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Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
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Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#12From 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.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#13https://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 implemen…
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 They always claimed to follow other successful implementations like Portugal, but the law was no where near what they implemented as far as requiring treatment.
Whats funny is the Governor is telling the Portland mayor to fix the drug issues...like it didn't stem from measure 110.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/07/19/kotek-and-blumenauer-t...
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#14This 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…
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."
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#15https://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 implemen…
Is it possible the probability of success of treating the use of certain brain altering chemicals is untenably low, even if treatment was "properly" funded?
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#16https://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 implemen…
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 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…
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.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#17I 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 underw…
Without legal sales, opiate users get trash street drugs that vary anywhere between unsafe and catastrophically dangerous. Furthermore, there's absolutely none of the benefits like being able to encourage them to keep their used needles in sharps containers like you might be able to do, if they had to drop off the full ones before they got their next fix.
We don't get the reduction in violence we'd see from legal sales. None of it.
Decrim is what you get from cowardly legislators and imbecilic activists worried that Tweaky the Copper Wiring Thief isn't getting a fair shake at life.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#18https://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 implemen…
Is it possible the probability of success of treating the use of certain brain altering chemicals is untenably low, even if treatment was "properly" funded?
I don't think so. Portugal was famously very successful at drug decriminalization, at least until they slashed funding to rehabilitation programs.
If you have data that suggests some drugs just make rehabilitation impossible or unlikely, I'd be interested to see it, though.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#19This 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…
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 rema…
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
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#20https://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 implemen…
Yeah, I see it as a failure in implementing a better road to recidivism for drug users that doesn't involve prison. It's a mental health issue after all. I think perhaps maybe even separate "mental" health from normal healthcare and make it free / universal might go a long way. Maybe insentivize it, like giving plasma. Go to therapy 4 weeks in a row get $100 cash. That way it's not "forcing" people into something which is still a sort of "prison" mindset, but it's more like "encouraging" them to be there, and drug users will do almost anything for money, right? So why not have them do therapy?