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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

#491

Post by andrei_says_ »

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…

Gabor Mate who has worked with patients dealing with addiction for decades speaks of drug addiction as a symptom of other issues, mostly trauma, hopelessness etc.

What we could do is shift our priorities from turning the country into a feudal system pressure cooker scenario and provide opportunities and resources for most.

No wait that’s just crazy. On another thought maybe we should just make harsher punishments for drug users and “clean the streets” by moving all the homeless to jail cells at $80k/year/person in taxpayer money.

Because mentioning a similar UBI amount is also crazy.

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

#492

Post by gooseyard »

michaelteter wrote: post #342

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…

I recently read Peter Turchin's "End Times" (the title is sorta clickbaity I think, as it's not a doomsday book), and in it, he describes a model of societal instability which features "popular immiseration" as a factor. Essentially he claims that the percentage of a population who respond negatively to the question "are you happy?" is correlated with the degree of instability of the social order.

Obviously, the idea of unhappiness is pretty broad, like from "my 401k is doing badly" to "I am unlikely to survive the day", but I suspect that it's true that if a certain threshold of the population answers yes to this question, that you can expect that a pretty large percentage of the respondents are probably in a pretty bad place, and if you have nothing left to lose, finding some way to soothe the pain of the end is at least understandable even if it's what nobody would prefer.

I am nothing even approaching a serious student of these issues, but I do fear that the lack of opportunities for Americans today to find a path to fulfillment with dignity means that many of us will wind up in situations where we are basically riding out the days until our death, and even though so many of the people consigned to this fate are not what we would consider ideal, I think we should judge ourselves as a society by how we address their issues.

Anyhow, Turchin himself comments on this matter in https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa... , it's an interesting read.

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

#493

Post by nonrepeating »

whimsicalism wrote: post #326
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Singapore is a dictatorship, count me out.

No, it is not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy_in_...

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

#494

Post by StanislavPetrov »

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 used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want.

I agree with this statement, but it should only hold true in your own home, on your own property, or on the property of someone who is amenable to whatever behavior you are engaged in.

>Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab?

Very simply we cannot have a functional society if we don't have rules about what behavior is allowed in public spaces. Just because every adult should be free to do drugs that doesn't (or at least shouldn't if we want a functional society) give license to these adults to break the rules we have set up for public spaces, whether or not their rule-breaking is a result of their drug use. I don't believe anyone who isn't breaking the rules of our public spaces should be locked up or forced into rehab for their drug use. But if they are stealing, harassing others, vandalizing, doing drugs on public property or engaging in a variety of other illegal behaviors, then they should be arrested and offered the choice between jail and rehab (in a locked facility).

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

#495

Post by theptip »

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…

One important observation is that drug use is largely downstream of homelessness. Being homeless is awful, and drives people to self-medication/-numbing. (Of course some homelessness is caused by prior drug addiction but I’ve seen compelling analysis suggesting it’s mostly the other way around.) SF primarily has a cost-of-living problem, which produces a homelessness problem, which produces a drug problem.

Programs that address homelessness (like housing-first, or work training) will also reduce drug abuse/deaths. And upstream stuff like really buying into building housing stock will also help with homelessness.

Part of the whole package of drug legalization is that if you actually dismantle the war on drugs machinery, you will have a huge budget to direct to social programs that can reduce the upstream causes of drug abuse, not just providing treatment after the fact. It sounds like Oregon didn’t get those programs in place yet.

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

#496

Post by Aeolun »

brightlancer wrote: post #480
wobbly_bush wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the opposite also true?

> 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.

I’m kind of of the opinion that we shouldn’t hold addicts to account for their addictions. By the time they’re addicted they’re not rational actors any more.

By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children as if they’re well-functioning adults.

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

#497

Post by Turskarama »

dvt wrote: post #473
simonh wrote: post #446

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 dem…

> 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. While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long s…

>life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years

Citation needed, you might be underestimating how much it costs to jail someone. If a drug user actually manages to get clean (which with proper support, most can) then the cost of support is basically checking up on them a couple of times a year. Meanwhile they can hold down a job and live a normal life.

That's as opposed to the significant costs of keeping someone in prison, which is significantly more than they would be earning if they were free.

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

#498

Post by 3minus1 »

calibas wrote: post #111
Ajay-p wrote: post #71

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 legalizati…

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.

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.

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

#499

Post by protastus »

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…

> 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 U.S. healthcare system is deeply broken, so it's tremendously difficult for someone who is poor and sick/mentally ill/addicted to drugs to regain control of their life. Irrespective of the legal status of hard drugs.

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

#500

Post by monocasa »

dvt wrote: post #473
simonh wrote: post #446

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 dem…

> 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. While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long s…

> life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years.

There are plenty of drugs in jails. Sticking someone in jail is a very expensive and unlikely to be effective way to treat their addiction.

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