Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

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.

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.

Can you elaborate? Are these examples of "lack of shame"?

> 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.

Even if it had been funded, Oregon wouldn't have been starting from zero, it's been in a deficit for mental health and addiction treatment for almost 20 years prior. It didn't have enough people and beds for chronic treatment against demand at any point in the 5 years before Measure 110 passed, even if you only consider the demand for them from housed people with health insurance and serious-but-not-hard-drug addictions,[1] nevermind the 2020 meth problem, then the 2021 fentanyl problem, and now the 10x larger 2022 fentanyl problem that's made it the cheapest drug available.

Aside from all that, the death rate spike steeper than the US average's spike or neighboring Washington spike over the same timeframe, but not by much, and Oregon's per-capita death rate is still lower than either; it's #35 out of the 50 states and DC.[2]

So even if Measure 110 had been passed, say, 5 years prior and had the time to fully distribute funding to and staff the existing need for treatment measures across the board before taking effect, the sheer scale of the fentanyl crisis since 2022 would've overwhelmed those resources anyway.

But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts. The authority to distribute funds went to an unqualified council that lacked the resources to vet agencies, so most of the allocated money's just sat there unused. Everything — from the council membership to its administrative structure to its term limits to its lack of data collection to measure any outcomes from the funding — has made distributing the funds harder than it needed to be, and determining if the funds have had any effect impossible.[3]

> 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.

For opioid deaths, most of the rise came in the last three months of the 2022 and first three months of 2023, defying the typical trend of declining during the winter.[4]

It's also nearly all fentanyl. If there's been an uptick in decriminalization-specific drug tourism, it'd be dwarfed by the totality of fentanyl use (or if all the new fentanyl use is tourism, Oregon's population would've grown by a half-million people or so over a few months). Seizures of fentanyl went from fewer than 1 million dose-equivalent units in 2020, to more than 4 million in 2021, to 32 million in 2022. Meth and especially heroin dropped over the same span and coke stayed level.[6]

Measure 110 also didn't change the Portland metro police response rate to calls, but who knows what to make of that with PPB being a giant crib of whining babies since 2020.[5]

1: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/24/oregons-measure-110-i...

2: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...

3: https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2023/01/audit-oregons-drug...

4: https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PREVENTIONWELLNESS/SUBSTANCEUS...

5: https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/10/11/initial-research-on-me...

6: http://oridhidta.org/annual-report

> Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana.

Maybe those people were right? Prohibition decreased the amount of people addicted to alcohol and the number of people who beat their wives. If we had a more hard-line response to alcohol instead of the half-in/half-out wishy-washy nonsense that was Prohibition enforcement maybe less people would have their lives ruined by alcohol to this day. Singapore famously goes hard even against cannabis and they are a vastly more functional society crime-wise than Oregon. I know from personal experience that when cannabis was decriminalized where I am the drivers in my area became much worse. I don't use Uber anymore here because almost every time I enter a car now it's too often clear that the driver is high.

I wonder if Americans are ever going to realize their incessant penchant for 'freedoms' with regards to drugs/guns/speech/ certain corporate policies / etc are harmful to the only goals that matter to a society: the flourishing of the population. I wonder if America will ever have an adult in the room.