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Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

theatlantic.com

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Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#131

Post by ecf »

tlogan wrote: post #121

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 s…

I don’t have any evidence to back this feeling up so take it with a grain of salt: San Francisco has a drug problem simply because it’s one of few places in the country where it’s safe to have a drug problem. Other states pay for addicts/homeless to be shipped off to California and all of a sudden it becomes our taxpayer problem.

If drugs were legalized country-wide then SF wouldn’t have the concentration it does and it would seem like a nice place.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#133

Post by rvcdbn »

tlogan wrote: post #121

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 s…

We have built a society where the best options for these people are to do what they are doing. Nobody starts using because they have a great life but they’re just curious what a bit of meth feels like and then accidentally get hooked. They do it because there’s no better life path open to them. It’s really a form of suicide. Criminalizing will make the suicide process faster and less visible to you. It won’t stop anyone from using but it will make using more dangerous. There is no easy solution. We need societal change. Making it illegal would be like criminalizing sugar because of the obesity epidemic.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#134

Post by AbrahamParangi »

kelnos wrote: post #5

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 implemen…

Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? I mean, it is self-evidently obvious that at some level of enforcement, you can actually control the problem.

The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#136

Post by willi59549879 »

sharperguy wrote: post #8

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 underw…

i think the only way it would work is to make it completely legal (also selling and production) with a lot of control on sales. I am not sure what would be best to control sales, guess it would need to be stricter than the control for tobacco and alcohol. But that way the government could at least get taxes from the sales of the drugs.

If only possession is legal then more people might try hard drugs that would have been scared away but drugs still have to be smuggled in. This also means that there is no quality control on the substances.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#137

Post by classichasclass »

randerson wrote: post #73
sharperguy wrote: post #8

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 underw…

I wonder: would be better or worse if states started giving out medical-grade Heroin to those who seek it? Perhaps with a prescription where one has to pick up a 1 day supply each day (less likely to OD) and the prescription gradually tapers off down to zero. It would put a dent in the illicit markets and reduce deaths of existing addicts, but could be too tempting for new people to try it out.

This is basically the methadone approach, but when I was in general practice, just try weaning people off anything they have a dependence on that they're not motivated to stop using.

Plus, harm reduction like syringe services (i.e., needle exchange) is already hugely controversial for "encouraging drug use." That sentiment is at best arguable and at worst a reductionist distortion, but it becomes even harder to argue against when you're in the business of handing out better dope.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#138

Post by zmgsabst »

thegrim33 wrote: post #112
gspencley wrote: post #61

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 opini…

A thought experiment I think about is along the lines of: what would society look like, say, 10,000 years in the future, if everybody somehow magically had an Einstein-level of intelligence and rationality. In such a society, sure, the government probably wouldn't need to step in; the vast, vast majority of the population would either have little interest in the drugs in the first place, or, if they did, could be tru…

Regulate the anti-social behavior, not the substance.

The problem is the places which legalized drugs also legalized anti-social behavior.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#139

Post by burkaman »

ecf wrote: post #131
tlogan wrote: post #121

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 s…

I don’t have any evidence to back this feeling up so take it with a grain of salt: San Francisco has a drug problem simply because it’s one of few places in the country where it’s safe to have a drug problem. Other states pay for addicts/homeless to be shipped off to California and all of a sudden it becomes our taxpayer problem. If drugs were legalized country-wide then SF wouldn’t have the concentration it does and…

This is a common theory but it isn't true. There are a lot of homeless people in San Fransisco because there are a lot of people there and it's hard to afford a home.

From a huge recent survey of homelessness in California:

> Nine out of ten participants lost their last housing in California; 75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing.

https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#140

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

gspencley wrote: post #61

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 opini…

> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.

I agree with this in principle, but only to an extent. It's not the government's business to intervene when people fill their bodies with, say, ice cream, which makes them happy but has some health consequences borne by the individual. But on the other hand, the government should certainly not permit people to fill their bodies full of explosive substances like nitroglycerin, which might detonate when they are outside walking around public spaces, taking out innocent bystanders.

Hard drugs fall somewhere in between these extremes, because in addition to their first-order effects on the user's health and happiness, they also seem to cause second-order consequences on innocent bystanders. Under the influence of drugs, some users can become aggressive and violent, and lose control of and -- importantly -- responsibility for their actions. Under the influence of addiction, some users also resort to robbery or theft to fund their habits. Many also end up unable to care for themselves. Statistically, this occurs with enough likelihood that it's a predictable, although not inevitable, consequence of substance abuse. Punishing the crimes committed under the influence of drugs does not act as an effective deterrent. Much of the harm from hard drugs does fall on people with no direct relationship to the drug users themselves, and they will have a strong and legitimate self-interest in having these substances banned.

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