This 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 it are scrutinized even when their outcomes are no worse.
"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."
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
WV is a half continent away, has massively different demographics, poverty rates, culture, history etc. Comparisons like that are extremely difficult to do properly. What we can easily compare is Oregon a few years ago vs Oregon now and deduce the impact of it's policies with nearby similar states as a reference.
> 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 Virginia, even if they're #49 in the ranking. It's gross.
I mean, Oregon has Intel, Nike, Adidas, a well-developed tech sector, etc, and West Virginia has coal mining, yet we're actually comparing ourselves to them.
I really wish people in this state would strive for something actually better.
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.
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 implementation and enforcement measures.
And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.
> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.
It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.
But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.
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 <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems.
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.
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.
I don't know the specifics in Oregon, but in many places (especially bigger cities) that stopped prosecuting drugs and prostitution, "throwing everyone in jail" was not the previous scenario. People were arrested then put into diversionary programs that were enforced by the courts. It worked much better than just letting people stay on the streets as the process acted as a wake up call for many (of course, not all).
Oregon basically made it a $100 fine or you could get treatment...<5% of the people arrested chose treatment. Portugal had more rules requiring treatment which is what made it effective...Oregon did not choose that route.
> Portugal had more rules requiring treatment which is what made it effective...Oregon did not choose that route.
As I explained in a sibling comment, requiring treatment is not the difference. Very few people who use drugs in Portugal are subject to mandatory drug treatment.
The key difference is that Portugal has a radically different housing policy than Oregon. As of 2019, housing is a formal legal right (and even before 2019, it was much closer to a de facto right than it was to Oregon's current model, which is "if you can't pay for a roof, pitch your tent over there, and hope we don't arrest you for vagrancy").
Most people who use drugs do not meet clinical criteria for addiction, so drug treatment programs are irrelevant and a waste of money for them. For those who do, drug treatment programs are still a waste of money unless they have stable housing, because it is essentially impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety without stable housing.
> I don't know the specifics in Oregon, but in many places (especially bigger cities) that stopped prosecuting drugs and prostitution, "throwing everyone in jail" was not the previous scenario. People were arrested then put into diversionary programs that were enforced by the courts.
The big difference between Oregon and the other cities/countries that tried this approach successfully is not diversionary programs - it's housing. In Oregon, housing is not guaranteed, which means any money spent on mandatory treatment programs for people without stable housing is essentially wasted.
Diversionary programs and rehabilitation are a waste of time and money if the recipient does not have guaranteed access to stable housing. It's virtually impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety in those circumstances.
> but I don't think the solution is "let's just go back to throwing everyone in jail".
As someone who lives in Oregon we need some way to force addicts into treatment. Jail worked in some cases because it meant that some addicts no longer had access to the drugs they were addicted to. But even better would be more of a therapeutic environment where they actually get treatment for addiction. However, it seems that most addicts aren't going into treatment willingly (big surprise) and this is why we're seeing so much trouble here. I voted for 110, but now I'm thinking that was a mistake. It either needs some major revisions to enable forcing drug users into treatment or it just needs to be repealed (the former would be better, I think).
How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
If someone wants to get high in their home, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in a bar or such, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in one of those places and then walk out in public _without harming anyone else_, I don't care.
The thefts, the assaults, the zombies and crazies in public, that stuff I care about.
There is a middle-ground between "criminalize USE" and "stop enforcing laws, particularly when drug abusers and homeless are involved".
> How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
> If someone wants to get high in their home
That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed, and in which almost all "last-resort" housing options (such as shelters) require sobriety. Achieving and maintaining sobriety without stable housing is virtually impossible, and yet somehow society expects everyone to be able to do it and then complains when this doesn't magically happen.
The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs", except that attitude is completely fantastical: it goes against all clinical evidence of how substance use disorders actually work, and all empirical evidence of what resources a person needs to stop using drugs (assuming that is even the end goal, which is not a given).
To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs, then you will wind up with homeless people using drugs in public. And criminalizing drug use doesn't change that; it just moves those people "out of sight" to jails and prisons, where they keep using drugs, at a monetary cost to society that is literally orders of magnitude greater than the straightforward option of just giving them housing.
> The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs",
How many times did I have to say that I don't care if people use drugs?
_I don't care if people use drugs._ I'm not interested in forcing folks into rehab.
But this crap:
> That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed...
> To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs
Is a BS excuse to let folks commit THEFT and ASSAULT because It's Really The System, or expose kids to fent smoke on the train because It's Really The System, or have kids step over zombies on the sidewalk because It's Really The System, or have children and women (and some men) harassed or threatened by crazies because It's Really The System, etc.
I don't care about the drug use. I worked with homeless folks for years and most of them are not OD'ing in public parks or harassing folks on the sidewalk. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
> Is a BS excuse to let folks commit THEFT and ASSAULT because It's Really The System, or expose kids to fent smoke on the train because It's Really The System, or have kids step over zombies on the sidewalk because It's Really The System, or have children and women (and some men) harassed or threatened by crazies because It's Really The System, etc. I don't care about the drug use. I worked with homeless folks for years and most of them are not OD'ing in public parks or harassing folks on the sidewalk. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Your original comment literally draws a false equivalence between "theft and assault" and "smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit".
Here's your comment:
> How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
Since the article is only talking about decriminalization of drugs (theft and assault are still criminal offenses), the only relevant difference here regards people who are using drugs in public places.
It's a pretty convenient bait-and-switch that allows you to complain about people using drugs (which is neither violent nor criminal behavior), and then when people call you out on it, revert back to complaining about violent and criminal behavior, which nobody in this entire comment chain except for you is talking about.
> Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Nobody's talking about criminal behavior. We're talking about drug use, which, as discussed in the article, is not a criminal offense in Oregon.
> Since the article is only talking about decriminalization of drugs (theft and assault are still criminal offenses), the only relevant difference here regards people who are using drugs in public places.
You should look up to the folks I was replying to:
"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 <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems."
"Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding.
...
"In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse."
I disagree that the implementation is terrible. Having seen several interviews on the matter I think its implemented exactly as the people of Portland wanted it. The major outstanding problem is a lot of the homeless people on drugs need someone to genuinely be there for them and care about them. That's the primary message you will hear from them if you care to listen to their stories on The Soft White Underbelly. It seems that you can't possibly spend enough money to make that happen at a policy level. There were horrible abuses in the institutions where it was tried here historically.
They didn't spend any money on it...they didn't fund or push treatment programs at all. The implementation was 100% awful...just like every Oregon program that means well.
Ted Wheeler is a piece of shit, pushing policies that are completely ineffective. He's more interested in illegally gassing non-violent protestors than fixing issues. The police here are well-funded and by-and-large don't do anything, bringing up the real question "why are we funding them?" A family member of mine had someone ARMED and going through a very obviously psychotic episode enter their house and it was over week before the police showed up to remove them. The damage to the house was outstanding, and my family member obviously couldn't stay there during it, but the Portland Police couldn't fucking be bothered. For a fucking week. It's absolutely insane we pay for police in my opinion.
The biggest issue in Portland that's been ignored since COVID started is that downtown Portland never recovered after the shutdown. It has nothing to do with safety, I know I live there, and it has everything to do with prices. The city is too expensive for what you get and what opportunities are here.
I'm no fan of Kotek, but truly Ted Wheeler is among the most shit mayors the city has ever known.
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?
"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.
The interesting metric would be the percentage of addicts that were treated and went on to be “productive” or at least not using for at least x, y, and z years, and probabilities of relapse.
No, I have not seen related statistics. I need the statistic because I do not see any other way to evaluate whether or not treatment is cost effective.
I have reached a conclusion that in order to evaluate the “success” of Portugal’s policies and how they can translate to other places, then I would like to know what kind of addictions it succeeded for and for what proportion of people and for which addictions.
A lot of countries have given up on curing addiction. Finland, for example, just gives homeless addicts housing with a social worker supervising, with the idea that their behavior will continue but giving them housing is cheaper than the public services they would consume otherwise. Success isn't necessarily quantified in how much addiction is cured. A lot of chronic drug addiction cases are simply written off (they will never be productive again).
That is just one perspective from the article, not a consensus, and definitely nothing that could qualify as famous, and even then the argument is along the lines of "It was successful until we stop dumping lots of money into it."
That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
> Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.
I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?
> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?
I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).
> I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled?
> I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes.
It looks like you don't understand which part you don't actually get. While Portugal's program was being funded properly, the increase in drug usage was no different from nearby countries that did not change their drug laws. Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time. But what about the cost? Well, it seems to have saved a boatload of money on enforcement.
“The most important direct effect was a reduction in the use of criminal justice resources targeted at vulnerable drug users,” says Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the U.K.’s University of Kent, who co-authored the study. “Before, a large number of people were being arrested and punished for drug use alone. They saved themselves a lot of money and stopped inflicting so much harm on people through the criminal justice system. There were other trends since drugs were decriminalized in 2001, but they are less easy to attribute directly to decriminalization.”
The hippies over at Forbes seem to think that ending canabis prohibition will help the US recover economically from the pandemic like ending alcohol prohibition helped end the great depression.
But what about the collateral damage of all this rampant treating-instead-of-imprisoning-people-for-drug-use? Well, The International Journal of Drug Policy said:
"Taking into consideration health and non-health related costs, we find that that the social cost of drugs decreased by 12% in the five years following the NSFAD's approval and by a rather significant 18% in the eleven-year period following its approval. Whilst the reduction of legal system costs (possibly associated with the decriminalization of drug consumption) is clearly one of the main explanatory factors, it is not the only one. In particular, the rather significant reduction of health-related costs has also played an important role."
Surely the stalwart right-wing CATO institute will set the record straight on the fallout from such an irresponsible policy:
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many EU states, those problems—in virtually every relevant category—have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001. In certain key demographic segments, drug usage has decreased in absolute terms in the decriminalization framework, even as usage across the EU continues to increase, including in those states that continue to take the hardest line in criminalizing drug possession and usage."
> Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time.
Marijuana isn't illegal in the US anymore (at least where I live). Fentanyl, which is basically laced into all hard drugs these days, I guess you could argue that they are going to be dead in one or two years anyways? I guess that's tough love for you.
Hey, marijuana should be legal...and here in Washington state at least it is. The biggest problem with marijuana, due to dumb federal rules, is that the (non-marijuana) drug addicts are more likely to do armed robberies of dispensaries because they are cash only businesses.
But let's not bait and switch here: "marijuana has been shown to be manageable, so let's allow people to do all the fentanyl they want" is not very logical. A lot of teens are just dying on their first experience with fent (or something they got that had fent in it that they didn't know about!). These aren't the same things at all.
You're picking at a razor thin slice of the premise while entirely ignoring the context. It doesn't matter which drug does what. In the time period that they were properly funding treatment as a replacement for the immense expenditure on drug law enforcement for users— so not within the post decade— drug use and all of the social ills that come with it were reduced, in some cases dramatically, compared to the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe was doing great compared to the US. The US criminalization of drug use is a fantastically expensive moral crusade that imparts misery upon people with addiction for absolutely no benefit. Portugal maintained stiff penalties for people in the black market drug business, as they should have, but simply treated the users instead of jailing them. If you have some kind of actual data showing that fentanyl, carfentanil, et al users are affected by policy differently than all other criminals or even motivated by punishment dramatically more than all other addicts, then bring it.
"It was successful until we stop dumping lots of money into it."
Generally, successful public programs often stop being successful when they stop recieving funding. That is a fact. The resources used to pay for the portugal program were redirected from enforcement. Perusing the wikipedia page, the stats seemed a lot more encouraging than any similar ones I've seen from a country with war-on-drugs type policies, but I'm not an expert.
> That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
It's funny that you mention Salt Lake City, because that example is commonly misunderstood and actually illustrates the exact opposite of what you're pointing out.
Utah set out to solve chronic homelessness. The causes and effects of chronic homelessness are completely different from transient or episodic homelessness, and the three require different approaches. Utah eliminated 91% of chronic homelessness within ten years, using a Housing First policy. After they ended the policy, total (not chronic) homelessness increased. The majority of that increase was from non-chronic homelessness, which was not targeted by their policy and which was increasing even before that policy ended (because it was, well, independent of a policy that was... not aimed at addressing it). Chronic homelessness has increased in Utah since the end of the program in 2015, but the overwhelming majority of homelessness that's reported on in Utah is still not chronic homelessness, because chronic homelessness makes up less than 20% of the homeless population.
It's odd to look at that as "the problem never ends", because the problem (chronic homelessness), did very nearly end, until the state decided to end the program and go back to their own ways.
> 2023 report reflects a 96% increase in people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2019, but also indicates Utah is making headway in developing deeply affordable housing
>Chronic homelessness refers to people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, either continuously or in four or more separate instances within the past three years, while also experiencing a disabling condition such as a physical disability, severe mental illness or substance use disorder.
Sounds like a good definition to me. I just don’t think it increased 96% in four years. It’s much more likely that they were cooking the numbers the previous years and had to come clean eventually.
> I just don’t think it increased 96% in four years. It’s much more likely that they were cooking the numbers the previous years and had to come clean eventually.
It's quite a leap of logic to look at an increase in chronic homelessness after ending a program that empirically reduced chronic homelessness using a straightforward mechanism, and conclude that the most probable explanation is "outright fraud, necessitating a decade-long conspiracy involving many people and organizations with opposing goals collaborating with each other, and which somehow has resulted in zero tangible evidence of the conspiracy surfacing even years after the alleged conspiracy fell apart".
I went to Portugal during this supposed 'golden' era and it was just as depressing then as Portland is now. I have no idea how anyone can say it was a success. The despair on the street was palpable.
If there was a measure for success that was agreed upon, for a region, the probability of success would then be lowered to "untenably low". That isn't the case, when data collection is performed.
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?
Why would mental health be separated from "normal" healthcare? Mental health involves chemical signals in the brain. Once a chemical dependency has been established, how possible is it to "talk" someone out of it in therapy?
well, the thing with mental healthcare compared with regular healthcare is that the first bit of it is often kind of coercive?
Like folks with chest pain want it fixed.
But folks who hear voices/are addicted to something/suffer from crippling anxiety often don't want to fix it for a variety of reasons, some of which are even pretty good (such as nasty medication side effects). Crossing that hurdle is tough
And you can talk someone out of a chemical dependency. Or rather, you can talk them into suffering through it, much the same way as you can talk someone into suffering through climbing a mountain or similar.
> 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.
Given that Oregon stopped its war on drugs and has had a terrible experience, I don't see how anyone can honestly believe that the war on drugs did not reduce the rates of drug use and addiction. This is not a political issue. Come to Portland and see. It's not like any other city. People engage in drugs freely and with impugnity. Correspondingly, people overdose continuously.
It seems obvious to me the war on drugs kept addiction rates and usage rates at a much more acceptable level. At least, it ensured the dangers of drug use didn't spill onto the streets (needles in public parks; drug users in public restrooms... places kids go).
Thus, it correspondingly seems obvious to me that the higher incarceration rate is worth it.
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.
> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary.
I think the question is how do we make prisons less cruel and dangerous, and lower recidivism. Of course there is a backlash against enforcement when the solution is locking people in cages.
After the outrage I saw when a US citizen was caned in Singapore for a vandalism violation, I'd say no, the people here probably don't look to Singapore as a guide for enforcement.
Minds have been changed on a lot of things that are pretty wild lately, in a short span of time. If this stuff continues, there might be further pretty wild changes of mind.
Considering that thousands of people are arrested for drug possession every year in Singapore, to say nothing of the number of people who use drugs in Singapore and avoid legal action, then yes.
> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary.
Drug use is rampant even inside prisons, which are literally the most surveilled and draconian environments on the planet. If a carceral approach to preventing drug use doesn't work even within prisons, what makes anyone think it can work in society at large, even if people were willing to turn all of society into a police state?
I was saddened to learn that Portugal slashed funding for their post decriminalization drug outreach programs. The shift from enforcement to treatment doesn't really work if you skip the treatment part.
After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
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 underworld in order to maintain the connections necessary to obtain the product, increasing the chances of abuse and reducing their chances of getting help if they need it. Of course, it's nice not to send people to jail for small quantities, but failing to fully legitimize the market in these ways could cause a lot of other issues.
I'm not sure that's exactly true. I do agree with you that some people will start using because they lose the fear of being caught, though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is.
Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
> 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 not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole.
We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
> In Amsterdam when you go to a music festival you will not see a lot of pod heads
I could be wrong, but I don't believe marijuana is as-legal in Amsterdam as it is in California for example. In CA, there's very few enforced restrictions of where you can get it and where you can use it.
> Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!
It doesn't appear so[1]. It appears they are struggling with the same issues - dramatic rise in drug use.
It's not really effective to just simply legalize all drugs. I agree with most, we shouldn't throw people in prison for drug use. No, instead we need to throw them into mandatory rehabilitation programs.
The goals of a decriminalization program shouldn't be to increase average citizen's drug use. But that's what happens without some sort of rehab/treatment program.
I am not a consumer of marijuana but in my observations of habitual users is nowhere near the same as someone addicted to heroin, and the severe physical and mental impact it has on their bodies. One could say alcohol and nicotine have such harmful effects, but not as dramatic and sudden as harder narcotics.
Disagree. Much more societal harm comes from the supply side (cartels, street gangs) than users, and much of the harm for/from users goes away if prices adjust to what they actually cost to produce (a tiny fraction of street price), and if the products are lab tested for potency and purity.
Little bit of a straw man there. Nobody said they weren't different things.
The promises of the legalize-marijuana crowd have not become true. There is still crime revolving around marijuana in CA, it's more expensive than it was before legalization, and the tax revenue is a drop in the bucket for CA.
So all we "gained" was a bunch more people using marijuana...
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
The problem here isn't with decriminalization-- it's with lack of commitment to what they originally replaced enforcement with. 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.
João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding."
It was working great while they were committed to funding treatment programs and pushing users towards them.
Isn’t the whole point of decriminalization that we won’t have to spend as much money enforcing laws and locking people up? Funny how you never hear anyone sound the alarm about lack of funding in the early stages when everyone’s talking about what a success decriminalization is, only when the dark side of such policies start showing. “We knew this would happen all along!”
Would you prefer to spend the money on arresting people and keeping a large prison population or would you rather spend money on rehabilitation programs? Either way you're going to spend money, but I think that the latter approach would help more people.
No that's not the whole point not even close , decriminalization works in reducing human suffering by using the money spent of emprisioning humans and spending it on programs etc .
California didn't just decriminalize use, they decriminalized sales and open air drug markets. The two are technically different policy outcomes. The state was just exceptionally lazy in it's implementation, which was somewhat driven by the early response to COVID.
> We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
Is this unique to CA? The street level suffering you see in CA cities is overwhelmingly related to fentanyl, an opioid. Infamously, the US is in the midst of the opioid crisis, with deaths continuing to rise unabated [1]. Places with harsher drug policing are also seeing rises in opioid deaths.
And while San Francisco is a top location for opioid deaths, the other top counties by death rates (Mendocino, Trinity, Alpine, Lake, Inyo, Humboldt, Nevada) are all very rural [2].
Meet people that have have done a lot of drugs? Some can still function. Others, just can’t. Had an owner of a successful tech company see it fall apart because he couldn’t make decisions anymore.
Was a really nice guy, but by the end I might hire him to sweep the floors, but only with supervision.
Not sure how he’s doing now, but I imagine he’ll be homeless by some point.
I am not endorsing drug use at all, but I have seen highly functioning drug users. I have never met a homeless man that could still function after being on the streets for a year.
> 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 well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics, to say nothing of the wide swath of wide reaching knock on effects the latter has like powerful cartels/gangs, militarized police actions in response, people being groomed as convicts for their use, etc.
I'm not at all inclined to sweep the dangers of hard drugs under the rug, I'm all for looking at their effects and impacts head on, and indeed I think the legalization route is the best route to do so. I think individuals should be given sole stewardship of their own conscious experience, by endogenous or exogenous means, and society's best chance of maximizing those individual choices is through well thought education, regulation, and support (which is likely to all be cheaper and more tractable than prohibition is).
What does a 20 year old alcoholic do? What does a 20 year old gambling addict do? It's wild that people even think of prison as an acceptable answer when there are so many analogs of things that people can abuse or get addicted to, things which we don't criminalize
One point people don't tend to know, is that a lot of folks actually get drugs in jail, and often prefer them. There's quite a few opioid replacements that get offered to anyone who can show addiction withdrawl, and many folks say they're actually a better, longer high than the street stuff.
There's also some revolving door, and 'Shawshank' style issues, where folks rotate out for a couple months in the spring / summer, do whatever on the street, and then rotate back in the fall / winter with some dumb crime. Eat, rest, stay warm, get the opioid replacements, then head back out. Kind of a homeless shelter where you just have to do some 3-month misdemeanor stint to get room / board.
Although long incarceration can definitely be an issue, there are also some folks who've made it a lifestyle.
> I tend to think increased usage of a regulated and taxable substance by a well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics
The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.
Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
We are organic machines developed without the influence of hard drugs over millions of years. We don't have complete control over our actions or thoughts. Why do you like sex? Why do you like men or women? Our programming controls this and drug addiction is a similar irrational control loop.
(most) Opiods are already legal and regulate - they are mostly medical useful drugs.
The current opiod crisis was largely created by over-prescription of legal, regulated opiods and subsequent rejection of further prescription; something that led many addicts to search out alternative sources, which grew a market for gray and black market opiods, which grew into whatever you want to call what we have now - tons of unregulated and often 'dirty' fentanyl and carfentanil flooding the system and ending up in everything.
I guess I'm saying I know where you are coming from, and increasing usage isn't going to be a great idea. On the other hand, felonization of it and the halo effect of street crime etc. absolutely is causing massive harm, arguably worse than the scenario you describe. It's not an easy problem to make real progress with.
Yea, it's a mess with no clear right answer. It doesn't sound like it's going too well in Portugal and Portland, but yea, some dystopian police state doesn't seem like the best answer either. It almost feels like some kind of delayed fuse terrorism that is plauging us. If cartels were killing people with guns instead of drugs, there would be military action. I wouldn't normally speak for military action, but having our fellow citizens hooked on hard drugs that kill and ruin lives is an absolute horror. Maybe we attack cartels and try to reduce supply some? Else, another route could be to produce a soma like drug that is safe and cheap so that people can be addicted and maintain their lives. It would have to be government controlled though, I don't think we would want corporations trying to compete and produce the best variant. But this route would lead to more people getting addicted and it would reduce the productivity of our society.
> The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.
So let's regulate them! (though as someone else pointed out they are indeed currently regulated, just not well)
> Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
I frankly find it bizarre when people venture down this train of thought. Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior? You mentioned sex, should we regulate that? Sugar? Groups (which inspire groupthink)? What even is the threshold for you for "logical?"
If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value.
Now if you truly want to venture down the road of restricting freedom to what is "logical" or some such thing, that actually is a road I think you could reasonably trod down (it's not a popular argument and I think it's pretty hard to make work but I can see a possible world with very little individual freedom but high degrees of flourishing, the problem is it's much more likely when you remove freedom flourishing also suffers b/c the possibilities narrow towards the needs of whomever still holds freedom, ie those in power), but I doubt that actually is where you were headed, drugs just tends to get this kind of double speak for historical reasons.
> Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior?
How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction? We place plenty of limits on stuff that can kill people. This is not some slippery slope thing, allowing it to flourish in our society is not in the long term best interest of literally anyone.
> If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value
That is the problem, we cannot assume that adults in the throws of addiction are capable of making decisions that are in their best interests. Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
> How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction?
Hard no. Alcohol ruins many people's lives, but that shouldn't interfere with my ability to imbibe if I so choose, it means that I should be educated and careful with how I do so.
> This is not some slippery slope thing
My intention was not to suggest it's a slippery slope, but rather that it is logically completely inconsistent w/ the values of individual freedom. If we value individual freedom, which most in the west purport to by default, individuals should have the ability to direct their body and mind in any way they deem appropriate and endure the consequences. Only you can experience your consciousness, and you should have primacy over how its stewarded.
> Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
This argument just doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. Humans are irrational in a whole host of circumstances in all sorts of ways, addiction is only one of them, and of course people can and do have all sorts of addictions to things that are wholly adaptive in others lives (sex as we've mentioned before is a fine example). The fact that addiction can drive some such irrationality is in no way a coherent argument to their prohibition.
Why does the fact that hard drug addiction hijacks the reward circuitry of the brain and is bad not a coherent argument? There has to be some red line that is too much. Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
> Why does the fact that hard drug addiction hijacks the reward circuitry of the brain and is bad not a coherent argument?
Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency. Again I didn’t bring up these other examples of sex and sugar and social media to highlight a slippery slope, I brought them up to highlight how odd it would be to attempt to legislate on the mere potential of irrational behavior. Human psychology is far more complex than you’re allowing for here, and only in a more black and white world of neurology, coupled with a world where we thought it prudent for society to outlaw anything with potential to catalyze less than “optimal” (as defined by someone) behavior, would such an argument bear any weight.
> Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
Yes and yes. A user should be able to consume straight poison if they want to. Again individuals should retain prime control over their bodies and minds, if we are to value freedom at all I can’t think of a freedom more basic than that.
I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that.
> Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency.
> I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that
OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with? The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society? Hard drugs are exactly that addictive to many users that try them. Most want to stop but they can't, where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
> OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with?
No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
> The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society?
Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them (because, again, the individual should have primacy over determining what is best for them). Clearly. There are also very obvious solutions to this problem: regulated distribution (w/ heroin for instance where folks can be assured clean drugs that are properly portioned for their use case to reduce risk of OD) and readily available treatment (if users want to stop there are plenty of options to help them do so, we just need to reappropriate resources currently used in a failed attempt at prevention to make treatment more universally available).
> where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
Addiction is simply part of the human condition. This would be true even if you completely removed scheduled drugs from all possible use. We cope with that best by treating it not attempting to ban it.
> No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
You attack my argument by saying it's illegible. You are a libertarian and I understand that it's a viewpoint that people have but they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies. It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
> Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them
It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
> This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery? What is best for human kind in the long run?
> they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies.
This is the generalization that started this thread and is wrong. On the contrary I believe you're showing evidence that you're not considering the full ramifications of the policies you support.
> It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
I think the proposal I made is far more likely to help people (protect people from OD'ing and ingesting dangerous contaminates they didn't intend to as well as offering them ample treatment options to stop when they want to). To say that prohibition helps people is naive in the extreme and neglects all the profound harm it causes (both directly and indirectly) while also robbing people of their agency.
And again the reason I'm dismissing your argument isn't even that, it's that it's completely logically inconsistent with typical western values (not just libertarian ones). If you want to argue as you are that drugs should be outlawed on the basis of their potential for addiction then you have to start looking at outlawing a great many other things that have similar potential (sugar, sex for pleasure, portion food so no one can eat too much, etc). But of course you probably don't advocate that, you just live in a world where drugs have already been made illegal so it seems reasonable and like you're helping people, but what you're doing is robbing them of their personhood.
> It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
I'm frankly a bit baffled that this is difficult to follow. As an advocate of individual freedom, I think people should be free to make their own choices without some governing body deciding what is best for them and forcing them to follow specific paths. This is mostly because I don't think we can trust any governing body to truly know (or even care) what's best for individuals at this juncture, the incentives just aren't aligned, thus freedom is preferable. I would like for this not to be the case actually, I'm a strong proponent of direct democracy, but that is for another conversation.
However if society crumbles the choices available to everyone start to drop dramatically, and future opportunity is replaced by large amounts of suffering. This should obviously be avoided at all costs. There are all sorts of things one could imagine we'd need to give up if civilization truly started to collapse, but we would only look to give up that we may preserve them in the future. Indeed we have a good example of this just recently w/ COVID (though the threat to society was overstated there it seems).
I'm beginning to think maybe you haven't consumed enough dystopic warnings in books/movies :-) (both highlighting the dangers of government control and apocalyptic conditions calling for extreme measures).
> I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery?
How about you have some empathy and give people some credit? Your view is the un-empathetic one here, not mine, you're viewing people as helpless children who need to be saved from themselves by you or whatever leaders you vote for (who are the same helpless children with propensity for vice and avarice and such as everyone else, just with more power).
I absolutely have experienced addiction and know many others who have. By your count the ones who rehabbed did so by sheer luck or outside force through no free will of their own. By my count they ove...
> Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended).
There is some evidence (not conclusive yet) that legal access to marijuana reduces abuse of opioids.
I've never used marijuana, I don't like the smell of marijuana, and so I'm not keen on folks using it around me -- but in the grand scheme, pot smokers are not the ones breaking into cars and threatening folks on the train.
> It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Are we going to do that for alcohol _use_? What about caffeine _USE_? Caffeine is the most widely abused drug in the US and thousands of auto fatalities every year are due to fatigue, which caffeine perpetuates.
I don't care about drug use. I care about the assaults, the robberies, and the street people who block sidewalks and harass pedestrians and transit users. I'm not keen on excusing their behavior because of their substance _abuse_.
Legalize everything!= Everyone should be using drugs. This is just one step in what should be a public health approach to drug use/abuse. Take away the lock them up because they are weak minded degenerates approach to drug use. I don’t see any dissonance in saying that drugs should be decriminalized and or legal in some cases but I also don’t think most people should use drugs regularly. If someone is abusing drugs it should certainly be cheaper to provide them with mental health care than locking them up in jail. Hard drugs like heroin and cocaine would be safer if they were not sold on the black market. I think that is a net positive vs the status quo- which is a game of “Is It Fentanyl?!?”™ currently. Should people be using those drugs? I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t want to even if I could buy them from a store.
As for cannabis, I’m convinced that for 90+% of the populous* it’s safer than alcohol.
*I think anyone with family history of schizophrenia should avoid weed and probably all intoxicants.
Alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs ever. It leads to all sorts of societal problems like early deaths, domestic abuse, traffic accidents, workplace accidents, even murder because it reduces inhibitions.
But somehow we're ok with selling unlimited quantities to people.
Most opiates are downright docile by comparison. A person passes out and can't harm anyone anymore.
Legalization would mean opiates are regulated. You can only get a certain strength. You can only buy so much per visit. Purity is regulated so you wouldn't accidentally get Fentanyl laced stuff and die.
There should be treatment options, of course, because it's the right thing to do, and it's also much cheaper than fixing the damage addicts can do, and also cheaper than the cost throwing them in prison.
Generally speaking drug addicts are actually self-medicating something anyway, it's like a slow suicide attempt due to some mental trauma or other mental illness like schizophrenia.
The OP is right. Decriminalization is the worst of both worlds.
For a long time we got use to not seeing as many drug addicts because a lot of them were thrown in prison where you don't see them anymore. Each one costing tax payers a full time wage, 35k per year per prisoner.
Decriminalization means you see more addicts out on the streets, but they're still getting overly strong, even laced stuff on the black market and are taken advantage of by predators.
Where marijuana legalization occurred there are purity limits on things like edibles. And you can only buy so much at once. It hasn't lead to really any problems but of course marijuana is one of the least harmful drugs out there. It's far less harmful than alcohol, so it might not be the best example.
I'd say alcohol is a better comparison to opiates and other hard drugs.
Legalization is the better path. We already should know better via our exercise in alcohol prohibition.
> Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high
That may be a result of measurement. People that used prior to legalization kept it secret. The stereotypical "stoners" are a fraction of cannabis users. After legalization people tend to be more open about their cannabis use.
If the measurement is based on surveys there will be an obvious increase after legalization as the legal consequences of admitting use have been removed.
If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded. Prior to legalization the majority of sales were illegal and the only sampling of the actual market size is from police seizures.
Yes, there will be a growth in the market when the legality is changed and stigma is reduced over time. That is people finding cannabis useful for themselves and no fear of being judged for that choice (same as alcohol is for many people).
There will always be a portion of the population that use drugs in excess to the detriment of their health or will compromise their morals to use. There is also a larger portion of the population that uses drugs regardless of legality and participates in society. You would never know the second cohort.
The problem with the first cohort is breaking other laws to satisfy their desire to use. Their drug use isn't the problem. Drugs didn't make them do anything. They should be punished for their other behavior not their consumption habits.
> If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded.
This may be true, but it’s the best measuring that we have. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing out the existing measures we have from before and after legalization on a hunch that it might be different results. The surveys try to account for this as much as they can.
I agree that people shouldn’t be punished for their drug use, but I think the point is that without punishment, drug use increases. And there are some negative impact from that increase.
It has proven untenable to treat this with law enforcement. It's too susceptible to bias, and creates a large class of people labeled as "criminals" the rest of their lives. It demonstrates an incredible lack of imagination that a large percentage of Americans can't see any way to handle this other than making things illegal, especially when we have a clear analog with alcohol.
If most people can handle having alcohol readily available, then those same people should be able to have other drugs readily available.
Personally I think marijuana is a bit unique, more similar to alcohol in how it can fit into daily life for some people. Sure the use has probably gone up but that's just social norms changing, not necessarily for better or worse. (If it displaces alcohol or other drug use it's probably for the better). Every culture has different ideas about what drugs are acceptable.
Maybe legalizing cocaine would also see occasional recreational use go up - that's not necessarily a problem either.
> 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 not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole.
That doesn't entirely follow. Marijuana is widely known to be benign, and so it's not much of a surprise that usage rose with legalization. Other drugs are known to not be benign, so you're not going to find a ton of people going "hey, why not try some heroin?"
> It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Totally agree, but I'd be in favor of a much harder line on the distribution and production side. The problem is one of supply, so if you can help rehab and curtail supply you help reduce usage.
> Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
There are also people that only get help due to the threat of incarceration (e.g. the judge says go to drug treatment or go to jail). Removing that fear can lead to more people not getting into treatment programs.
"We might have to operate in a cruel and unusual fashion, otherwise, some users might not actually be afraid enough of violence from the state to get help."
This is an unfortunate binary we've backed ourselves into. I can imagine tons of other methods the state could use to drive compliance other than outright incarceration and the threat of entirely destroying your life.
What do you mean? Since this is fentanyl, they are already destroying their lives, they will be lucky to still be alive a couple of years if something drastic isn't done.
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.
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.
Are they unguarded right now? Your casually sarcastic "just a thought" makes it sound like everyone else is an idiot for not doing something obvious. Or are you suggesting building a magnificant wall?
Thankfully our land and sea borders only total about 312 yards or so, two squads of border control could keep eyes on it at all times, and shut that stuff down.
The same thing is true for tobacco - while it is legally to sell and consume (by super-adults, 21+) in every US state, they've taxed it so highly that there is a fantastic black market.
And Eric Garner is a great example of how the government with murder you on the _suspicion_ that you aren't paying your taxes. Garner commonly sold individual cigarettes ("loosies") which were usually untaxed; it does not appear he was selling on the day he was choked to death by the NYPD, but rather that he was targeted as a usual suspect.
So we should legalize all of this stuff for adults AND keep the taxes low enough to avoid black markets. Sadly, the folks in favor of "legalization" are often wetting themselves at the thought of the tax revenue.
I don't think cigarette taxes have been keeping up with inflation. They are like $12 for a pack now in Seattle, they were $10 a pack 7 years ago. So oddly enough, given the recent bout of inflation, they are actually affordable again.
In Sydney, they are $37AU a pack, or about $24 USD.
That demonstrates that California did a very bad job at legalization. The black market arises when the taxes on a good exceed the risk of getting caught. If California had legalized marijuana and treated it like liquor, there would be no black market.
What are the sizes of those black markets? They're tiny, and limit the violence they do (since customers are willing to pay a slight premium for peace).
Hell, if it was legalized, we could limit the price by law... cost + 2% (or whatever margin the pharmaceutical companies would need to not refuse). They would out-compete the cartels in weeks.
Pretending that the black markets would remain to any great degree is just disingenuous.
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.
If you tried such a method people would probably be opposed to it because of concerns people would be tempted to obtain it and sell.
One would probably model it off of methadone clinics. In most clinics the methadone has to be taken by the person on site and witnessed to prevent issues of diversion. However a lot of places allow people to graduate to be able to pick up a multiple day supply after they have shown stability, etc…
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.
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.
As you mentioned, decriminalization is not enough. The effort that was spent on enforcement needs to be repurposed on quality control. It's much easier to enforce laws on businesses who want to sell their products openly than on individuals consuming substances in private.
The FDA and DEA should be entirely repurposed to randomly testing all food and drug products and ensuring that the ingredients list is accurate to within a certain margin. Having a single arbiter of good and bad substances has proven to be a failure again and again (remember the Food Pyramid?). I would much rather have access to everything, and know that it is labeled correctly, than have some dysfunctional bureaucracy "looking out for me".
That's probably true. Decriminalization is an imperfect first step that can be taken unilaterally by the executive branch while the legislative is deadlocked. In time society grows accustomed to decriminalization and the true legalization is more feasible.
In California the decriminalization of magic mushrooms has caused lots more people to start growing them, so price, quality, and diversity are better than ever. That probably wouldn't be the case with other drugs that aren't as easy to produce just anywhere. Although opium poppy field or coca greenhouses are definitely possible.
Completely agree, in for a dime in for a dollar. The reality is legalizing drugs is a politically untenable platform to get elected on because economic realities like supply and demand play no role in the deeply entrenched moral prejudice that is so prevalent in the (often older) voting population.
I don't mean to be offensive or ageist and I'm sure lots of older people have been touched both directly and indirectly by drug abuse, my experience is those that have been affected in some way have changed their long held views on drugs being a criminal issue as opposed to a medical one.
> the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view
Lets hope Oregon will be shining beacon of inclusivity for all drug users, anywhere in US! We should not rush into any conslusions for at least 30 years!!!
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments.
Can you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with? It's not in your interest to vandalize this place, for the same reason one doesn't throw trash in a city park, or leave fires burning in dry forests, or pee in swimming pools: it destroys what makes the place worth visiting in the first place.
From 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.
Don't forget that many of those people are fueling their drug habits with theft...theft that has gone largely unchecked. Oregon became a destination for addicts where they didn't have to worry about legal troubles that came along with drug use. All
This is an important point. While drugs are decriminalized, crimes such as theft are not.
Pro-drug decriminalization people often argue that stuff like theft is still illegal. However, there are so many drug-related thefts that our particular district attorney is unwilling to prosecute them.
As a result, law enforcement won't even take them to jail, let alone show up, most of the time. Typically, you file a self-report on your LE's website and then never hear about it again. The thieves know this, of course. (For myself, n=3 since 2020. Though, I did recover a stolen iPhone last week because I acquired enough evidence/telemetry/etc to warrant a response.)
Every retail store with a 20 mile radius of Portland has put theft deterrent devices on even the most basic items. Home depot locks up almost everything other than lumber now because theft is so prolific. It's frustrating for your average joe trying to shop anymore.
Multnomah DA is an a$$hole and moron...he doesn't care about the people he is supposed to serve.
Same down south. Our DA seems more concerned with protecting criminal rights than fighting crime.
Edit: Turns out the DA isn't pursuing more minor crimes, such as property crimes, reportedly due to a mass egress of prosecutors for more high-paying jobs. Nonetheless, a bad mix of realities.
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 have negative results. Problem is, who is going to pay for that treatment and for how long? On top of that, is it ok for Bob the local heroine addict to shoot up in front of peoples homes in a local residential community or school? Do we really want to worry about Bob dropping his needles on the ground?
I'm not a fan of sending people to jail for drug use but when balanced against the very real repercussions to peoples lives regarding hard drug use and the affect on communities, not sure what the alternative is. Rendering down town areas unwalkable due to an infestation of addicts, and the associated uptick in property crime and robbery is not acceptable either.
Plus once drugs are legal, its very likely the first thing to be chopped in a budget crunch is going to be treatment programs as illustrated in Portugal.
Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.
They should couple decriminalization with stringent arrests for public use and public intoxication. It’s so damn simple, why won’t they do it. Set a limit above which you’re not allowed to be loitering on the streets like they do with alcohol.
This is definitely part of the answer. Walking through the streets of San Francisco a while ago with my kids I was shocked to see people just lying on the side walk in pools of their own vomit. Also was very protective of my kids walking past people that were obviously on drugs and out of their minds. These people became not so much people but just a threat. It seemed inhumane to just leave them like that. With that said, I would not want the job of dealing with them for what I am sure is a relatively low salary with the reward of seeing most people you help back on drugs the next week.
Thats the thing, I don't. With that said, there is almost nothing more dangerous to a human than another human. I wish them nothing but happiness in life but I am also not going to ignore the fact that they are on drugs and potentially mentally compromised. A danger to themselves and others.
Yes. What would you like me to do? Walk up to each one I came across, my little kids in tow and try to have an intelligent conversation with them? Give them all my money? Invite them back with me to my hotel like the pied Piper of addicts?
I want them out of the way and far away from my kids. I was pretty clear that I perceived them as a threat.
I’m with you on most of what you said but probably calling 911 may be one option that lets you continue along your way while helping someone that may be in a life or death situation.
I would generally agree with you but there were dozens of people like this there, some better, some the same. I wish I was exaggerating. Dude wasn't dying, he just found a good spot to vomit and take a nap.
I'm sorry but giving wildly exaggerated options and suggesting and they're your only options is a bit disingenuous. How about just checking that they're okay instead of glaring at them for inconveniencing you?
And yes, really, I'm asking how they're a threat when they're unconscious? Just because they're homeless doesn't make them dangerous. This attitude of the homeless being a nuisance or and inconvenience instead of part of the community only exacerbates the problem and makes them less likely to receive the help they need. Homelessness is a complex issue and I'm not sure what the solution is but seeing them as people in tough circumstances that need help is a start.
There were people like this all over the city. Literally thousands of people who actually live there walk passed them every day. I did as they did, figured the people that live there know better than a tourist. Did you want me to kneel down next to each one, my kids next to me and give them a shake? What are the odds someone passed out on hard drugs, likely with mental issues is going to react well to being woken by a stranger?
I invite people in my community into my home. Do you expect me to invite homeless addicts into my house?
Homeless people are a "nuisance and inconvenience" to the community. To argue otherwise is to be disingenuous.
> Homeless people are a "nuisance and inconvenience" to the community. To argue otherwise is to be disingenuous.
Okay, it's pretty clear that you're discussing this from a place of ignorance and privilege. I suggest educating yourself better before engaging further on this subject.
Are you arguing that the majority of people don't see homeless people as an inconvenience? Or that people are glad to contribute large amounts of their tax dollars to support them? I'm arguing from a place of reality, not imaginary "how it should be" perspective. No one besides a few on the far left wants homeless addicts in their community. If you think that the vast majority of people like the homeless and addicts in their community you are not being realistic.
What is there to educate myself on? I want to live in a safe neighborhood where my kids don't have to worry about stepping on needles or vomit, where my wife can walk down the street without being catcalled by dudes that have not showered in 3 weeks. Where stores and cars are not broken into. Is that wrong? And before we touch on all we need is more housing, sure but that's expensive, takes a really long time to build and how are the addicts going to pay rent or are we just going to raise taxes? Plus I don't want an apartment complex full of addicts next door.
I'm well aware that the majority of people don't want anything to do with homeless people. I'm saying this needs to change. It's exactly this attitude of not wanting to deal with people they find inconvenient that ostracises and stigmatizes them further, cutting them off from the support they need and leading to further antisocial behaviour. It's particularly unfair since they're typically homeless through circumstances beyond their control. They're people, just like us, and they are part of the community.
If you'd like to gain more of an understanding, I think the best way is to talk with them directly about their experience. Volunteering is an excellent way to do this.
That's one of the interesting things I noticed about Amsterdam. It is notorious for the availability of cannabis, but it's very clear that you don't consume in public or around the neighborhood. (Modulo a group of teens I saw passing a joint around in the park). The coffeeshops are clearly intended to contain the drug use. Unlike California where you smell weed everywhere.
There is so much absurd regulation of marijuana in California, that the gray and black markets are still thriving. There is too much demand and not enough legal supply because of bullshit red tape. Making it easier to grow legally is the path to taking organized crime and violence out of it.
I hate to be that HN guy who nitpicks an otherwise spot-on comment, but anyway...
One correction: many opiate users, yes, even heroin users, can be functional members of society. There are many folks you would never know use H, at least until they accidentally get some fentanyl and die.
Same thing with meth(which is actually a prescription medication). I'll say that there is always a very high probability that some life stress transforms a casual usage pattern into full-blown addiction though. I've seen it first hand with a family member who used meth for years "on the weekends, to get things done" until some stress in their mid-40s turned them into a hallucinating IV meth user.
More or less though, I think we should maintain criminalization of public usage of most drugs, but I'm open to whatever pragmatic approach maximizes public health and safety while lowering crime.
Fair point. This I think goes along with the idea of a functional alcoholic. People can be functional and fine for a very long time, until they aren't. This likely has less affect on the community during their 'functional' phase. I am for the most part against public use and intoxication.
You’re ignoring the right of someone to do with their body as they see fit, in favor of giving power to governments over people’s bodies. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol despite’s its negative effects. Doesn’t work for prostitution or gambling either.
Sure, as long as those people don't negatively affect others. Who cleans up after the addict? Who pays for their property crimes or aggression? Who has to clean up their body after an OD or discover it?
I'm open to decriminalizing everything, start with steroids. As long as there are harsh punishments for public intoxication, property damage, theft and all the adjacent crimes that addiction causes, have at it. It can't result in a wasteland of addicts in every down town though
To add, I've known many folks who were infrequent users of cocaine, about once or twice a year during holidays or parties or the like.
I also knew one person who worked in finance and EVERYONE did coke; he wasn't addicted and stopped using when he switched fields (he hated the 80h weeks).
These anecdotes contrasted heavily with my experience in the Bronx in the 80s, where drug users were overwhelmingly drug abusers and generally awful people. I still won't use recreational drugs (other than caffeine and alcohol) but I don't judge people who do.
It is very possible to use hard drugs and not be addicted . I used to use cocaine socially before kids but I think back and really no positives. Going to bars and in and out of bathrooms in groups. Was really just asking to get arrested for possession. Problem with drugs like that is you think you are invincible but really at least in my case I was just being stupid and lucky.
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 aside somewhere. Most people view addiction as a moral failing and think addicts deserve whatever they get.
I've never been in favor of drug criminalization except possibly in the case of the most addictive and deadly hard drugs (crystal meth, fentanyl, concentrated opiates), but I always hoped that legalization would come with a redirection of funding from prisons and police into treatment. The latter part just isn't happening, or isn't happening with any effectiveness. My take is that nobody gives a damn and decriminalization is more about saving money than freedom or better treatment approaches.
The problem as I see it is that any "treatment" requires the addict wanting to be treated
You could argue that the Taliban are the government that cares the most about addicts, because they are actually making addicts change the way a parent corrects a child
Referencing Portugal feels weird. Most reports I see are still very favorable to the outcomes they are seeing, is that changing?
Decriminalizing doesn't change people with a drug problem into not having a drug problem, true. It does, at least, free them from also having a legal problem. Idea being that they can seek and get treatment for their drug problem, now. Something they can't do when it is criminal. (Indeed, reading the Wikipedia page for Portugal shows increased treatments as their first bullet in favor.)
I'd also guess that it makes it easier for treatments to be offered. As, right now, offering help there is basically aiding illegal activity.
Thanks for the link, I'll try and take a deeper dive later. Cursory read is not favorable to the article, though. Problems include,
* Having to concede that Portugal is still doing better than most of Europe.
* Leaning on pandemic years for a lot of the excess growth.
* A passing discussion of funding and other costs.
I see most of this was covered in the discussion here. Will see what else is mentioned.
> Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.
Make them actually legal (and thus more safe), tax them heavily, use a portion of said taxation to educate properly and then support and rehabilitate those who need it. Don't allow unsafe activities in public places that cause an unsafe environment.
This really isn't that complicated, we've just been under the spell of prohibition for so long waking up can be a bit disorienting.
What did I make up and what did I say that requires evidence? And what responsibility do you imagine I’d require to have the opinion I relayed?
Of course nothing is simple if given a close enough look, but there are also rather straightforward solutions here such that we shouldn’t feel just totally stumped about what to do.
problem with this kind of reasoning is that there is very little real data on a world where drugs are decriminalised / legal. while the things you listed could all be negative consequences of such a world, since it was never tried we don't know and its just a conjecture...
There's also a genie out of the bottle problem. Once you decriminalize drugs and people start using them it's very hard to flip a switch and make them stop. To get the data could very well require a massive sacrifice if it turns out to be a very bad idea
Possibly. On the other hand - all drugs started out decriminalised and the reasons for the criminalisation were not always or even usually out of concern for the well being of the user, but racism against the chinese (opium) and black people (marijuana)
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein
In a later comment you ask ...how should I provide help & compassion?
I would say one-on-one as an individual walking the streets, you probably shouldn't, especially if you have children in tow.
We need to address our nationwide affordable housing crisis. California is disproportionately impacted and takes a lot of the blame for it, but I think they are basically the dumping ground and whipping boy for a national failure.
Decriminalization is helpful in part because if you criminalize use of the drug, it makes it harder to seek treatment. People who expect to go to jail for trying to get the help they need are more likely to not come forward and to continue to try to fix their problems themselves.
We need a better understanding of why people do drugs, what the underlying root causes are. It's hard to solve a problem without knowing why it exists. Given our long track record of not getting results, I think we have room for improvement in how we frame this problem.
I agree with you for the most part. There is a massive housing cost crisis. I bought my house 5 years ago for $320k and its worth just under $600k now. For the same house. It makes no sense. Plus its not like I can sell it and get 2 more at the original price. I don't know how entry level salary people could even consider home ownership now.
I don't think decriminalization of hard drugs works without an ample amount of long term money set aside for treatment. Plus money for additional law enforcement to aggressively enforce existing property, violence and public intoxication laws. People should not have to endure a slipping down life because others choose to do drugs.
As far as the why people do drugs, I'm not sure we need that much study. It starts out fun, then it turns into something to numb the pain, then its something that is needed. I've done a myriad of drugs in my time, thankfully I never passed the fun phase. I don't presume to know what drove people to the 'numb the pain' phase and I do feel for them. I am not willing to upend my life or endanger my kids to find out. There is also a limit, how much money should society be expected to spend to constantly on an individual who keeps going through treatment and keeps going back to using? With that said, I do think the number is above zero.
My patience fails though at those that endanger others and commit crimes to further their addiction.
To be clear, I am not someone who thinks "bad behavior" just needs "sympathy and compassion." I'm absolutely not interested in creating a situation that endangers innocent bystanders in the name of feeling sorry for anyone.
I'm just someone who thinks drug use happens for a reason and doesn't get resolved with sheer self discipline. It gets resolved when the reason for using gets resolved.
I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up.
The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.
Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.
Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.
Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.
The people I fear the most are people who are 100% sure they're doing the right thing. This comment section is full of that - "no, this is a good policy and it's just the implementation that's wrong."
Sure, maybe? But maybe it's just a bad policy? Maybe we could adjust the implementation? Maybe we can look at other places were things are better?
Maybe a bit of shame could be helpful, too. SF and Portland have turned into a national punch line. That's shameful.
If a policy requires nearly perfect implementation, and follow through, and good behavior of the people, in order to succeed, and you rarely achieve / sustain the follow through by the community or police, etc. then it is not a good policy. Even though the concept was nice.
A policy is everything, start to finish. You can't just say a policy was good except for the implementation. No matter how good it makes you feel that you got the idea right, it just wasn't carried out the way you thought.
> 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 relative's apartment building is a 10 minute walk away. He is dealing with people passed out in vomit in the stairwells, smashing the first and second floor windows regularly, pulling the fire alarms and setting small fires regularly. All of this is quite new. And it's so absent from my upper-middle-class community half a kilometre away -- we're so insulated -- that a lot of my peers seem to be unaware there's even anything going on. None of that is happening on my street.
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)
> 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.
This is a joke, right? Like, either you live in a small town not large enough to have distinct neighbourhoods, or you are so isolated as to not see the abject poverty that many live here. Take Toronto, for example. Right on Mt. Pleasant Rd. and St. Clair you have Rosedale, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. If you walk down a street there, you won't find a person making less than $100K. You'll have perfectly maintained roads, bike lanes, and very good private schools (like Upper Canada College), where every kid there pays $50K a year. Go down Mt. Pleasant until it becomes Jarvis St., and continue going down until you hit Dundas St., where the average person makes minimum wage and can barely afford their apartment. And that's just a 2km difference!
Ask anyone whether they would rather live in Forest Hill (again, Toronto) or on Jane and Finch, and you'll get the same answer any time. For Montreal, ask anyone whether they would live in Westmount, or in Sainte-Marie, and again, you'll get the same answer. There absolutely are "good" and "bad" neighbourhoods in Canada, and in some cases, they're just as bad as in the United States (speaking from experience here).
You are forgetting that it's a 10 minute walk from Forest Hill to one of Toronto's poorest communities. They are part of the same community geographically. Same with Jane/Finch -- within walking distance of very wealthy detached suburban homes. It's even more jutted up against each other south of Bloor/Yonge, with some of the wealthiest high-rise condos directly against some of the poorest public housing and tent cities. I am not denying the existence of the divide -- it's very real and very stark -- I am however fascinated that it occurs on the same block. It's not a different part of town. It's the same geographic area sliced differently. That the two worlds are so separate, when literally next to each other, is what I was trying to point out.
A lot of these drugs are used to get people into the sex trade; once you get someone on drugs to do things with/to their body they otherwise wouldn't the cycle of shame begins that often traps these people in the escape through drug induced pleasure. Just the sad truth.
Would we expect early results to be encouraging? There's a lot of inertia in something like this. The damage is already done for anyone locked up on a drug charge. And reallocating resources from prisons to diversionary programs will take at least a generation.
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 opinion. Regardless of drug use statistics, no one belongs in jail or with a criminal record for no reason other than possessing and/or consuming an intoxicant. I don't even care if drug use goes up with decrminalization or legalization. In my opinion it is simply outside of the proper moral scope of a government to concern itself with such matters. Feel free to disagree. This is my personal political view.
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
Anyone who disagrees with me should be unable to vote.
The paradox of tolerance says I should not tolerate anyone who is intolerant, and if they disagree with me then they are intolerant and we should not tolerate them.
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
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
Because we invest in people. We pay money to educate them, in many cases feed, shelter, and clothe them and in a variety of other ways. We expect citizens to contribute back into society. Having millions of zombies interested in nothing else than getting high is self destructive not only for the individuals we have invested in but also to our societies general longterm health.
So yes, government does have an active interest in having a healthy populace.
By that same logic more people are dying or ruining their lives from poor diet and lack of exercise. Should the government be mandating diet and enforcing exercise quotas?
That doesn't follow at all. People who eat poorly and/or don't exercise are not a drain on society like drug addicts sleeping on the street, stealing to fund their addiction, and contributing nothing. There's big differences and it's not even really nuanced. It's obvious these are different things.
Saying that we should encourage healthy lifestyles.
A food addict doesn't hold up a corner store to get their fix in a pack of candy, but their costs to the healthcare system are significant. The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was nearly $173 billion in 2019 dollars. Medical costs for adults who had obesity were $1,861 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight*. High functioning drug addicts contribute plenty to society, much like there are high functioning obese people. What about the obese who don't contribute to society and sit around and play video games all day? The stereotype of a homeless drug addict is a very visible type of addict, but what of the wall street investment banker hooked on cocaine? 41.9% of Americans were obese (as of March 2020, same cdc link as above). They are a drain on society, and it's a bigger problem than you think. It's more insidious because it's less in your face than being mugged at gunpoint so it seems more benign, but it's causing massive issues.
When you’re passed out in the streets laying in your own shit then your business has become my business and we shouldn’t encourage that. You just keep comparing unrelated things.
You support the government encouraging (via incentives) drug addicts in the streets.
> When you’re passed out in the streets laying in your own shit then your business has become my business and we shouldn’t encourage that.
When you're diet is so poor that you're literally shitting in the seat at McDonalds because you are drinking so much diet coke and eating so much grease. This is a real story I saw at a McDonalds less than a year ago. When the person got up there was a visible splat on the seat.
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 trusted to partake responsibly.
However, that's not the world we live in. We share our cities with fairly unintelligent, irrational people, that have no interest in higher ideals. Our cities are being destroyed and made unsafe by these people that are just out of their minds on drugs / mental issues, completely disconnected from society, vandalizing, breaking and entering, hurting other people. They obviously, demonstrably, can't be trusted to partake responsibly.
I guess the debate is to what level the government needs to step in to control such people and the actions they take. I'd say that since they've already demonstrated they can't be trusted to coexist with peaceful society, that some level of action needs to be taken. But it's tough because in an ideal society I'd say the correct thing is for the government to stay out of it. But we live in a far from ideal society.
The substance is causing the anti-social behavior though, it’s putting people in a state where they’re not able to control their behavior or reason rationally about how it affects them and the people around them. In such a situation, you cannot just focus on the outcomes, you need to control the inputs as well.
No offense, but a very high degree of irrationality is to consider yourself to be rational. A good excuse would be if you are very young. Your characterization of drug users as unintelligent and with no interest in higher ideals merely demonstrates that you've had almost no contact with them, thus it is highly irrational for you to have an opinion on them. They are doing things that are bad for them and are therefore stupid? Coca Cola is a diabetes inducing poison, yet people drink it and feel good about themselves. Some will eventually get so sick from it and similar things they consume that they will go blind or lose a limb. Worse yet, others will consider Coca Cola a wonderful business and buy stock, which will go up. Coca Cola will continue to expand and improve, causing more havoc on society, raising the cost of health insurance for everyone. Stupidity as a way of life.
Stop referring to people with a problem as "such people", it implies there is something inherently wrong with them. There are a lot of people that have strong tendencies to addictions, but there are also a lot of them where a bad break or two pushes them the wrong way. There's a lot that can be done with education and prevention. How much of the now unnecessary police funds were redirected for these and other measures?
A person who becomes addicted to opiods, methamphetamine, or other "hard" drugs will with some probability require medical treatment, and and some people who uses those drugs will cause other costs to society. I don't know what those percentages are, but for opiods it's definitely not negligible. Many people begin using opiods and become addicted without intending to, and later need medical assistance. So there is a public interest in how much these substances are used, and it's legitimate for government to regulate them.
In other words, there's a tradeoff between the autonomy to do things to your body and the real costs that drug addiction imposes on others.
> Feel free to disagree. This is my personal political view.
How do you address the argument that drug users go on to be a burden to society?
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
It seems like it should if the result is a burden on society, though there are many potential solution to ameliorate the problem other than outlawing or restricting substances.
> I think there are point of views that are a much larger burden on society, and yet people are free to have them.
I claim this is an apples to oranges comparison. Controlling peoples views is an attempt at mind control vs regulating substances directly or indirectly which is a common practice, not putting lead into gas for example. Or indirectly regulated, eating of highly radioactive substances.
> 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.
I absolutely want my government to have an opinion on what people put into their bodies. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and instead I get a loaf with a high concentration of bleach, used to clean the machines at the factory, and it kills me, I think the government should have an opinion on it. I think they should do what it can to prevent that from happening. I do want a government that regulates drugs so that if I buy Tylenol, I'm going to get Tylenol and not melamine pills. If someone is selling a pill and says it makes me lose weight or regrow hair, I want the government to have the opinion that if they make that claim, they must have scientifically run studies to back that up. I'm not saying the FDA is perfect, far from it! But the government's duty is to its people, so I, personally, think that government should play some role in what goes into people's bodies, to make sure people know what they're getting, and they're getting what they paid for.
That the government has extended their reach to criminalize things people choose to put into their bodies, and the resulting problems that's caused and causing, is a travesty, but I think saying the government should have _no_ opinion on that is going too far.
> I absolutely want my government to have an opinion on what people put into their bodies. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and instead I get a loaf with a high concentration of bleach, used to clean the machines at the factory, and it kills me, I think the government should have an opinion on it.
I don't think you intended it, but this is shifting the goal post.
My position is that I think an individual has the right to choose to kill themselves by any means of their choosing. Which means if someone chooses to drink a cup of bleach, I don't think the law should step in to stop them.
Murdering someone by offering them bleach disguised as something innocuous is a completely different matter that has nothing to do with what I am talking about.
I don't disagree with you, but the statement you made was "But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies."
I'm not shifting the goalposts, I'm pointing out that statement, as written, can be read a different way, and that actually you might want the government having opinions about what people put into their own bodies.
Government regulation has everything to do with what you're talking about. You're saying the government shouldn't regulate what people put in their bodies and I'm saying the government should regulate what people put in their bodies. It's not that different.
The HN/reddit stance on "war on drugs" and drugs in general is proof education and common sense don't have as much correlation as is commonly thought of. These forums kept bringing up Portugal for more than a decade and when finally the results were seen, the new favorite psyop they're shilling is "the govt isn't doing enough" and "we must do more". Lol.
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 legalization is beneficial.
Prison is not the answer but decriminalization removes incentives against powerful narcotics.
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.
A sea change like this, especially when it comes to substances people take to feel some relief from the bullshit of our bullshit-heavy world- and involve physical dependance- isn't going to look awesome overnight. We have to wait until some of the dust shakes off. and this is a major problem with public initiatives in this polarized day and age. If they aren't immediately effective and amazing, we demonize them immediately.
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.
I recently visited Portland and is was shocking. Sad because aside from stunning homelessness and crime out in the open it's actually a beautiful quirky city. 1br luxury apts / condos are well designed and reasonably priced. Restaraunts and culture are incredible and feel deeply grounded in community - a far cry from what Austin (my home town) now considers "weird" or cool.
I'd live there in a second if the state / city cleared up the nutty violent "activists" and homeless all over the place.
The activists make a living on it though. There are massive funds allocated for these programs that don't solve the problems but rather manage them. In fact, a larger customer base will only increase their funding.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 554 ms ] threadAs always, states that are "tough on drugs" get a free pass regardless of how bad their outcomes are, and states that legalize it are scrutinized even when their outcomes are no worse.
"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."
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 Virginia, even if they're #49 in the ranking. It's gross.
I mean, Oregon has Intel, Nike, Adidas, a well-developed tech sector, etc, and West Virginia has coal mining, yet we're actually comparing ourselves to them.
I really wish people in this state would strive for something actually better.
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 implementation and enforcement measures.
And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.
> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.
It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.
But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.
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...
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/22/economist-magazi...
As I explained in a sibling comment, requiring treatment is not the difference. Very few people who use drugs in Portugal are subject to mandatory drug treatment.
The key difference is that Portugal has a radically different housing policy than Oregon. As of 2019, housing is a formal legal right (and even before 2019, it was much closer to a de facto right than it was to Oregon's current model, which is "if you can't pay for a roof, pitch your tent over there, and hope we don't arrest you for vagrancy").
Most people who use drugs do not meet clinical criteria for addiction, so drug treatment programs are irrelevant and a waste of money for them. For those who do, drug treatment programs are still a waste of money unless they have stable housing, because it is essentially impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety without stable housing.
The big difference between Oregon and the other cities/countries that tried this approach successfully is not diversionary programs - it's housing. In Oregon, housing is not guaranteed, which means any money spent on mandatory treatment programs for people without stable housing is essentially wasted.
Diversionary programs and rehabilitation are a waste of time and money if the recipient does not have guaranteed access to stable housing. It's virtually impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety in those circumstances.
As someone who lives in Oregon we need some way to force addicts into treatment. Jail worked in some cases because it meant that some addicts no longer had access to the drugs they were addicted to. But even better would be more of a therapeutic environment where they actually get treatment for addiction. However, it seems that most addicts aren't going into treatment willingly (big surprise) and this is why we're seeing so much trouble here. I voted for 110, but now I'm thinking that was a mistake. It either needs some major revisions to enable forcing drug users into treatment or it just needs to be repealed (the former would be better, I think).
If someone wants to get high in their home, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in a bar or such, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in one of those places and then walk out in public _without harming anyone else_, I don't care.
The thefts, the assaults, the zombies and crazies in public, that stuff I care about.
There is a middle-ground between "criminalize USE" and "stop enforcing laws, particularly when drug abusers and homeless are involved".
> If someone wants to get high in their home
That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed, and in which almost all "last-resort" housing options (such as shelters) require sobriety. Achieving and maintaining sobriety without stable housing is virtually impossible, and yet somehow society expects everyone to be able to do it and then complains when this doesn't magically happen.
The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs", except that attitude is completely fantastical: it goes against all clinical evidence of how substance use disorders actually work, and all empirical evidence of what resources a person needs to stop using drugs (assuming that is even the end goal, which is not a given).
To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs, then you will wind up with homeless people using drugs in public. And criminalizing drug use doesn't change that; it just moves those people "out of sight" to jails and prisons, where they keep using drugs, at a monetary cost to society that is literally orders of magnitude greater than the straightforward option of just giving them housing.
How many times did I have to say that I don't care if people use drugs?
_I don't care if people use drugs._ I'm not interested in forcing folks into rehab.
But this crap:
> That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed...
> To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs
Is a BS excuse to let folks commit THEFT and ASSAULT because It's Really The System, or expose kids to fent smoke on the train because It's Really The System, or have kids step over zombies on the sidewalk because It's Really The System, or have children and women (and some men) harassed or threatened by crazies because It's Really The System, etc.
I don't care about the drug use. I worked with homeless folks for years and most of them are not OD'ing in public parks or harassing folks on the sidewalk. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Your original comment literally draws a false equivalence between "theft and assault" and "smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit".
Here's your comment:
> How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
Since the article is only talking about decriminalization of drugs (theft and assault are still criminal offenses), the only relevant difference here regards people who are using drugs in public places.
It's a pretty convenient bait-and-switch that allows you to complain about people using drugs (which is neither violent nor criminal behavior), and then when people call you out on it, revert back to complaining about violent and criminal behavior, which nobody in this entire comment chain except for you is talking about.
> Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Nobody's talking about criminal behavior. We're talking about drug use, which, as discussed in the article, is not a criminal offense in Oregon.
You should look up to the folks I was replying to:
"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 <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36959984
Even from the article:
"Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding.
...
"In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse."
https://archive.ph/rznQr
The rest of your comment is just as full of misrepresentations.
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/05/13/survey-shows-ore...
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/03/20/wheeler-slams-mea...
The biggest issue in Portland that's been ignored since COVID started is that downtown Portland never recovered after the shutdown. It has nothing to do with safety, I know I live there, and it has everything to do with prices. The city is too expensive for what you get and what opportunities are here.
I'm no fan of Kotek, but truly Ted Wheeler is among the most shit mayors the city has ever known.
If you have data that suggests some drugs just make rehabilitation impossible or unlikely, I'd be interested to see it, though.
It isn't that famously successful at all, at least in Portugal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"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.
I have reached a conclusion that in order to evaluate the “success” of Portugal’s policies and how they can translate to other places, then I would like to know what kind of addictions it succeeded for and for what proportion of people and for which addictions.
That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.
I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?
> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?
I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).
> I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes.
It looks like you don't understand which part you don't actually get. While Portugal's program was being funded properly, the increase in drug usage was no different from nearby countries that did not change their drug laws. Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time. But what about the cost? Well, it seems to have saved a boatload of money on enforcement.
“The most important direct effect was a reduction in the use of criminal justice resources targeted at vulnerable drug users,” says Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the U.K.’s University of Kent, who co-authored the study. “Before, a large number of people were being arrested and punished for drug use alone. They saved themselves a lot of money and stopped inflicting so much harm on people through the criminal justice system. There were other trends since drugs were decriminalized in 2001, but they are less easy to attribute directly to decriminalization.”
https://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experi...
The hippies over at Forbes seem to think that ending canabis prohibition will help the US recover economically from the pandemic like ending alcohol prohibition helped end the great depression.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kriskrane/2020/05/26/cannabis-l...
But what about the collateral damage of all this rampant treating-instead-of-imprisoning-people-for-drug-use? Well, The International Journal of Drug Policy said:
"Taking into consideration health and non-health related costs, we find that that the social cost of drugs decreased by 12% in the five years following the NSFAD's approval and by a rather significant 18% in the eleven-year period following its approval. Whilst the reduction of legal system costs (possibly associated with the decriminalization of drug consumption) is clearly one of the main explanatory factors, it is not the only one. In particular, the rather significant reduction of health-related costs has also played an important role."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...
Surely the stalwart right-wing CATO institute will set the record straight on the fallout from such an irresponsible policy:
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many EU states, those problems—in virtually every relevant category—have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001. In certain key demographic segments, drug usage has decreased in absolute terms in the decriminalization framework, even as usage across the EU continues to increase, including in those states that continue to take the hardest line in criminalizing drug possession and usage."
Yep, they did.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwald...
Marijuana isn't illegal in the US anymore (at least where I live). Fentanyl, which is basically laced into all hard drugs these days, I guess you could argue that they are going to be dead in one or two years anyways? I guess that's tough love for you.
Hey, marijuana should be legal...and here in Washington state at least it is. The biggest problem with marijuana, due to dumb federal rules, is that the (non-marijuana) drug addicts are more likely to do armed robberies of dispensaries because they are cash only businesses.
But let's not bait and switch here: "marijuana has been shown to be manageable, so let's allow people to do all the fentanyl they want" is not very logical. A lot of teens are just dying on their first experience with fent (or something they got that had fent in it that they didn't know about!). These aren't the same things at all.
Generally, successful public programs often stop being successful when they stop recieving funding. That is a fact. The resources used to pay for the portugal program were redirected from enforcement. Perusing the wikipedia page, the stats seemed a lot more encouraging than any similar ones I've seen from a country with war-on-drugs type policies, but I'm not an expert.
It's funny that you mention Salt Lake City, because that example is commonly misunderstood and actually illustrates the exact opposite of what you're pointing out.
Utah set out to solve chronic homelessness. The causes and effects of chronic homelessness are completely different from transient or episodic homelessness, and the three require different approaches. Utah eliminated 91% of chronic homelessness within ten years, using a Housing First policy. After they ended the policy, total (not chronic) homelessness increased. The majority of that increase was from non-chronic homelessness, which was not targeted by their policy and which was increasing even before that policy ended (because it was, well, independent of a policy that was... not aimed at addressing it). Chronic homelessness has increased in Utah since the end of the program in 2015, but the overwhelming majority of homelessness that's reported on in Utah is still not chronic homelessness, because chronic homelessness makes up less than 20% of the homeless population.
It's odd to look at that as "the problem never ends", because the problem (chronic homelessness), did very nearly end, until the state decided to end the program and go back to their own ways.
> 2023 report reflects a 96% increase in people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2019, but also indicates Utah is making headway in developing deeply affordable housing
For however you define chronic, I guess.
>Chronic homelessness refers to people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, either continuously or in four or more separate instances within the past three years, while also experiencing a disabling condition such as a physical disability, severe mental illness or substance use disorder.
It's quite a leap of logic to look at an increase in chronic homelessness after ending a program that empirically reduced chronic homelessness using a straightforward mechanism, and conclude that the most probable explanation is "outright fraud, necessitating a decade-long conspiracy involving many people and organizations with opposing goals collaborating with each other, and which somehow has resulted in zero tangible evidence of the conspiracy surfacing even years after the alleged conspiracy fell apart".
Like folks with chest pain want it fixed.
But folks who hear voices/are addicted to something/suffer from crippling anxiety often don't want to fix it for a variety of reasons, some of which are even pretty good (such as nasty medication side effects). Crossing that hurdle is tough
And you can talk someone out of a chemical dependency. Or rather, you can talk them into suffering through it, much the same way as you can talk someone into suffering through climbing a mountain or similar.
Given that Oregon stopped its war on drugs and has had a terrible experience, I don't see how anyone can honestly believe that the war on drugs did not reduce the rates of drug use and addiction. This is not a political issue. Come to Portland and see. It's not like any other city. People engage in drugs freely and with impugnity. Correspondingly, people overdose continuously.
It seems obvious to me the war on drugs kept addiction rates and usage rates at a much more acceptable level. At least, it ensured the dangers of drug use didn't spill onto the streets (needles in public parks; drug users in public restrooms... places kids go).
Thus, it correspondingly seems obvious to me that the higher incarceration rate is worth it.
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.
I think the question is how do we make prisons less cruel and dangerous, and lower recidivism. Of course there is a backlash against enforcement when the solution is locking people in cages.
Considering that thousands of people are arrested for drug possession every year in Singapore, to say nothing of the number of people who use drugs in Singapore and avoid legal action, then yes.
> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary.
Drug use is rampant even inside prisons, which are literally the most surveilled and draconian environments on the planet. If a carceral approach to preventing drug use doesn't work even within prisons, what makes anyone think it can work in society at large, even if people were willing to turn all of society into a police state?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy_in_...
I have not seen that.
> over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure.
It was not. WoD helped to _control_ the amount of drugs. It certainly had not eradicated them, but it helped to reduce their prevalence.
After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
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 not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole.
We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
In Amsterdam when you go to a music festival you will not see a lot of pod heads. I was one of the few and I'm a German!
Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!
I could be wrong, but I don't believe marijuana is as-legal in Amsterdam as it is in California for example. In CA, there's very few enforced restrictions of where you can get it and where you can use it.
> Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!
It doesn't appear so[1]. It appears they are struggling with the same issues - dramatic rise in drug use.
It's not really effective to just simply legalize all drugs. I agree with most, we shouldn't throw people in prison for drug use. No, instead we need to throw them into mandatory rehabilitation programs.
The goals of a decriminalization program shouldn't be to increase average citizen's drug use. But that's what happens without some sort of rehab/treatment program.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
In CA, it's cheaper to buy illegal marijuana than going to one of the licensed stores, for a whole variety of reasons.
That "market arbitrage" opens the door for a lot of things to occur - all things proponents of legalization promised would go away.
The promises of the legalize-marijuana crowd have not become true. There is still crime revolving around marijuana in CA, it's more expensive than it was before legalization, and the tax revenue is a drop in the bucket for CA.
So all we "gained" was a bunch more people using marijuana...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing is priced at “actual costs to produce.” Nothing. I wish it were the case though maybe one day.
And that's the way for more than 10 years.
Even as a tourist
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"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.
João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding."
It was working great while they were committed to funding treatment programs and pushing users towards them.
This, "but we'll do it better" argument seems to fall flat universally. Everybody thinks they can do it better, but nobody actually does...
Is this unique to CA? The street level suffering you see in CA cities is overwhelmingly related to fentanyl, an opioid. Infamously, the US is in the midst of the opioid crisis, with deaths continuing to rise unabated [1]. Places with harsher drug policing are also seeing rises in opioid deaths.
And while San Francisco is a top location for opioid deaths, the other top counties by death rates (Mendocino, Trinity, Alpine, Lake, Inyo, Humboldt, Nevada) are all very rural [2].
[1] https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
[2] https://skylab.cdph.ca.gov/ODdash/?tab=CA
Maybe. homeless are the main issue, rather than drugs?
Like if I had to choose between regular cocaine habbit, and bein homeless, i'd rather be a cokehead.
Was a really nice guy, but by the end I might hire him to sweep the floors, but only with supervision. Not sure how he’s doing now, but I imagine he’ll be homeless by some point.
He enjoyed going to burning man a lot.
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 well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics, to say nothing of the wide swath of wide reaching knock on effects the latter has like powerful cartels/gangs, militarized police actions in response, people being groomed as convicts for their use, etc.
I'm not at all inclined to sweep the dangers of hard drugs under the rug, I'm all for looking at their effects and impacts head on, and indeed I think the legalization route is the best route to do so. I think individuals should be given sole stewardship of their own conscious experience, by endogenous or exogenous means, and society's best chance of maximizing those individual choices is through well thought education, regulation, and support (which is likely to all be cheaper and more tractable than prohibition is).
Going to jail for a year breaks any career chances or most of the job opportunities plus messes up his mind by staying with other convicts.
Letting him experiment with drugs, he might mess up his health but also he has still a chance to continue rather normal life.
And right now it seems to be "if you do this thing that sometimes has a really bad outcome and we catch you then we'll make that outcome much worse"
There's also some revolving door, and 'Shawshank' style issues, where folks rotate out for a couple months in the spring / summer, do whatever on the street, and then rotate back in the fall / winter with some dumb crime. Eat, rest, stay warm, get the opioid replacements, then head back out. Kind of a homeless shelter where you just have to do some 3-month misdemeanor stint to get room / board.
Although long incarceration can definitely be an issue, there are also some folks who've made it a lifestyle.
The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.
Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
We are organic machines developed without the influence of hard drugs over millions of years. We don't have complete control over our actions or thoughts. Why do you like sex? Why do you like men or women? Our programming controls this and drug addiction is a similar irrational control loop.
The current opiod crisis was largely created by over-prescription of legal, regulated opiods and subsequent rejection of further prescription; something that led many addicts to search out alternative sources, which grew a market for gray and black market opiods, which grew into whatever you want to call what we have now - tons of unregulated and often 'dirty' fentanyl and carfentanil flooding the system and ending up in everything.
I guess I'm saying I know where you are coming from, and increasing usage isn't going to be a great idea. On the other hand, felonization of it and the halo effect of street crime etc. absolutely is causing massive harm, arguably worse than the scenario you describe. It's not an easy problem to make real progress with.
So let's regulate them! (though as someone else pointed out they are indeed currently regulated, just not well)
> Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
I frankly find it bizarre when people venture down this train of thought. Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior? You mentioned sex, should we regulate that? Sugar? Groups (which inspire groupthink)? What even is the threshold for you for "logical?"
If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value.
Now if you truly want to venture down the road of restricting freedom to what is "logical" or some such thing, that actually is a road I think you could reasonably trod down (it's not a popular argument and I think it's pretty hard to make work but I can see a possible world with very little individual freedom but high degrees of flourishing, the problem is it's much more likely when you remove freedom flourishing also suffers b/c the possibilities narrow towards the needs of whomever still holds freedom, ie those in power), but I doubt that actually is where you were headed, drugs just tends to get this kind of double speak for historical reasons.
How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction? We place plenty of limits on stuff that can kill people. This is not some slippery slope thing, allowing it to flourish in our society is not in the long term best interest of literally anyone.
> If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value
That is the problem, we cannot assume that adults in the throws of addiction are capable of making decisions that are in their best interests. Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
Hard no. Alcohol ruins many people's lives, but that shouldn't interfere with my ability to imbibe if I so choose, it means that I should be educated and careful with how I do so.
> This is not some slippery slope thing
My intention was not to suggest it's a slippery slope, but rather that it is logically completely inconsistent w/ the values of individual freedom. If we value individual freedom, which most in the west purport to by default, individuals should have the ability to direct their body and mind in any way they deem appropriate and endure the consequences. Only you can experience your consciousness, and you should have primacy over how its stewarded.
> Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
This argument just doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. Humans are irrational in a whole host of circumstances in all sorts of ways, addiction is only one of them, and of course people can and do have all sorts of addictions to things that are wholly adaptive in others lives (sex as we've mentioned before is a fine example). The fact that addiction can drive some such irrationality is in no way a coherent argument to their prohibition.
Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency. Again I didn’t bring up these other examples of sex and sugar and social media to highlight a slippery slope, I brought them up to highlight how odd it would be to attempt to legislate on the mere potential of irrational behavior. Human psychology is far more complex than you’re allowing for here, and only in a more black and white world of neurology, coupled with a world where we thought it prudent for society to outlaw anything with potential to catalyze less than “optimal” (as defined by someone) behavior, would such an argument bear any weight.
> Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
Yes and yes. A user should be able to consume straight poison if they want to. Again individuals should retain prime control over their bodies and minds, if we are to value freedom at all I can’t think of a freedom more basic than that.
I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that.
> I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that
OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with? The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society? Hard drugs are exactly that addictive to many users that try them. Most want to stop but they can't, where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
> The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society?
Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them (because, again, the individual should have primacy over determining what is best for them). Clearly. There are also very obvious solutions to this problem: regulated distribution (w/ heroin for instance where folks can be assured clean drugs that are properly portioned for their use case to reduce risk of OD) and readily available treatment (if users want to stop there are plenty of options to help them do so, we just need to reappropriate resources currently used in a failed attempt at prevention to make treatment more universally available).
> where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
Addiction is simply part of the human condition. This would be true even if you completely removed scheduled drugs from all possible use. We cope with that best by treating it not attempting to ban it.
You attack my argument by saying it's illegible. You are a libertarian and I understand that it's a viewpoint that people have but they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies. It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
> Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them
It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
> This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery? What is best for human kind in the long run?
This is the generalization that started this thread and is wrong. On the contrary I believe you're showing evidence that you're not considering the full ramifications of the policies you support.
> It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
I think the proposal I made is far more likely to help people (protect people from OD'ing and ingesting dangerous contaminates they didn't intend to as well as offering them ample treatment options to stop when they want to). To say that prohibition helps people is naive in the extreme and neglects all the profound harm it causes (both directly and indirectly) while also robbing people of their agency.
And again the reason I'm dismissing your argument isn't even that, it's that it's completely logically inconsistent with typical western values (not just libertarian ones). If you want to argue as you are that drugs should be outlawed on the basis of their potential for addiction then you have to start looking at outlawing a great many other things that have similar potential (sugar, sex for pleasure, portion food so no one can eat too much, etc). But of course you probably don't advocate that, you just live in a world where drugs have already been made illegal so it seems reasonable and like you're helping people, but what you're doing is robbing them of their personhood.
> It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
I'm frankly a bit baffled that this is difficult to follow. As an advocate of individual freedom, I think people should be free to make their own choices without some governing body deciding what is best for them and forcing them to follow specific paths. This is mostly because I don't think we can trust any governing body to truly know (or even care) what's best for individuals at this juncture, the incentives just aren't aligned, thus freedom is preferable. I would like for this not to be the case actually, I'm a strong proponent of direct democracy, but that is for another conversation.
However if society crumbles the choices available to everyone start to drop dramatically, and future opportunity is replaced by large amounts of suffering. This should obviously be avoided at all costs. There are all sorts of things one could imagine we'd need to give up if civilization truly started to collapse, but we would only look to give up that we may preserve them in the future. Indeed we have a good example of this just recently w/ COVID (though the threat to society was overstated there it seems).
I'm beginning to think maybe you haven't consumed enough dystopic warnings in books/movies :-) (both highlighting the dangers of government control and apocalyptic conditions calling for extreme measures).
> I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery?
How about you have some empathy and give people some credit? Your view is the un-empathetic one here, not mine, you're viewing people as helpless children who need to be saved from themselves by you or whatever leaders you vote for (who are the same helpless children with propensity for vice and avarice and such as everyone else, just with more power).
I absolutely have experienced addiction and know many others who have. By your count the ones who rehabbed did so by sheer luck or outside force through no free will of their own. By my count they ove...
Every single one of them said it didn’t affect them.
There is some evidence (not conclusive yet) that legal access to marijuana reduces abuse of opioids.
I've never used marijuana, I don't like the smell of marijuana, and so I'm not keen on folks using it around me -- but in the grand scheme, pot smokers are not the ones breaking into cars and threatening folks on the train.
> It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Are we going to do that for alcohol _use_? What about caffeine _USE_? Caffeine is the most widely abused drug in the US and thousands of auto fatalities every year are due to fatigue, which caffeine perpetuates.
I don't care about drug use. I care about the assaults, the robberies, and the street people who block sidewalks and harass pedestrians and transit users. I'm not keen on excusing their behavior because of their substance _abuse_.
*I think anyone with family history of schizophrenia should avoid weed and probably all intoxicants.
But somehow we're ok with selling unlimited quantities to people.
Most opiates are downright docile by comparison. A person passes out and can't harm anyone anymore.
Legalization would mean opiates are regulated. You can only get a certain strength. You can only buy so much per visit. Purity is regulated so you wouldn't accidentally get Fentanyl laced stuff and die.
There should be treatment options, of course, because it's the right thing to do, and it's also much cheaper than fixing the damage addicts can do, and also cheaper than the cost throwing them in prison.
Generally speaking drug addicts are actually self-medicating something anyway, it's like a slow suicide attempt due to some mental trauma or other mental illness like schizophrenia.
The OP is right. Decriminalization is the worst of both worlds.
For a long time we got use to not seeing as many drug addicts because a lot of them were thrown in prison where you don't see them anymore. Each one costing tax payers a full time wage, 35k per year per prisoner.
Decriminalization means you see more addicts out on the streets, but they're still getting overly strong, even laced stuff on the black market and are taken advantage of by predators.
Where marijuana legalization occurred there are purity limits on things like edibles. And you can only buy so much at once. It hasn't lead to really any problems but of course marijuana is one of the least harmful drugs out there. It's far less harmful than alcohol, so it might not be the best example.
I'd say alcohol is a better comparison to opiates and other hard drugs.
Legalization is the better path. We already should know better via our exercise in alcohol prohibition.
That may be a result of measurement. People that used prior to legalization kept it secret. The stereotypical "stoners" are a fraction of cannabis users. After legalization people tend to be more open about their cannabis use.
If the measurement is based on surveys there will be an obvious increase after legalization as the legal consequences of admitting use have been removed.
If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded. Prior to legalization the majority of sales were illegal and the only sampling of the actual market size is from police seizures.
Yes, there will be a growth in the market when the legality is changed and stigma is reduced over time. That is people finding cannabis useful for themselves and no fear of being judged for that choice (same as alcohol is for many people).
There will always be a portion of the population that use drugs in excess to the detriment of their health or will compromise their morals to use. There is also a larger portion of the population that uses drugs regardless of legality and participates in society. You would never know the second cohort.
The problem with the first cohort is breaking other laws to satisfy their desire to use. Their drug use isn't the problem. Drugs didn't make them do anything. They should be punished for their other behavior not their consumption habits.
This may be true, but it’s the best measuring that we have. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing out the existing measures we have from before and after legalization on a hunch that it might be different results. The surveys try to account for this as much as they can.
I agree that people shouldn’t be punished for their drug use, but I think the point is that without punishment, drug use increases. And there are some negative impact from that increase.
If most people can handle having alcohol readily available, then those same people should be able to have other drugs readily available.
The homeless issue is multidimensional and, surprise, people were already getting drugs before they were decriminalized.
Legalization is morally correct and eliminates the gangs, violence, and high costs of prohibition.
Maybe legalizing cocaine would also see occasional recreational use go up - that's not necessarily a problem either.
That doesn't entirely follow. Marijuana is widely known to be benign, and so it's not much of a surprise that usage rose with legalization. Other drugs are known to not be benign, so you're not going to find a ton of people going "hey, why not try some heroin?"
Totally agree, but I'd be in favor of a much harder line on the distribution and production side. The problem is one of supply, so if you can help rehab and curtail supply you help reduce usage.
There are also people that only get help due to the threat of incarceration (e.g. the judge says go to drug treatment or go to jail). Removing that fear can lead to more people not getting into treatment programs.
This is an unfortunate binary we've backed ourselves into. I can imagine tons of other methods the state could use to drive compliance other than outright incarceration and the threat of entirely destroying your life.
What do you mean? Since this is fentanyl, they are already destroying their lives, they will be lucky to still be alive a couple of years if something drastic isn't done.
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.
Oops, my bad. Nope, it's 2000 miles or so.
And Eric Garner is a great example of how the government with murder you on the _suspicion_ that you aren't paying your taxes. Garner commonly sold individual cigarettes ("loosies") which were usually untaxed; it does not appear he was selling on the day he was choked to death by the NYPD, but rather that he was targeted as a usual suspect.
So we should legalize all of this stuff for adults AND keep the taxes low enough to avoid black markets. Sadly, the folks in favor of "legalization" are often wetting themselves at the thought of the tax revenue.
In Sydney, they are $37AU a pack, or about $24 USD.
Hell, if it was legalized, we could limit the price by law... cost + 2% (or whatever margin the pharmaceutical companies would need to not refuse). They would out-compete the cartels in weeks.
Pretending that the black markets would remain to any great degree is just disingenuous.
One would probably model it off of methadone clinics. In most clinics the methadone has to be taken by the person on site and witnessed to prevent issues of diversion. However a lot of places allow people to graduate to be able to pick up a multiple day supply after they have shown stability, etc…
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.
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.
The FDA and DEA should be entirely repurposed to randomly testing all food and drug products and ensuring that the ingredients list is accurate to within a certain margin. Having a single arbiter of good and bad substances has proven to be a failure again and again (remember the Food Pyramid?). I would much rather have access to everything, and know that it is labeled correctly, than have some dysfunctional bureaucracy "looking out for me".
In California the decriminalization of magic mushrooms has caused lots more people to start growing them, so price, quality, and diversity are better than ever. That probably wouldn't be the case with other drugs that aren't as easy to produce just anywhere. Although opium poppy field or coca greenhouses are definitely possible.
I don't mean to be offensive or ageist and I'm sure lots of older people have been touched both directly and indirectly by drug abuse, my experience is those that have been affected in some way have changed their long held views on drugs being a criminal issue as opposed to a medical one.
Lets hope Oregon will be shining beacon of inclusivity for all drug users, anywhere in US! We should not rush into any conslusions for at least 30 years!!!
Can you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with? It's not in your interest to vandalize this place, for the same reason one doesn't throw trash in a city park, or leave fires burning in dry forests, or pee in swimming pools: it destroys what makes the place worth visiting in the first place.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
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.
Pro-drug decriminalization people often argue that stuff like theft is still illegal. However, there are so many drug-related thefts that our particular district attorney is unwilling to prosecute them.
As a result, law enforcement won't even take them to jail, let alone show up, most of the time. Typically, you file a self-report on your LE's website and then never hear about it again. The thieves know this, of course. (For myself, n=3 since 2020. Though, I did recover a stolen iPhone last week because I acquired enough evidence/telemetry/etc to warrant a response.)
Multnomah DA is an a$$hole and moron...he doesn't care about the people he is supposed to serve.
Edit: Turns out the DA isn't pursuing more minor crimes, such as property crimes, reportedly due to a mass egress of prosecutors for more high-paying jobs. Nonetheless, a bad mix of realities.
People addicted to hard drugs require treatment, leaving them to their own devices is likely to have negative results. Problem is, who is going to pay for that treatment and for how long? On top of that, is it ok for Bob the local heroine addict to shoot up in front of peoples homes in a local residential community or school? Do we really want to worry about Bob dropping his needles on the ground?
I'm not a fan of sending people to jail for drug use but when balanced against the very real repercussions to peoples lives regarding hard drug use and the affect on communities, not sure what the alternative is. Rendering down town areas unwalkable due to an infestation of addicts, and the associated uptick in property crime and robbery is not acceptable either.
Plus once drugs are legal, its very likely the first thing to be chopped in a budget crunch is going to be treatment programs as illustrated in Portugal.
Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.
This is part of the problem. They are a threat, but they're also still people.
Just don't think of them as less than human.
I can tell you're frustrated about having to see homeless people. Let's just drop it there, then. I hope your community heals.
I want them out of the way and far away from my kids. I was pretty clear that I perceived them as a threat.
As far as how are they a threat, really?
The internet is overflowing with articles like this. https://www.foxla.com/news/lapd-woman-stabbed-in-head-scisso...
And yes, really, I'm asking how they're a threat when they're unconscious? Just because they're homeless doesn't make them dangerous. This attitude of the homeless being a nuisance or and inconvenience instead of part of the community only exacerbates the problem and makes them less likely to receive the help they need. Homelessness is a complex issue and I'm not sure what the solution is but seeing them as people in tough circumstances that need help is a start.
I invite people in my community into my home. Do you expect me to invite homeless addicts into my house?
Homeless people are a "nuisance and inconvenience" to the community. To argue otherwise is to be disingenuous.
These are just from yesterday
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/homeless-man-accused-of-fat...
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/pittsburgh-police-arrest-suspect...
Okay, it's pretty clear that you're discussing this from a place of ignorance and privilege. I suggest educating yourself better before engaging further on this subject.
What is there to educate myself on? I want to live in a safe neighborhood where my kids don't have to worry about stepping on needles or vomit, where my wife can walk down the street without being catcalled by dudes that have not showered in 3 weeks. Where stores and cars are not broken into. Is that wrong? And before we touch on all we need is more housing, sure but that's expensive, takes a really long time to build and how are the addicts going to pay rent or are we just going to raise taxes? Plus I don't want an apartment complex full of addicts next door.
If you'd like to gain more of an understanding, I think the best way is to talk with them directly about their experience. Volunteering is an excellent way to do this.
One correction: many opiate users, yes, even heroin users, can be functional members of society. There are many folks you would never know use H, at least until they accidentally get some fentanyl and die.
Same thing with meth(which is actually a prescription medication). I'll say that there is always a very high probability that some life stress transforms a casual usage pattern into full-blown addiction though. I've seen it first hand with a family member who used meth for years "on the weekends, to get things done" until some stress in their mid-40s turned them into a hallucinating IV meth user.
More or less though, I think we should maintain criminalization of public usage of most drugs, but I'm open to whatever pragmatic approach maximizes public health and safety while lowering crime.
I'm open to decriminalizing everything, start with steroids. As long as there are harsh punishments for public intoxication, property damage, theft and all the adjacent crimes that addiction causes, have at it. It can't result in a wasteland of addicts in every down town though
I also knew one person who worked in finance and EVERYONE did coke; he wasn't addicted and stopped using when he switched fields (he hated the 80h weeks).
These anecdotes contrasted heavily with my experience in the Bronx in the 80s, where drug users were overwhelmingly drug abusers and generally awful people. I still won't use recreational drugs (other than caffeine and alcohol) but I don't judge people who do.
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 aside somewhere. Most people view addiction as a moral failing and think addicts deserve whatever they get.
I've never been in favor of drug criminalization except possibly in the case of the most addictive and deadly hard drugs (crystal meth, fentanyl, concentrated opiates), but I always hoped that legalization would come with a redirection of funding from prisons and police into treatment. The latter part just isn't happening, or isn't happening with any effectiveness. My take is that nobody gives a damn and decriminalization is more about saving money than freedom or better treatment approaches.
You could argue that the Taliban are the government that cares the most about addicts, because they are actually making addicts change the way a parent corrects a child
But addicts are grown ups with free will
Any * successful * treatment requires the patient to want treatment.
In addition, the triggers for it all need to be addressed.
Those can be:
Simple pain, trauma
More complex financial issues, housing, etc...
PTSD of various kinds, war, abuse and the like.
Without a plan to address triggers and desire to be done with it all, treatment success is extremely unlikely.
We are fallen creatures and simply accepting our fallen nature might be more productive
The primary is to want to be done.
It all starts there.
How ending it goes really depends on the person. Take it one struggle at a time. Wash, rinse repeat.
Having finished, one tends to look around and ask, "what now?"
And that is what I meant. Have some options for people that are not doorways back.
Decriminalizing doesn't change people with a drug problem into not having a drug problem, true. It does, at least, free them from also having a legal problem. Idea being that they can seek and get treatment for their drug problem, now. Something they can't do when it is criminal. (Indeed, reading the Wikipedia page for Portugal shows increased treatments as their first bullet in favor.)
I'd also guess that it makes it easier for treatments to be offered. As, right now, offering help there is basically aiding illegal activity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36638752
Make them actually legal (and thus more safe), tax them heavily, use a portion of said taxation to educate properly and then support and rehabilitate those who need it. Don't allow unsafe activities in public places that cause an unsafe environment.
This really isn't that complicated, we've just been under the spell of prohibition for so long waking up can be a bit disorienting.
Of course nothing is simple if given a close enough look, but there are also rather straightforward solutions here such that we shouldn’t feel just totally stumped about what to do.
-- Albert Einstein
In a later comment you ask ...how should I provide help & compassion?
I would say one-on-one as an individual walking the streets, you probably shouldn't, especially if you have children in tow.
We need to address our nationwide affordable housing crisis. California is disproportionately impacted and takes a lot of the blame for it, but I think they are basically the dumping ground and whipping boy for a national failure.
Decriminalization is helpful in part because if you criminalize use of the drug, it makes it harder to seek treatment. People who expect to go to jail for trying to get the help they need are more likely to not come forward and to continue to try to fix their problems themselves.
We need a better understanding of why people do drugs, what the underlying root causes are. It's hard to solve a problem without knowing why it exists. Given our long track record of not getting results, I think we have room for improvement in how we frame this problem.
I don't think decriminalization of hard drugs works without an ample amount of long term money set aside for treatment. Plus money for additional law enforcement to aggressively enforce existing property, violence and public intoxication laws. People should not have to endure a slipping down life because others choose to do drugs.
As far as the why people do drugs, I'm not sure we need that much study. It starts out fun, then it turns into something to numb the pain, then its something that is needed. I've done a myriad of drugs in my time, thankfully I never passed the fun phase. I don't presume to know what drove people to the 'numb the pain' phase and I do feel for them. I am not willing to upend my life or endanger my kids to find out. There is also a limit, how much money should society be expected to spend to constantly on an individual who keeps going through treatment and keeps going back to using? With that said, I do think the number is above zero.
My patience fails though at those that endanger others and commit crimes to further their addiction.
I'm just someone who thinks drug use happens for a reason and doesn't get resolved with sheer self discipline. It gets resolved when the reason for using gets resolved.
The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.
Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.
Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.
Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.
Sure, maybe? But maybe it's just a bad policy? Maybe we could adjust the implementation? Maybe we can look at other places were things are better?
Maybe a bit of shame could be helpful, too. SF and Portland have turned into a national punch line. That's shameful.
If a policy requires nearly perfect implementation, and follow through, and good behavior of the people, in order to succeed, and you rarely achieve / sustain the follow through by the community or police, etc. then it is not a good policy. Even though the concept was nice.
A policy is everything, start to finish. You can't just say a policy was good except for the implementation. No matter how good it makes you feel that you got the idea right, it just wasn't carried out the way you thought.
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.
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)
This is a joke, right? Like, either you live in a small town not large enough to have distinct neighbourhoods, or you are so isolated as to not see the abject poverty that many live here. Take Toronto, for example. Right on Mt. Pleasant Rd. and St. Clair you have Rosedale, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. If you walk down a street there, you won't find a person making less than $100K. You'll have perfectly maintained roads, bike lanes, and very good private schools (like Upper Canada College), where every kid there pays $50K a year. Go down Mt. Pleasant until it becomes Jarvis St., and continue going down until you hit Dundas St., where the average person makes minimum wage and can barely afford their apartment. And that's just a 2km difference!
Ask anyone whether they would rather live in Forest Hill (again, Toronto) or on Jane and Finch, and you'll get the same answer any time. For Montreal, ask anyone whether they would live in Westmount, or in Sainte-Marie, and again, you'll get the same answer. There absolutely are "good" and "bad" neighbourhoods in Canada, and in some cases, they're just as bad as in the United States (speaking from experience here).
That's called a neighborhood. From what you're describing, those areas are now two different neighborhoods.
And what root causes should they be addressing that they have the means to address?
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 opinion. Regardless of drug use statistics, no one belongs in jail or with a criminal record for no reason other than possessing and/or consuming an intoxicant. I don't even care if drug use goes up with decrminalization or legalization. In my opinion it is simply outside of the proper moral scope of a government to concern itself with such matters. Feel free to disagree. This is my personal political view.
The paradox of tolerance says I should not tolerate anyone who is intolerant, and if they disagree with me then they are intolerant and we should not tolerate them.
Checkmate, fascists.
Because we invest in people. We pay money to educate them, in many cases feed, shelter, and clothe them and in a variety of other ways. We expect citizens to contribute back into society. Having millions of zombies interested in nothing else than getting high is self destructive not only for the individuals we have invested in but also to our societies general longterm health.
So yes, government does have an active interest in having a healthy populace.
Saying that we should encourage healthy lifestyles.
* https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
You support the government encouraging (via incentives) drug addicts in the streets.
When you're diet is so poor that you're literally shitting in the seat at McDonalds because you are drinking so much diet coke and eating so much grease. This is a real story I saw at a McDonalds less than a year ago. When the person got up there was a visible splat on the seat.
However, that's not the world we live in. We share our cities with fairly unintelligent, irrational people, that have no interest in higher ideals. Our cities are being destroyed and made unsafe by these people that are just out of their minds on drugs / mental issues, completely disconnected from society, vandalizing, breaking and entering, hurting other people. They obviously, demonstrably, can't be trusted to partake responsibly.
I guess the debate is to what level the government needs to step in to control such people and the actions they take. I'd say that since they've already demonstrated they can't be trusted to coexist with peaceful society, that some level of action needs to be taken. But it's tough because in an ideal society I'd say the correct thing is for the government to stay out of it. But we live in a far from ideal society.
The problem is the places which legalized drugs also legalized anti-social behavior.
Stop referring to people with a problem as "such people", it implies there is something inherently wrong with them. There are a lot of people that have strong tendencies to addictions, but there are also a lot of them where a bad break or two pushes them the wrong way. There's a lot that can be done with education and prevention. How much of the now unnecessary police funds were redirected for these and other measures?
In other words, there's a tradeoff between the autonomy to do things to your body and the real costs that drug addiction imposes on others.
How do you address the argument that drug users go on to be a burden to society?
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
It seems like it should if the result is a burden on society, though there are many potential solution to ameliorate the problem other than outlawing or restricting substances.
I think there are point of views that are a much larger burden on society, and yet people are free to have them.
I claim this is an apples to oranges comparison. Controlling peoples views is an attempt at mind control vs regulating substances directly or indirectly which is a common practice, not putting lead into gas for example. Or indirectly regulated, eating of highly radioactive substances.
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.
That the government has extended their reach to criminalize things people choose to put into their bodies, and the resulting problems that's caused and causing, is a travesty, but I think saying the government should have _no_ opinion on that is going too far.
I don't think you intended it, but this is shifting the goal post.
My position is that I think an individual has the right to choose to kill themselves by any means of their choosing. Which means if someone chooses to drink a cup of bleach, I don't think the law should step in to stop them.
Murdering someone by offering them bleach disguised as something innocuous is a completely different matter that has nothing to do with what I am talking about.
I'm not shifting the goalposts, I'm pointing out that statement, as written, can be read a different way, and that actually you might want the government having opinions about what people put into their own bodies.
Government regulation has everything to do with what you're talking about. You're saying the government shouldn't regulate what people put in their bodies and I'm saying the government should regulate what people put in their bodies. It's not that different.
Prison is not the answer but decriminalization removes incentives against powerful narcotics.
Slow down. Let's not just toss it out just yet.
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.
I'd live there in a second if the state / city cleared up the nutty violent "activists" and homeless all over the place.