Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – it isn't working

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/oregon-decriminalized-hard-drugs-it-isnt-working-78ee7476

by JumpCrisscross • 3 years ago

138 310 3 years ago

wsj.com

anonym292• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/K41lT

Nursie6• 3 years ago

These always just result in perpetual “I am not a robot” checking for me :/

solardev2• 3 years ago

Works for me in an incognito window for some reason. Oh, and you have to be on Chrome and not use Cloudflare DNS, I think

mdorazio• 3 years ago

Might be a DNS over HTTPS issue. Try whitelisting archive.is if you're using Firefox (Firefox > Settings > Privacy & Security > [Scroll to bottom] "DNS over HTTPS" > "Manage Exceptions...") or turn off secure DNS in Chrome (Settings > Privacy and security > Security > Advanced section).

hcnews• 3 years ago

For a lot of these changes, you need a motivated and engaged enforcer/system-owner who will work through these challenges. It takes time and effort to change the culture of a group. I can't imagine someone wanting to change unless they either gain a strong motivation (highly unlikely given that they have been in the current condition for a while themselves) or they are given the right framework/setup by someone else (govt. in this case). So, this is a hard problem and one shouldn't get disheartened due to no progress so far.

PedroBatista• 3 years ago

Decriminalizing drug usage is just a small but necessary part to mitigate this problem.

As usual these people didn't learn or "forgot" all the other hard parts.

This particular article doesn't mention it, but I'm getting sick of hearing "Portugal decriminalized drug usage in the 90s and solved the drug problem" - Really? that simple? Even Hollywood westerns were more deep than that.

On of the key aspects to "solve" this problem is also culture, family support, personal responsibility and that's when you hear the tires screeching and nothing will get done or ever work.

ip262• 3 years ago

culture, family support, personal responsibility

I have to agree, if the secret ingredient to making decriminalization work is enlisting timeless conservative values, we’re toast. A more unlikely coalition has never been seen.

mike_d2• 3 years ago

I think presenting voters with "decriminalize drug use" was a deceptive play to start with. Most voters picture themselves smoking weed on the weekend or doing mushrooms at Coachella, not the people unescapably trapped by drugs.

Habitual drug addicts don't have personal responsibility, family support, or a community of non-drug addicts to depend on. Forced incarceration in a treatment program is literally their only chance at breaking the cycle long enough to get them support for the underlying issues that led to addiction.

bb882• 3 years ago

I don't think anyone in Portland was being deceived. They have had a huge issue with homelessness and drug addicts for the better part of the last decade.

Tents are everywhere. On the side streets, on the interstate right of ways. It's been that way for a decade.

enragedcacti• 3 years ago

Habitual drug addicts don't have personal responsibility, family support, or a community of non-drug addicts to depend on.

survivorship_bias_plane.png

There are millions of habitual hard drug users that do have some personal responsibility, some family support, some sober people around them encouraging them. They are holding down jobs and paying for their own housing, they've already quit multiple times but have gotten pulled back in. For those people forced incarceration could maybe solve their addiction at the cost of their housing and their job.

Fluorescence• 3 years ago

culture, family support, personal responsibility

Abstinence is not an inevitable consequence of a stable life - plenty of kids from comfortable backgrounds discover they really really like drugs. We need to accept that "getting high" is a basic human motivation that won't go away. The existential realities of the human condition is enough to seek escape. Some of us are born with dopamine regulation issues that doom us towards substance use. Despite being sober for a long time I still had bad cravings for alcohol and nicotine but an adult ADHD diagnosis and medication quieted that insatiable hunger for stimulation... by regular administration of stimulants! The hereditary aspects explained a lot about my family.

IMHO the real solution should be to design better drugs. Consider it the "Steam" argument - we need to outcompete the damaging drugs with products along the lines proposed by David Nutt. e.g.

- no overdose risk or organ damage

- cheap and make available for free so no crime required to acquire

- easy reversal of the effects e.g. with a common product like OJ

- no dependence issues

When you discuss investing in this research, you quickly discover that many of those who claim to be solving tragedies of addiction are actually trying to enforce an ideology that considers getting high to be a moral crime. Even if there were no personal or societal harms they still believe drugs should be violently prohibited. Their ideology actively seeks to cause harm. Of course they are hypocrites getting their stimulation from drink, food, sex, religion, abuse/control of others or whatever they manage to carve out as acceptable.

ip262• 3 years ago

So… coffee?

orasis• 3 years ago

What's going on in the streets of Portland isn't happy healthy kids that like to get high.

mech987987• 3 years ago

As far as I can tell marijuana ticks all those marks but junkies still go for harder drugs anyway.

Nursie6• 3 years ago

Ah, personal responsibility. Declension, in my experience, is usually as follows -

  *They* deserve their fate because they are weak, stupid and bad.
  *You* have made some bad choices and may work to recover from them.
  *I* have merely made a small mistake and deserve a second chance.

BirAdam• 3 years ago

The war on drugs hasn’t worked either. Having an opioid epidemic in the USA should make that painfully obvious to everyone.

ta988• 3 years ago

The opioid epidemic has been mostly fueled by pharma companies, their consultants, doctors, pharmacists and the government that did nothing for decades despite knowing well something wasn't right. The war on drugs mostly criminalized people that couldn't afford the legal drugs or couldn't find a crooked doctor to prescribe them so they had to rely on street vendors and their low quality-high variability-high fraud products.

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

The US has an opiod epidemic because it was easy to get fentanyl legally.

arcticbull8• 3 years ago

It was legal to get opioids like oxy legally, fentanyl was always pretty tightly controlled. I believe it was mostly used in surgeries alongside anesthesia.

standapart• 3 years ago

Not really. There were things like Purdue, but that wasn't fentanyl.

The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.

davidw2• 3 years ago

Places like West Virginia have more opioid deaths than Oregon does.

Measure 110 has some flaws, but the sensible approach is to see what can be done to course correct rather than just go back to the thing that wasn't working.

mike_d2• 3 years ago

In a Boston University study they found that 81% of prescription drug abuse and 79% of high alcohol abuse was to self manage pain. There is no humane approach to furthering addictions as a band-aid for our lack of medical care and failure to address mental illness.

Scrap the free use drugs laws and invest in clinics for underserved populations with chronic pain management programs and mandatory rehab programs for people who have lost the battle.

https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusi...

cameldrv• 3 years ago

The war on rain hasn't worked. Many houses have leaky roofs and people get wet. This is painfully obvious to anyone. We should destroy all forms of shelter and we will finally be free.

solardev2• 3 years ago

Might help dilute the opiates

arcticbull8• 3 years ago

Your analogy would make more sense if roofs didn't actually keep people dry, and instead caused several other forms of harm. And people kept insisting we have them anyways based on fundamentalist moralizations.

Without belaboring the analogy, the truth is anyone who wants drugs can get them, right now. So we're not stopping that - but instead we're creating several new kinds of harm. Around marking people as felons, social stigma, loss of income sending people to prison, arrest, and that's before we even talk about how shit the US penal system is. Prison by the way? Full of drugs, and reason for people to want an escape.

Of course making it illegal also creates a black market which is basically the only reason cartels exist.

The reality is it's a mental health issue, and a particularly interesting one - for instance, American GIs addicted to heroin in Vietnam came home and the vast majority of them just stopped using it cold turkey. Fascinating right? [1]

Decriminalization and treating it as a mental health issue -- and sentencing addicts to rehab makes infinitely more sense.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...

kelsey9876543• 3 years ago

Sorry get the hell out of here with that disingenuous argument.

jrflowers• 3 years ago

The war on rain hasn't worked. Many houses have leaky roofs and people get wet. This is painfully obvious to anyone. We should destroy all forms of shelter and we will finally be free.

This is a great analogy. Rain is drugs and arresting people for drugs is patching roofs. When the government spends resources on anything other than arresting people with drugs (doing roofing jobs) then they are destroying people’s homes (things that are affected by rain or drugs).

It is so refreshing to see a simple and profound insight on this

beej714• 3 years ago

But the war on rain has actually worked. It's extremely rare that people get wet.

If the war on drugs worked remotely as well as the war on rain, we wouldn't even be discussing it.

justrealist• 3 years ago

The war on illegal drugs hasn't worked because... a lot of people died from other, legal prescription pharmaceuticals?

corethree9• 3 years ago

Opioid epidemic wasn't caused by the war on drugs.

Opioid epidemic happened because doctors prescribed it as pain killers.

somehnguy• 3 years ago

They are pain killers.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

I don't think the US ever had a war on drugs. If any state in the US did the following three things, Singapore style: Announce that all drugs are illegal, users will be institutionalized and undergo mandatory rehab, traffickers will be executed you'd be rid of the drug problem pretty quickly.

Every US state I've ever been in had people use drugs, smoke weed, completely openly, every club, every corner. Where's the war?

orwin• 3 years ago

Alcohol is banned in Singapore too?

standardUser9• 3 years ago

The drug war is largely not happening in places you are visiting, my privileged friend.

And your Singapore-style solution is antithetical to a free society.

kube-system2• 3 years ago

The US did implement mass incarceration for drug offenses. It happened mostly between 1980 and 2000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_S...

huytersd3• 3 years ago

The problem is in Singapore they don’t just institutionalize drug users, they are physically punished and jailed for very long terms.

anon2915• 3 years ago

Prohibition of drugs has empirically been shown to reduce negative effects of drug use. For example, nationwide prohibition in the United states severely curtailed both domestic abuse and liver cirrhosis rates.

nitwit0052• 3 years ago

At an extraordinary cost. Huge numbers of people imprisoned, violence related to the drug trade.

The real question is if the costs are worse than the problem. We gave up on alcohol prohibition because it was clear it was a net negative.

carllerche• 3 years ago

The issue here is that, after M110, there is little the police can do to prevent *public* usage of hard drugs like fentanyl. Drug addicts will be smoking fent in front of a K-5 school and all the police can do is fine them. There is more enforcement of public alcohol consumption than fent / meth.

elil178• 3 years ago

Isn't this preferable to forcing drug addicts into prison? Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves

0xDEAFBEAD2• 3 years ago

How about criminalizing public drug use only?

Just for the sake of argument here, supposing someone is addicted to drugs in private, and legalization is at a stage where they can get quality product that they're not going to overdose on easily. Is that actually a problem for society? Like, if you prefer to live a lifestyle where you sleep under a bridge and spend the money you would've used for housing on drugs, maybe that's just a personal choice that's yours to make? The only problem I see here is -- how is it that these drug addicts are funding their habit? I'm thinking through criminal activity in many cases?

Terr_• 3 years ago

How about criminalizing public drug use only?

I'd be concerned about that falling extra-heavily on homeless people in some way. If someone were already stuck sleeping on a park bench, it'd be kind of unfair to ding them again for not being tipsy or high "back in their own home."

0xDEAFBEAD2• 3 years ago

Maybe there could be a few parks in the city where public drug use is legal, and have it be illegal everywhere else?

In practice, cops could just arrest for the sort of public drug use that causes problems

HDThoreaun3• 3 years ago

That would literally be the point. It is not acceptable to be strung out on a park bench. That bench is not "their home", it belongs to the public.

jolmg• 3 years ago

Officer Jose Alvarez stopped arresting people for possession and began giving out tickets with the number for a rehab helpline. Most of the people smoking fentanyl or meth on this city’s streets balled them up and tossed them onto the ground. “Those tickets frankly seemed like a waste of time,” said Alvarez

Maybe the drugs are fulfilling some need, so simply escaping the addiction is counter-productive to their lives. Maybe the rehab to escape the addiction needs to be packaged with other sorts of rehabs that help them obtain healthier alternatives to fulfill those needs that are being met by the drugs.

Quick search online:

Addiction isn’t as simple a concept as it may seem on the surface. From an outside perspective, addiction can be seen as a simple propensity for substance abuse. However, on mental, physical and emotional levels, there’s a lot more to addiction. From a behavioral perspective, using drugs becomes a way of life. Most friends and social situations revolve around drugs, especially as drugs start to replace former social connections and hobbies. --- https://fherehab.com/learning/mind-motives-addicted-drugs/

So, at least, rehab on building healthy social connections is also needed.

Finding a better solution to the drug problem is unlikely to be as simple as just decriminalizing.

I also wonder if the fact that decriminalization is done in a patch-work manner location-wise is also part of the problem. I wonder if it's easier or harder for homeless people to relocate to places where their activities aren't criminal. They likely have less material things tying them down to a location, but they may also rely more on the face-to-face social ties they already have.

beej714• 3 years ago

Finding a better solution to the drug problem is unlikely to be as simple as just decriminalizing.

There is funding in Oregon as part of 110 to do more than just decriminalize. Unfortunately that wasn't used for effect.

henning• 3 years ago

What the fuck is making it a crime again going to fix? What is going to suddenly work that isn't working now?

TylerE3• 3 years ago

It's always struck me as sadly hilarious how the same crowd that's always shouting for drug laws is the exact same crowd that argues that stricter gun laws would increase crime and make the streets more dangerous.

josephcsible4• 3 years ago

The difference is that guns have some good uses.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Arresting people and putting them in jail makes them leave the neighbourhood for a while. It doesn't solve the drug addiction problem, but it solves the feeling of unease and safety risks associated with being near drug addicts.

Being the only place in the region where drugs can be abused free from meddling influence can also pull in addicts from surrounding areas, only increasing the problem.

mimikatz2• 3 years ago

It also forces them to get clean and give them another shot at sobriety.

HDThoreaun3• 3 years ago

People doing heroin and meth in public are annoying. They're commonly violent too/. Making those drugs and doing them in public illegal allows society to remove those nuisances, at least temporarily.

sowbug2• 3 years ago

Why not criminalize violent acts instead? I don't care if the guy who attacks me is high or not, same as I don't care if the guy who didn't attack or bother me was high or not.

FlyingBears• 3 years ago

The horror of the current approach is the concentrated influx of drug users from other states that magnified the issue in California and Oregon. I am resigned to the fact that everyone waits around for the current wave of users to simply die off. If the decriminalization was distributed evenly among the states, there would be a chance for somewhat orderly transition.

dminor• 3 years ago

Measure 110 did two things:

- recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the ticket or going to treatment

- funded treatment with $300mm from cannabis taxes

The problem is Oregon took years to decide who to give the treatment money to. Only last year did they actually start funding treatment.

In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.

Essentially drug use was entirely ignored for a couple years.

So is measure 110 a failure? It's too soon to say. Certainly the rollout has been.

One unintended consequence is that Oregon has no law against public drug use, leaving this issue to cities/counties. If they don't have such a law, public drug use is essentially legal, since police used to rely on possession to stop it.

One thing that has gone right is the reduction of the burden on the court system. The state saved about $40mm over the first 3 years.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

This thing where decisions are made too early, too polar-ly: this rush to judgement & condemnation feels like one of the most damned & sad trends, such a strong sap of societies good energies. There are some more known cases, but not being so sure to rush into negative judgement feels like such a relieving positive sign, is so much what I seek as a trust marker.

corethree9• 3 years ago

What is a failure is legalizing the use of drugs. You're getting into the technicalities.

When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.

scheeseman4863• 3 years ago

Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored). If I weren't so ready to lean on incompetence as the most likely reason, I would think it's sabotage.

thaumasiotes2• 3 years ago

Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored).

If we're ignoring them now, what's the problem with continuing to ignore them?

mbrumlow• 3 years ago

You should be worried that any system they required government intervention was a good idea.

The entire idea is insane. Let’s make drugs legal and provide treatment for the problem we created.

It’s the same of saying hey! Lawn darts are now legal, don’t worry we will increase our EMS staff during the summer.

seanmcdirmid6• 3 years ago

Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore? If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?

api• 3 years ago

Governments aren’t really great at anything except law, police, and military. All they have is a hammer.

It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.

0xpgm• 3 years ago

The article says a police officer stopped arresting people and started handing out tickets to a drug rehab helpline once the measure went into effect. He stopped a few months later because it felt like a waste of time, as so few were following through.

It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding.

The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.

ajmurmann5• 3 years ago

I don't know what percentage of addicts want treatment, but I understand that the treatment centers in Portland metro are very hard to get into because they are so busy.

Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...

seanmcdirmid6• 3 years ago

I don’t think cities have any control over felonies at all, they can just issue civil fines and misdemeanors, or is it different in Oregon?

insanejudge• 3 years ago

fully agree on the failure of the rollout. There's also going to be issues with rolling anything out involving medical treatment into our gutted public health system and fragmented private system, so it has to be done through a lengthy (and apparently trivially abused) system of private organizations applying for the money, but the new treatment infrastructure should have been at least somewhat in place before changing the laws.

Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion.

In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility.

The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here.

It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization.

IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.

yowzadave• 3 years ago

This general story outline is very common: some initiative that has a good idea at core has poor execution; it “fails” in its popular perception; the initiative’s ideological opponents claim that the failure is a result of the original idea being bad.

Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea.

There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike.

Bad execution kills good ideas!

anon2915• 3 years ago

In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.

I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it.

Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them

freedomben• 3 years ago

Where are you getting those numbers from?

jasonwatkinspdx3• 3 years ago

Also just for some context, a perennial problem in Oregon is that many of the people in government agencies are opposed to the majority view of Oregonians.

One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction.

Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown.

And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine.

So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

Heavy trucks clog I5 and crack the freeways into rubble. An efficient and environmentally friendly solution is to incentivize long haul containers to be shipped by rail.

kibwen• 3 years ago

police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here

The history of Oregon is grimly fascinating. It was more-or-less illegal for black people to live in Oregon from 1844 to 1926 (although this became complicated to enforce thanks to the 14th amendment in 1868). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

araes• 3 years ago

From an outsider perspective, it looks like a siege that's escalating. Apparently now setting attack dogs on prisoners in dead ends cells. (context: from what I read the prisoner refused to be handcuffed and insulted a guard, resulting in [1] @ approx 30 sec.) Apparently this is getting rather common in US incarceration though.

[1] https://www.insider.com/how-dogs-are-trained-to-attack-us-pr...

bb882• 3 years ago

Being in Portland last summer, I got the feeling that the residents were tired of police acting as social services, and addiction being criminalized.

Part of it is the frustration that drug companies got rich from opioids, yet the addicts got to serve the crimes.

kepler12• 3 years ago

Two (?) some years ago a review story about Oregon's decriminalization policy was here on HN and I said that I didn't think it was a good idea, and was kind of shouted down by people saying, "this is the only rational choice, to do what works and stop penalizing people which costs a lot and doesn't change their behavior".

Well, you can make stepwise rational choices all the way down into oblivion and watching your cities and states fall apart. It may be kind and more rational, but you've removed disincentives to use drugs and find yourselves in a society where you've attracted and created the conditions for this behavior to continue.

No matter what your policy stance on the potential solutions, it is not good to be having a society where people are using serious drugs without penalty.

Oh well, lesson learned, especially for people who thought they were liberal. Unfortunately at great expense and pain.

anonzzzies2• 3 years ago

it is not good to be having a society where people are using serious drugs without penalty.

Alcohol?

kepler12• 3 years ago

Serious, and almost inevitably danger / criminal- and life-destroying behavior inducing drugs.

anon2915• 3 years ago

Well, you can make stepwise rational choices all the way down into oblivion and watching your cities and states fall apart.

This is a good point. We often see this pathological behavior in training neural networks (HN's latest interest du jour). It's easy to find local minima and think this is the best it's going to get, even if the global minima is in a completely different direction. Given the general danger of a stochastic optimization algorithm which would see us changing the law to increase harm, perhaps stepwise optimization algorithms are not the way one should run a government, yet this seems to be the only accepted political methodology these days. If someone suggests something completely new, even if they have ample evidence or a good causal model, they are often ignored.

BeetleB• 3 years ago

The studies on this are mixed, with some saying it worsened the problem, and others saying it didn't. See, for example:

https://www.opb.org/article/2023/09/27/oregon-drug-decrimina...

This is definitely not a decided issue.

MilStdJunkie• 3 years ago

It is for the WSJ readership.

dec0dedab0de• 3 years ago

I think if you’re going to decriminalize drugs, you need to be very tough on public use

superkuh3• 3 years ago

One of the hardest most damaging drugs there is, alcohol, is legal and allowed in public and semi-public private property in all 50 states. Drinking solvents is not really much of a step above huffing them yet we as a society tolerate it. And that's good. Because it's their body and their choice.

atestu• 3 years ago

no it's not. Very few public places in the US allow alcohol consumption.

n8cpdx• 3 years ago

Not really. Open use isn’t allowed in Portland.

Due to a quirk in state law, Portland can enforce a prohibition on drinking in public (outside of OLCC regulated establishments) but cannot enforce a prohibition on smoking or shooting up meth or fentanyl in public.

elil178• 3 years ago

Why?

astrange3• 3 years ago

If you make public space bad, people won't use it.

A big problem with American leftism is that it's all young people whose primary goal is looking cool. They think drug users are cool and police are uncool. So if you complain that some guy is smoking crack on the subway, they'll yell at you because they think the act of watching the guy smoke crack is giving them street cred and will get them laid because they're not like those boring suburbanites.

But what it actually means is parents are going to drive everywhere and not take the subway.

kspyy• 3 years ago

the pilot trying to shut off engines mid flight after having taken mushrooms 2 days prior definitely wasn't a great look either!

austin-cheney• 3 years ago

We shouldn't forget that a measurably significant percentage of the population is almost guaranteed to become drug addicts provided any access to drugs. This is due to a variety of mental and neurological defects that result in addiction craving behavior and a near complete absence of inhibition regulation. This is tricky because for these people you cannot fight demand and counseling will not work as the problem is the hardware not the personality. The only partial solution is certain forms of medications and the only absolute solution is to forcefully separate that population from addictive substances and other people eager seeking such substances.

ajmurmann5• 3 years ago

For a discussion of how likely someone is to behind addicted it's crucial to differentiate between drugs. Meth and fentanyl are extremely addictive. It's not only mental, but also a strong physical addiction. I understand that withdrawal from these drugs mashes you feel liked you are gonna die. Fent and meth are a huge problem and IMO need to be treated very harshly whereas LSD, mushrooms and marijuana aren't physically addictive at all and come with comparatively little problems.

naruhodo• 3 years ago

When I saw the headline, I was struck by two thoughts:

* what constitutes "working", and

* "working" for whom?

The article makes it clear to me that the main problem is that since there are no criminal sanctions, there is less incentive to hide drug-taking activity. The streets are now cluttered with filthy, homeless fentanyl and meth addicts. Many right-thinking citizens are upset by how untidy it all looks.

What a surprise that not making an addict's life harder by locking them up has not magically led to them getting clean. The uptake on support services is not what one would hope.

Some people would like to return to criminalisation, presumably because "out of sight, out of mind". I think people with poverty, addiction and mental health problems should be given more support instead.

zerbinxx• 3 years ago

Fwiw locking people up actually does make some addicts lives easier. The life of a hard drug addict is filled with the constant strife of trying to procure money/drugs, all while extremely fucked up, and the. navigating the dangerous and shitty situations that puts them in. My aunt went to jail for 5 years for meth and she said it was the first time she felt she had enough piece to actually understand and work on sobriety since she started using 10 years prior. She’s been close to 20 years clean now. Granted, not everyone has it so nice, but she lost her kids, became a felon, and suffered a lot because of it. But then again, meth addiction begets a lot of suffering as well.

tticvs• 3 years ago

Your comment implies that having homeless fentanyl and meth addicts does not cause actual harm to the rest of society, only the perception of harm. This is demonstrably false.

You also suggest they should be "given more support" what to do if this does not work, and does not keep the rest of society safe?

mimikatz2• 3 years ago

We need to not treat all drugs the same. Heroin, Fentanyl, Meth are absolutely destructive forces and possession should force people into rehab or jail (their choice). Weed, acid, maybe coke should just be tickets and you can't do it/carry it around publically, openly sell it, etc.

beej714• 3 years ago

The worst part about blowing the rollout is that now we're going to go back to the expensive, ineffective system we had before.

smitty1e• 3 years ago

Possibly there is a correlation between public policy that promotes "jacking around" and the subsequent "finding out".

Restated: perhaps there was wisdom in prohibitions against drugs heavier than nicotine/alcohol? Maybe there was a line that stabilized society in general?

Will there be a sufficient level of "finding out" this side of the grave that will trigger thought?

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

It is not enough. As long as you also have other actors such as Federal side stopping you making start-ups. Like Uber of hard drugs. Imagine if everything from ethanol, to weed to all the way to fentanyl was delivered at moments notice to your door by network of independent sellers.

Unless you get to that point you have not decriminalized them enough... And it will clearly fail as it stays underground.

ajmurmann5• 3 years ago

What you are describing is legalization, not decriminalization.

superkuh3• 3 years ago

Isn't working? How many people have their lives forever ruined or murdered by police over drug war delusions? That number has surely gone way, way down. It's not like other states don't have legal hard drugs. Pretty much every state has one of the hardest drugs there is, alcohol, fully legal.

standardUser9• 3 years ago

Decriminalization is a cowardly half-measure that is doomed to fail. It doesn't resolve any of the actual issues that cause harm. Drugs are still impure, contaminated and hard to dose. They still must be purchased via an often-violent black market. It does absolutely nothing to prevent drugs being sold to minors. It doesn't create connections between addicts and services that can help them. It generates no revenue to fund those desperately-needed services.

Legalization with regulation is the one way to manage addictive substances in a free society. The rest of us are waiting around for you all to stop clutching your pearls so we can do what needs to be done. In the meantime, addicts will keep dying and law enforcement will keep ruining lives.

And black markets will keep getting richer.

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

Marijuana was legalized. But, the government heaped so many punitive taxes, regulations, and licensing restrictions on it that it left the black market a very profitable opportunity.

2 or 3 decades ago Canada decided to heap big taxes on cigarettes. A black market promptly emerged, complete with drive-by shootings. Canada rescinded those taxes and the black market (and its associated crime) evaporated.

standardUser9• 3 years ago

The blacket market for weed still exists for a lot of reasons, taxes being a small one, but weed is not a good comparison for other drugs. The markets for most drugs are comparably minuscule and the drugs themselves are not so trivially produced by anyone with a patch of dirt.

bombcar2• 3 years ago

It amuses me to no end that there are places legalizing hard drugs at the same time that they make cigarettes illegal.

drpgq• 3 years ago

There's still a big black market in Canada for reserve cigarettes. In Ontario reserve cigarettes are a huge chunk of the market.

Obscurity43404• 3 years ago

The black market for this kinda thing (bootleg cigarettes or untaxed whatever) is very much alive and well, if decentralized. Not gonna get into the demographics or anything

Teever• 3 years ago

Canada rescinded those taxes and the black market (and its associated crime) evaporated.

This is completely incorrect.

The taxes remain and have in fact been increased, and the black market has remained, but mostly shrunk as the pool of smokers has decreased due to the increase in taxes and other national campaigns to reduce the amount of smokers.

pfannkuchen2• 3 years ago

I find the crime part of black markets pretty interesting. When you are selling legal products, if someone rips you off the system will generally help you, and the police may use violence as part of helping you. When you are selling illegal products, the system won’t help you and you have to be your own police. The big difference is that police violence is not considered “crime” while your violence is, even if they are achieving similar goals.

criddell3• 3 years ago

Decriminalization is a cowardly half-measure that is doomed to fail.

How is failure or success determined? Did we know what the goals were for decriminalization? Was improving drug purity a goal? Were legal markets supposed to appear? Was it supposed to reduce access to minors? Was some mechanism for connecting addicts to social services to help them supposed to appear?

What would "help" mean in this context anyway? Does it only mean get sober or could it also involve helping addicts continue to use as safely as possible?

standardUser9• 3 years ago

How is failure or success determined? Did we know what the goals were for decriminalization?

I think supporters would say that ending an approach that has failed miserably across multiple generations is a success unto itself. And that the bigger goal was to open a path to a wider rollback of the drug war.

Was improving drug purity a goal?

Saving lives is always an explicit and implicit goal in public policies around health. Drug purity saves lives. Especially these days.

Were legal markets supposed to appear? Was it supposed to reduce access to minors?

No. It is basically a government mandate for people to hand their money directly to the criminal drug dealers.

Was some mechanism for connecting addicts to social services to help them supposed to appear?

To be fair, Oregon has taken other actions to fund services for addicts, like diverting funds from their marijuana tax revenue.

Most people probably want a drug policy that leads to a) fewer dead people and b) fewer addicts and c) reduced crime. Personally, I also think we need to consider liberty as one of the top goals if we're going to judge a drug policy as successful or not. But even in that respect, this law did very little.

Obscurity43404• 3 years ago

The part that annoys me is the obsession with sobriety as the only acceptable means to avoid further prosecution. Its like, thats not how any of this works. Your neurons and brain chemistry doesn't give a shit about deferred prosecutions or expungement etc when its not able to brain.

Stagnant• 3 years ago

I agree that legalization/regulation should be the end goal but it isn't a prerequisite for creating connections between addicts and health care services. In many of the western european countries there have been "drug consumption rooms" for decades now and the general opinion about them seems to be very positive[1]. They are essentially supervised rooms where addicts can get clean needles and use their drugs in a clean and supervised setting as well as having a change to speak to social workers if they want to.

I don't know if Oregon has any system like that in place right now. If they don't, it would seem like the reasonable first step considering that one of the major complaints seems to be drug use in public.

1: https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/media/publications...

bdcravens5• 3 years ago

I'm not exactly on the ACAB bandwagon, but I do feel that governments are willing to do half-measures as a way of reinforcing the perceived need for a stronger police state.

yieldcrv2• 3 years ago

these theories all rely on an extremely coordinated government.

in this case it was a direct referendum passed by voters, overwhelmingly.

the measure itself is quite comprehensive, read it yourself to see if it fits into a roundabout theory

jl6• 3 years ago

cowardly half-measure
in a free society

I feel these two go together. One reason that we have such a patchwork of messy ineffective policy is because the policymakers are pulled in different directions by a deeply divided society. Just look at this thread - there’s very little clear consensus about what exactly the right answer is. Everybody has an opinion. People vote. Policy lurches.

do what needs to be done

In contrast, this kind of tough talk is more fitting of a non-free society where sweeping decisions get made by steamrolling stakeholders. The populace gets tired of pusillanimous party politicians, so they elect a strongman who can do what needs to be done. But will the strongman do the right thing? Strongmen don’t have a great track record.

standardUser9• 3 years ago

There's no consensus bout the best way forward. But what baffles me is that there's still no consensus that the current system is an abject failure. Decades of imprisoning people, seizing their property, ruining their job prospects, all at an outrageous cost in both tax money and liberty. Yet too many people still refuse to entertain any genuinely different approach. And when they do, we get half-measures like these.

I think part of the problem is that many people suffer no personal consequences from existing policies and they (wrongly) think the people who do suffer somehow deserve it.

scarface_74• 3 years ago

Only one point, how hard has it ever been for a minor to get alcohol and cigarettes?

Bostonian• 3 years ago

I don't think I want the government to be spending money to ascertain the quality of recreational drugs -- it seems like an endorsement of such drugs. In theory, brands that earn a reputation for high quality could develop.

ilikecakeandpie• 3 years ago

Why not? Bad/deadly drugs, particularly due to cross contamination, are a public health crisis. Making sure a drug isn't going to have fentanyl in it is no more an endorsement than making sure a beer doesn't have bleach in it

kbelder• 3 years ago

I knew it would kill hundreds or thousands of people when I voted for it. I also intensely dislike recreational drug use.

But people should be in charge of their own behavior, even if self-destructive.

darkwizard42• 3 years ago

The issue generally is that self-destructive behavior now costs you (both in terms of $$ from your taxes, but also in terms of societal safety and disruption)

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Big picture, it’s kind of funny seeing a community assume it has new insights into human nature and burn down the metaphorical Chesterton fence only to learn the hard way.

“I pride myself on being a bit cynical, but obviously I was very naive.”

joenot4432• 3 years ago

The preface to your quote, from the article, makes the irony that much more palpable.

“There is constant problems all over town—it doesn’t matter where you live—with people strung out on drugs,” said Loew, who described herself as a communist. “I pride myself on being a bit cynical, but obviously I was very naive.”

romafirst34• 3 years ago

Compared to what? Do we think throwing everyone in jail and having the cops spend their time chasing around after drug users is a success?

If people are upset at drug users using drugs in public (which seems to be the thing everyone actually has a problem with) give them somewhere to use their drugs that isn’t in public.

YeBanKo• 3 years ago

give them somewhere to use their drugs that isn’t in public

Why can’t they use them at home?

aeternum• 3 years ago

Many don't have homes and the shelters don't allow drug use.

brlewis• 3 years ago

I'm studying persuasion. If anyone changes their opinion on decriminalization as a result of arguments made here, could you please say so in reply to this comment?

thomastjeffery6• 3 years ago

How do we define "working" here?

Does "working" mean it prevents people from using drugs? In that case, throwing millions of people into prison must be a great idea! I call bullshit.

We need to be explicit about our goals! The goal I support is treatment.

Yes, decriminalization is failing to provide treatment. Of course it is! That wasn't its intended purpose in the first place. The purpose was to stop punishing victims with incarceration and felony conviction.

We still need to replace the broken system with a useful one. That means regulated production and distribution of drugs instead of turning a blind eye to the black market. That means programs that heavily encourage treatment, not just "I gave them a ticket to go if they feel like it".

Just imagine if our society put half the effort we put into getting people to drink Coca-Cola into getting people healthcare.

foxyv• 3 years ago

Judging by the way drug laws have been enforced in the past. Working means arbitrarily suppressing Americans right to vote, speak, protest, and participate in our economy.

So yeah, it's not working because it isn't doing that anymore.

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

How do we define "working" here?

You could read the article.

"People sprawled on sidewalks and using fentanyl with no fear of consequence have become a common sight in cities such as Eugene and Portland. Business owners and local leaders are upset, but so are liberal voters who hoped decriminalization would lead to more people getting help. In reality, few drug users are taking advantage of new state-funded rehabilitation programs."

thomastjeffery6• 3 years ago

I did read the article. Did you read my comment?

comte70922• 3 years ago

Yes, decriminalization is failing to provide treatment. Of course it is! That wasn't its intended purpose in the first place.

Gonna have to correct you here. Measure 110 was supposed to bring decriminalization and treatment. The treatment just never really materialized.

thomastjeffery6• 3 years ago

OK, so decriminalization and treatment are separate avenues that were combined into one measure. The first materialized, and the second did not. You have reiterated my point.

ericmcer• 3 years ago

Can you force them to undergo treatment? Do most drug users want to get clean but they don't have the resources? I watch a lot of youtube interviews with homeless people (so I am an expert lol), but a common occurrence is a persons community, friends, family and entire way of life revolve around homelessness and drugs. It is way more complicated than just assuming they all want to be clean but society isn't willing to help them. How can the government provide an entire new lifestyle complete with work/friends/etc. for someone.

"Just imagine if our society put half the effort we put into getting people to drink Coca-Cola into getting people healthcare."

Healthcare is our #1 expense and growing bigger every year. We 100% put way more effort and money into it than any other problem our society faces.

thomastjeffery6• 3 years ago

Do most drug users want to get clean but they don't have the resources?

That's the problem: the way our healthcare system is currently structured, patients must actively pursue care. I have not seen even an attempt at resolving this problem.

This isn't unique to addiction, either: I would have taken ADHD meds this morning, except that I need to find a new prescriber before I can get any; and to do that, I must overcome the primary symptom of ADHD (executive dysfunction) to even start looking for care. Somehow, being aware of this catch-22 situation only makes it worse.

We already know that people suffering from addiction are the least likely to advocate for change; yet we haven't even bothered to give anyone else the job.

---

Healthcare is our #1 expense and growing bigger every year.

We already know that the United States wastes an incredible proportion of its healthcare spending. Some comparisons estimate a 20% overhead relative to other countries. Get rid of the insurance model, and we will be in a much stronger financial position.

That doesn't even begin to factor in the added costs of incarceration (which itself includes mandatory healthcare), let alone the secondary costs of an untreated populace who are addicted and impoverished.

costco• 3 years ago

How many conversations do people need to have on the relative merits of criminalization vs decriminalization before they get sick to their stomach? If you want to make a difference either get rich or climb the ranks of whatever political organization has the most power in your area. Everyone should think about a retirement from arguing online!

prmoustache• 3 years ago

Looks to me the law is working, addicts don't end up in jail for being addicts.

Did it solve the drug problem, no. This is not enough and such a problem cannot be solved in 3 years, nor can it be solved state wide because addicts who don't want to be harassed by law enforcement will move to states that let them live.

Looks like people just don't care about the drug problem, and its impact on criminality, economy and general well being of their fellow human being. People just don't care there are addicts, they care about seeing them out in public only.

hax0ron3• 3 years ago

The reason why drug production and consumption should be legal is not that this will necessarily lead to better social outcomes as measured by conventional standards, it is because prohibitions on drugs are an insult to liberty. It is ridiculous for a supposedly free society to try to stop people from putting substances into their own bodies just like it would be a ridiculous for a free society to try to stop people from, for example, having consensual sex with each other.

Drug prohibition is in principle incompatible with liberty.

If you want a free society, some things must be legal even if the social impact of allowing them to be legal seems to many people to be negative. There are already laws against many of the things that people blame on drugs. I know that it is tempting to many people to criminalize drugs rather than to try to do a more effective job of policing things that people blame on drugs. But this is the same kind of mentality that would, for example, get rid of free speech because sometimes free speech leads people to commit violence. That kind of mentality is a pathway towards the US becoming like China.

Another issue with the drug war is unfair enforcement. Well-off people have absolutely no problem getting illegal drugs. A huge number of successful professionals do illegal drugs on a regular basis and only rarely even come close to potentially getting in legal trouble. Meanwhile poor people and dealers are probably more likely to get busted.

The drug war, by artificially making certain substances sell at prices that are vastly higher than what it costs to manufacture them, also creates a type of black market currency that enables the activities of all sorts of groups that engage in actually harmful behavior like killing people.

Obscurity43404• 3 years ago

Why should any drug be treated any more harshly than some grandfathered in bullcrap like alcohol? I can't even get past that first enormous hypocrisy...

Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – it isn't working

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