Why Oregon's Drug Decriminalization Failed (msn.com) 194
In 2020 Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs.
But now "America's most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended," writes the Atlantic, "after more than three years of painful results." Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative... Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed...
More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment... Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all...
Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon's drug problems. 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... Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which — in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110 — there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime — while such crime was falling nationally — led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy.
The article notes that Oregon was the first U.S. state to decriminalize marijuana back in 1973, and had long shown low rates of imprisonment for non-violent crimes (diverting offenders into so-called "drug courts" which could mandate treatment or order court-directed supervision). "However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed."
But "One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon's addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded," the article concludes. And it adds that the newly-passed law now "provides extensive new funding for immediate needs, including detox facilities, sobering centers, treatment facilities, and the staff to support those services."
They recommend other states adopt "adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment" — and instead of punitive incarcerations, "use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use."
But now "America's most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended," writes the Atlantic, "after more than three years of painful results." Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative... Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed...
More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment... Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all...
Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon's drug problems. 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... Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which — in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110 — there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime — while such crime was falling nationally — led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy.
The article notes that Oregon was the first U.S. state to decriminalize marijuana back in 1973, and had long shown low rates of imprisonment for non-violent crimes (diverting offenders into so-called "drug courts" which could mandate treatment or order court-directed supervision). "However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed."
But "One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon's addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded," the article concludes. And it adds that the newly-passed law now "provides extensive new funding for immediate needs, including detox facilities, sobering centers, treatment facilities, and the staff to support those services."
They recommend other states adopt "adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment" — and instead of punitive incarcerations, "use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use."
"grossly underfunded" - BULLSHIT!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
The only thing underfunded is a bounty on corrupt politicians (sorry to be redundant).
Re:"grossly underfunded" - BULLSHIT!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon's addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded,
Was. Was underfunded, prior to Measure 110. Your link is about the present day, after Measure 110 was passed.
The Oregon legislature allocated significant funds to rehabilitation programs along with decriminalization, expecting a lot of addicts to sign up for those programs now that doing so was no longer stigmatized. But the addicts didn't do that. And so there was a lot of wasted money.
You can't just rehabilitate (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of drug addicts are self-medicating. Just throwin
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Congratulations, you've just successfully argued in favor of institutionalizing addicts. Lock em up and throw away the key, right? Especially if you have to pick them up from a homeless camp or similar.
Turning them loose to go get high on the streets again is not an option.
Re:You can't just rehabilitate (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it becomes a bit of a cost optimization problem. If the drug users are causing harm to society (break-ins, thefts, etc), then that needs to be dealt with. Its not obvious to me that locking vast segments of the population in jail without treatment does that. Especially, when the addicts have access to drugs in jail.
As the system from Portugal was explained to me, the users would get a supply of drugs, and it came with responsibilities. On-going therapy, not letting others have access to your supply, or go to jail.
It sounds like the Oregon trial just decriminalized without requiring treatment or responsibility. The result was proliferation.
Seems like something more in the middle is needed. Not sure we are going to get it ...
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Which is exactly what the Oregon legislature is doing.
The sequence of events (as I understand them) would now be:
1. you get popped for substance possession, short of "intent to distribute" weight;
2. you get arrested and arraigned;
3. (a) if it's your first trip to court for low-weight possession, you get probation with a suspended sentence.;
3. (b) if you are on probation already, you go to jail for the remainder of your suspended sentence;
4. Each Oregon county can choose to implement a program which states
Re:You can't just rehabilitate (Score:5, Insightful)
This wasn't so much a 'stop waging a "war on drugs"' policy as a 'every drug-addict wants to join the rat-race' policy. If drug-users wanted that, they'd already be avoiding drug-use. A drug-use problem is created by opportunity, environment, personality, and genetics.
Making it difficult to get drugs quickly runs into the paradox of diminishing returns. It's important to make a cost-benefit decision, not a 'win'-the-war decision. Environment is mostly 3 tiers of government, plus family and friends. Government can't help everyone but help needs to start before they have a drug problem, such as social/healthcare services. Personality is a difficult but people can learn to recognize triggers from themselves, their family, their friends (and use social/healthcare services) and learn beneficial avoidance habits. Genetics, obviously can't be changed.
In this case, the government was willing to provide quit-using treatments but it also quit dealing with the other aspects of drug-use, including drug-addicts' propensity for violence and homelessness (another trigger for criminal behaviour).
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I mean yeah there's Medicare but it takes damn little income to get kicked off that.
That's Medicaid. Medicare is for retirees.
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Re: "grossly underfunded" - BULLSHIT!!!! (Score:3)
Can't say I'm surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Drug decriminalization only really works when you have the social support structures in place to prevent most people from turning to drugs in the first place. You know, things like free/affordable higher education, well-paying jobs, healthcare, affordable housing - the stuff that's typically present in places which have had success stories with drug decriminalization campaigns.
Let people do drugs in good ol' late stage capitalism America and well, yeah, what happened in Oregon is what you'll get.
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Re:Can't say I'm surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
.... the stuff that's typically present in places which have had success stories with drug decriminalization campaigns.
The only "success" with drug decriminalization campaigns has been short term only. There have been ZERO instances of drug decriminalization that have had long term success.
The idea that you can get rid of all the problems of drug use through decriminalization is silly, childish, wishful thinking.
Prohibition Yay!! (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the CDC excessive alcohol use was responsible for about 178,000 deaths in the United States each year during 2020–2021, The numbers of deaths for all other drugs combined were 91,000 (2021) and 106,000 (2022).
So alcohol causes more death. More non-death mayhem too, I would wager.
Hallucinagenic mushrooms were legal in Oregon and now they aren't. They aren't addictive, are argueably therapudic, far, far less destructive than alcohol.
Re: Prohibition Yay!! (Score:2, Interesting)
I stand correct the difference was about 70k, around 108k died of just drug overdoses
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The irony of this post. Prohibition primarily targeted alcohol, and failed. Miserably. 178k+ people die every year to alcohol because the people of the United States demand it.
Re:Prohibition Yay!! (Score:5, Insightful)
178,000 deaths, I can buy because there are way more alcohol users than there are heroin users.
There are 902,000 [drugabusestatistics.org] Americans who use heroin, annually (at least according to those people).
There are 14,000 overdoses from heroin annually.
That leaves heroin at a 1.5% death rate.
Now let's talk about alcohol.
In the USA, only counting those 18 and over, 215.6 million [drugabusestatistics.org] adults had a drink in the last year. Using your figures on alcohol deaths, that leaves the per-user death rate at .08%
Alcohol is FAR safer than heroin. Your numbers are lying.
Re: Prohibition Yay!! (Score:4, Informative)
When you ban something, all the casual and paw abiding users stop, leaving the addicts and unscrupulous users only. The normal dynamic when you ban something is you get fewer users, but the users you do have are more hardcore addicts and cause greater problems.
The purity of black market drugs is also bad. Black market alcohol was terrible. Over 500 people died on one day, in one city (NYC, 1926) from poisoned black market alcohol. This never happens anymore.
Until we legalize and regulate heroin the same way we do alcohol, for at least a generation or two, it's impossible to say if heroin is more dangerous than alcohol.
Re:Prohibition Yay!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't think it's either relevant or useful. Vitamin A is deadly in excess. So is oxygen. If you measure only the effects once you exceed the toxic threshold, you won't get an accurate profile. You need to know what the benefits are at the therapeutic threshold, AND you need to know what controls you can add to keep things in the therapeutic range.
(Alcohol in low doses impairs brain development at any dose, but it also diversifies and strenthens the microbiome, and microbiome health improves brain function
Re:Prohibition Yay!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never seen an ounce of supporting data to suggest marijuana is more harmful than alcohol. All you're doing peddling tired myths like this is discrediting your entire message.
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That data is very hard to come by, as we don't really have good numbers on how much marijuana gets used. Canada has very good data on how marijuana impaired accidents nearly quintupled when they legalized marijuana. The doctor that wrote that paper had this to say about comparative deadliness of the two substances:
“Stoned driving is as dangerous, if currently less deadly, than drunk driving. Many people don’t understand that, and have a false sense that driving while intoxicated on cannabis is safe, which is untrue. “The odds of being involved in a motor vehicle crash when driving ‘stoned’ are approximately double those of sober driving, but significantly less than the 10 to 15 times increase when driving with a blood alcohol concentration of approximately 0.1,”
On it's face this would seem to agree with your assessment that marijuana is less deadly than alcohol. From a driving perspective it probably is. Although the paper went on to talk about how v
Re:Prohibition Yay!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Alcohol really is a societal problem and with the rapid urbanization of the early 20th century, the problems with Alcohol were acute...I don't know why they were so bad but alcohol abuse was really quite bad. Alcohol use plummeted during Prohibition, domestic abuse went way down, liver cirrhosis deaths went way down, etc. etc. And despite the inevitable organized crime that resulted, overall crime went down too.
Some people still drank alcohol, did crime, and died of course, but much fewer people. The normal law of prohibition is that when you ban something, you will have fewer consumers, but each one will, on average, be worse off and more disruptive than consumers in a legal market. The product becomes much more expensive, lower quality, and more dangerous. People forget this happened with alcohol too. 585 people died in one day in NYC 1926 because of poisoned alcohol.
We did move away from total alcohol prohibition, but we still have many controls (taxes, licenses to sell and make, age limits, locations and hours where it can be sold, concentration tiers, areas it's still banned, advertising controls, major controls on driving while consuming, jobs where you still get fired if caught using, etc. etc.). Basically, we replaced total prohibition with a web of other controls...we did not replace prohibition with a free-for-all. We still are banning drinking while driving, implementing age limits and major, real-crime punishments for providing alcohol to minors, and a patchwork of harm-reduction regulations, taxes, etc.
What's important to realize about Oregon's "decriminalization" experiment is there was never a legal market for the drugs. We have still never tried a regulated market of pure, safe drugs the way we do alcohol. We kept the bootlegging and black market, and just stopped arresting users. This is nothing like alcohol. We should still try "real" decriminalization with strong controls. It will take some time to figure out what those controls need to be.
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Read about how people lived (more to the point, didn't live because they worked 9-12 hours a day 6 days a week) and were abused at work, during the late guilded age and you'll quickly see why people smoked like chimneys and spent half of every day sloshed. Then thank a Union for the fact that we don't
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Yes, alcohol kills more people, but most drugs (including marijuana) are more deadly.
There is zero data to support this conclusion. In fact, there is lots of data to show that alcohol causes way more health problems than cannabis. In fact, I don't even need to show mountains of data, I'll give you this single data point: people die all the time of alcohol poisoning. Literally nobody dies of a THC overdose because you would have to smoke hundreds of joints in a single day to even approach that risk.
Thus, nothing you wrote can be believed because you impeached your own argument through yo
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When has that ever worked in the United States?
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Look at the penalties for drug use and trafficking in Southeast Asia. Malaysia was executing people for trafficking. Even with penalties that harsh it hasn't stopped drug use. Throwing addicts in jail doesn't help them either. The only way people stop using drugs is they die or decide to get clean themselves.
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Completely stop: no, massively reduce: yes. A drug addict is incapable of thinking of anything but the next dose, they can't also "decide" to get clean. This is how drugs work, and why they're so profitable.
Even though I'm all for personal freedoms in other cases, here the drug addict already has no freedom.
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here the drug addict already has no freedom.
They had the freedom to not use drugs.
Re:Can't say I'm surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
A drug addict is incapable of thinking of anything but the next dose
Unbelievably incorrect.
they can't also "decide" to get clean.
FFS... drug addicts "decide" to get clean ALL THE TIME. In fact, it's the single best predictor of success in treatment. If they didn't make the decision, it's almost certainly not going to stick. If they came to it on their own, it's far more likely to be positive.
This is how drugs work
You do not know how drugs work.
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I lived in malaysia, which is across the border from Thailand, and let me tell you.... I hate magic sky daddy bullshit, but i felt much much safer in malaysia than thailand, but the inverse was that I was arrested for pre-marital sex.
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No, you're posting AC because what you're saying is total bullshit, and you know it.
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Isn't that sort-of what they do with addicts in many EU countries? Maybe not as thoroughly or roughly as El Salvador does it, but . . .
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Decriminalizing drugs has worked really well in Portugal for over two decades.
https://transformdrugs.org/blo... [transformdrugs.org]
Fewer addicts, greater proportion in treatment, usage levels below EU averages, and a corresponding reduction in drug related crime. Consumers of drugs are treated as patients rather than criminals.
Re: Can't say I'm surprised (Score:2)
Re:Can't say I'm surprised (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Oregon.
The Oregon State Hospital is overcrowded, another mental health facility was shutdown for being unsafe, and the homeless money went unspent. Why you might ask? Because the local government only gives out government grants to those organizations that are a part of the grant grifting operations, whereby the grantees are relied upon to contribute money back to the politicians who give them money, and many of those grantees were shut down due to gross incompetence or fraud. The Secretary of State who ostensibly was responsible for regulating the marijuana and liquor business, ended up being found to have been on the take from the same businesses she was regulating for example. Combine this with the fact that this was rolled out during the great pandemic, escalating homelessness driven by migration and federal reserve policies, and people from other states shipping their homeless / unwanted masses over here, and the "defunding" of the police.
I am not a leftist, but i think its entirely possible that the causes for the statistics cited, were a more proximate result of incompetence in the government, given that the policies here were not too different than those in the Netherlands. I think its worth asking WHY people want to escape reality by doing drugs in the first place, than trying to pretend that making drugs illegal is going to stop people from doing drugs. Especially given that recent studied have shown that "wokeness" is correlated to being unhappy, depressed, and a general lack of an internal locus of control.
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I am not a leftist, but i think its entirely possible that the causes for the statistics cited, were a more proximate result of incompetence in the government, given that the policies here were not too different than those in the Netherlands.
It really doesn't help that the US right-wing politicians want to see (so-called) leftist policies fail, because that failure increases the perceived strength of their political platform. In many cases, they even go so far as to undermine or sabotage them on purpose, just so they can say "look, it didn't work!" Of course, there's also a considerable amount of corruption and greed in politics in general on both sides of the aisle, especially when it involves money being handed out ostensibly to help people
Re:Can't say I'm surprised (Score:5, Informative)
> It really doesn't help that the US right-wing politicians want to see (so-called) leftist policies fail
That is delusional cope, Oregon has been controlled by the left wing with a supermajority for decades. You cannot blame right wingers, for the multiple instances of left wing government officials e.g. John Kitzhaber, Shemia Fagan, et al being involved in bribery, and the system of political patronage and incompetence that they have implemented.
Re:Can't say I'm surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
>When you combine that with the DINOs who have inevitably wormed their way into positions of influence
More delusional cope, or rather the "no true scotsman" fallacy. You're saying that despite enacting all of the same left wing policies, that they're not actually democrats, because they are are grifters? When the communists abolished capitalism in the USSR and China , the power vacuum was simply replaced by politicians , by virtue of the fact that they control the allocation of resources, but even more importantly they were not limited by the free market and voluntary exchange or elections.
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"I'm absolutely certain there are red counties even in Oregon where the local government is more than happy to see a drug decriminalization program fail so people will go back to voting "the right way" (as someone else in this discussion so aptly put it)."
I don't have any actual, y'know, documented examples of this happening or of the actions they took to sabotage the program, but I'm certain!
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I'm absolutely certain there are red counties even in Oregon where the local government is more than happy to see a drug decriminalization program fail so people will go back to voting "the right way" (as someone else in this discussion so aptly put it).
That's a possibility. Luckily, there are a whole bunch of "blue" counties you can use as a control. How did drug de-criminalization do in e.g. Portland?
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Drug decriminalization also needs support of a family, group, or other "tribe". Someone alone will just go back to using drugs. If the setting is changed, addictions can be dealt with. For example, there were many soldiers in Viet Nam addicted to heroin and morphine, but once back in the states, there was not a massive addiction crisis because the environment changed which allowed people to function without drugs.
The problem is that the US doesn't really have any support systems, other than a superficial
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People use drugs for fun. It's shocking, I know, but true. Once they're hooked, they won't stop, but their reasons for starting may not be the existential ennui or crushing depression you imagine foments all addiction. Oh sure there are some addicts who got hooked on pain meds or just can't cope with something-or-other, but when you look at the reason why street drugs are available in the first place, the primary customers are people who just wanted to get high to . . . you know, get high.
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People who seek to anesthetize themselves from reality through the use of recreational chemistry are broken people, and legalizing their cope method doesn't automatically make them better people.
The utopia you posit doesn't exist and has never existed for more than a teeny group (and only them because of a vastly wealthy society around them, generated by that terrible late-stage capitalism you decry).
To believe otherwise....you'd have to be on drugs.
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Underfunded, at $7,000 per phone call? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure that more money wouldn't have fixed that problem.
Re:Underfunded, at $7,000 per phone call? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Always amazes me... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm always amazed how the left can take the kernel of a good idea, then destroy it through their arrogance and impatience, amplify it to a stupid level. Then of course, demand it all right now .
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Nothing can get done because people don't want to work anymore. https://apnews.com/article/ore... [apnews.com]
The best part. https://apnews.com/article/ore... [apnews.com]
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Heheh, yeah, did I mention spectacular hypocrisy?
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The right never would have approved decriminalization at all.
And it looks like the Right was......well, right.
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If you need an example from this article, rather than accept a phase in or that the policy needed to be more nuanced, they did everything all at once and eliminated the criminal penalties which pressured people to enter drug programs.
Had they listened to more level headed people on the other side, they could have made smaller changes (or simply had them phase in over time) and noticed these problems in time to make changes.
Look at the Just Stop Oil idiots. They don't seem to notice that their style of prot
Re: Always amazes me... (Score:2)
See, this is the arrogance he's talking about. Nobody has all of the answers. Nobody is always correct, all the time.
Re:Always amazes me... (Score:4, Interesting)
That isn't a Left or Right issue; there are people in both camps that focus inordinate amounts of energy into a single issue with blinders to reality.
Personally, I am glad that Oregon tried it rather than my home state, so everybody else could learn from the failure. There was a lot of debate going back decades as to if something like that would work or not.
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I agree totally. I only mentioned left because it was relevant to this article.
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That isn't a Left or Right issue;
No, of course not; it never is when a Leftist idea fails :p
One of the challenges of democracy though is that being right (no pun intended) most of the time about painful issues tends to make human beings unpopular.
Re: Always amazes me... (Score:2)
Problem isn't the left (Score:2, Interesting)
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So it's all Republican's fault. Eyes rolling, but I got it.
But wouldn't it have been better for the cause if Democrats had done something that made sense, or had a chance of succeeding?
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You can deny reality all you want, but the right has a long history of sabotaging government programs just to claim that they don't work.
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So now the legislation was sabotaged by Republicans, who made it more extreme...
Re: Problem isn't the left (Score:2)
This comment reeks of copium.
Look, this policy gell on its face not because of any kind of sabotage or money issues, but because legislators (especially liberal ones) often have no clue how human nature works and almost never understand why the problem they are trying to fix exists in the first place. They may or may not have altruistic intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, intelligence and wisdom is required far more often than just compassion.
Drug addiction is not something junki
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Apparently in this case, it's the Democrats' policies that don't work, full stop.
Re: Problem isn't the left (Score:5, Funny)
Ah yes, the powerful, influential right wing political machine in Oregon. Okay. Sure.
It's the supply stupid. (Score:3)
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Yep. The missing part here is to make the drugs free on request (in single-user amounts) to anyone who interacts with healthcare professionals.
Real Estate grab (Score:2)
Was it all just billionaires paying politicians to approve terrible policies that push up crime and push down real estate prices? Now that they've bought large chunks of the cities at a discount, they've instructed the politicians to revert back to tough-on-crime policies, to push real estate values back up. I know this sounds ridiculous, but there were definitely some very rich people funding far left politicians and you can be sure they expect to benefit from it in some way. I probably need more tinfoi
Where is the answer to the title question? (Score:3)
Re:Where is the answer to the title question? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where they succeeded (Score:2)
Failure to address supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO (based mostly on asking a number of them why they started):
Users are essentially victims. No sane person wants to be a drug addict, homeless, selling themselves or committing crimes to get their next fix. That first use is usually when someone is at a low point in their lives and in a weakened mental state is influenced by others to take that first hit. Any of those people who want to get off the drug addiction merry-go-round should be treated as medical cases.
Sellers are scum bag trash that should suffer the harshest of punishment. These pieces of sub human shit take advantage of the weak to fill their own wallets, provide no value to society or their "customers" and only make the lives of everyone they touch into trash. Long prison terms, hard labor, stripped of all wealth (to go into treatment programs for their victims), death, whatever. Nothing is too harsh for those vampires.
With the amount of money the drug trade takes in, if that money was confiscated from dealers there should be plenty to fund platinum quality support for users who want help.
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If you don't address the underlying conditions leading to people becoming drug users in the first place, you might be surprised (and probably also disgusted) to discover the lengths people will go to get high. Perhaps you may have heard of Krokodil?
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I should have been more explicit. Yes, you're right, but the demand side isn't because people are poor or racism or lack of education about "drugs are bad". It's people being in a bad spot in life, feeling they have nothing else to lose, someone convinces them this is a great way to feel better, "first one is freeee!" and then they're fucked.
The average person taking crack or Kroc or fentanyl or ice or any of a long list of things we've seen over the years isn't a super genius who accidentally slipped on
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Really stupid is places that hand out needles and otherwise encourage people to continue to use drugs and make it easier to be a drug user while doing nothing about the supply side
Really stupid is the people that ignore the statistics.
Needle exchanges work in most places that operate them.
Really stupid is also insisting that if people cannot fix every single problem in one go then they should fix nothing.
All you've proven by hyper focusing on Oregon is that America which trends much more right wing than mos
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I see your understanding of recreational drug use comes straight from a 1960s anti-drug advert. No, there are countless people who are perfectly fine getting addicted to drugs without any requirement for a low point in their life and no "weakened mental state".
The idea that every drug user is a victim just waiting to be saved is absurd. If you want to learn more, there was a trial in Oregon where they provided facilities to help people overcome their problems. It didn't work. You can read about it on Slashd
Monkeys and buttons (Score:5, Interesting)
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Citation?
Re:Monkeys and buttons (Score:4, Interesting)
It seemed like a good idea at the time (Score:3)
It should be studied, honestly, without politics
Hopefully, something of value will be learned
Addiction research is clouded by confident, but wrong, political opinion
We need data and fact-based programs
Naturally (Score:2)
It is to be expected that the death rate went up in the beginning. A bunch of people who have done little but struggle to get more drugs for years suddenly get all they want. Honestly, they were already destined to die early from an overdose sooner or later.
At the same time, there were likely some few of the self-condemned that actually did at least somewhat recover and are no longer destined to die from overdose.
The real question is did more or less people move into that desperate state with decriminalizat
OK but WHY (Score:2)
OK, so the drug legalization failed because people didn't accept the new offers for help as much as if would have been required, but WHY were the offers refused?
It has been tried elsewhere, Portugal (Score:5, Informative)
People keep saying this was obviously going to fail and that nowhere else has ever tried it, so good for them to try.
It has been tried (in Portugal) and a full report is here:
https://transformdrugs.org/blo... [transformdrugs.org]
Apparently Portugal was the model for the Orgegon attempt, but either the population or circumstances are different or they didn't do it right.
Alcohol was only ever decriminalised. (Score:4, Informative)
During alcohol prohibition, alcohol wasn't illegal to consume, posses or buy, it was only illegal to manufacture, transport and supply. In other words, alcohol prohibition was more like decriminalisation.
So decriminalisation was never really the solution because it leaves the supply in the hands of criminals and all the problems that creates.
What needs to happen is actual legalisation.
Re: (Score:2)
Or at least a legal way to get your (quality controlled) drugs for free. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
Decriminalize the supply side too (Score:3)
Decreasing use by decriminalized users is fantasy, to reduce ODs just provide better product.
Decrim != Legalized (Score:2)
Can't just let one state trial it (Score:3)
Popular vote overturned (Score:3)
The people voted 110 in, the legislators "fixed" it. Mostly by the request of the rural regions, who have little resources, only police. So all problems must go to jail.
In my county they had a levy all hot and steamin' ready to go for jail expansion on repeal. This will be the new homeless camp. Oh we were talking about drugs? Not sorry I conflated that, since no else hesitates to. Homeless drug using pagans must be coddled with free stuff, while being put in a cage, where they can't pay it off. Because that's where this stops. No one wants to "help", they just want to not see the faces so they can go about their upright christian lives. They got their good thing going. Hate to be that guy.
I'm am for 110 still. But no one wanted to make it work. Or, wanted to make sure all the "benefits" (new channels of treatment getting favor and gov money, I'm guessing) went to their pals (Democrats, in this case). Republicans are like pharisees, all rules, no compassion. Never had a chance really. Graft and hatred and apathy and laziness doomed it.
Why Did It Fail? (Score:3)
Because decriminalization isn't the same thing as legalization.
$7000/phone call (Score:3)
Re: Good. This was legalizing coercive control (Score:2)
Re: Good. This was legalizing coercive control (Score:2)
Alcohol is an intoxicant. Consuming it is legal, but being intoxicated in public less so.
Caffeine has absolutely no known negative effects unless you take a lethal dose. And you have to work hard to do that with coffee.
Nicotine is regulated. Moreso in bluer places.
Re: (Score:2)
Caffeine can be hard on the kidneys after prolonged use.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem isn't necessarily that drug users are harming themselves, it's that many of them will turn to crime to support the cost of their habit before the drugs send them to a dirt nap.
Re:I just feel sorry for the normal people in Oreg (Score:5, Interesting)
Sane people knew that base on what evidence ?
Prohibition sure as fuck isn't working.
I voted for this, and voted for it precisely to try it. It seemed like a more rational way to deal with the problem. Also, i'm not insane, thank you very much.
My thinking was, when I voted for it, was that it could be changed if needed, which is exactly what's happening.
There's one very important consideration in this type of effort that's being ignored - no one has made a serious effort to do something similar. That always carries heavy risk in implementation. Basically the problem was, as far as I can tell, is that you have to absolutely force addicts into treatment programs. So next time someone says that addicts will "choose" to do it we can point to this effort and say "no- they will not".
Meanwhile armchair quarterbacks like you have all the answers, none of which you have shared.
Or is your answer to spend 100s of millions of dollars on prisons to lock up users and then complain that we spend too much money on prisons ? That's generally what everybody else does.
Meanwhile, you're welcome.
Re: I just feel sorry for the normal people in Ore (Score:2)