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Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

• dadjoker 3y ago
  Uh, yeah "early results aren’t encouraging" is the understatement of the century for those of us who live here.
• rationalfaith 3y ago
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• 9g3890fj2 3y ago
  https://archive.today/rznQr https://archive.today/rznQr
• jeffbee 3y ago
  This article has severe methodological errors. It fails to consider the Oregon stats in the context of other states. Oregon's change in OD rates have not been exceptional, and have more or less followed the trend of other states, while being greatly better compared to states like W. Virginia. 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.
  • mattzito 3y ago
    The article seems to hit that straight on: "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."
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      That is a highly misleading discussion though. The existing rate in WV is quadruple that in Oregon. Oregon was up a bit on a low denominator. WV was down slightly on a ludicrous prior rate. Fails to mention that other states with similar trends compared to Oregon are Wyoming, Maine, and Texas. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
      • seizethecheese 3y ago
        misleading it what sense? The article is about the impact of a recent policy change.
      • jjcon 3y ago
        WV is a half continent away, has massively different demographics, poverty rates, culture, history etc. Comparisons like that are extremely difficult to do properly. What we can easily compare is Oregon a few years ago vs Oregon now and deduce the impact of it's policies with nearby similar states as a reference.
  • anon291 3y ago
    > while being greatly better compared to states like W. Virginia. 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.
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      But see that is exactly what I am talking about. You cannot — cannot — attribute a change in overdose rate to state policy without examining and controlling for the factors that we know influence overdoses: personal income, homelessness, etc. This article completely fails to examine whether Oregon's changes can be due to a shift in the income among its population.
      • anon291 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure being on the streets as a drug addict also causes loss of income, so you really can't take that into account without taking in cyclic effects.
        • jeffbee 3y ago
          And yet you have for some reason assigned causality in the case of WV.
• kelnos 3y ago
  https://archive.is/rznQr https://archive.is/rznQr 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.
  • j_walter 3y ago
    Clearly they had the best of intentions, but Oregon's politicians are terrible at implementing anything properly. Open drug markets, increased property and retail thefts and a homeless population explosion are what happened...when <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems. 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-tell-local-officials-fix-rampant-drug-use-on-portland-streets-now/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/07/19/kotek-and-blumenauer-t...
    • kelnos 3y ago
      That's fair, and certainly a problem, but I don't think the solution is "let's just go back to throwing everyone in jail". We know from long experience that isn't working.
• ortusdux 3y ago
  I was saddened to learn that Portugal slashed funding for their post decriminalization drug outreach programs. The shift from enforcement to treatment doesn't really work if you skip the treatment part. 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-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
• tracker1 3y ago
  From the last time I drove through Oregon, it kind of felt like they had already done this.
  • d35007 3y ago
    Oregon voted to decriminalize hard drugs in the 2020 election, according to the article.
• sharperguy 3y ago
  I always thought decriminalization was in some ways the worst of both worlds. On one hand, keeping the production and trade side illegal continues to perpetuate the underground culture and fund international cartels. Meanwhile their market base increases due to fewer people being afraid of being caught, the product quality is still completely unregulated. Users still need to stay embedded in an an unscrupulous underworld in order to maintain the connections necessary to obtain the product, increasing the chances of abuse and reducing their chances of getting help if they need it. Of course, it's nice not to send people to jail for small quantities, but failing to fully legitimize the market in these ways could cause a lot of other issues.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's exactly true. I do agree with you that some people will start using because they lose the fear of being caught, though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is. 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.
    • Alupis 3y ago
      > though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended). People who would have never tried it before now do so because the stigma is gone, and it's trivial to get. This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. While marijuana might be relatively benign, other drugs are not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole. We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days. It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
• Thoeu388 3y ago
  > the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view 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!!!
  • dang 3y ago
    We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. Can you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with? It's not in your interest to vandalize this place, for the same reason one doesn't throw trash in a city park, or leave fires burning in dry forests, or pee in swimming pools: it destroys what makes the place worth visiting in the first place. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
• Thoeu388 3y ago
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• runjake 3y ago
  From the areas I live and work, Measure 110 has, at best, made no difference whatsoever. 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.
  • j_walter 3y ago
    Don't forget that many of those people are fueling their drug habits with theft...theft that has gone largely unchecked. Oregon became a destination for addicts where they didn't have to worry about legal troubles that came along with drug use. All
    • runjake 3y ago
      This is an important point. While drugs are decriminalized, crimes such as theft are not. Pro-drug decriminalization people often argue that stuff like theft is still illegal. However, there are so many drug-related thefts that our particular district attorney is unwilling to prosecute them. As a result, law enforcement won't even take them to jail, let alone show up, most of the time. Typically, you file a self-report on your LE's website and then never hear about it again. The thieves know this, of course. (For myself, n=3 since 2020. Though, I did recover a stolen iPhone last week because I acquired enough evidence/telemetry/etc to warrant a response.)
      • j_walter 3y ago
        Every retail store with a 20 mile radius of Portland has put theft deterrent devices on even the most basic items. Home depot locks up almost everything other than lumber now because theft is so prolific. It's frustrating for your average joe trying to shop anymore. Multnomah DA is an a$$hole and moron...he doesn't care about the people he is supposed to serve.
        • runjake 3y ago
          Same down south. Our DA seems more concerned with protecting criminal rights than fighting crime. Edit: Turns out the DA isn't pursuing more minor crimes, such as property crimes, reportedly due to a mass egress of prosecutors for more high-paying jobs. Nonetheless, a bad mix of realities.
• ConanRus 3y ago
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• wonderwonder 3y ago
  If you decriminalize hard drugs, all that happens is that addicts stay addicts, have a higher likely hood of becoming homeless and higher chance of dying. Hard drugs for the most part outside of controlled environments have almost no positive qualities. Drugs like cannabis have medical attributes and can provide benefits. 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.
  • soligern 3y ago
    They should couple decriminalization with stringent arrests for public use and public intoxication. It’s so damn simple, why won’t they do it. Set a limit above which you’re not allowed to be loitering on the streets like they do with alcohol.
    • wonderwonder 3y ago
      This is definitely part of the answer. Walking through the streets of San Francisco a while ago with my kids I was shocked to see people just lying on the side walk in pools of their own vomit. Also was very protective of my kids walking past people that were obviously on drugs and out of their minds. These people became not so much people but just a threat. It seemed inhumane to just leave them like that. With that said, I would not want the job of dealing with them for what I am sure is a relatively low salary with the reward of seeing most people you help back on drugs the next week.
• schnable 3y ago
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  • dang 3y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
• kepler1 3y ago
  I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up. 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.
  • local_issues 3y ago
    The people I fear the most are people who are 100% sure they're doing the right thing. This comment section is full of that - "no, this is a good policy and it's just the implementation that's wrong." 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.
    • kepler1 3y ago
      Agreed. If a policy requires nearly perfect implementation, and follow through, and good behavior of the people, in order to succeed, and you rarely achieve / sustain the follow through by the community or police, etc. then it is not a good policy. Even though the concept was nice. A policy is everything, start to finish. You can't just say a policy was good except for the implementation. No matter how good it makes you feel that you got the idea right, it just wasn't carried out the way you thought.
  • NegativeLatency 3y ago
• RyanAdamas 3y ago
  A lot of these drugs are used to get people into the sex trade; once you get someone on drugs to do things with/to their body they otherwise wouldn't the cycle of shame begins that often traps these people in the escape through drug induced pleasure. Just the sad truth.
• mulmen 3y ago
  Would we expect early results to be encouraging? There's a lot of inertia in something like this. The damage is already done for anyone locked up on a drug charge. And reallocating resources from prisons to diversionary programs will take at least a generation.
• gspencley 3y ago
  It's working just fine. 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.
  • _blz2 3y ago
    Why do you think everyone should get voting rights if there is a section of the society who want to actively harm themselves. What are their votes reflective of?
    • andybak 3y ago
      This is quite frankly, a bizarre take that shows little understanding of drug use or society.
    • gspencley 3y ago
      Why are you assuming what I think about voting rights? I never brought that up.
    • ikrenji 3y ago
      why do you want to create a policy for everyone based on actions of the few? the tails should be disregarded. so what if 5-10% of the people abuse a system that otherwise benefits the other 80-90% ? cost of doing business
    • tenebrisalietum 3y ago
      Anyone who consumes sugar, trans fat or smokes cigarettes should be unable to vote as well?
• KingLancelot 3y ago
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• _blz2 3y ago
  The HN/reddit stance on "war on drugs" and drugs in general is proof education and common sense don't have as much correlation as is commonly thought of. These forums kept bringing up Portugal for more than a decade and when finally the results were seen, the new favorite psyop they're shilling is "the govt isn't doing enough" and "we must do more". Lol.
• Ajay-p 3y ago
  I resided in Portland for two years and volunteered at a free medical clinic. We saw many individuals who were addicted to hard narcotics and it was the same people, repeatedly in our clinics. Then new drugs would emerge on the street and it seemed a never ending cycle of drug addiction, poor health, homelessness, and death. It wore me down because the tide of addicts never slowed, and I questioned if such legalization is beneficial. Prison is not the answer but decriminalization removes incentives against powerful narcotics.
  • frandroid 3y ago
    ...Do you have evidence that the disincentives worked before?
  • calibas 3y ago
    There's already powerful incentives against narcotics, you mentioned three of them: "poor health, homelessness, and death." If that's not enough to dissuade someone, laws aren't going to make much difference.
    • 3minus1 3y ago
      Your unbacked assertion is disputed by the facts cited in the article. In the year after Oregon got rid of criminal penalities, drug overdoses increased significantly more compared to the US average and nearby states. So yes laws do in fact make a difference.
• BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  on the other hand. the very 'late' results of criminalizing drugs are also really terrible.... e.g. latin america
• damnesian 3y ago
  A sea change like this, especially when it comes to substances people take to feel some relief from the bullshit of our bullshit-heavy world- and involve physical dependance- isn't going to look awesome overnight. We have to wait until some of the dust shakes off. and this is a major problem with public initiatives in this polarized day and age. If they aren't immediately effective and amazing, we demonize them immediately. Slow down. Let's not just toss it out just yet.
• Tiktaalik 3y ago
  From what is written here in the article it sounds to me that unlike the Portugal jurisdiction they are trying to emulate, Oregon really hasn't followed through on building out the required health measures, that is treatment, that is required to go hand in hand with decriminalization for the entire concept to be a success. 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.
• 71a54xd 3y ago
  I recently visited Portland and is was shocking. Sad because aside from stunning homelessness and crime out in the open it's actually a beautiful quirky city. 1br luxury apts / condos are well designed and reasonably priced. Restaraunts and culture are incredible and feel deeply grounded in community - a far cry from what Austin (my home town) now considers "weird" or cool. I'd live there in a second if the state / city cleared up the nutty violent "activists" and homeless all over the place.
  • nemo44x 3y ago
    The activists make a living on it though. There are massive funds allocated for these programs that don't solve the problems but rather manage them. In fact, a larger customer base will only increase their funding.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• squarefoot 3y ago
  Decriminalization has nothing to do with limiting the use of drugs. The main purpose is to bring down costs so that criminal cartels will see their profits eroded through competition. This will also reduce other crimes, especially violent ones, because less people will need for example to rob a shop to buy drugs. Of course more easy drugs around mean that initially more people will use them, however that is just the immediate result of having at hand something that once was harder to find. Give it time. We all know that whoever is on drugs won't stop searching for them, no matter the cost, and no matter if that cost is on someone else's life; the choice is between prohibiting something that can't be prohibited effectively, or destroying profits for criminals, which can be very effective. 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.
  • bozhark 3y ago
    That only happens when the source becomes cheaper than black market. 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.
• tlogan 3y ago
  I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want. 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?
  • chrisweekly 3y ago
    "Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults." Many drugs are incredibly dangerous, addictive and harmful, but that's still a wild overstatement.
  • rqtwteye 3y ago
    It was clear that making drugs legal wouldn't solve all problems. What needs to happen is that the budgets that got spent on prosecuting and imprisoning drug users now gets spent on treatment options.
  • irthomasthomas 3y ago
    I'm not surprised. Since the market is still controlled by drug dealers. Legalise the whole supply chain and let people buy opium and cocaine at the apothecary, like they did in olden days, see how things are then.
  • anotherhue 3y ago
    I suggest the drug user equivalent of an insane asylum. If you've shown you're a danger to yourself and/or others you get a place in a retreat/monastery/rehab centre/prison island where you get the care you need. 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.
• spoonjim 3y ago
  Drugs have destroyed many societies and we look like we’re allowing it to happen to us.
• indymike 3y ago
  Addictions and incarceration have three things in common: they both rob a person of vast amounts of time, society of whatever that person's output is and impose vast hardship on the people around the addict/incarcerated.
• AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  The thing that's craziest to me is that the people who believe in decriminalization are typically totally against deregulating pharmaceutical drugs, but all the arguments in favor of one are in favor of the other as well! My body, my choice? Applies equally to experimental cancer therapies and to crack. You might say "oh well the pharma companies are manipulative, they're liars, they can't be trusted" - dear reader, do we really think the street dealers are better?
• porkbeer 3y ago
  Legalizing theft was the problem. So much actual crime is happening, the drugs are not the primary issue here.
• ecshafer 3y ago
  Supporting legalization / decriminalization of hard drugs is a luxury belief. If you’re in a nice rich circle it’s easy to believe it doesn’t harm anyone except yourself. If you are around people that become drug addicts, it becomes apparent that it drastically harms everyone around them, themselves probably not the most. You can only see so many addict parents throw away the money for kids food, or pawn of their kids PlayStation for drugs / gambling / etc before you see a lot of things aren’t as simple as it’s a free country. 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.
  • anon84873628 3y ago
    Clearly the prohibition on drugs is not preventing those people from accessing them. Obviously rehabilitation would be ideal. But all else being equal, it would be better if the drugs were cheaper and safer.
    • kcb 3y ago
      It's not so hard to believe that lack of access prevents some from getting hooked.
      • brnaftr361 3y ago
        The dangers of getting hooked are greatly exacerbated by current "treatment" modalities and the culture the black market breeds.
      • SyzygistSix 3y ago
        Hard drugs don't need to be made available to non-addicts just because the sale is legalized and formalized.
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      The real root issue, is that we drastically underfund rehabilitation. There are generally just not enough rehab spots, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. to address the unmet need. There are not enough of them in the health system because we don't pay for them enough. There are also not really resources in the prison system either. A lot of the prison-reform movement was actually supported initially by conservatives, because low-tax governments cannot afford to lock large numbers of people up for petty crime. No matter what the solution is, it requires spending money.
• giraffe_lady 3y ago
  This the most openly bloodthirsty and triumphant comment section I've seen in a while. Given the context and implications, the power of the consensus and emotional tone here is chilling.
• hitpointdrew 3y ago
  Decriminalization is mostly pointless step and won't work to fix the "drug" issue. It only solves one piece of the puzzle, jailing non-violent people. You still have black markets, you still have stigmatization, you still have unknown and mystery substances (users don't know what they are actually getting). 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.
  • adamredwoods 3y ago
    I partially agree with this. Not all drugs should be legalized, but rather, handled differently. In Seattle, the latest "drug enforcement" failed because the judicial system knew they didn't have the people-power to process the inflow of repeat offenders, who are cycled through the system and let go, only to repeat again. It may keep them off the streets for a bit, but it doesn't solve anything. Police should be able to enforce drug abuse, but it's a different path. https://www.kuow.org/stories/what-s-next-for-seattle-drug-law-mayor-council-look-ahead https://www.kuow.org/stories/what-s-next-for-seattle-drug-la...
  • code_runner 3y ago
    There will always be black markets for the people who don't trust the government and certainly for people who don't want to go to some supervised location. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good etc, but some of it feels like just make the gov't complicit in people absolutely ruining their own lives. Its a tough nut to crack.
• brightlancer 3y ago
  Rubbish. 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.
  • mech765 3y ago
    Let's take fentanyl for example. It kills so many people that there isn't any good reason for it to be a legal drug off prescription. The difference between fentanyl and other drugs is a matter of degree.
    • hathchip 3y ago
      But the only reason fentanyl is a prevalent recreational drug is prohibition. Heavy users vastly prefer heroin, casual users much prefer oxy or similar. Fentanyl is just cheaper to obtain and easier to traffick. Furthermore a lot of fentanyl deaths are caused by mislabeling and misidentification of the drugs which would not happen without prohibition. Fake painkiller pills with fent in them, fentanyl poorly mixed into heroin or filter, etc.
  • darth_avocado 3y ago
    I generally agree with the sentiment that drugs should be treated like we treat other addictions like alcohol. Drugs should be decriminalized, anti social criminal behavior should stay criminalized. If I’m drunk and pee in public or assault someone, I’ll go to jail. That is what should happen if I do it under the influence of drugs. 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.
• dahwolf 3y ago
  Some have the belief that hard drug users are temporarily down, but with the proper help can be converted back into productive citizens. 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.
• alphanullmeric 3y ago
  Like with most things, I would strongly support decriminalizing all drugs on the condition that other people are not held responsible, financially or otherwise, for the actions of drug users. Your body your choice, my money my choice.
• deleted 3y ago
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• nicup12345689 3y ago
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• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Decriminalization isn't a panacea (no pun intended.) If there's no integrated treatment, social services, and medical system to support this, then it's doomed to fail. 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.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  Expecting legalization to fix drug-related social issues was never realistic. What it does fix is mass incarceration of people who are ill. 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.
• lampshades 3y ago
  I support decriminalizing/legalizing hard drugs. But you need to have the force to quickly and harshly deal with crime that it causes. 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.
• hintymad 3y ago
  Funny. Chinese people were plagued by opium more than a 100 years ago. The Qing government, no matter how corrupted and useless they were, were willing to go to wars with British for fighting opiums. Pictures like this are national stigma even today: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2011/10/29/be-careful-what-you-wish-for https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2011/10/29/be-caref.... Yet, the US, the lighthouse of the nations on earth, thought it was okay to tolerate drugs, and it's certainly okay to have streets like in SF or like Kensington in Phili.
  • wittenbunk 3y ago
    Opiates arent decriminalized in Philadelphia, seems like your argument is more based in bias then logic
    • hintymad 3y ago
      I was talking about the general tolerance towards drugs.
• abotsis 3y ago
  I’m not familiar with the bill and specifics, does anyone know if it improved access to rehabilitation if sought?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• michaelteter 3y ago
  I don't even have to read the article. 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?
  • sircastor 3y ago
    Any time we have a conversation about this, my wife brings it up: People are using drugs to deal with something - often trauma of some sort. That trauma might be anything from childhood abuse to homelessness. Our society (The USA, generally speaking) is not particularly interested in helping people deal with their trauma before it becomes a problem.
    • carpet_wheel 3y ago
      We create misery and then distribute poison to escape it. Ugly way of disposing of the unwanted, but it can serve as a warning to the rest.
      • reilly3000 3y ago
        Manufactured Misery. Would make a great slogan for America
        • Spivak 3y ago
          Proud to live in the USSRI!
    • Exuma 3y ago
      Tell your wife it’s because it’s fun
• carpet_wheel 3y ago
  The opioid epidemic is at the heart of these issues. Maybe Oregon voters were naive, or maybe fentanyl is just too poisonous to really be considered a drug. 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.
• ttul 3y ago
  Oregon decriminalizes drugs for a couple of years and we expect that the toxic drug crisis, homelessness, violence, poverty, petty crime, and child abuse will all magically disappear overnight. Yet the prohibition on drugs has been in force for decades and has accomplished none of its goals. 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.
• jeffrom 3y ago
  Is Oregon leading the US fentanyl crisis? At a glance, it doesn’t look like it. Has West Virginia decriminalized as well? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
• FredPret 3y ago
  I thought legalization was the way due to libertarian reasons. Who is the gov to regulate my behaviour? 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.
• droptablemain 3y ago
  China, not Oregon, has the right idea regarding junkies and pushers.
• glonq 3y ago
  Vancouver BC says hello, where the same experiment is also failing. 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.
• alex_lav 3y ago
  It's funny to me that governments (and citizens) aren't realizing you can't simply _do less_ and expect things to improve. As in, deciminalizing drugs could work if the effort that was formerly spent mindlessly arresting and prosecuting smalltime drug offenders was instead spent on increased efforts in community outreach and rehabilitation, but that's not what happened. What we got was a society in which drugs are no longer criminalized but no additional resources. Literally just a government and society _doing less_. Who thought this would work? 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.
• counterpartyrsk 3y ago
  Make prescription drugs legal, it's stupid that I need to get a prescription for asthma medicine for the rest of my life.
• AYBABTME 3y ago
  On an individual point of view, being easy on drug makes sense. We ought to have the right to do what we please to our bodies. But if you zoom out and look at the collective outcome, this is the sort of stuff that takes down millenium-old empires and keeps them down for centuries - China. 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.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  If you legalize it, you need to have a system in place to get to that objective on why you wanted to legalize it in the first place.
• simonh 3y ago
  What was done in Oregon, based on the successful policy in Portugal, was decriminalising use and possession of very small quantities. Distribution and sale are still just as illegal as before. 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.
  • fooker 3y ago
    It is always easy to blame the execution rather than the policy, if you are ideologically biased to believe in the policy.
    • wobbly_bush 3y ago
      Isn't the opposite also true?
      • brightlancer 3y ago
        > Isn't the opposite also true? Not PP, but the onus is always on the person or group making the affirmative claim. It _might_ be that the policy is sound but the execution is in error, but we should not _assume_ that the policy is sound.
• richardanaya 3y ago
  Oregon enabled public drug use is the problem, just like drunk driving and public intoxication, it should be made illegal.
• jiggyjace 3y ago
  > “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.” Saying this is not the logical conclusion one might think it is. It's not a problem where there are only two solutions.
• richardanaya 3y ago
  Oregon enabled public use of drugs is the problem without consequence, just like drunk driving and public intoxication, it should be made illegal.
• badlucklottery 3y ago
  So Oregon started a two-pronged approach (reduced criminalization coupled with low-/no-cost treatment centers) and weren't able to actually get the treatment side of it working. Statistically jail is a very bad drug treatment center. But it's likely better than no treatment at all.
• throw7 3y ago
  paywall and the archive is down. 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.
• airocker 3y ago
  extreme freedom leads a democracy to tyranny -- socrates
• coding123 3y ago
  I have two minds on this: 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.
• theptip 3y ago
  We need to decriminalize drugs but this doesn’t mean we need to tolerate public intoxication. It’s a big confounder because we also saw a big increase in homelessness over the last few years due to Covid-related economic impacts; a housing-first anti-homelessness policy would complement drug decriminalization by moving drug use off the streets where it is maximally dangerous, in addition to being maximally unsightly. 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”.
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. 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.
  • nickff 3y ago
    >"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." 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.
    • chrstphrknwtn 3y ago
      People are disenfranchised all over the United States, dying deaths of poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. Keeping the status quo seems very unethical.
• K0balt 3y ago
  The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power. 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.
  • dclowd9901 3y ago
    I think your premise (that folks suffering addiction _don’t_ feel shame) may be incorrect. I think the addiction is more powerful than the shame.
    • dminor 3y ago
      Indeed, if you talk with people in recovery about what they felt during their worst moments, they overwhelmingly mention shame. Unfortunately our instincts about addiction lead us pretty far from the realities of addiction, as OP demonstrates.
  • OO000oo 3y ago
    You can’t devalue shame without devaluing dignity. They go hand in hand.
  • Affric 3y ago
    Well said. Shame is making a comeback in a big way with restorative justice. Hopefully enough of us get there so we can see meaningful change.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    [flagged]
• dathinab 3y ago
  I don't know what exactly Oregon did, so following isn't about Oregon but more in general: 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.
• matthewmorgan 3y ago
  After any repression there's a rebound effect.
• jmyeet 3y ago
  The so-called "War on Drugs" was an objective and abject failure. It merely created the carceral state leading to the US having the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any country in the world. With 4% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners. 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.
• ip26 3y ago
  Maybe if we reach a consensus that neither the war on drugs nor 110 worked properly, we can sit down and have a straightforward discussion about what would, now that both ideologies have failed.
• smcg 3y ago
  They dropped the ball with funding treatment programs, which are essential for this to work in the first place. That should be in the headline. Decriminalization hasn't been debunked. "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."
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  We've all heard it before, that decriminalization will make drugs appear less like a forbidden fruit and remove some of the incentive to abuse. But that's not really true, at least not where things like drugs are concerned and addiction is a possibility. 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.
• crtified 3y ago
  Alcohol, being at once one of the worlds most dangerous hard drugs, one of the worlds premium luxury markets, and a common everyday cultural component across large swathes of humanity, is proof that society can and does incorporate the regular leisure usage of mental intoxicants as an ethically acceptable standard of living. 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.
  • bill_joy_fanboy 3y ago
    Alcohol as a "luxury market" is really just a marketing gimmick. It's dressed up to be palatable and to entice people. Dealers gotta make money. "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.
    • crtified 3y ago
      It is not universal, but it is a common component of mainstream culture across China, India, Russia, USA, Canada, most European countries, most Central and South American countries, most African countries, Australia, Japan, and others - encompassing a majority of the human population.
• fzeroracer 3y ago
  I don't know what people expect. We have a nationwide problem that states are trying to solve at an individual level and failing. I lived in Virginia and Texas, both had severe drug issues, homeless problems and those states are strict on drugs. They're experiencing rises in deaths due to fentanyl, rising homeless rates and more. No one talks about the issues in those states because they aren't doing anything to try and stop it, so there's no new policy to criticize.
• efields 3y ago
  Can’t do the decriminalization and legalization without proper resources devoted to rehabilitation. This is a health problem and the US doesn’t like to provide free healthcare to those who need it. Oregon did the right thing by decriminalizing, but massively screwed it up by under investment in care.
• kazinator 3y ago
  The headline is a lie. > 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.
• whiddershins 3y ago
  Reading the comments here, I am not seeing a lot of awareness that Portugal’s “decriminalization” and Oregon’s couldn’t be more different. 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.
• kinakomochidayo 3y ago
  Mandate drug recovery programs for opioid/stimulant and various hard drugs. Legalize psychedelics and promote anti-addiction and therapy programs using psychedelics such as Iboga, Ayahuasca and Psilocybin.
• crtified 3y ago
  Worth noting that this and other similar content published by author Jim Hinch is written from his perspective as senior editor of the heavily Christian rehab-evangelist outfit "Guideposts". Not a criticism, merely contextualising the presented editorial position.
  • th0ma5 3y ago
    This comment should be at the top, as this person has a financial interest is promoting an opposing opinion.
• faangiq 3y ago
  Remember- this is by design.
• gloryjulio 3y ago
  I am firmly against criminalization of the soft drugs(alcohol, cigarette, weed, lsd, etc) But I felt like the hard drugs are in a different problem space. Not sure what's the answer
• keithalewis 3y ago
  Legalize hard drugs, but if are down to your bottom dollar because you can't use them responsibly then you lose some rights. Imagine a world where people are held accountable for their actions.
• yaokdokay 3y ago
  [dead]
• ITB 3y ago
  The problem is that hard opiates aren’t a drug in the sense that alcohol or mdma are drugs. It’s straight up poison. It should definitely be controlled and possession should be prosecuted.
• inamberclad 3y ago
  Decriminalization is fine, but there's still no way out for these people. How would one go from living on the street in a state of addiction to happy, housed, and employed? Quality of life is tenuous enough for regular Americans who haven't lost it all before. Climbing back up the hill must seem impossible for those at the bottom. Therefore, there's little motivation to get clean.
• dclaw 3y ago
  Funny how it completely ignores the fact that covid sent everything to hell, and bureaucratic crap caused funding to not even be dispersed for over 2 years after passage. Of course programs that you judge based on an imaginary 3 year timeline will fail when they have only had maybe 8 months to do anything.
• timbo1642 3y ago
  [dead]
• user6723 3y ago
  A small amount of Molly and a couple tabs of LSD is pretty fuckin' amazing ngl
• ezekiel68 3y ago
  If you read my replies to other threads in this discussion, you might imagine I agree with the pessimistic tone of the article. But change is hard. We have no rational basis to imagine that such a momentous policy (and enforcement) upheaval would not make things somewhat "worse" before they might become better. Or, whether the troubling anecdotes observed now under the new policy are truly statistically significant compared to the proportion of those benefitted by the change -- until a more thoughrough assessment can be conducted. 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.
• Terr_ 3y ago
  To recycle from an NY-Times submission on the same topic yesterday [0]: > 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36950162#36950237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36950162#36950237
• ajmurmann 3y ago
  In Portland these policies clearly aren't working and I want dealing fentanyl and meth be punished. There are more nuanced problems going on that might play a large role in this policy taking. Lack of rehab facilities definitely is one of these factors. The Portland police also has largely stopped policing anything. I wonder how different things would look if even just all cars without license plates got stopped. It also doesn't help that even repeat offenders get released without bail. I genuinely wonder how different things would look if hard drugs were decriminalized, but all other laws were enforced properly.
• ohthehugemanate 3y ago
  I have heard that Portland is such a mess because three factors hit at once: 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?
• frankreyes 3y ago
  I've said this will happen over ten years ago. But hey, let's keep people on drugs, it's going to be fun
• DropInIn 3y ago
  Decriminalization doesn't work in isolation 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...
• yafbum 3y ago
  I feel like when I traveled to Asia, I didn't see any of that. I don't think it's because of better individual self-control (plenty of other addictions, like gambling, alcohol or smoking). But isn't there like death penalty for drug traffickers there? Is that the only effective deterrent? 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.
  • SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat... Only if we also bring in the death penalty for people who sell fried food, burn stuff, have infectious diseases and drive cars
    • yafbum 3y ago
      I have yet to see someone be repeatedly brought back to life by an emergency worker due to a sudden French fries overdose, or live out on the streets because they just can't stop buying churros and spacing out on them.
• barbs 3y ago
  Decriminalizing drugs reduces a lot of harms regarding drug use, but it's no silver bullet. Seems like the uptick in drug overdose deaths would be best responded to with injecting rooms. They've been a resounding success around the world in reducing overdoses and harms related to injecting drug use.
• No-Firefighter 3y ago
  The idea behind drug decriminalization, aiming to treat drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal one, seems promising in theory. It's encouraging to see efforts to shift the focus toward rehabilitation and support for those struggling with addiction. However, the data from Oregon's experience suggests that the reality is far more nuanced.
• aarong11 3y ago
  Places that decriminalize drugs need to pour the money they saved on enforcement into health, social programmes and education. The positive effects of decriminalising anything aren't going to be seen until a while after that is done.
• jamesgill 3y ago
  No doubt that the reform isn’t perfect, but this is such a poor, confused attempt at creating a story of causality (or even correlation).
• chociej 3y ago
  Of course it hasn't reduced addiction. The quote from TFA explains it best: "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." 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.
• lionelholt 3y ago
  The problem as summarized by the photo isn't drugs. The problem everywhere -- not just in Oregon -- is Human Overpopulation. The severity of it in Oregon has increased because of populations spilling over from elsewhere, most notably California. Sadly, Portland is finally a large city, thus it has the same issues all other large cities have. This overall problem of Human Overpopulation which is the root cause of pretty much every other problem in the entire world (climate change, wealth gap, dwindling resources, etc) is exacerbated by certain politicians opposing birth control.
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  Anyone got the heart to say all drugs and alcohol are bad and should be banned everywhere? No one? Reminder: Alcohol is a known carcinogen and a toxin as classified by WHO, and drug use frequently ruin people’s entire lives, as well as killing them! The obvious yet unthinkable fact that drugs, alcohol, and many other things are more often than not merely distracting yourself from your problems? Still no one? Oh, come on, folks! Really? <more silence…> Sigh. I guess everyone are addicts of something.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  https://archive.is/EfGAD https://archive.is/EfGAD
• androidbishop 3y ago
  As a fairy heavy drug user, I feel I should chime in since it appears most of the comments here are coming from "normies" whose experience with users seems to be limited to homeless street addicts or family/friends who fell apart. 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.
  • androidbishop 3y ago
    6. We need to research and fund more effective substance abuse treatment. There is a surprising dearth of evidence-based treatment programs out there. Having gone through a few court-mandated programs myself, I cannot express enough how useless these were. Show up to a few meetings, watch some ludicrous after-school scared-straight specials, attend a number of NA meetings listening to junkies relate the same rock bottom stories over and over, the occasional piss test (which either didn't even test for the drugs I was on or could be beat by staying clean for just a few days) and probably the only helpful thing: community service. The most effective experience I had getting clean wasn't even a drug program at all: living at a yoga commune for several months as part of their volunteer program. Something about living away from regular life, with a variety of people (not just users), having all my basic needs met, meditating and doing yoga every day, living simply and having jobs to do around the compound, in a totally non judgemental or condescending atmosphere free of conversations that constantly focused on drugs or addiction, really helped me reset. Maybe that only works for me, I don't know what works for other people, but there might be something to that experience that can be applied to other programs as well.