but I suspect quite rare). Accountability may only be possible at a local group level, but I see no reason this accountability can't propagate. It definitely should be possible within such parent-groups like Hacker News. I suspect that this tall order would resolve a lot of other issues as well.
One of the biggest problems with drugs is the paraeconomy that is created, funnelling millions to the wrong hands, and ending up with fentanyl spiked dope on the market. If we accept that the need for drugs will not go away, then they need to be legalized, controlled, taxed, and regulated so that not only the cartels aren't funded, but the state receives their profit and turns it into measures for controlling drug abuse, for offering help, etc.
Now how do we handle the general lack of meaning that the west is experiencing which is turning people into mice hitting the dopamine level forever running on the hedonistic treadmill, that's a different question.
Children don't know the world yet, cannot contain their urges, and can get their brain chemistry permanently altered after trying heroin.
Now here's the trick -- all adults are children, just older. Some can contain the emotions better than others.
Yes. Claiming people can use these things without consequences is just wrong. Anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly never dealt with addicts. The only possible argument for drug decriminalization is getting rid of all the violent crime surrounding it. That's a worthy reason but must certainly be weighed against the significant risks presented by drugs. Lots of people out there have literally never witnessed the extent an opioid addict's drug seeking behavior.
The benefit is that it allows for 1) freedom of choice and 2) it is (theoretically) better than the alternative (defunds criminal gangs, provides tax revenues to fund treatment, etc.)
However, we seemed to have completely dropped the ball on #2, just look at the untaxed marijuana sales on New York City streets, where are all the new rehab facilities paid for with drug tax revenues. Why are gangs and cartels still making so much form the drug trade and still commuting violent crime?
2. Start a better public works program. Employment is good for mental health.
3. Maybe require a month of service or something, just to have a way to resocialize people when they break.
4. Have people pick up their benefits somewhere not in the city. Some reason to move.
5. Forced rehab to those engaged in harm; nature and nutrition.
6. Need to avoid cultures of homelessness. Need good policy. Look to Amsterdam, a city with virtually no homelessness.
7. Make better drugs available? Fentanyl seems like the worst.
That said, I don’t think Portland was wrong with the decision to decriminalize. I think they just did it in the wrong order. They should have had strong support set up _before_ ever going the route of decriminalizing.
Maybe you just don't notice the ones who live like normal adults because... they live like normal adults.
The U.S. healthcare system is deeply broken, so it's tremendously difficult for someone who is poor and sick/mentally ill/addicted to drugs to regain control of their life. Irrespective of the legal status of hard drugs.
Heathcare facilities for the mentally ill is a really good start.
But, you know, that's, like, expensive.
That’s already enough of a case to legalize. Make it safe.
Then address the root of the issue.
This means using testing as to detect outbreaks. Schools should be allowed and encouraged to test students, as long as a positive test results in a trip to the doctor, not prison.
We shouldn’t force law abiding adults into treatment, but if they break the law, like vagrancy, treatment should be an alternative to gradually increasing prison time.
Treat it like we treat COVID. Test and treat. Vaccinate and manage. But if you refuse testing and treatment, you’re on your own.
I trust health experts as much as the Nasa scientists who lost contact with voyager2 and the nasa scientists are working under much less pressure than an ER room!
There's very little reason for opioids to be freely available.
But weed, psychadelics, mdma, etc. why not?
I recall decriminalisation worked well in Portugal, and maybe it's not repeatable but I wonder if there are other variables beyond the drugs here. I couldn't read the article as behind a paywall but US seems to have other more significant issues where crimes themself are not getting dealt with in these areas. You don't charge addicts for drug use, but when they are stealing or fighting etc they need to be caught and charged. Also there needs to be social support which seems lacking in US compared to other western countries.
And bigger picture, when I watch iterviews with people caught in this life so many grow with parents and communities like this. This cycle needs to be broken somehow but doing so going into ethical grey zones, like Project Prevention, where I feel it's a difficult positive to push for but for the best outcome (in my view) but respect that people can be totally valid feeling otherwise.
At the moment it really seems one of those unsolvable issues. Such a shame it can't be stopped at the supply side.
But what I've seen in the US has made me think differently. Most people who get fat eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like transgender, guns, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make fast food illegal again and force people into rehab? Should we require weight tests for homeless people to receive government help like CAAP payments?
Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. It ends up with grossly distorted demographic distributions of those that suffer legal consequences in deeply unfair ways. Criminalisation on use also aligns the interests of users with those of dealers, where differences in criminal liability help drive a wedge between them.
The 3 year old policy in Oregon looks like it was fumbled. They didn’t put in place essential social and health care support services that a policy like this relies on for 2 years. Portugal has a national health care service, so a co-ordinated approach seems like it was far easier to implement and co-ordinate. Still, Oregon seems to have made much needed improvements in this area.
Policies like this are not silver bullets. Drug abuse is a severe issue with deep roots in individual lives and society, and manifests differently in different societies. I hope Oregon sticks with it and works on trying to get this policy to work, and tailor their response to their needs. 50 years of the war on drugs has failed utterly, let’s give an alternative a chance.
How are you defining successful? The linked article links to a recent wapo article from last week "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts". I don't know one way or the other, I'm just trying to collect more data points. Didn't Vancouver BC try something similar?
(Seems a little odd that this Atlantic article, the Wapo article questioning Portugal's policy, and yesterday's Times article about weed addiction have all appeared in a week's span. Since none of them seems triggered by an external reporting event.)
While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years. Not to mention that the latter is also more popular with voters.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/once-hailed-for-decrimi...
The [Portugese drug offense] committees have a broad range of sanctions available to them when ruling on the drug use offence. These include:
Fines, ranging from €25 to €150. These figures are based on the Portuguese minimum wage of about €485 (Banco de Portugal, 2001) and translate into hours of work lost.
Suspension of the right to practice if the user has a licensed profession (e.g. medical doctor, taxi driver) and may endanger another person or someone's possessions.
Ban on visiting certain places (e.g. specific clubbing venues).
Ban on associating with specific other persons.
Foreign travel ban.
Requirement to report periodically to the committee.
Withdrawal of the right to carry a gun.
Confiscation of personal possessions.
Cessation of subsidies or allowances that a person receives from a public agency.
Meanwhile Oregon's (and much of the West Coast's) idea of "decriminalization" is just... No consequences for doing hard drugs! Here's Oregon's law, from the article:
To achieve this goal, Measure 110 enacted two major changes to Oregon’s drug laws. First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline. Second, the law set aside a portion of state cannabis tax revenue every two years to fund a statewide network of harm-reduction and other services.
You don't even have to pay the fine! You can just call a hotline. No follow up, no ensuring that you go to treatment... Just a phone call.
The idea that you can have no consequences for hard drug use, and that people will just voluntarily check themselves into "services" (or that "harm reduction" services will dissuade people from using hard drugs) is I think at this point dead in the water.
I used to be in favor of broad drug decriminalization. But the opioid epidemic changed my mind: some drugs are so bad that even when administered by a regulated medical system, large numbers of people's lives can be ruined simply by giving them access to the drug. Allowing street usage of similar drugs like heroin, fentanyl, etc can't be safer than that. I don't necessarily think jail is the best option, but zero-consequence + entirely-optional treatment for opiate abuse is not a working policy, and IMO jail is actually a better policy than that: at least in jail you have a chance at forcing them off the drug. My preferred policy at this point would probably look more like mandatory state-enforced rehab in a confined setting without long-term legal implications like a criminal record, though.
Less-addictive drugs like marijuana, ketamine, MDMA, etc I think probably should be legal for adults, with some guardrails around access similar to e.g. Sudafed. But effectively having an open season for using opiates is asking for trouble.
There are doubts about success of that policy now. Article from a few weeks ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
Legalize and harm reduction have been the tenets for so so long. No one does it.
Personally: drugs should be illegal, but the punishment should be rehab and life stabilization not prison. Drug selling, production, and smuggling should have the harshest possible punishments.
The drug that kills and ruins most lives on the planet is alcohol followed by food (diabetes). And the abuse of alcohol and food has the same root that drug abuse does: mental health and education.
And let's not even start talking about the damage of legal drugs (medicines) on society at all age tiers.
Supporting a real criminal justice system is a luxury belief. Many societies don’t have the resources to have 2 years of evidence gathering, investigation, court process, free lawyer for the defendant, then appeals. Then years of incarceration, feeding no clothing inmates, and rehabilitation.
“Every child should go to school” is a luxury belief
The question is, where do you set the bar?
Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
We don't get the reduction in violence we'd see from legal sales. None of it.
Decrim is what you get from cowardly legislators and imbecilic activists worried that Tweaky the Copper Wiring Thief isn't getting a fair shake at life.
The FDA and DEA should be entirely repurposed to randomly testing all food and drug products and ensuring that the ingredients list is accurate to within a certain margin. Having a single arbiter of good and bad substances has proven to be a failure again and again (remember the Food Pyramid?). I would much rather have access to everything, and know that it is labeled correctly, than have some dysfunctional bureaucracy "looking out for me".
In California the decriminalization of magic mushrooms has caused lots more people to start growing them, so price, quality, and diversity are better than ever. That probably wouldn't be the case with other drugs that aren't as easy to produce just anywhere. Although opium poppy field or coca greenhouses are definitely possible.
I don't mean to be offensive or ageist and I'm sure lots of older people have been touched both directly and indirectly by drug abuse, my experience is those that have been affected in some way have changed their long held views on drugs being a criminal issue as opposed to a medical one.
If only possession is legal then more people might try hard drugs that would have been scared away but drugs still have to be smuggled in. This also means that there is no quality control on the substances.
Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana. Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance. (Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological.)
If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, sold only to adults in very limited stores, and folks can enter treatment without fear of arrest.
The big mistake California (and other Leftist faux-topias) made was decriminalizing THEFT, ASSAULT, smoking and shooting on BART, smoking and shooting in public parks, smoking and shooting on sidewalks in front of residences -- and taxing the legal pot industry so highly that it was miles cheaper to buy stuff illegally no the corner.
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The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how quickly one can be addicted to it. Therefore, treatment should be much more easily be available and it should be much easier to have an intervention.
the legal pot industry's problem is it's impossible for it to turn a profit. they can't deduct operating expenses from their tax liability like other businesses can, because of federal law. items like rent, payroll.
they also can't use the same systems of credit management and bank accounts, because of federal law.
state taxes are a very minor part of the story.
Maybe those people were right? Prohibition decreased the amount of people addicted to alcohol and the number of people who beat their wives. If we had a more hard-line response to alcohol instead of the half-in/half-out wishy-washy nonsense that was Prohibition enforcement maybe less people would have their lives ruined by alcohol to this day. Singapore famously goes hard even against cannabis and they are a vastly more functional society crime-wise than Oregon. I know from personal experience that when cannabis was decriminalized where I am the drivers in my area became much worse. I don't use Uber anymore here because almost every time I enter a car now it's too often clear that the driver is high.
I wonder if Americans are ever going to realize their incessant penchant for 'freedoms' with regards to drugs/guns/speech/ certain corporate policies / etc are harmful to the only goals that matter to a society: the flourishing of the population. I wonder if America will ever have an adult in the room.
This is exactly it. The problem is letting the drug use impact other people's quality of life, access to common resources like parks, etc.
The difference between fentanyl and other drugs is a matter of degree.
This kind of behavior is primarily encountered when hard drugs are part of the equation.
Are you under the impression that cities like SF, Portland, Seattle etc. were arresting drug users who went to treatment centers at any point in the last 20 years or so? Ever heard of methadone clinics?
Not being from California—when/how did they do that?
Same with tobacco, but that’s because of taxes.
I agree with your other point though - permissiveness of use shouldn't come with ignoring all societal norms, just because you are a vulnerable drug user. In fact, permissiveness of use should be paired with stricter enforcement of quality of life laws
I can tell you firsthand that minors have no problem acquiring alcohol and tobacco.
"Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological."
I would, and that is not based on subjective opinion, call your statement - rubbish.
I will even throw you a bone.
https://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Madness-Deepak-Cyril-DSouza...
We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything.
> State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures.
And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.
> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.
It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.
But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.
They always claimed to follow other successful implementations like Portugal, but the law was no where near what they implemented as far as requiring treatment.
Whats funny is the Governor is telling the Portland mayor to fix the drug issues...like it didn't stem from measure 110.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/07/19/kotek-and-blumenauer-t...
The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.
Given that Oregon stopped its war on drugs and has had a terrible experience, I don't see how anyone can honestly believe that the war on drugs did not reduce the rates of drug use and addiction. This is not a political issue. Come to Portland and see. It's not like any other city. People engage in drugs freely and with impugnity. Correspondingly, people overdose continuously.
It seems obvious to me the war on drugs kept addiction rates and usage rates at a much more acceptable level. At least, it ensured the dangers of drug use didn't spill onto the streets (needles in public parks; drug users in public restrooms... places kids go).
Thus, it correspondingly seems obvious to me that the higher incarceration rate is worth it.
I have not seen that.
> over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure.
It was not. WoD helped to _control_ the amount of drugs. It certainly had not eradicated them, but it helped to reduce their prevalence.
The US military is, if anything, serious about understanding cause and effect. They studied and learned about drug addiction during and after the Viet Nam war.
What they found might seem counterintuitive. Addicted soldiers could break the habit easily once they returned home. Of course this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that circumstance has a lot to do with behavior.
Given that, if you don't change the circumstances, then changing the details (criminalization, penalties) won't change the behavior.
WHY are people using drugs (or alcohol, as many of us do?) What is being avoided or intentionally clouded?
Obviously, the idea of unhappiness is pretty broad, like from "my 401k is doing badly" to "I am unlikely to survive the day", but I suspect that it's true that if a certain threshold of the population answers yes to this question, that you can expect that a pretty large percentage of the respondents are probably in a pretty bad place, and if you have nothing left to lose, finding some way to soothe the pain of the end is at least understandable even if it's what nobody would prefer.
I am nothing even approaching a serious student of these issues, but I do fear that the lack of opportunities for Americans today to find a path to fulfillment with dignity means that many of us will wind up in situations where we are basically riding out the days until our death, and even though so many of the people consigned to this fate are not what we would consider ideal, I think we should judge ourselves as a society by how we address their issues.
Anyhow, Turchin himself comments on this matter in https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa... , it's an interesting read.
This is why rehab clinics seemingly "work" - you remove the person from the environment driving them to seek refuge from reality. They relapse very easily once back in the same situation that got them addicted in the first place.
Ive experienced it myself on a vacation during an addiction long ago: I was not worried about my situation, I had positive people around me and we did fun things. During that time I realized I had no interest in being high but felt the withdrawal so I wound up dosing as little as possible just so I wasn't jonesing. I realized breaking the addiction meant making life changes which weren't easy but I managed to get over it.
I don't think the main expectation of decriminalization is to solve the drug issue, but to stop adding fuel to the fire. But, maybe that will turn out to have been wrong
In the US they would be jailed or socially ostracized.
The circumstances changed such that there were serious consequences for doing drugs, and many were able to get off them when presented with consequences.
Removing consequences for antisocial levels of drug use does nothing to encourage people to get clean.
The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.
Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.
Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.
Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.
Sure, maybe? But maybe it's just a bad policy? Maybe we could adjust the implementation? Maybe we can look at other places were things are better?
Maybe a bit of shame could be helpful, too. SF and Portland have turned into a national punch line. That's shameful.
This is hyperbole, I live in one of the rougher neighborhoods. The city gov especially the mayor and his cronies have done nothing to actually fix problems, they just do expensive sweeps and cleanup without addressing root causes.
Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed.
Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance.
The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Not enough emphasis on identifying the actual root cause of the drug use which may be infection. They are probably worried about things like spreading HIV by needle sharing, not "So, does this person have an undiagnosed infection for which their drug of choice is medical treatment?"
Also: Are they building substantial amounts of new affordable housing with good access to transit and essentials like nearby grocery stores? Without that, trying to help homeless people get housing is a joke. If the housing they need simply does not exist, no amount of acting like homeless people are merely badly behaved and need to try harder fixes fuck all.
This isn't an academic study; if people are dying and the treatment funding is not being increased immediately, keeping this 'experiment' going seems very unethical.
I don’t think there’s any safe injection sites in Portland either, or some safe supply system.
There has to be something in the policy which discriminates between “wrong direction entirely” and “not doing enough”.
Decriminalization on its own seems to be just everybody turning a blind eye and otherwise doing nothing to help, so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t work.
Even if it had been funded, Oregon wouldn't have been starting from zero, it's been in a deficit for mental health and addiction treatment for almost 20 years prior. It didn't have enough people and beds for chronic treatment against demand at any point in the 5 years before Measure 110 passed, even if you only consider the demand for them from housed people with health insurance and serious-but-not-hard-drug addictions,[1] nevermind the 2020 meth problem, then the 2021 fentanyl problem, and now the 10x larger 2022 fentanyl problem that's made it the cheapest drug available.
Aside from all that, the death rate spike steeper than the US average's spike or neighboring Washington spike over the same timeframe, but not by much, and Oregon's per-capita death rate is still lower than either; it's #35 out of the 50 states and DC.[2]
So even if Measure 110 had been passed, say, 5 years prior and had the time to fully distribute funding to and staff the existing need for treatment measures across the board before taking effect, the sheer scale of the fentanyl crisis since 2022 would've overwhelmed those resources anyway.
But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts. The authority to distribute funds went to an unqualified council that lacked the resources to vet agencies, so most of the allocated money's just sat there unused. Everything — from the council membership to its administrative structure to its term limits to its lack of data collection to measure any outcomes from the funding — has made distributing the funds harder than it needed to be, and determining if the funds have had any effect impossible.[3]
> I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
For opioid deaths, most of the rise came in the last three months of the 2022 and first three months of 2023, defying the typical trend of declining during the winter.[4]
It's also nearly all fentanyl. If there's been an uptick in decriminalization-specific drug tourism, it'd be dwarfed by the totality of fentanyl use (or if all the new fentanyl use is tourism, Oregon's population would've grown by a half-million people or so over a few months). Seizures of fentanyl went from fewer than 1 million dose-equivalent units in 2020, to more than 4 million in 2021, to 32 million in 2022. Meth and especially heroin dropped over the same span and coke stayed level.[6]
Measure 110 also didn't change the Portland metro police response rate to calls, but who knows what to make of that with PPB being a giant crib of whining babies since 2020.[5]
1: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/24/oregons-measure-110-i...
2: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...
3: https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2023/01/audit-oregons-drug...
4: https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PREVENTIONWELLNESS/SUBSTANCEUS...
5: https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/10/11/initial-research-on-me...
As always, states that are "tough on drugs" get a free pass regardless of how bad their outcomes are, and states that legalize it are scrutinized even when their outcomes are no worse.
"The consequences of Measure 110’s shortcomings have fallen most heavily on Oregon’s drug users. In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In neighboring Idaho and California, where drug possession remains subject to prosecution, the rate of increase was significantly lower than Oregon’s. (The spike in Washington State was similar to Oregon’s, but that comparison is more complicated because Washington’s drug policy has fluctuated since 2021.) Other states once notorious for drug deaths, including West Virginia, Indiana, and Arkansas, are now experiencing declines in overdose rates."
Typical Oregon response comparing Oregon, a fairly rich state, with West Virginia, one of the poorest states. If you can't do better than a poor state with your high taxes and high median incomes... that's not a good reflection on the state. Yet, most Oregonians seem to get some satisfaction that they do better than Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia, even if they're #49 in the ranking. It's gross.
I mean, Oregon has Intel, Nike, Adidas, a well-developed tech sector, etc, and West Virginia has coal mining, yet we're actually comparing ourselves to them.
I really wish people in this state would strive for something actually better.
People addicted to hard drugs require treatment, leaving them to their own devices is likely to have negative results. Problem is, who is going to pay for that treatment and for how long? On top of that, is it ok for Bob the local heroine addict to shoot up in front of peoples homes in a local residential community or school? Do we really want to worry about Bob dropping his needles on the ground?
I'm not a fan of sending people to jail for drug use but when balanced against the very real repercussions to peoples lives regarding hard drug use and the affect on communities, not sure what the alternative is. Rendering down town areas unwalkable due to an infestation of addicts, and the associated uptick in property crime and robbery is not acceptable either.
Plus once drugs are legal, its very likely the first thing to be chopped in a budget crunch is going to be treatment programs as illustrated in Portugal.
Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.
One correction: many opiate users, yes, even heroin users, can be functional members of society. There are many folks you would never know use H, at least until they accidentally get some fentanyl and die.
Same thing with meth(which is actually a prescription medication). I'll say that there is always a very high probability that some life stress transforms a casual usage pattern into full-blown addiction though. I've seen it first hand with a family member who used meth for years "on the weekends, to get things done" until some stress in their mid-40s turned them into a hallucinating IV meth user.
More or less though, I think we should maintain criminalization of public usage of most drugs, but I'm open to whatever pragmatic approach maximizes public health and safety while lowering crime.
The part that hasn't changed is "screw them." Nobody really cares about these people. They're viewed as an inconvenience and the debate is over the least costly way to either warehouse them or shove them aside somewhere. Most people view addiction as a moral failing and think addicts deserve whatever they get.
I've never been in favor of drug criminalization except possibly in the case of the most addictive and deadly hard drugs (crystal meth, fentanyl, concentrated opiates), but I always hoped that legalization would come with a redirection of funding from prisons and police into treatment. The latter part just isn't happening, or isn't happening with any effectiveness. My take is that nobody gives a damn and decriminalization is more about saving money than freedom or better treatment approaches.
-- Albert Einstein
In a later comment you ask ...how should I provide help & compassion?
I would say one-on-one as an individual walking the streets, you probably shouldn't, especially if you have children in tow.
We need to address our nationwide affordable housing crisis. California is disproportionately impacted and takes a lot of the blame for it, but I think they are basically the dumping ground and whipping boy for a national failure.
Decriminalization is helpful in part because if you criminalize use of the drug, it makes it harder to seek treatment. People who expect to go to jail for trying to get the help they need are more likely to not come forward and to continue to try to fix their problems themselves.
We need a better understanding of why people do drugs, what the underlying root causes are. It's hard to solve a problem without knowing why it exists. Given our long track record of not getting results, I think we have room for improvement in how we frame this problem.
Decriminalizing doesn't change people with a drug problem into not having a drug problem, true. It does, at least, free them from also having a legal problem. Idea being that they can seek and get treatment for their drug problem, now. Something they can't do when it is criminal. (Indeed, reading the Wikipedia page for Portugal shows increased treatments as their first bullet in favor.)
I'd also guess that it makes it easier for treatments to be offered. As, right now, offering help there is basically aiding illegal activity.
Make them actually legal (and thus more safe), tax them heavily, use a portion of said taxation to educate properly and then support and rehabilitate those who need it. Don't allow unsafe activities in public places that cause an unsafe environment.
This really isn't that complicated, we've just been under the spell of prohibition for so long waking up can be a bit disorienting.
I guess if you want drug use to go down, or to reduce deaths etc. if those specific metrics are you goals, and nothing else matters, that's one thing. Maybe it is not "working" by those standards.
But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies. It is a health/medical issue and, in a broader context, a liberty issue. It is not a legal issue in my opinion. Regardless of drug use statistics, no one belongs in jail or with a criminal record for no reason other than possessing and/or consuming an intoxicant. I don't even care if drug use goes up with decrminalization or legalization. In my opinion it is simply outside of the proper moral scope of a government to concern itself with such matters. Feel free to disagree. This is my personal political view.
However, that's not the world we live in. We share our cities with fairly unintelligent, irrational people, that have no interest in higher ideals. Our cities are being destroyed and made unsafe by these people that are just out of their minds on drugs / mental issues, completely disconnected from society, vandalizing, breaking and entering, hurting other people. They obviously, demonstrably, can't be trusted to partake responsibly.
I guess the debate is to what level the government needs to step in to control such people and the actions they take. I'd say that since they've already demonstrated they can't be trusted to coexist with peaceful society, that some level of action needs to be taken. But it's tough because in an ideal society I'd say the correct thing is for the government to stay out of it. But we live in a far from ideal society.
That the government has extended their reach to criminalize things people choose to put into their bodies, and the resulting problems that's caused and causing, is a travesty, but I think saying the government should have _no_ opinion on that is going too far.
In other words, there's a tradeoff between the autonomy to do things to your body and the real costs that drug addiction imposes on others.
I agree with this in principle, but only to an extent. It's not the government's business to intervene when people fill their bodies with, say, ice cream, which makes them happy but has some health consequences borne by the individual. But on the other hand, the government should certainly not permit people to fill their bodies full of explosive substances like nitroglycerin, which might detonate when they are outside walking around public spaces, taking out innocent bystanders.
Hard drugs fall somewhere in between these extremes, because in addition to their first-order effects on the user's health and happiness, they also seem to cause second-order consequences on innocent bystanders. Under the influence of drugs, some users can become aggressive and violent, and lose control of and -- importantly -- responsibility for their actions. Under the influence of addiction, some users also resort to robbery or theft to fund their habits. Many also end up unable to care for themselves. Statistically, this occurs with enough likelihood that it's a predictable, although not inevitable, consequence of substance abuse. Punishing the crimes committed under the influence of drugs does not act as an effective deterrent. Much of the harm from hard drugs does fall on people with no direct relationship to the drug users themselves, and they will have a strong and legitimate self-interest in having these substances banned.
How do you address the argument that drug users go on to be a burden to society?
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
It seems like it should if the result is a burden on society, though there are many potential solution to ameliorate the problem other than outlawing or restricting substances.
Because we invest in people. We pay money to educate them, in many cases feed, shelter, and clothe them and in a variety of other ways. We expect citizens to contribute back into society. Having millions of zombies interested in nothing else than getting high is self destructive not only for the individuals we have invested in but also to our societies general longterm health.
So yes, government does have an active interest in having a healthy populace.
After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
It's very easy to change legislation and deregulate. A lot harder to actually spend the money to build out a robust system of healthcare.
Deregulation is a necessary step in order to treat addiction as a disease best fixed with healthcare, but it can't be the single only step.
It's dispiriting that people are looking at Oregon struggling through the implementation details and thinking that the whole idea was a mistake and we need to go back to decades old drug war tactics. Not clear at all how those approaches would succeed in this moment as the new problem of fentanyl and toxic drugs has made things worse than it has ever been.
The notion that we need to give up and go back to the old ways seems more like a knee jerk reaction and flight to safety of what we've always done.
And then there's the stance by some politicians furiously in favor of prohibition, which smells of conflict of interests to say the least, but that's another story.
The only way that happens is gov. Subsidies.
It’s why CO and WA and others still have such a large black market for weed.
Prison is not the answer but decriminalization removes incentives against powerful narcotics.
I keep hearing of people on the west coast committing small crimes constantly and being let out. We can't blame it all on the drugs, people still need to be required to act responsible. Right now we're letting people become junkies on the street and not even doing anything when they rob all the stores.
Make robbing the fucking store illegal, not doing drugs.
On a related note, anybody got a quick turn-around on a Hyundai Veloster rear window? Ours was just smashed out for the fourth time, because local fentanyl zombies somehow believe we are stashing a treasure trove under the back hatch.
I often hear the "decriminalize drugs it worked in Portugal" phrase. But while it's not wrong it also misses a lot of points.
Portugal did much more then just decriminalizing drugs, they also e.g. giving people free therapy or consulting to get them away from drugs, places where addicts can safely take drugs and also people can reach out to them to help them reduce drug consumption and much more. Also they did various steps to reduce the poverty<=>organized crime<=>selling drugs<=>taking drugs relationship through I don't remember enough details.
I'm not even sure the last step is possible in the US due to the US being in a very different situations, e.g. wrt. police violence, gang violence, but also stuff like how society tends to punish people which had been in prison even through the prison punishment already is supposed to be their full penalty and enacting such discrimination is quite problematic (as it makes it much harder for someone to change their live to the better).
Anyway only decriminalizing without any other steps is likely most times a bad idea.
E.g. in Portugal after cutting resources for that program the results also started to become worse AFIK.
What is most important in my opinions is to make it easier for people to get away from drugs and turn their live around. _And this fundamentally also means not treating drug addicts for criminals because they are drug addicts_. But that isn't exact the same as a general decriminalization. For example you could have rules like not punishing people which committed a (non serve, e.g. drug possession up to some amount) crime due to being addicted iff and only iff they take a withdrawal therapy, and only once or so. Also such a therapy is provided for free by the state for any addicted citizen, at least once or twice in their live. Similar you do not get discriminated when for having been addicted in the past if you went to a withdrawal therapy. Especially the later point is really important.
The current situation with hard drug use is that there are far more drugged out people in public, and far more open drug use in public since 2020. The exact causes, I'll leave to experts to determine. Measure 110 has certainly played a part, though.
I think it’s also really important to carefully weigh the cost/benefit; maybe a 60% increase in OD rate is actually preferable to jailing people in terms of harm inflicted? This is alluded to in the article but not actually analyzed. Repealing (rather than tweaking the implementation as they are doing) might do more harm, even though “think of the children” leads voters to want to roll back the change.
Finally, there is a market composition issue - fentanyl is increasingly common because it’s much easier to smuggle (more doses per gram) than heroin. But the potency also makes it extremely dangerous as it is easier to accidentally OD, even assuming you have known quality / evenly diluted concentration. Heroin on the other hand is much safer, especially if it’s regulated to be consistent and known quality. If we had decriminalized supply of safer versions of drugs, we’d probably see a dramatic reduction of usage in the more dangerous ones (and therefore a reduction in harm). Most drug ODs are accidental due to unknown potency, but simply decriminalizing possession doesn’t resolve this problem. My summary here would be “cheap, quality heroin would displace fentanyl and reduce ODs”.
> First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline.
It doesn't sound like decriminalized use to me. They are handing out pretty hefty tickets.
Traffic violations are illegal; it's a crime to run a red light.
> Selling, trafficking, and possessing large amounts of drugs remain criminal offenses in Oregon.
I.e. not decriminalized.
Trafficking and manufacturing cannot be decriminalized. I mean, think about all the prescription drugs out there.
What you have to do is to provide them as cleanly produced pharmaceuticals that can be provided to someone who is addicted, and at a reasonable, low cost.
You cannot just do the following and expect great results:
* the same thugs are selling the same shit;
* nobody knows where the shit came from or what is in it;
* only, the users aren't hard criminals now, only perpetrating a $100 misdemeanor.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
OTOH, militarized and racist Nixonian prohibition also doesn't serve a public good. One easy change: the US schedule of substances should go away because it levies unfair and unequal punishment on users. Psychoactive substances don't need the regulations, controls, or expense of monitoring highly enriched uranium: it's spending money and effort on the wrong parts of the public health situation. There is already a template for dealing with other substances, i.e., alcohol and tobacco. Focusing on healthcare and mental healthcare for all, with substance treatment being part of it, would lead to better outcomes and probably reduce the costs of policing.
Speaking as a person in Portland OR, it's not the decriminalizing that isn't working, it's the absolute dipshit of a mayor in Ted Wheeler and the total apathy from the local PD that are our largest failing.
> When evaluating these policies, it's worth keeping in mind that it may not be a choice between "Drug Sickness versus Normal Productive Citizen", but instead a balance of "Drug Sickness versus Prison Inmate".
> Sure, a person imprisoned for drug-use may be "out of sight, out of mind", but--even ignoring ethical/moral issues--the raw financial cost of that incarceration is still there, and could be might higher than whatever was being spent before in trash-removal or patrols or whatever.
Not a criticism, merely contextualising the presented editorial position.
In Portugal drug use in public is not tolerated. Shooting heroin in the park will result in arrest and a choice between treatment and jail.
Oregon’s approach seems to be what someone imagined Portugal was doing without actually finding out.
You can believe people have a right to do what they want with their body while simultaneously believing they don’t have the right to impose upon other people by acting in antisocial ways.
This may be a difficult distinction to make, but many people don’t seem to even try.
Just because something is acceptable, or legal, should not mean it is necessarily celebrated or even tolerated in public.
I think we overestimate for how many of them this is a realistic path. Quite a few of them will struggle for life. Have no family or a dysfunctional one, no marketable skills or ability to gain them, mental issues and cognitive shortcomings, wrong kind of friends/network, a whole host of issues.
Miracle comeback stories will grab the attention, but shouldn't be seen as the normal path. The normal path may be dedicating enormous resources for very little return.
I don't have the answers. You can't do nothing but you can't babysit somebody for their entire life either.
So you need to compare the effects of legalization with the effects of criminalization. First order effects might seem bad: more drug users in public, more crime. But you also don’t see the drug users who weren’t imprisoned and were able to get help and turn their lives around.
What Oregon tells me is that deinstitutionalization doesn’t work. You can’t just kick drug users to the streets and expect that to fix the problem. Sick people need help.
I'd live there in a second if the state / city cleared up the nutty violent "activists" and homeless all over the place.
If you are happy to walk down your street and purchase a bottle of wine or craft beer, then you are casting your vote about what you consider to be an acceptable standard for such activities.
"Society" isn't really a unit. Plenty of people would happily make alcohol illegal if they had power. It's not ethically acceptable to drink in a lot of communities (even in the U.S.). Some countries prohibit alcohol present day.
My point is that the status of alcohol as "ethically acceptable" is far from universal.
To "solve" the drug issue we need full legalization and regulation of all drugs, and safe centers/locations where drugs can be used under medical supervision.
It's not that decriminalizing drugs hasn't worked. It's just now you see it. Previously it was hidden in remote prisons where the drugs were often brought in by the staff.
The point here is you need to fix the underlying reasons why people use drugs. Those reasons vary. Many heroin users start off with a valid prescription for opiate painkillers. The US prescribes opiates at a prodigious rate. Doctors are given golf trips to prescribe Oxycontin to enrich the Sacklers, creating the next generation of heroin junkie.
A lot of it is escapism and self-medication too. Untreated mental health issues, homelessness, hopeless conditions, etc.
In short, the drug isssue cannot be separated from material conditions, from having basic needs met. So when people cannot afford food or shelter, we as a society are making a choice to prioritize profits for a very few at the expensive of spreading misery and death to many people. Putting them in prison merely hides those problems from view.
Being so bold to think that a good dose of superior modern intellectualism is going to make up for the fundamental flaws this introduce in a society, is a special type of belly button observationism.
As a society, we shouldn't stop our inquiry by looking at the personal tragedy that this causes on the individuals. The real long term issue is at the higher order level, where a society's fabric is torn apart by the debilitating nature of many drugs when deployed at scale on a society. Addictive debilitating drugs are a powerful force bringing a people down, taking others along with them.
Softness on drugs from a high minded perspective boils down to a decoupling mistake similar to the mispricing that carbon taxes attempt to correct. Drugs impose a high social cost that's hidden from sight when we just look at it from first-order individual right's perspective. But if we dig deeper, our collective individual rights are all put in jeopardy.
"state audit published this year found that the new law was “vague” about how state officials should oversee the awarding of money to new treatment programs, and set “unrealistic timelines” for evaluating and funding treatment proposals. As a result, the funding process was left largely to the grant-making panel, most of whose members “lacked experience in designing, evaluating and administrating a governmental-grant-application process,” according to the audit. Last year, supporters of Measure 110 accused state health officials, preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, of giving the panel insufficient direction and resources to handle a flood of grant applications. The state health authority acknowledged missteps in the grant-making process."
If people are hoping for a policy where literally no one "falls through the cracks", I'd have to suspect they had little to no experience with those who struggle with substance addiction.
1) I'm kind of against nanny state stuff.
2) From looking around, and seeing the state of things - a lot of people are going to turn to drugs. So people passing these laws... kindof have blood on their hands?
All that said, I'm getting older and realizing something that I don't think young people like to admit or thing about: not everyone is fit to live on this planet. There is only so much resource you can pass out but at a certain point there's not much to do for people just screaming into the wind 19 hours of the day.
We have a society, we can't just turn that off so everyone feels special.
1) the police stopped arresting for small possession, but no social services were funded to fill the gap for helping/making people get clean. Churches can only do so much.
2) the war on fentanyl pushed that drug market into homemade from ingredients anyone can get on alibaba... greatly increasing access.
3) the unemployment crisis.
I can vouch personally for the massive number of people who appear high on fentanyl, specifically. Thank goodness it's not an aggressive drug. Can someone with more context and subject expertise comment?
That doesn't mean that decriminalization is bad, it means you can't ignore public health. Seems uniquely American to assume that just leaving addicted people alone without appropriate healthcare options is going to reduce addiction.
Slow down. Let's not just toss it out just yet.
Saying this is not the logical conclusion one might think it is. It's not a problem where there are only two solutions.
It’s fine to critique a new approach and work on improvements, but let’s not be too hasty here. We are trying to undo decades of harm caused by ridiculous policy failures.
If you grew up in the rust belt, none of this is new. Kids were ODing in middle school in the 90s. Tragic of course, but someone is getting rich so inevitably the root cause is not bothered with.
1. There are far more users out there than you realize. Almost all of my friends use, they all live normal lives and you wouldn't know it unless you actively partied with them. There are vast swaths of society that aren't opiate or meth addicts, but partake in coke, ketamine, psychedelics, mdma, etc regularly without consequence. You just aren't seeing it.
2. Anyone who hasn't been through the criminal justice ringer for drugs likely does not fully appreciate how devastating it can be. In most cases it does not contribute positively to a person's life, can hinder future employment, can cost a person their job, their livelihood, their housing, their kids, etc., for what was likely a victimless crime. Decriminalization, within reason, is a moral imperative. Full legalization, with regulation, is the only way to effectively deal with the problem in its entirety, from supply on down, the same as it was with alcohol.
3. Using drugs is a personal choice that people should be free to make, the same as using alcohol (a drug as debilitating, toxic, addictive, etc as most illegal drugs), or scuba diving, or skydiving, or any other high risk activity that we tolerate. Like the latter activities, you can implement licensing requirements such as mandatory education and fees to fund abuse treatment programs. Legalizing it across the board will mandate safe and responsible supply, and remove the criminal organizations from the equation. Again, look at what happened with alcohol prohibition and its eventual legalization. It is the EXACT same as what we are experiencing with drugs.
4. Because it is entirely possible to use drugs responsibly, its use in and of itself should not be the focus of criminal enforcement. It is bad behavior that is the issue, and like alcohol, we can criminalize it. Driving drunk, public intoxication, child endangerment, domestic abuse, assault, property damage, etc are all problems we have with drunks, and all are criminalized respectively. There is no reason why we can't do the same with drugs.
5. Addiction is a serious issue. But it is a public health issue, and should be treated as such. Turning addicts into criminals is just making a difficult situation worse. These people are sick, they should get help. We also need to serious expand programs for the homeless, as the housing problem is what drives a lot of what you see on the streets.
Oregon did the right thing by decriminalizing, but massively screwed it up by under investment in care.
Statistically jail is a very bad drug treatment center. But it's likely better than no treatment at all.
Harsh perhaps, but if we look at outcomes, the current situation kills a lot of people and wastes a lot of lives. I can see how some people would think "don't administer narcan to addicts" but I don't think that it's fair to attribute addictive behaviors entirely to the user. Someone is selling them the stuff and know full well the amorality of it. That said, creating negative consequences for users before addiction takes place can also create the right incentive structure to avoid mass addiction such as what we're seeing in both cities and countryside in the US.
Well funded and highly available treatment programs must be made available alongside it
And that's not even getting into the need for a regulated and safe supply that can only come with outright legalization...
Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour. It is an unfortunate side effect of what I can only describe as the infantilisation of society that I have watched happen over the last few decades.
It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
It turns out that forbidding bad things and punishing bad behavior does reduce their incidence.
Now let's apply that to all the other crime we've gone soft on, like depravity or murder or violence in general. Criminalize drugs, criminalize the production and distribution of pornography, criminalize public displays and promotion of depravity. Singapore may take some things a bit far, but you cannot deny that crime is EXTREMELY low, something that should compel us to get off the sentimental train and consider that adequate punishment is good thing.
Legalize psychedelics and promote anti-addiction and therapy programs using psychedelics such as Iboga, Ayahuasca and Psilocybin.
But then I met addicts. People who made one (fatal) mistake and are now hooked for life, and careening through life completely out of their own control.
In the past, we had strong social institutions like the church, and mass participation in the army, and insane asylums for the bad apples. The problem there was over-control and abuse of disempowered people.
Note I don’t agree with the above, but now we’ve swung so far the other way that there are people doing hard drugs 100m from where I’m typing this, and there are seemingly no answers.
I hope we find an enlightened way to guide those who need help because neither the old nor the current way is working perfectly.
did oregon have a unified intervention program where there was one point of contact who knew and tracked the patient from initial contact through all ups, downs, sides, and arounds? that p.o.c. would have access to full patient history (in a social sense also), and be able track the progression and punishments and rewards the "system" offers.
Lets hope Oregon will be shining beacon of inclusivity for all drug users, anywhere in US! We should not rush into any conslusions for at least 30 years!!!
