Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by ikrenji » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

_blz2 wrote: post #67

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…

Why do you think everyone should get voting rights if there is a section of the society who want to actively harm themselves. What are their votes reflective of?

why do you want to create a policy for everyone based on actions of the few? the tails should be disregarded. so what if 5-10% of the people abuse a system that otherwise benefits the other 80-90% ? cost of doing business

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

#92

Post by anon291 » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #68

NegativeLatency wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts This is hyperbole, I live in one of the rougher neighborhoods. The city gov especially the mayor and his cronies have done nothing to actually fix problems, they just do expensive sweeps and cleanup without addressing root causes.

I'm not sure about in the United States, but here in Canada, we barely even have "good" and "bad" neighbourhoods. My city is quite well-mixed together economically. Somehow, despite that, the recent dysfunction of society -- the sharp increase in the number of homeless and the number of publicly intoxicated people -- seems to fall entirely on the poor as a consequence. They're the ones suffering it day to day. A rela…

Oh goodness... you can't be serious? Have you been to vancouver?

As for being insulated in your upper middle class community. I mean... every country has that. my neighborhood which is a mile and a half from downtown Portland had private security during the entirety of the riots of 2020. These are far left people (which I know based on conversations with my neighbors, yard signs, and who they vocally proclaim they're voting for) and they all collectively decided to hire private companies to ensure the rif-raf doesn't get in. It's exactly like that now. In my own neighborhood, there's nothing, but if you cross the street to the 'wrong side of the tracks' so to speak, it's like an apocalypse (getting better thankfully, due to the recent increase in policing)

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

#93

Post by tenebrisalietum » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

_blz2 wrote: post #67

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…

Why do you think everyone should get voting rights if there is a section of the society who want to actively harm themselves. What are their votes reflective of?

Anyone who consumes sugar, trans fat or smokes cigarettes should be unable to vote as well?

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

#94

Post by andybak » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

chronofar wrote: post #80

Alupis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended). People who would have never tried it before now do so because the stigma is gone, and it's trivial to get. This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. While marijuana might be relatively benign, other drugs are…

> This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. These types of generalizations are usually built of straw and mud, but I'll go ahead and respond as someone in said crowd with a "no it's not." There's an implicit assumption here that increased usage is worse than the effects of prohibition, but that's at minimum highly debatable. I tend to think increased usage of a regulated and taxable substance by a…

I can think of few things likely to befall a drug user that are more devastating and costly to society than a long period of incarceration.

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

#95

Post by the_cat_kittles » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

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…

i agree with no criminal penalties for drugs, but your justification seems ignorant of the negative externalities. i think a better justification is simply that the tradeoffs from legalization are worth it

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

#96

Post by treeman79 » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

morkalork wrote: post #57

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sal…

Without legal sales, cartels will keep doing cartel things. Also where will money for treatment programs come from? It will always be at risk of being cut by fiscally conservative governments, vs legal sales that can be taxed to fund amelioration efforts.

Perhaps guard the boarders so not nearly so much is crossing. Would also help stop human trafficking. Just a thought.

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

#97

Post by chefandy » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #41

kelnos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Portugal was famously very successful at drug decriminalization It isn't that famously successful at all, at least in Portugal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

Excerpt from that article:

"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available."

It did work well. It doesn't now. What changed in between then and now is funding and commitment to getting addicts into treatment-- the founding principle of the program to begin with.

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

#98

Post by Tiktaalik » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

From what is written here in the article it sounds to me that unlike the Portugal jurisdiction they are trying to emulate, Oregon really hasn't followed through on building out the required health measures, that is treatment, that is required to go hand in hand with decriminalization for the entire concept to be a success.

It's very easy to change legislation and deregulate. A lot harder to actually spend the money to build out a robust system of healthcare.

Deregulation is a necessary step in order to treat addiction as a disease best fixed with healthcare, but it can't be the single only step.

It's dispiriting that people are looking at Oregon struggling through the implementation details and thinking that the whole idea was a mistake and we need to go back to decades old drug war tactics. Not clear at all how those approaches would succeed in this moment as the new problem of fentanyl and toxic drugs has made things worse than it has ever been.

The notion that we need to give up and go back to the old ways seems more like a knee jerk reaction and flight to safety of what we've always done.

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

#99

Post by anon291 » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #87

anon291 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while being greatly better compared to states like W. Virginia. Typical Oregon response comparing Oregon, a fairly rich state, with West Virginia, one of the poorest states. If you can't do better than a poor state with your high taxes and high median incomes... that's not a good reflection on the state. Yet, most Oregonians seem to get some satisfaction that they do better than Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virgi…

But see that is exactly what I am talking about. You cannot — cannot — attribute a change in overdose rate to state policy without examining and controlling for the factors that we know influence overdoses: personal income, homelessness, etc. This article completely fails to examine whether Oregon's changes can be due to a shift in the income among its population.

I'm pretty sure being on the streets as a drug addict also causes loss of income, so you really can't take that into account without taking in cyclic effects.

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

#100

Post by foobarian » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

api wrote: post #46

wonderwonder wrote: post #36

If you decriminalize hard drugs, all that happens is that addicts stay addicts, have a higher likely hood of becoming homeless and higher chance of dying. Hard drugs for the most part outside of controlled environments have almost no positive qualities. Drugs like cannabis have medical attributes and can provide benefits. People addicted to hard drugs require treatment, leaving them to their own devices is likely to…

My take is that we're going from a criminalization based "screw them, warehouse them in jail and ruin their lives with felony convictions" policy to a laissez-faire "screw them, let them die on the street" policy. The part that hasn't changed is "screw them." Nobody really cares about these people. They're viewed as an inconvenience and the debate is over the least costly way to either warehouse them or shove them as…

The movie Traffic already said it. "Treatment of addiction? Addicts treat themselves. They overdose and then there's one less to worry about."