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For a lot of these changes, you need a motivated and engaged enforcer/system-owner who will work through these challenges. It takes time and effort to change the culture of a group. I can't imagine someone wanting to change unless they either gain a strong motivation (highly unlikely given that they have been in the current condition for a while themselves) or they are given the right framework/setup by someone else (govt. in this case). So, this is a hard problem and one shouldn't get disheartened due to no progress so far.
Decriminalizing drug usage is just a small but necessary part to mitigate this problem.
As usual these people didn't learn or "forgot" all the other hard parts.
This particular article doesn't mention it, but I'm getting sick of hearing "Portugal decriminalized drug usage in the 90s and solved the drug problem" - Really? that simple? Even Hollywood westerns were more deep than that.
On of the key aspects to "solve" this problem is also culture, family support, personal responsibility and that's when you hear the tires screeching and nothing will get done or ever work.
I have to agree, if the secret ingredient to making decriminalization work is enlisting timeless conservative values, we’re toast. A more unlikely coalition has never been seen.
I think presenting voters with "decriminalize drug use" was a deceptive play to start with. Most voters picture themselves smoking weed on the weekend or doing mushrooms at Coachella, not the people unescapably trapped by drugs.
Habitual drug addicts don't have personal responsibility, family support, or a community of non-drug addicts to depend on. Forced incarceration in a treatment program is literally their only chance at breaking the cycle long enough to get them support for the underlying issues that led to addiction.
I don't think anyone in Portland was being deceived. They have had a huge issue with homelessness and drug addicts for the better part of the last decade.
Tents are everywhere. On the side streets, on the interstate right of ways. It's been that way for a decade.
> Habitual drug addicts don't have personal responsibility, family support, or a community of non-drug addicts to depend on.
survivorship_bias_plane.png
There are millions of habitual hard drug users that do have some personal responsibility, some family support, some sober people around them encouraging them. They are holding down jobs and paying for their own housing, they've already quit multiple times but have gotten pulled back in. For those people forced incarceration could maybe solve their addiction at the cost of their housing and their job.
The forced incarceration is more about trying to tactically solve the specific pain point (people doing drugs on a doorstep), not solving the bigger problem.
Which even trying to agree on what the bigger problem is, near as I can tell, is impossible.
> culture, family support, personal responsibility
Abstinence is not an inevitable consequence of a stable life - plenty of kids from comfortable backgrounds discover they really really like drugs. We need to accept that "getting high" is a basic human motivation that won't go away. The existential realities of the human condition is enough to seek escape. Some of us are born with dopamine regulation issues that doom us towards substance use. Despite being sober for a long time I still had bad cravings for alcohol and nicotine but an adult ADHD diagnosis and medication quieted that insatiable hunger for stimulation... by regular administration of stimulants! The hereditary aspects explained a lot about my family.
IMHO the real solution should be to design better drugs. Consider it the "Steam" argument - we need to outcompete the damaging drugs with products along the lines proposed by David Nutt. e.g.
- no overdose risk or organ damage
- cheap and make available for free so no crime required to acquire
- easy reversal of the effects e.g. with a common product like OJ
- no dependence issues
When you discuss investing in this research, you quickly discover that many of those who claim to be solving tragedies of addiction are actually trying to enforce an ideology that considers getting high to be a moral crime. Even if there were no personal or societal harms they still believe drugs should be violently prohibited. Their ideology actively seeks to cause harm. Of course they are hypocrites getting their stimulation from drink, food, sex, religion, abuse/control of others or whatever they manage to carve out as acceptable.
Ah, personal responsibility. Declension, in my experience, is usually as follows -
*They* deserve their fate because they are weak, stupid and bad.
*You* have made some bad choices and may work to recover from them.
*I* have merely made a small mistake and deserve a second chance.
The opioid epidemic has been mostly fueled by pharma companies, their consultants, doctors, pharmacists and the government that did nothing for decades despite knowing well something wasn't right. The war on drugs mostly criminalized people that couldn't afford the legal drugs or couldn't find a crooked doctor to prescribe them so they had to rely on street vendors and their low quality-high variability-high fraud products.
It was legal to get opioids like oxy legally, fentanyl was always pretty tightly controlled. I believe it was mostly used in surgeries alongside anesthesia.
Bro, there was a movie made about how wrong you are on this topic. It's called pain hustlers, it stars captain america and emily blunt. In the movie they renamed the drug to Lonafen, but the actual drug is called Subsys. The drug contains Fentanyl.
Places like West Virginia have more opioid deaths than Oregon does.
Measure 110 has some flaws, but the sensible approach is to see what can be done to course correct rather than just go back to the thing that wasn't working.
In a Boston University study they found that 81% of prescription drug abuse and 79% of high alcohol abuse was to self manage pain. There is no humane approach to furthering addictions as a band-aid for our lack of medical care and failure to address mental illness.
Scrap the free use drugs laws and invest in clinics for underserved populations with chronic pain management programs and mandatory rehab programs for people who have lost the battle.
It isn’t that simple though. Say you have an encampment set up next to a public bus stop used by high schoolers, and they start selling to kids to support their own habits, and kids start dropping dead from bad fentanyl trips. So…how do those clinics for underserved populations really help in that case?
It doesn’t matter. If you can’t go after buyers, you have almost no leverage to go after dealers either. Those high school students are going to start dying in increasing numbers.
Yeah. The gateway drug here is chronic and intractable pain. I am reminded of Blade Runner: "You were made as well as we could make you." "But not to last."
After a kid or two, you've done what evolution has selected for, and if walloping amounts of suffering and disability appear after that, well, there's always the next batch. Nobody wants to look too hard at that. People's squeamishness about genetic engineering has always had a whiff of the ignorable about it. It's pretty fun to pat yourself on the back about avoiding "eugenics" when you're healthy and young.
I suppose we could go the animal husbandry approach and just license reproductive age, pushing it steadily up and creating an artificial evolutionary pressure to keep people healthy at greater and greater ages.
The war on rain hasn't worked. Many houses have leaky roofs and people get wet. This is painfully obvious to anyone. We should destroy all forms of shelter and we will finally be free.
Your analogy would make more sense if roofs didn't actually keep people dry, and instead caused several other forms of harm. And people kept insisting we have them anyways based on fundamentalist moralizations.
Without belaboring the analogy, the truth is anyone who wants drugs can get them, right now. So we're not stopping that - but instead we're creating several new kinds of harm. Around marking people as felons, social stigma, loss of income sending people to prison, arrest, and that's before we even talk about how shit the US penal system is. Prison by the way? Full of drugs, and reason for people to want an escape.
Of course making it illegal also creates a black market which is basically the only reason cartels exist.
The reality is it's a mental health issue, and a particularly interesting one - for instance, American GIs addicted to heroin in Vietnam came home and the vast majority of them just stopped using it cold turkey. Fascinating right? [1]
Decriminalization and treating it as a mental health issue -- and sentencing addicts to rehab makes infinitely more sense.
Analogy doesn't make sense for people who use drugs recreationally because they need some sort of logic that justifies their own behavior and fits with their morals as well. That is the only time the analogy doesn't make sense.
The logic is pretty straightforward: You eliminate the source of drugs you eliminate drugs. The problem is the complexities surrounding the word "eliminate".
I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively.
That being said there are other places that legalized drugs and that helped with the drug problem but the logic here isn't as straightforward. It's the complexities that make it work and dealing with complexities is next to impossible. We can't even fully articulate why it worked in these places and replicating it will be hard if not impossible.
The drug war largely didn't work because of complexities. There's so much bureaucracy surrounding getting to the root of the problem and putting someone in jail. Singapore just executes you if you sell hard drugs. You're done. That's an effective deterrent and it is PROVEN to work.
Whether that method is moral or justified is a different story, but in terms of easiest, most effective and most practical method this is the best possible way. The path forward is right there, we know how to do it.
The blocker here is morality and people like you. You likely use drugs and you don't want to be executed. You want to use these things recreationally and straddle the line between abuse and responsible use. Nothing wrong with your viewpoint, but personally speaking, I would completely eliminate recreational/responsible drug use if it meant saving lives and improving society.
I mean it's your right to use drugs, but at the same time I don't want to walk through SF smelling shit, piss and avoiding junkies. So when you're rights infringe on public spaces then that's a problem.
> Analogy doesn't make sense for people who use drugs recreationally because they need some sort of logic that justifies their own behavior and fits with their morals as well. That is the only time the analogy doesn't make sense.
Fun ad hominem.
> I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively.
No they didn't haha.
All of the countries in east Asia have huge drug problems. Japan has incredibly strict drug laws and a horrible meth problem. In the last major outbreak, 2% of Japan was injecting meth intravenously. Drugs are available in Japan, [1] Singapore [2] and China [3]. Exacerbated by the criminalization.
All aggressive prosecution does is push problems underground.
We've tried it your way for like 52 years. Your way has filed. Time to try something new.
BS your information is just looking at relative change annually. Singapore's drug policies have plateaued. It's been in effect for decades you can't expect a drug policy that's been in place for decades have continues upward trends of lower and lower drug use, they will hit a limit.
Any change you see now is just noise as they're basically at the peak of the amplitude for maximal change. And that's what you're basically googling.
You need to look at relative illicit drug use by population percentage by country:
Also think critically. You will be killed if you attempt to sell drugs there. Does it make sense that the policy is not effective? What the hell is going on?
Don't be just a blind data scientist trying to scaffold the data to fit your view point. If the data doesn't fit the common sense then perhaps you're unconsciously manipulating the data to fit your view.
Also one of your articles shows 0.7% of youths in Singapore have used drugs in the past year. Is that suppose to support your argument? Look up the amount of youths that use drugs in the US. I think the reported number is like 40%. Actual number is likely 70%.
So what I'm hearing is the executions haven't stopped drug use.
> Also think critically. You will be killed if you attempt to sell drugs there. Does it make sense that the policy is not effective? What the hell is going on?
>So what I'm hearing is the executions haven't stopped drug use.
Did you not look at the data I sent you? Singapore has the lowest drug use among almost all countries. Not just a little low, but massively lower. The only countries better off then Singapore tend to be countries where the citizens can't afford drugs.
What you heard is wrong. And the google results you sent me is cherry-picked data in service of the articles agenda. Did drug usage increase in Singapore in the last year? Is that a 0.1% increase to 0.7% from the year before while the US sits at 40% usage rate? Come on bro.
>Finally, we're on the same page.
No we're not on the same page at all. Or at least you're just not admitting it.
Singapore is an authoritarian city-state with full control over its borders, and also a very unique society.
Many other countries have similarly draconian drug laws, up to and including execution, but do not have the same results. So that alone certainly isn't it. Malaysia and Indonesia for instance. China ranks first in the world for number of executions related to drug trafficking. List here. [1]
They also have full control over their border because it's a tiny island city-state, and their government leans heavily authoritarian. With the illegal gum and the caning. They also have strong social cohesion and lots of government support and social programs for individuals.
What I would say is:
1. Given other countries have similar drug laws and significantly more drug use than Singapore, this is likely correlation not causation.
2. The social programs in Singapore and the strong social cohesion are likely far more responsible for lower drug use.
3. Given the choice to lower drug harm by liberalizing like Portugal or cracking down like Singapore, I would suggest that the former is far more in line with canonical Western values and maximizes individual liberty -- and should be applied even if it leads to slightly worse outcomes overall because there is never a perfect solution.
I would caution you also that there's a long history of unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the 'Singapore model.' Most famously in China after Deng Xiaoping visited in the 70s.
> The only countries better off then Singapore tend to be countries where the citizens can't afford drugs.
Look at the data source I posted then look at the countries below Singapore. The citation is there you just didn't look.
>Singapore is an authoritarian city-state with full control over its borders, and also a very unique society.
Yes only an authoritarian society can pull off executions like this. Additionally such a society would be unique. Nothing supports your argument in this sentence.
>Many other countries have similarly draconian drug laws, up to and including execution, but do not have the same results. So that alone certainly isn't it. Malaysia and Indonesia for instance. China ranks first in the world for number of executions related to drug trafficking. List here. [1]
And you will see all counties with draconian drug laws and actual enforcement of the drug laws such that drug use policies that are illegal rather the "illegal" have drug use that is significantly lower then countries that don't have draconian laws. Again all of this is in my source which I already cited.
>Given other countries have similar drug laws and significantly more drug use than Singapore, this is likely correlation not causation.
Wishful thinking. There are many factors which blur the outcome of drug usage. It is not only draconian drug laws that influence it thus you will see all kinds of numbers everywhere.
What you must do is identify an overall generality. This generality is easily and I mean easily identifiable by the source I listed which ranks countries by drug use. You will clearly see that countries with more freedom to use drugs cluster at the top and countries with less freedom cluster on the bottom.
Also your argument is clearly flawed. Correlation does not prove causation but correlation is still a prerequisite to causation. Additionally minor exceptions to an overall correlation isn't evidence for no causation. That's just false.
>2. The social programs in Singapore and the strong social cohesion are likely far more responsible for lower drug use.
Nice. You just state this out of nowhere. How about I demand the same level of citation you demand? Where is your source and your source needs to establish "causation".
>Given the choice to lower drug harm by liberalizing like Portugal or cracking down like Singapore, I would suggest that the former is far more in line with canonical Western values and maximizes individual liberty -- and should be applied even if it leads to slightly worse outcomes overall because there is never a perfect solution.
As we see with the topic of this thread applying it to Portugal has good outcomes, applying it to Oregon had horrible outcomes. It's not clear if it works. Unless you can find evidence to the same level as the source I cited where countries with draconian drug laws are clearly clustered with lower drug usage, your arguments will remain inferior.
Additionally, Maximizing western values leads concentration of power in the business sector rather then the government sector. To even the modern day citizen it's not so clear cut which is better. Western values or Singapore?
>I would caution you also that there's a long history of unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the 'Singapore model.' Most famously in China after Deng Xiaoping visited in the 70s.
Sure maybe they can't implement something as effective as Singapore. But certainly the source I cited clearly shows a correlation.
Causation is more or less unestablishable for your or my argument. No point in bringing it up.
> Causation is more or less unestablishable for your or my argument. No point in bringing it up.
I would argue that it's pretty clearly uncorrelated because countries all over the world have varying degrees of draconian drug laws and have achieved nothing. You have an outlier, that's all.
Of course you're trying to establish causation because you're arguing this is the basis for similar laws elsewhere.
> To even the modern day citizen it's not so clear cut which is better. Western values or Singapore?
It's hard to say. One is better in some ways, the other in other ways.
Thanks for sharing your perspective! I think we can agree to disagree but this was an interesting conversation.
>I would argue that it's pretty clearly uncorrelated because countries all over the world have varying degrees of draconian drug laws and have achieved nothing.
The same source I cited illustrates a correlation that contradicts your argument. Go look at it again. Countries with draconian laws quantitatively correlate with lower drug use in the one source I cited.
You said drugs were everywhere in Singapore. You were proven wrong via sources. Now this argument is wrong again, also contradicted with the Same source.
>Thanks for sharing your perspective! I think we can agree to disagree but this was an interesting conversation.
No problem. But to be honest this sentence makes it look like we are on even ground and ending the argument amicably because neither can move forward with more evidence.
This is not what occured. You made several statements and those statements are categorically wrong. Your overall argument is definitively wrong. This is not about whether you agree or disagree with me as the sources directly contradict your claims.
> The same source I cited illustrates a correlation that contradicts your argument. Go look at it again. Countries with draconian laws quantitatively correlate with lower drug use in the one source I cited.
Again, there's 1 country with draconian laws and good results, and a whole armada of countries with draconian laws and bad results. That tells me it's correlation not causation. Even if it were causative, it's not a model that aligns with Western values.
You're fixated on a single data point that aligns with your preconceptions despite a whole lot of data that doesn't.
> You said drugs were everywhere in Singapore. You were proven wrong via sources. Now this argument is wrong again, also contradicted with the Same source.
Tons of articles disagree with you. Not to mention, I think the data is likely very suspect - after all, who would admit in surveys or studies to consuming drugs if it would get the executed? That's exactly the problem Japan has.
> This is not what occured. You made several statements and those statements are categorically wrong.
Respectfully disagree.
94% of people on death row in Singapore are there for non-violent drug offenses lol. That's not something I'm going to advocate for even if I believed you'd found a causative system in Singapore that could ever be willingly reproduced abroad, and I really don't. I see a correlation as evidenced by the myriad other countries who try this approach and fail miserably.
Here I'll support your unpopular Singaporean idea if you support mine - have 80% of people in the US live in government housing. The Singapore HDB is a fantastic model we should reproduce! It materially improved affordability of housing in SG.
Look, if you want to turn the United States into a utopia like Singapore, I'm all for it, but it's going to take a bit more than just making drugs illegal.
Perhaps, we could start with nationalizing ~80% of the country's housing stock, requiring permits for which neighbourhood you are allowed to live in, having ethnic quotas for each region to enforce multiculturalism and harmony and common prosperity...
Stable housing, and a stable, harmonous society, with many of your pressing concerns back-stopped by a benevolent autocracy are probably the reason Singapore has low rates of drug use.
It's weird how the US right salivates over a very small, bloody subset of Singapore's social policies... While turning its nose at the ones that actually make it a successful state. It's almost like the cruelty, not the outcomes, are the point...
> The war on rain hasn't worked. Many houses have leaky roofs and people get wet. This is painfully obvious to anyone. We should destroy all forms of shelter and we will finally be free.
This is a great analogy. Rain is drugs and arresting people for drugs is patching roofs. When the government spends resources on anything other than arresting people with drugs (doing roofing jobs) then they are destroying people’s homes (things that are affected by rain or drugs).
It is so refreshing to see a simple and profound insight on this
I don't think the US ever had a war on drugs. If any state in the US did the following three things, Singapore style: Announce that all drugs are illegal, users will be institutionalized and undergo mandatory rehab, traffickers will be executed you'd be rid of the drug problem pretty quickly.
Every US state I've ever been in had people use drugs, smoke weed, completely openly, every club, every corner. Where's the war?
Prohibition of drugs has empirically been shown to reduce negative effects of drug use. For example, nationwide prohibition in the United states severely curtailed both domestic abuse and liver cirrhosis rates.
The issue here is that, after M110, there is little the police can do to prevent *public* usage of hard drugs like fentanyl. Drug addicts will be smoking fent in front of a K-5 school and all the police can do is fine them. There is more enforcement of public alcohol consumption than fent / meth.
No, they are hurting both tangibles- because they steal and attack bystanders, and intangibles- like ruining neighborhoods, driving down prices, making drugs more accessible to young kids etc.
> Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.
These people have families. They may be parents themselves. They are living in a community, one which has children. Here in Canada, with how things are now going -- I now see young children in the tent camps with their parents.
Public drug use almost certainly encourages children to uptake the behaviour themselves. Children are impressionable. They adopt the behaviours of their parents, of their older siblings, of their older siblings' friends, and yes, even just people they see on the street.
Along with that, simple physical accessibility - the widespread presence of the substance in society - means children will have more access.
When cannabis was legalized in Canada there was a sharp increase in the number of children showing up in the ER from cannabis poisoning. [1] Children steal their parents' drugs all the time, both by accident and by intention. The more proliferate and visible drugs are, the more people walking around with some fentanyl in one of their pockets, the more such exposure incidents will happen and the more such drugs will fall in the hands of children.
I'm pro-legalization, for what it's worth. But this is one of those downsides I'm worried about.
I agree that kids getting access to their parents drugs is a problem (although I don't think that's what the person I was responding to was talking about). It sounds like you might agree that if a parent is using drugs but is still capable of caring for their children, the best thing to do would not be to arrest them but rather to either make sure that they're preventing their kids from getting access to those drugs (by providing them with a safe, for example).
You can rationalize all you want but a bunch of junkies hanging around where you live ruin everything. They make everything dirty, they are themselves dirty, drop needles everywhere and shit on the sidewalk. One junkie jumped up and ran towards one of my buddies in Philadelphia once screaming “I have HIV”. Get your head out of your ass.
I’ve also seen people in the street do wild things in Philly. And yes, homeless people are often dirty because the way don’t have access to running water. And yes, drug users sometimes litter needles (the crime you’re complaining about is littering, which is still illegal).
None of those things are a reason why someone should lose their freedom for using drugs. Prison isn’t a punishment we should throw around to people we find distasteful or annoying, it’s an extremely serious measure.
Respectfully, have you ever lived next to an encampment? I have. Is your assertion "Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves" based on past experience, or how you imagine the world ought to be?
I haven't but I've visited for a week with a friend who does. Of course it was sad to see people in so much pain, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
Even if you have more specific issues with living next to homeless people, that doesn't mean they deserve to be in jail for drug crimes. They should be given housing.
Even if you did want to throw people in jail for being homeless, only about half of chronically homeless people use drugs (https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaign...), so outlawing drugs wouldn't even solve the issue you want it to solve.
Just for the sake of argument here, supposing someone is addicted to drugs in private, and legalization is at a stage where they can get quality product that they're not going to overdose on easily. Is that actually a problem for society? Like, if you prefer to live a lifestyle where you sleep under a bridge and spend the money you would've used for housing on drugs, maybe that's just a personal choice that's yours to make? The only problem I see here is -- how is it that these drug addicts are funding their habit? I'm thinking through criminal activity in many cases?
I'd be concerned about that falling extra-heavily on homeless people in some way. If someone were already stuck sleeping on a park bench, it'd be kind of unfair to ding them again for not being tipsy or high "back in their own home."
Reminds me of Hamsterdam in the third season of The Wire. The purpose of Hamsterdam was to serve as an open air drug market where drugs could be purchased and consumed. It of course devolved into terrible conditions, but it was all concentrated in a single area that could be monitored and policed. Drug use outside of the area was not tolerated at all.
The idea stills holds merit in my mind. Yes, it condones drug use and illegal activities, but it also cleans up the surrounding areas. I think it would also serve as a deterrent for the casual trying of a substance that could result in lifelong addiction. Who in their right mind would want to go to such a disgusting place to try something new?
It turns a problem that is currently diffuse to a problem that is concentrated. Like the difference between coal power plants spewing CO2 into the air versus nuclear power plants that leave radioactive waste that can be contained in barrels. Not the greatest analogy, but the point stands.
> Officer Jose Alvarez stopped arresting people for possession and began giving out tickets with the number for a rehab helpline. Most of the people smoking fentanyl or meth on this city’s streets balled them up and tossed them onto the ground. “Those tickets frankly seemed like a waste of time,” said Alvarez
Maybe the drugs are fulfilling some need, so simply escaping the addiction is counter-productive to their lives. Maybe the rehab to escape the addiction needs to be packaged with other sorts of rehabs that help them obtain healthier alternatives to fulfill those needs that are being met by the drugs.
Quick search online:
> Addiction isn’t as simple a concept as it may seem on the surface. From an outside perspective, addiction can be seen as a simple propensity for substance abuse. However, on mental, physical and emotional levels, there’s a lot more to addiction. From a behavioral perspective, using drugs becomes a way of life. Most friends and social situations revolve around drugs, especially as drugs start to replace former social connections and hobbies. --- https://fherehab.com/learning/mind-motives-addicted-drugs/
So, at least, rehab on building healthy social connections is also needed.
Finding a better solution to the drug problem is unlikely to be as simple as just decriminalizing.
I also wonder if the fact that decriminalization is done in a patch-work manner location-wise is also part of the problem. I wonder if it's easier or harder for homeless people to relocate to places where their activities aren't criminal. They likely have less material things tying them down to a location, but they may also rely more on the face-to-face social ties they already have.
It's always struck me as sadly hilarious how the same crowd that's always shouting for drug laws is the exact same crowd that argues that stricter gun laws would increase crime and make the streets more dangerous.
Strong opioids are the only option that works for many people with chronic pain. In some countries (but not the US), heroin (technical name: diamorphine) is used for extreme pain, like late stage cancers. It truly is one of the most effective painkillers that exist - and it isn't unimaginably strong like fentanyl, so it's much harder to accidentally OD on when used medically.
Arresting people and putting them in jail makes them leave the neighbourhood for a while. It doesn't solve the drug addiction problem, but it solves the feeling of unease and safety risks associated with being near drug addicts.
Being the only place in the region where drugs can be abused free from meddling influence can also pull in addicts from surrounding areas, only increasing the problem.
Prison is not rehab. Do you want a massive tax increase? We would need one if we were to actually incarcerate drug users for the duration they need to become sober. And we would need to fund those prisons to a level wherein they don't make people more likely to break the law once they get out. And what about re-entry? It would take a lot of money to not dump former addicts back on the exact same street where they first became an addict. Their friends will be waiting!
Besides, most states still jail people for petty drug crimes and they have been for 70 years. It doesn't work.
People doing heroin and meth in public are annoying. They're commonly violent too/. Making those drugs and doing them in public illegal allows society to remove those nuisances, at least temporarily.
Why not criminalize violent acts instead? I don't care if the guy who attacks me is high or not, same as I don't care if the guy who didn't attack or bother me was high or not.
My comment was slightly tongue in cheek. Most violent acts are already crimes. I haven't looked it up, but I imagine that loitering and defecating in public are as well.
The horror of the current approach is the concentrated influx of drug users from other states that magnified the issue in California and Oregon. I am resigned to the fact that everyone waits around for the current wave of users to simply die off. If the decriminalization was distributed evenly among the states, there would be a chance for somewhat orderly transition.
- recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the ticket or going to treatment
- funded treatment with $300mm from cannabis taxes
The problem is Oregon took years to decide who to give the treatment money to. Only last year did they actually start funding treatment.
In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.
Essentially drug use was entirely ignored for a couple years.
So is measure 110 a failure? It's too soon to say. Certainly the rollout has been.
One unintended consequence is that Oregon has no law against public drug use, leaving this issue to cities/counties. If they don't have such a law, public drug use is essentially legal, since police used to rely on possession to stop it.
One thing that has gone right is the reduction of the burden on the court system. The state saved about $40mm over the first 3 years.
This thing where decisions are made too early, too polar-ly: this rush to judgement & condemnation feels like one of the most damned & sad trends, such a strong sap of societies good energies. There are some more known cases, but not being so sure to rush into negative judgement feels like such a relieving positive sign, is so much what I seek as a trust marker.
What is a failure is legalizing the use of drugs. You're getting into the technicalities.
When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.
Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored). If I weren't so ready to lean on incompetence as the most likely reason, I would think it's sabotage.
> Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored).
If we're ignoring them now, what's the problem with continuing to ignore them?
I'm suggesting that it makes no sense to label maintaining the status quo a "failure". If you make a policy change, and the circumstance you were already fine with continues to obtain, your policy change has not thereby failed.
One negative consequence is that it becomes more of an open-air problem that you see in day to day life, not something that gets hidden away in the seedy side of town after hours.
Should lawn darts be illegal? There's a good argument to say it shouldn't be sold as a toy for children, but in terms of it's danger to the public there's a whole host of adult activities that cause considerably more capacity for harm that are considered acceptable and legal.
My family plays horseshoes. 16 oz metal ‘U’ shapes being tossed through the air while drinking beer. One could argue that the problem with lawn darts was that they were too light, allowing children without proper sense to throw them too far.
so what? for one thing, children can legally play with (though not necessarily "own") guns, bows, model rockets, etc in most states. those all seem as dangerous, if not more so, than lawn darts.
I don't think children should be going anywhere near such things without adult supervision, but completely banning sale seems like a wildly disproportionate response.
The lawn darts were sharp and a bit hard to control. Basically like throwing a giant knife up in the air. Guns and bows have fairly well established training and safety regimes (i.e don't point them at someone), and model rockets get ignited 30' away
But throwing a dart high in the air and hitting a wandering 2 year old actually did happen, and there was no real attempt to only their the darts in one direction
I was a nine years old and I tossed it as high and as far as I could. I realized it was coming dangerously close to a friend. Everybody had their backs to me. I yelled, but nobody heard me.
In my memory it landed inches from them, but that could be because I was young and scared shitless. Maybe it landed fifteen feet behind them. All I know is it scared me enough that I have never touched a lawn dart after that.
> You should be worried that any system they required government intervention was a good idea.
You mean like providing basic infrastructure to ensure society and commerce can function?
There are plenty of things which can and should require government intervention. Unless you're a hardline anarchist, there's not a lot of wiggle room on this one.
As for drugs, let's be clear, they weren't made legal, they were made to function like traffic citations, with required treatment instead of prison time. Are you going to argue that we shouldn't have traffic citations, because they require traffic court and the necessary infrastructure to process the fines?
If not one issues the traffic tickets and just ignores it now because none of the actual mechanisms mentioned actually exist, then defacto it was made legal no?
Legal and unregulated maybe. Oh they were really legal they would have to be regulated, so when you bought them at the store you would know that the product was unadulterated and of a known dosage. Which is pretty important info for things you are putting in your body.
Drugs were already being used. Some of the drugs that were decriminalized are not causing issues. Some do cause issues.
The "issue" drugs and their users existed no matter what, and decriminalization of them (I suspect) hasn't caused a spike in users of the bad drugs.
I for one, will not try meth or heroin no matter how accessible it is.
Decriminalization says "okay we don't want this stuff on the shelf at Walgreens, but trying to jail people for it isn't working, so let's try something else".
Jailing costs money. Treatment costs money. The question is which tool is better for society and each citizen?
This the argument that the failure here is not the decriminalization as a concept, but the lack of a replacement for removing users of the "bad drugs" off the streets.
Sure, but that can be said of pretty much anything?
Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
This does seem to be a particularly terrible ‘implementation’ though.
The problem near as I can tell is that people are ignoring the very real needs of the majority to not be miserable, and actively guilting the majority (you’re not allowed to not like these things because that would mean you’re a bad person) and that is winding the spring for an authoritarian backlash which we’ve already seen get very scary.
People care about their emotions, and when pressed will do almost anything to protect them. Including having people March ‘bad people’ off to ovens as long as they can pretend they’re awesome in the process.
Trump gets so much traction for this very reason, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
A ‘good idea’ where it is impossible to implement well, but easy to pretend to implement - in terrible ways - is actually a really bad idea.
As is a good idea (somewhere/some other time!) that no one can actually afford/doesn’t fit the circumstances where we are at, but we do anyway.
That is what I’m referring to. Communism, as an example, has a terrible track record beyond smaller communes (about 50ish, it appears). Folks I’ve met who push it as a good idea, call the larger scale failures problems with the implementation. It wasn’t done right.
It is also of course a common strategy for folks who are ideologically opposed to a new idea to sabotage the actual implementation of that idea, then declare the whole idea terrible.
I don’t know enough about the behind the scenes situation with the Oregon decriminalization to know if the treatment/rehab part of the effort was sabotaged or not, or actually went as well as could be expected, etc.
But time to design it and ramp it up, or evaluating if it would even produce useful/good outcomes or would even be effective (and what to do if it wasn’t) clearly wasn’t provided in the measure.
If they’re even now struggling to even get it ramped up, then that falls solidly under one of those three categories IMO. Feel free to pick which one.
Notably, these are the same issues that SF has been having with homelessness and drug use, among many other places.
Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore? If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?
The Drug War is massively, massively expensive. You have to pay for all that policing, plus the massive resources needed to convict and incarcerate people. All that pointless, wasteful cat-and-mouse with addicts and dealers. Not to mention people in prison for drug offenses don't pay taxes, and a criminal record makes it even harder to find productive work.
However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.
It's also massively complicated and tied into all kinds of things you might never imagine (the education system, the healthcare system, foreign policy, etc, etc).
Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.
One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.
I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.
This is a pretty ignorant comment to see on HN. So far we have strong evidence to show delegalisation causes huge issues and legalization works as expected. Have a look at any country that went that route.
It sounds like a big part of the issue is that Portugal has substantially pulled back on funding after COVID...
"Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. "
Prior to that, the numbers seemed quite impressive:
"By 2018, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. Portugal had the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. HIV infections from drug use injection had declined 90%. The cost per citizen of the program amounted to less than $10/citizen/year while the U.S. had spent over $1 trillion over the same amount of time. Over the first decade, total societal cost savings (e.g., health costs, legal costs, lost individual income) came to 12% and then to 18%."
a) It's cheaper to fund the new resources than it is to continue the pointless war
b) You may be able to tax the activity too, further offsetting costs
c) Ruining lives by attaching criminal charges to activities should not solely be a cost-benefit analysis anyway. Or if it is, it needs to take into account the lost opportunities and lost years of those who are caught up in the criminal system
I get decriminalization, let people be responsible for their own choices that don’t affect others. But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions, probably more like trillions of dollars to fix the consequences of those decisions. This isn’t cheap at all, supporting an unhoused neighbor with a fent problem runs around $100k/year just to shelter (before treatment can even start, usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop), sucking the air, empathy, and resources out for the rest of our homelessness problem. And…fent is cheap, taxing it via legalization is a non-starter (the illicit questionable stuff would still exist because the users don’t want to and cannot pay high prices).
If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away. I can really admire countries like China that don’t coddle their addicts and instead apply pure tough love.
If you're going to make this argument, I really wish you'd make it more explicit. I think what you're suggesting makes cities unlivable. The homeless drug users have to exist in space somewhere. What do you propose to do with these people? There's nowhere to ship them to that's not owned by someone who objects to their presence.
It is just really expensive, it would be better if they didn't do drugs rather than just letting them do it and having society responsible for picking up the pieces. If society has to be responsible for paying for these problems, then its no longer a personal decision with personal effect. We as a society have to decide whether we are going to allow hard drug abuse and "pay the bill for that decision" or not.
The point others are making is that it appears to be a zero-sum game, i.e., we're paying one way or the other, so the more compassionate option with better outcomes should win out. As I have seen it stated, the options appear to be to pay for: (i) criminalization and its effects/expenses, e.g., court system burden, incarceration, etc.; (ii) de-criminalization (potentially with legalization/taxation) to offset the cost of keeping cities livable by mitigating its effects/expenses, e.g., treatment and housing for addicts that may become homeless; or (iii) de-criminalization without paying for mitigations, leading to unlivable cities. Your comment reads like you see some way of simply not paying to deal with addicts, while also not having the consequences of a bunch of (potentially homeless) addicts living in society. If that's an accurate description of your point, how does that work? If it's not, then what do you mean?
You can't get addicted to a substance that you don't have the ability to obtain in the first place, or that you could obtain but choose not to because you're afraid of punishment. That's the whole theory behind criminalization: that it's not a zero sum game!
I think you're probably right that the criminal justice system isn't the most effective way of dealing with people who are already addicted, but how do you propose we stop people from getting addicted in the first place if hard drugs are perfectly legal, and the government is actively working to minimize the personal downsides of being addicted to them? Why not become an addict if the only consequence is that it means you get free food and housing for the rest of your life?
So is your theory is that the drug war was a success, and nobody could get drugs when they were illegal? How do you propose to make them go away? That way was tried, and failed.
Honestly you're making my point. We (as in civilization) tried criminalization, and it is more expensive (and has other added downsides) compared with decriminalization/legalization + taxation and treatment. How do I propose to get people not to think drugs are their best option? Ha. Okay sure, in response to that straw man here's my stab at fixing human society to help reduce the number of people that go that route (since that's what it would take). UBI + free healthcare (including all procedures that may be used to either assisting with a miscarriage or causing an abortion) + free contraceptives + free childcare + additional assistance for parents + free school lunches + free higher ed + strong labor protections / unions (+ -- US specific -- constitutional amendments to allow for regulation of firearms, getting monied interests out of politics, lessening the influence of extremists in politics including ranked choice voting or similar, making public money available to third-parties, I'm sure there's more). I'm sure what I've missed could fill an encyclopedia. My point is that the problem isn't simple, so if you're going to try to "solve" it, you're wasting time debating whether incarceration is better than legalization.
> My point is that the problem isn't simple, so if you're going to try to "solve" it, you're wasting time debating whether incarceration is better than legalization.
Okay, but that debate is what this entire thread is about. I don't think it's a waste of time. We don't have to fix all the world's problems at once.
> We (as in civilization) tried criminalization, and it is more expensive (and has other added downsides) compared with decriminalization/legalization + taxation and treatment
Personally I think the jury's still out on that one, particularly once you ask yourself whether legalization is likely to result in less drug addiction overall, or more. But time will tell.
> You can't get addicted to a substance that you don't have the ability to obtain in the first place
If you're saying you can't acquire heroine, given 24 hours, I'm afraid I've lost faith in everything else you've said because it's just based on a flawed perception of what world we live in.
> how do you propose we stop people from getting addicted in the first place if hard drugs are perfectly legal
There are shades of legal and illegal. There's "We're going to lock you up for years for simple possession" and there's "We're giving it away free to kids at the corner store!", and in between those extremes lies a whole multidimensional landscape we could explore.
With harder drugs like opiates, most people are not talking about them being available at the liquor store, but solutions like removing criminal penalties for possession while providing support services, maintenance doses and counselling for those who are addicted.
> Why not become an addict
Is that a life you want? Queuing up outside the medical centre every morning for a shot that keeps the pain at bay?
You need to think of it as a system of feedback loops. If you don't stem the input of the cycle of drug abuse by investing a little, your problem gets worse.
It seems people take a moral or 'fairness' based attitude to these social phenomena and that's what causes things like the war on drugs as a form of justice. The idea that everyone is self determined, which in a small way is true of the individual. But if you look at people in aggregate things are more clear, the universe doesn't play by those rules...
> But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions
You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.
The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.
> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop
Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.
Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?
> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.
No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.
> I can really admire countries like China...
That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.
And from your other comment -
> it would be better if they didn't do drugs
Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...
But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.
And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.
Addiction is also a symptom of other social issues.
The problem isn't that some people are weak willed. It's more that there are many cultural elements that covertly value antagonism and hostility, and the poor bear the brunt of that.
The rich bear the brunt in other ways. No one much cares if $billionaire is clearly off his head on coke, because he/she has the protective support system that makes prosecution unlikely - even though their decision-making can be ridiculous, self-harming, and catastrophic for millions.
That aside - wealth really doesn't mean they're models of mental and emotional health.
It's important to point out that the framing of drug addiction as a weakness of will has an important function - to unburden people from guilt and a responsibility to others.
To be in the position of recognizing a problem and then being relatively powerless to enact change is a powerful motivator in disavowing the problem or responsibility to fix it. It's an adaptive response to avoiding mental discomfort.
And it works - people who don't feel responsibility to others avoid an entire class of mental discomforts. Taking away that adaptive mechanism exposes folks to a level of pain they likely aren't equipped to handle - a reason they developed it in the first place.
Have the overall societal costs of dealing with the consequences of drug use gone up due to decriminalization?
Furthermore, you could use the same argument about the effects of a whole lot of other mental health and healthcare issues. It'd be cheaper to let a whole lot of people suffer or die. It'd also be grossly inhumane. Like China.
> If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?
Just because drug use is illegal doesn't mean that the damage of drugs is free.
You either spend XYZ millions of dollars (in both direct costs and wasted human potential) and inflict untold human suffering by 'treating' that damage through prisons.
... Or you decriminalize it, and spend QRS millions of dollars by treating it through other means.
Society still pays, the difference is in how and how much it pays.
Right. The line we were being fed for a long time was that ending the drug war and decriminalizing possession was a good thing in its own right. Not that decriminalizing would make things worse if it wasn’t also met by other policies. Sure, people suggested these other policies as well. But I’ve never heard anyone say that decriminalization is a bad idea if they’re not in place (which is appearing more and more likely).
We saw the same thing with drug use in Portugal. Lots of people for years were saying that the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and it was a tremendous success, so we should follow suit. But there was an article here recently talking about how it’s a mess there, and the responses were “Well, of course, because the government didn’t _also_ do XYZ.”
Also, the decriminalization movement seems to overlap mostly with the deincarceration movement. And if you have both, what incentives do you actually have? The above poster said to just threaten them with a fine. That’s what they did with fare evasion here, now people just give false names or ignore the fine.
Honestly, given we’re now seeing things we were told we wouldn’t see by the decriminalization advocates, a lot of this is sounding like “No True Scotsman” arguments. It seems like no matter the failure, someone is just going to come along and say that it’s not a real failure because the government messed up.
It sounds like you are picking and choosing what information to accept. You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.
> You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.
I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.
A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.
This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.
The Netherlands also decriminalizes drugs to an extent, but -just like in Portugal- that is part of a larger plan to keep drugs and drug addicts under control. It just so happens that merely treating drug addicts as criminals doesn't give you all that much control, hence. Letting go of control entirely is the exact opposite of what Netherlands and Portugal have been doing.
> Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore?
It remains illegal. It's just that the penalties for it are removed. It means no legitimate, tax-paying business will get into it, leaving it for criminal black market operations.
Governments aren’t really great at anything except law, police, and military. All they have is a hammer.
It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional
expertise in anything else.
Anglo governments are especially bad with this. In general Anglo governments have a huge problem with trying to run government on the cheap operationally but inflating their budgets for projects and tort defense. They try to keep taxes low to appease their citizens but when new infrastructure or systems need to be built, they hire contractors who are less efficient than on-site dedicated staff and can be paid for with a 10/20/30 year tax increase. Instead of relying on a large bureaucracy to create ministerial due process, they rely on tort reform and an army of expensive lawyers and unclear judicial processes instead. The end result is a lack of state capacity.
In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)
As a community activist, I hope so. I certainly spend my time and energy talking to regular people and lawmakers about these issues. But my activism is only at the local level.
Yeah actually, Quebec is a lot better at building infrastructure and creating bureaucracy than the Anglo provinces. I'm not sure how effective their bureaucracy is though. I don't really know much about the cultural roots of this, but I will say it's sticky enough that immigrants to Anglo areas end up picking up the same attitudes toward taxation even if their families were not originally from an Anglo area/culture.
I also want to emphasize that the tax increases and tort protections that Anglo governments have end up usually costing individuals more than they would under a system that is willing to pay up front for a larger government, but that these costs are hidden in terms of tax garnishes, fees, and other things instead of upfront tax costs.
The article says a police officer stopped arresting people and started handing out tickets to a drug rehab helpline once the measure went into effect. He stopped a few months later because it felt like a waste of time, as so few were following through.
It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding.
The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.
I don't know what percentage of addicts want treatment, but I understand that the treatment centers in Portland metro are very hard to get into because they are so busy.
Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...
fully agree on the failure of the rollout. There's also going to be issues with rolling anything out involving medical treatment into our gutted public health system and fragmented private system, so it has to be done through a lengthy (and apparently trivially abused) system of private organizations applying for the money, but the new treatment infrastructure should have been at least somewhat in place before changing the laws.
Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion.
In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility.
The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here.
It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization.
IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.
This general story outline is very common: some initiative that has a good idea at core has poor execution; it “fails” in its popular perception; the initiative’s ideological opponents claim that the failure is a result of the original idea being bad.
Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea.
There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike.
> In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.
I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it.
Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them
Also just for some context, a perennial problem in Oregon is that many of the people in government agencies are opposed to the majority view of Oregonians.
One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction.
Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown.
And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine.
So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.
Heavy trucks clog I5 and crack the freeways into rubble. An efficient and environmentally friendly solution is to incentivize long haul containers to be shipped by rail.
Quite a lot of them are but there are relatively few branch lines that run directly into business districts, which tend to shift and metastasize far faster than new rail construction can keep pace. NIMBYs are generally accommodating to new job-producing office park proposals but will dig their heels in at the slightest suggestion of running a new branch or god forbid a new ramp into any part of town. So rail infrastructure is stuck with whatever was built out during wartime exigencies, which means there's nothing really newer than the late '60s in terms of infrastructure for rail.
The upshot of this is that you get the trucks on the local roads and thoroughfares anyway, they're just last-mile intermodal or short-haul drayage instead of long-haul, but that doesn't eliminate the perfusuon of 80,000 lb 54 ft metal boxes milling around on streets 7 days a week, streets that were seldom if ever engineered with this kind of abuse in mind.
No, on that specific section of I5 there are a large amount of long haul trucks too. It is not at all just last mile and local delivery stuff. Note I'm sitting approximately 1/4th mile from the section I'm talking about so please don't say I'm clueless.
> police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here
The history of Oregon is grimly fascinating. It was more-or-less illegal for black people to live in Oregon from 1844 to 1926 (although this became complicated to enforce thanks to the 14th amendment in 1868). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
Yes. Oregon was a big Klan state. You can still see the results in how few black people there are here. The high school I went to in the 70’s had only two black kids in over a thousand students.
Yeah, there's a really ugly history of racism here and the remnants of that remain very real problems.
Not that long after that law was struck down, there was a large migration of black families to Portland to work in the shipyards during WW2. Kaiser et all built a factory town a bit north of Portland proper named Vanport. This place is a fascinating bit of history because it was racially integrated with no real tensions. After the war was over most of the families decided to stay.
Then some years later a flood destroyed Vanport. It was clear rebuilding it would result in the same thing in the future. So the wonderful leaders of Portland asked themselves "where can we put these black people?"
They decided on my neighborhood, Albina. At the time it was mostly germanic people here, because they had been forced into this area in the same way decades before in a prior immigration wave. One interesting sign of this is if you check out all of the now black baptist churches, you'll find cornerstones written in german memorializing their construction.
That said, the black community here thrived. They built a flourishing downtown with lots of business, banks that would not discriminate, etc. Note that this was the only neighborhood black people could live in. Overt redlining continued here until the 1970s.
Flash forward to that time and two different projects were deliberately used to destroy that downtown as well as steal a portion of the neighborhood. Building a freeway interchange for one, and the construction of a hospital as the second.
The hospital is particularly galling as they used eminent domain to take people's businesses and houses, paying far below market value, and even worse stole vastly more land than the hospital needed. At the time they justified it as needed for "future expansion."
Just about 15 years ago in this neighborhood you'd find the hospital surrounded by several blocks of either nothing but grass, or grass and just one or two small buildings.
And then Portland got hit with the massive migration wave creating our housing crisis. So the hospital started selling the land to developers to build apartment and condo buildings.
While we definitely needed more housing, it's revolting that black businesses and homes were stolen and destroyed under a lie, only for the hospital to profit off selling the land to developers building housing for upper income folks a few decades later.
We're definitely on the trajectory of progress, but there is still so far to go, and the fight over it is very real.
I hope this helps give people here some context as to why the BLM protests here were so intense. There's real anger and it is justified. Many of the people at those protests either experienced this directly, or are the children of people who did.
From an outsider perspective, it looks like a siege that's escalating. Apparently now setting attack dogs on prisoners in dead ends cells. (context: from what I read the prisoner refused to be handcuffed and insulted a guard, resulting in [1] @ approx 30 sec.) Apparently this is getting rather common in US incarceration though.
Two (?) some years ago a review story about Oregon's decriminalization policy was here on HN and I said that I didn't think it was a good idea, and was kind of shouted down by people saying, "this is the only rational choice, to do what works and stop penalizing people which costs a lot and doesn't change their behavior".
Well, you can make stepwise rational choices all the way down into oblivion and watching your cities and states fall apart. It may be kind and more rational, but you've removed disincentives to use drugs and find yourselves in a society where you've attracted and created the conditions for this behavior to continue.
No matter what your policy stance on the potential solutions, it is not good to be having a society where people are using serious drugs without penalty.
Oh well, lesson learned, especially for people who thought they were liberal. Unfortunately at great expense and pain.
People driving over other people daily is not enough? I like alcohol myself but no clue why it always gets a pass. Well I do: they didn’t manage to even make the prohibition work even a little bit.
It’s addictive, makes you fat, causes diabetes, screws with hormones, metabolism and sugar levels and costing society a fortune. Center of domestic violence usually, car crashes etc.
> People driving over other people daily is not enough? I like alcohol myself but no clue why it always gets a pass. Well I do: they didn’t manage to even make the prohibition work even a little bit
> Well, you can make stepwise rational choices all the way down into oblivion and watching your cities and states fall apart.
This is a good point. We often see this pathological behavior in training neural networks (HN's latest interest du jour). It's easy to find local minima and think this is the best it's going to get, even if the global minima is in a completely different direction. Given the general danger of a stochastic optimization algorithm which would see us changing the law to increase harm, perhaps stepwise optimization algorithms are not the way one should run a government, yet this seems to be the only accepted political methodology these days. If someone suggests something completely new, even if they have ample evidence or a good causal model, they are often ignored.
One of the hardest most damaging drugs there is, alcohol, is legal and allowed in public and semi-public private property in all 50 states. Drinking solvents is not really much of a step above huffing them yet we as a society tolerate it. And that's good. Because it's their body and their choice.
Due to a quirk in state law, Portland can enforce a prohibition on drinking in public (outside of OLCC regulated establishments) but cannot enforce a prohibition on smoking or shooting up meth or fentanyl in public.
If you make public space bad, people won't use it.
A big problem with American leftism is that it's all young people whose primary goal is looking cool. They think drug users are cool and police are uncool. So if you complain that some guy is smoking crack on the subway, they'll yell at you because they think the act of watching the guy smoke crack is giving them street cred and will get them laid because they're not like those boring suburbanites.
But what it actually means is parents are going to drive everywhere and not take the subway.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of leftism. It's not that smoking crack is "cool," it's that the person smoking crack is a human being, deserving of dignity, who doesn't deserve to be thrown in prison. Of course that person shouldn't be allowed to smoke crack in an indoor public place, but is the solution really to take away all their freedom? I certainly don't think so.
I believe one case of this I saw this year (which was in the UK, and actually did result in them being arrested) had a bunch of people claim the specific subway-crack-smoking guy was both cool and being oppressed, and then it made the news and he turned out to be a domestic abuser. Not the most recent time I've seen this argument though - that would be yesterday, about Philadelphia I think.
People who do drugs in an enclosed space in public are doing an antisocial act and as such are the type of people willing to do other antisocial acts. It's different from simply being homeless.
That's a weird thing to call cool and whoever was saying that was cool was wrong, of course.
If someone is a domestic abuser who smokes crack on the subway, I think they should go to prison for domestic abuse and be kicked off the subway for smoking crack on the subway.
I do hate that people smoke on the Philadelphia subway, although it's mostly cigarettes and not crack in my experience. I think those people should be kicked off the subway. I just don't think that's the sort of thing someone she ould go to jail for.
We shouldn't forget that a measurably significant percentage of the population is almost guaranteed to become drug addicts provided any access to drugs. This is due to a variety of mental and neurological defects that result in addiction craving behavior and a near complete absence of inhibition regulation. This is tricky because for these people you cannot fight demand and counseling will not work as the problem is the hardware not the personality. The only partial solution is certain forms of medications and the only absolute solution is to forcefully separate that population from addictive substances and other people eager seeking such substances.
For a discussion of how likely someone is to behind addicted it's crucial to differentiate between drugs. Meth and fentanyl are extremely addictive. It's not only mental, but also a strong physical addiction. I understand that withdrawal from these drugs mashes you feel liked you are gonna die. Fent and meth are a huge problem and IMO need to be treated very harshly whereas LSD, mushrooms and marijuana aren't physically addictive at all and come with comparatively little problems.
When I saw the headline, I was struck by two thoughts:
* what constitutes "working", and
* "working" for whom?
The article makes it clear to me that the main problem is that since there are no criminal sanctions, there is less incentive to hide drug-taking activity. The streets are now cluttered with filthy, homeless fentanyl and meth addicts. Many right-thinking citizens are upset by how untidy it all looks.
What a surprise that not making an addict's life harder by locking them up has not magically led to them getting clean. The uptake on support services is not what one would hope.
Some people would like to return to criminalisation, presumably because "out of sight, out of mind". I think people with poverty, addiction and mental health problems should be given more support instead.
Fwiw locking people up actually does make some addicts lives easier. The life of a hard drug addict is filled with the constant strife of trying to procure money/drugs, all while extremely fucked up, and the. navigating the dangerous and shitty situations that puts them in. My aunt went to jail for 5 years for meth and she said it was the first time she felt she had enough piece to actually understand and work on sobriety since she started using 10 years prior. She’s been close to 20 years clean now. Granted, not everyone has it so nice, but she lost her kids, became a felon, and suffered a lot because of it. But then again, meth addiction begets a lot of suffering as well.
Your comment implies that having homeless fentanyl and meth addicts does not cause actual harm to the rest of society, only the perception of harm. This is demonstrably false.
You also suggest they should be "given more support" what to do if this does not work, and does not keep the rest of society safe?
We need to not treat all drugs the same. Heroin, Fentanyl, Meth are absolutely destructive forces and possession should force people into rehab or jail (their choice). Weed, acid, maybe coke should just be tickets and you can't do it/carry it around publically, openly sell it, etc.
Possibly there is a correlation between public policy that promotes "jacking around" and the subsequent "finding out".
Restated: perhaps there was wisdom in prohibitions against drugs heavier than nicotine/alcohol? Maybe there was a line that stabilized society in general?
Will there be a sufficient level of "finding out" this side of the grave that will trigger thought?
It is not enough. As long as you also have other actors such as Federal side stopping you making start-ups. Like Uber of hard drugs. Imagine if everything from ethanol, to weed to all the way to fentanyl was delivered at moments notice to your door by network of independent sellers.
Unless you get to that point you have not decriminalized them enough... And it will clearly fail as it stays underground.
Isn't working? How many people have their lives forever ruined or murdered by police over drug war delusions? That number has surely gone way, way down. It's not like other states don't have legal hard drugs. Pretty much every state has one of the hardest drugs there is, alcohol, fully legal.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadAs usual these people didn't learn or "forgot" all the other hard parts.
This particular article doesn't mention it, but I'm getting sick of hearing "Portugal decriminalized drug usage in the 90s and solved the drug problem" - Really? that simple? Even Hollywood westerns were more deep than that.
On of the key aspects to "solve" this problem is also culture, family support, personal responsibility and that's when you hear the tires screeching and nothing will get done or ever work.
I have to agree, if the secret ingredient to making decriminalization work is enlisting timeless conservative values, we’re toast. A more unlikely coalition has never been seen.
Habitual drug addicts don't have personal responsibility, family support, or a community of non-drug addicts to depend on. Forced incarceration in a treatment program is literally their only chance at breaking the cycle long enough to get them support for the underlying issues that led to addiction.
Tents are everywhere. On the side streets, on the interstate right of ways. It's been that way for a decade.
survivorship_bias_plane.png
There are millions of habitual hard drug users that do have some personal responsibility, some family support, some sober people around them encouraging them. They are holding down jobs and paying for their own housing, they've already quit multiple times but have gotten pulled back in. For those people forced incarceration could maybe solve their addiction at the cost of their housing and their job.
Which even trying to agree on what the bigger problem is, near as I can tell, is impossible.
Abstinence is not an inevitable consequence of a stable life - plenty of kids from comfortable backgrounds discover they really really like drugs. We need to accept that "getting high" is a basic human motivation that won't go away. The existential realities of the human condition is enough to seek escape. Some of us are born with dopamine regulation issues that doom us towards substance use. Despite being sober for a long time I still had bad cravings for alcohol and nicotine but an adult ADHD diagnosis and medication quieted that insatiable hunger for stimulation... by regular administration of stimulants! The hereditary aspects explained a lot about my family.
IMHO the real solution should be to design better drugs. Consider it the "Steam" argument - we need to outcompete the damaging drugs with products along the lines proposed by David Nutt. e.g.
- no overdose risk or organ damage
- cheap and make available for free so no crime required to acquire
- easy reversal of the effects e.g. with a common product like OJ
- no dependence issues
When you discuss investing in this research, you quickly discover that many of those who claim to be solving tragedies of addiction are actually trying to enforce an ideology that considers getting high to be a moral crime. Even if there were no personal or societal harms they still believe drugs should be violently prohibited. Their ideology actively seeks to cause harm. Of course they are hypocrites getting their stimulation from drink, food, sex, religion, abuse/control of others or whatever they manage to carve out as acceptable.
Bro, there was a movie made about how wrong you are on this topic. It's called pain hustlers, it stars captain america and emily blunt. In the movie they renamed the drug to Lonafen, but the actual drug is called Subsys. The drug contains Fentanyl.
In fact, maybe a reluctance to prescribe the stuff is exactly why the guy resorted to bribing people.
According to the CDC, 4% of fentanyl deaths come from prescription fentanyl.
The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.
Measure 110 has some flaws, but the sensible approach is to see what can be done to course correct rather than just go back to the thing that wasn't working.
Scrap the free use drugs laws and invest in clinics for underserved populations with chronic pain management programs and mandatory rehab programs for people who have lost the battle.
https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusi...
After a kid or two, you've done what evolution has selected for, and if walloping amounts of suffering and disability appear after that, well, there's always the next batch. Nobody wants to look too hard at that. People's squeamishness about genetic engineering has always had a whiff of the ignorable about it. It's pretty fun to pat yourself on the back about avoiding "eugenics" when you're healthy and young.
I suppose we could go the animal husbandry approach and just license reproductive age, pushing it steadily up and creating an artificial evolutionary pressure to keep people healthy at greater and greater ages.
Without belaboring the analogy, the truth is anyone who wants drugs can get them, right now. So we're not stopping that - but instead we're creating several new kinds of harm. Around marking people as felons, social stigma, loss of income sending people to prison, arrest, and that's before we even talk about how shit the US penal system is. Prison by the way? Full of drugs, and reason for people to want an escape.
Of course making it illegal also creates a black market which is basically the only reason cartels exist.
The reality is it's a mental health issue, and a particularly interesting one - for instance, American GIs addicted to heroin in Vietnam came home and the vast majority of them just stopped using it cold turkey. Fascinating right? [1]
Decriminalization and treating it as a mental health issue -- and sentencing addicts to rehab makes infinitely more sense.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...
The logic is pretty straightforward: You eliminate the source of drugs you eliminate drugs. The problem is the complexities surrounding the word "eliminate".
I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively.
That being said there are other places that legalized drugs and that helped with the drug problem but the logic here isn't as straightforward. It's the complexities that make it work and dealing with complexities is next to impossible. We can't even fully articulate why it worked in these places and replicating it will be hard if not impossible.
The drug war largely didn't work because of complexities. There's so much bureaucracy surrounding getting to the root of the problem and putting someone in jail. Singapore just executes you if you sell hard drugs. You're done. That's an effective deterrent and it is PROVEN to work.
Whether that method is moral or justified is a different story, but in terms of easiest, most effective and most practical method this is the best possible way. The path forward is right there, we know how to do it.
The blocker here is morality and people like you. You likely use drugs and you don't want to be executed. You want to use these things recreationally and straddle the line between abuse and responsible use. Nothing wrong with your viewpoint, but personally speaking, I would completely eliminate recreational/responsible drug use if it meant saving lives and improving society.
I mean it's your right to use drugs, but at the same time I don't want to walk through SF smelling shit, piss and avoiding junkies. So when you're rights infringe on public spaces then that's a problem.
Fun ad hominem.
> I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively.
No they didn't haha.
All of the countries in east Asia have huge drug problems. Japan has incredibly strict drug laws and a horrible meth problem. In the last major outbreak, 2% of Japan was injecting meth intravenously. Drugs are available in Japan, [1] Singapore [2] and China [3]. Exacerbated by the criminalization.
All aggressive prosecution does is push problems underground.
We've tried it your way for like 52 years. Your way has filed. Time to try something new.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xg8q7k/how-stigma-created-ja...
[2] https://www.thecabinsingapore.com.sg/blog/despite-tough-pena...
[3] https://time.com/5530597/trump-china-drug-problem/
In Singapore, drug use is illegal, not "illegal." Note, again, the quotation marks.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-drugs-idUSSIN13...
[2] https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/drug-abuse-starts-youn...
Any change you see now is just noise as they're basically at the peak of the amplitude for maximal change. And that's what you're basically googling.
You need to look at relative illicit drug use by population percentage by country:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-...
Also think critically. You will be killed if you attempt to sell drugs there. Does it make sense that the policy is not effective? What the hell is going on?
Don't be just a blind data scientist trying to scaffold the data to fit your view point. If the data doesn't fit the common sense then perhaps you're unconsciously manipulating the data to fit your view.
Also one of your articles shows 0.7% of youths in Singapore have used drugs in the past year. Is that suppose to support your argument? Look up the amount of youths that use drugs in the US. I think the reported number is like 40%. Actual number is likely 70%.
> Also think critically. You will be killed if you attempt to sell drugs there. Does it make sense that the policy is not effective? What the hell is going on?
Finally, we're on the same page.
Did you not look at the data I sent you? Singapore has the lowest drug use among almost all countries. Not just a little low, but massively lower. The only countries better off then Singapore tend to be countries where the citizens can't afford drugs.
What you heard is wrong. And the google results you sent me is cherry-picked data in service of the articles agenda. Did drug usage increase in Singapore in the last year? Is that a 0.1% increase to 0.7% from the year before while the US sits at 40% usage rate? Come on bro.
>Finally, we're on the same page.
No we're not on the same page at all. Or at least you're just not admitting it.
Many other countries have similarly draconian drug laws, up to and including execution, but do not have the same results. So that alone certainly isn't it. Malaysia and Indonesia for instance. China ranks first in the world for number of executions related to drug trafficking. List here. [1]
They also have full control over their border because it's a tiny island city-state, and their government leans heavily authoritarian. With the illegal gum and the caning. They also have strong social cohesion and lots of government support and social programs for individuals.
What I would say is:
1. Given other countries have similar drug laws and significantly more drug use than Singapore, this is likely correlation not causation.
2. The social programs in Singapore and the strong social cohesion are likely far more responsible for lower drug use.
3. Given the choice to lower drug harm by liberalizing like Portugal or cracking down like Singapore, I would suggest that the former is far more in line with canonical Western values and maximizes individual liberty -- and should be applied even if it leads to slightly worse outcomes overall because there is never a perfect solution.
I would caution you also that there's a long history of unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the 'Singapore model.' Most famously in China after Deng Xiaoping visited in the 70s.
> The only countries better off then Singapore tend to be countries where the citizens can't afford drugs.
Citation very needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_drug_tr...
Look at the data source I posted then look at the countries below Singapore. The citation is there you just didn't look.
>Singapore is an authoritarian city-state with full control over its borders, and also a very unique society.
Yes only an authoritarian society can pull off executions like this. Additionally such a society would be unique. Nothing supports your argument in this sentence.
>Many other countries have similarly draconian drug laws, up to and including execution, but do not have the same results. So that alone certainly isn't it. Malaysia and Indonesia for instance. China ranks first in the world for number of executions related to drug trafficking. List here. [1]
And you will see all counties with draconian drug laws and actual enforcement of the drug laws such that drug use policies that are illegal rather the "illegal" have drug use that is significantly lower then countries that don't have draconian laws. Again all of this is in my source which I already cited.
>Given other countries have similar drug laws and significantly more drug use than Singapore, this is likely correlation not causation.
Wishful thinking. There are many factors which blur the outcome of drug usage. It is not only draconian drug laws that influence it thus you will see all kinds of numbers everywhere.
What you must do is identify an overall generality. This generality is easily and I mean easily identifiable by the source I listed which ranks countries by drug use. You will clearly see that countries with more freedom to use drugs cluster at the top and countries with less freedom cluster on the bottom.
Also your argument is clearly flawed. Correlation does not prove causation but correlation is still a prerequisite to causation. Additionally minor exceptions to an overall correlation isn't evidence for no causation. That's just false.
>2. The social programs in Singapore and the strong social cohesion are likely far more responsible for lower drug use.
Nice. You just state this out of nowhere. How about I demand the same level of citation you demand? Where is your source and your source needs to establish "causation".
>Given the choice to lower drug harm by liberalizing like Portugal or cracking down like Singapore, I would suggest that the former is far more in line with canonical Western values and maximizes individual liberty -- and should be applied even if it leads to slightly worse outcomes overall because there is never a perfect solution.
As we see with the topic of this thread applying it to Portugal has good outcomes, applying it to Oregon had horrible outcomes. It's not clear if it works. Unless you can find evidence to the same level as the source I cited where countries with draconian drug laws are clearly clustered with lower drug usage, your arguments will remain inferior.
Additionally, Maximizing western values leads concentration of power in the business sector rather then the government sector. To even the modern day citizen it's not so clear cut which is better. Western values or Singapore?
>I would caution you also that there's a long history of unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the 'Singapore model.' Most famously in China after Deng Xiaoping visited in the 70s.
Sure maybe they can't implement something as effective as Singapore. But certainly the source I cited clearly shows a correlation.
Causation is more or less unestablishable for your or my argument. No point in bringing it up.
I would argue that it's pretty clearly uncorrelated because countries all over the world have varying degrees of draconian drug laws and have achieved nothing. You have an outlier, that's all.
Of course you're trying to establish causation because you're arguing this is the basis for similar laws elsewhere.
> To even the modern day citizen it's not so clear cut which is better. Western values or Singapore?
It's hard to say. One is better in some ways, the other in other ways.
Thanks for sharing your perspective! I think we can agree to disagree but this was an interesting conversation.
The same source I cited illustrates a correlation that contradicts your argument. Go look at it again. Countries with draconian laws quantitatively correlate with lower drug use in the one source I cited.
You said drugs were everywhere in Singapore. You were proven wrong via sources. Now this argument is wrong again, also contradicted with the Same source.
>Thanks for sharing your perspective! I think we can agree to disagree but this was an interesting conversation.
No problem. But to be honest this sentence makes it look like we are on even ground and ending the argument amicably because neither can move forward with more evidence.
This is not what occured. You made several statements and those statements are categorically wrong. Your overall argument is definitively wrong. This is not about whether you agree or disagree with me as the sources directly contradict your claims.
> The same source I cited illustrates a correlation that contradicts your argument. Go look at it again. Countries with draconian laws quantitatively correlate with lower drug use in the one source I cited.
Again, there's 1 country with draconian laws and good results, and a whole armada of countries with draconian laws and bad results. That tells me it's correlation not causation. Even if it were causative, it's not a model that aligns with Western values.
You're fixated on a single data point that aligns with your preconceptions despite a whole lot of data that doesn't.
> You said drugs were everywhere in Singapore. You were proven wrong via sources. Now this argument is wrong again, also contradicted with the Same source.
Tons of articles disagree with you. Not to mention, I think the data is likely very suspect - after all, who would admit in surveys or studies to consuming drugs if it would get the executed? That's exactly the problem Japan has.
> This is not what occured. You made several statements and those statements are categorically wrong.
Respectfully disagree.
94% of people on death row in Singapore are there for non-violent drug offenses lol. That's not something I'm going to advocate for even if I believed you'd found a causative system in Singapore that could ever be willingly reproduced abroad, and I really don't. I see a correlation as evidenced by the myriad other countries who try this approach and fail miserably.
Here I'll support your unpopular Singaporean idea if you support mine - have 80% of people in the US live in government housing. The Singapore HDB is a fantastic model we should reproduce! It materially improved affordability of housing in SG.
Have a good one man.
Perhaps, we could start with nationalizing ~80% of the country's housing stock, requiring permits for which neighbourhood you are allowed to live in, having ethnic quotas for each region to enforce multiculturalism and harmony and common prosperity...
Stable housing, and a stable, harmonous society, with many of your pressing concerns back-stopped by a benevolent autocracy are probably the reason Singapore has low rates of drug use.
It's weird how the US right salivates over a very small, bloody subset of Singapore's social policies... While turning its nose at the ones that actually make it a successful state. It's almost like the cruelty, not the outcomes, are the point...
Who would be our ‘strongman’ here that could mobilize such a force, locking down the entire border, searching everyone, etc.?
And is that really any better?
This is a great analogy. Rain is drugs and arresting people for drugs is patching roofs. When the government spends resources on anything other than arresting people with drugs (doing roofing jobs) then they are destroying people’s homes (things that are affected by rain or drugs).
It is so refreshing to see a simple and profound insight on this
If the war on drugs worked remotely as well as the war on rain, we wouldn't even be discussing it.
Opioid epidemic happened because doctors prescribed it as pain killers.
Every US state I've ever been in had people use drugs, smoke weed, completely openly, every club, every corner. Where's the war?
And your Singapore-style solution is antithetical to a free society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_S...
That's a crime on it's own, and it's a crime that most drug users aren't committing.
> ruining neighborhoods
How?
> driving down prices
That's a good thing for people who need to buy homes.
> making drugs more accessible to young kids
Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.
These people have families. They may be parents themselves. They are living in a community, one which has children. Here in Canada, with how things are now going -- I now see young children in the tent camps with their parents.
Public drug use almost certainly encourages children to uptake the behaviour themselves. Children are impressionable. They adopt the behaviours of their parents, of their older siblings, of their older siblings' friends, and yes, even just people they see on the street.
Along with that, simple physical accessibility - the widespread presence of the substance in society - means children will have more access.
When cannabis was legalized in Canada there was a sharp increase in the number of children showing up in the ER from cannabis poisoning. [1] Children steal their parents' drugs all the time, both by accident and by intention. The more proliferate and visible drugs are, the more people walking around with some fentanyl in one of their pockets, the more such exposure incidents will happen and the more such drugs will fall in the hands of children.
I'm pro-legalization, for what it's worth. But this is one of those downsides I'm worried about.
[1] https://www.sickkids.ca/en/news/archive/2022/hospitalization...
None of those things are a reason why someone should lose their freedom for using drugs. Prison isn’t a punishment we should throw around to people we find distasteful or annoying, it’s an extremely serious measure.
Even if you have more specific issues with living next to homeless people, that doesn't mean they deserve to be in jail for drug crimes. They should be given housing.
Even if you did want to throw people in jail for being homeless, only about half of chronically homeless people use drugs (https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaign...), so outlawing drugs wouldn't even solve the issue you want it to solve.
Just for the sake of argument here, supposing someone is addicted to drugs in private, and legalization is at a stage where they can get quality product that they're not going to overdose on easily. Is that actually a problem for society? Like, if you prefer to live a lifestyle where you sleep under a bridge and spend the money you would've used for housing on drugs, maybe that's just a personal choice that's yours to make? The only problem I see here is -- how is it that these drug addicts are funding their habit? I'm thinking through criminal activity in many cases?
I'd be concerned about that falling extra-heavily on homeless people in some way. If someone were already stuck sleeping on a park bench, it'd be kind of unfair to ding them again for not being tipsy or high "back in their own home."
In practice, cops could just arrest for the sort of public drug use that causes problems
The idea stills holds merit in my mind. Yes, it condones drug use and illegal activities, but it also cleans up the surrounding areas. I think it would also serve as a deterrent for the casual trying of a substance that could result in lifelong addiction. Who in their right mind would want to go to such a disgusting place to try something new?
It turns a problem that is currently diffuse to a problem that is concentrated. Like the difference between coal power plants spewing CO2 into the air versus nuclear power plants that leave radioactive waste that can be contained in barrels. Not the greatest analogy, but the point stands.
Maybe the drugs are fulfilling some need, so simply escaping the addiction is counter-productive to their lives. Maybe the rehab to escape the addiction needs to be packaged with other sorts of rehabs that help them obtain healthier alternatives to fulfill those needs that are being met by the drugs.
Quick search online:
> Addiction isn’t as simple a concept as it may seem on the surface. From an outside perspective, addiction can be seen as a simple propensity for substance abuse. However, on mental, physical and emotional levels, there’s a lot more to addiction. From a behavioral perspective, using drugs becomes a way of life. Most friends and social situations revolve around drugs, especially as drugs start to replace former social connections and hobbies. --- https://fherehab.com/learning/mind-motives-addicted-drugs/
So, at least, rehab on building healthy social connections is also needed.
Finding a better solution to the drug problem is unlikely to be as simple as just decriminalizing.
I also wonder if the fact that decriminalization is done in a patch-work manner location-wise is also part of the problem. I wonder if it's easier or harder for homeless people to relocate to places where their activities aren't criminal. They likely have less material things tying them down to a location, but they may also rely more on the face-to-face social ties they already have.
There is funding in Oregon as part of 110 to do more than just decriminalize. Unfortunately that wasn't used for effect.
Being the only place in the region where drugs can be abused free from meddling influence can also pull in addicts from surrounding areas, only increasing the problem.
Besides, most states still jail people for petty drug crimes and they have been for 70 years. It doesn't work.
- recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the ticket or going to treatment
- funded treatment with $300mm from cannabis taxes
The problem is Oregon took years to decide who to give the treatment money to. Only last year did they actually start funding treatment.
In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.
Essentially drug use was entirely ignored for a couple years.
So is measure 110 a failure? It's too soon to say. Certainly the rollout has been.
One unintended consequence is that Oregon has no law against public drug use, leaving this issue to cities/counties. If they don't have such a law, public drug use is essentially legal, since police used to rely on possession to stop it.
One thing that has gone right is the reduction of the burden on the court system. The state saved about $40mm over the first 3 years.
When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.
If we're ignoring them now, what's the problem with continuing to ignore them?
The entire idea is insane. Let’s make drugs legal and provide treatment for the problem we created.
It’s the same of saying hey! Lawn darts are now legal, don’t worry we will increase our EMS staff during the summer.
I don't think children should be going anywhere near such things without adult supervision, but completely banning sale seems like a wildly disproportionate response.
But throwing a dart high in the air and hitting a wandering 2 year old actually did happen, and there was no real attempt to only their the darts in one direction
I was a nine years old and I tossed it as high and as far as I could. I realized it was coming dangerously close to a friend. Everybody had their backs to me. I yelled, but nobody heard me.
In my memory it landed inches from them, but that could be because I was young and scared shitless. Maybe it landed fifteen feet behind them. All I know is it scared me enough that I have never touched a lawn dart after that.
Like having drugs be illegal?
You mean like providing basic infrastructure to ensure society and commerce can function?
There are plenty of things which can and should require government intervention. Unless you're a hardline anarchist, there's not a lot of wiggle room on this one.
As for drugs, let's be clear, they weren't made legal, they were made to function like traffic citations, with required treatment instead of prison time. Are you going to argue that we shouldn't have traffic citations, because they require traffic court and the necessary infrastructure to process the fines?
The "issue" drugs and their users existed no matter what, and decriminalization of them (I suspect) hasn't caused a spike in users of the bad drugs.
I for one, will not try meth or heroin no matter how accessible it is.
Decriminalization says "okay we don't want this stuff on the shelf at Walgreens, but trying to jail people for it isn't working, so let's try something else".
Jailing costs money. Treatment costs money. The question is which tool is better for society and each citizen?
Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
This does seem to be a particularly terrible ‘implementation’ though.
The problem near as I can tell is that people are ignoring the very real needs of the majority to not be miserable, and actively guilting the majority (you’re not allowed to not like these things because that would mean you’re a bad person) and that is winding the spring for an authoritarian backlash which we’ve already seen get very scary.
People care about their emotions, and when pressed will do almost anything to protect them. Including having people March ‘bad people’ off to ovens as long as they can pretend they’re awesome in the process.
Trump gets so much traction for this very reason, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
No, it can't
>Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
That's a horrible example.
I largely agree with the rest of the post.
As is a good idea (somewhere/some other time!) that no one can actually afford/doesn’t fit the circumstances where we are at, but we do anyway.
That is what I’m referring to. Communism, as an example, has a terrible track record beyond smaller communes (about 50ish, it appears). Folks I’ve met who push it as a good idea, call the larger scale failures problems with the implementation. It wasn’t done right.
It is also of course a common strategy for folks who are ideologically opposed to a new idea to sabotage the actual implementation of that idea, then declare the whole idea terrible.
I don’t know enough about the behind the scenes situation with the Oregon decriminalization to know if the treatment/rehab part of the effort was sabotaged or not, or actually went as well as could be expected, etc.
But time to design it and ramp it up, or evaluating if it would even produce useful/good outcomes or would even be effective (and what to do if it wasn’t) clearly wasn’t provided in the measure.
If they’re even now struggling to even get it ramped up, then that falls solidly under one of those three categories IMO. Feel free to pick which one.
Notably, these are the same issues that SF has been having with homelessness and drug use, among many other places.
Or if you think I’m wrong, I’m all ears!
However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.
Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.
One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.
I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.
This is a pretty ignorant comment to see on HN. So far we have strong evidence to show delegalisation causes huge issues and legalization works as expected. Have a look at any country that went that route.
https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. "
Prior to that, the numbers seemed quite impressive:
"By 2018, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. Portugal had the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. HIV infections from drug use injection had declined 90%. The cost per citizen of the program amounted to less than $10/citizen/year while the U.S. had spent over $1 trillion over the same amount of time. Over the first decade, total societal cost savings (e.g., health costs, legal costs, lost individual income) came to 12% and then to 18%."
Source: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
b) You may be able to tax the activity too, further offsetting costs
c) Ruining lives by attaching criminal charges to activities should not solely be a cost-benefit analysis anyway. Or if it is, it needs to take into account the lost opportunities and lost years of those who are caught up in the criminal system
If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away. I can really admire countries like China that don’t coddle their addicts and instead apply pure tough love.
I think you're probably right that the criminal justice system isn't the most effective way of dealing with people who are already addicted, but how do you propose we stop people from getting addicted in the first place if hard drugs are perfectly legal, and the government is actively working to minimize the personal downsides of being addicted to them? Why not become an addict if the only consequence is that it means you get free food and housing for the rest of your life?
Okay, but that debate is what this entire thread is about. I don't think it's a waste of time. We don't have to fix all the world's problems at once.
> We (as in civilization) tried criminalization, and it is more expensive (and has other added downsides) compared with decriminalization/legalization + taxation and treatment
Personally I think the jury's still out on that one, particularly once you ask yourself whether legalization is likely to result in less drug addiction overall, or more. But time will tell.
If you're saying you can't acquire heroine, given 24 hours, I'm afraid I've lost faith in everything else you've said because it's just based on a flawed perception of what world we live in.
There are shades of legal and illegal. There's "We're going to lock you up for years for simple possession" and there's "We're giving it away free to kids at the corner store!", and in between those extremes lies a whole multidimensional landscape we could explore.
With harder drugs like opiates, most people are not talking about them being available at the liquor store, but solutions like removing criminal penalties for possession while providing support services, maintenance doses and counselling for those who are addicted.
> Why not become an addict
Is that a life you want? Queuing up outside the medical centre every morning for a shot that keeps the pain at bay?
It's not a life I want.
Turns out, drugs are both fun AND addictive and it's hard to combat that with threats of jail time.
It seems people take a moral or 'fairness' based attitude to these social phenomena and that's what causes things like the war on drugs as a form of justice. The idea that everyone is self determined, which in a small way is true of the individual. But if you look at people in aggregate things are more clear, the universe doesn't play by those rules...
You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.
The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.
> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop
Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.
Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?
> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.
No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.
> I can really admire countries like China...
That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.
And from your other comment -
> it would be better if they didn't do drugs
Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...
But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.
And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.
The problem isn't that some people are weak willed. It's more that there are many cultural elements that covertly value antagonism and hostility, and the poor bear the brunt of that.
The rich bear the brunt in other ways. No one much cares if $billionaire is clearly off his head on coke, because he/she has the protective support system that makes prosecution unlikely - even though their decision-making can be ridiculous, self-harming, and catastrophic for millions.
That aside - wealth really doesn't mean they're models of mental and emotional health.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/poverty-homelessness-and...
To be in the position of recognizing a problem and then being relatively powerless to enact change is a powerful motivator in disavowing the problem or responsibility to fix it. It's an adaptive response to avoiding mental discomfort.
And it works - people who don't feel responsibility to others avoid an entire class of mental discomforts. Taking away that adaptive mechanism exposes folks to a level of pain they likely aren't equipped to handle - a reason they developed it in the first place.
Furthermore, you could use the same argument about the effects of a whole lot of other mental health and healthcare issues. It'd be cheaper to let a whole lot of people suffer or die. It'd also be grossly inhumane. Like China.
How much do you think we have spent on the DEA, ATF, and 2 million prisoners?
Just because drug use is illegal doesn't mean that the damage of drugs is free.
You either spend XYZ millions of dollars (in both direct costs and wasted human potential) and inflict untold human suffering by 'treating' that damage through prisons.
... Or you decriminalize it, and spend QRS millions of dollars by treating it through other means.
Society still pays, the difference is in how and how much it pays.
We saw the same thing with drug use in Portugal. Lots of people for years were saying that the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and it was a tremendous success, so we should follow suit. But there was an article here recently talking about how it’s a mess there, and the responses were “Well, of course, because the government didn’t _also_ do XYZ.”
Also, the decriminalization movement seems to overlap mostly with the deincarceration movement. And if you have both, what incentives do you actually have? The above poster said to just threaten them with a fine. That’s what they did with fare evasion here, now people just give false names or ignore the fine.
Honestly, given we’re now seeing things we were told we wouldn’t see by the decriminalization advocates, a lot of this is sounding like “No True Scotsman” arguments. It seems like no matter the failure, someone is just going to come along and say that it’s not a real failure because the government messed up.
I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.
A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.
This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.
It remains illegal. It's just that the penalties for it are removed. It means no legitimate, tax-paying business will get into it, leaving it for criminal black market operations.
What it needs to be is legalized.
It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.
In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)
I also want to emphasize that the tax increases and tort protections that Anglo governments have end up usually costing individuals more than they would under a system that is willing to pay up front for a larger government, but that these costs are hidden in terms of tax garnishes, fees, and other things instead of upfront tax costs.
It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding.
The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.
Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...
Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion.
In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility.
The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here.
It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization.
IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.
Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea.
There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike.
Bad execution kills good ideas!
I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it.
Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them
One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction.
Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown.
And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine.
So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.
The upshot of this is that you get the trucks on the local roads and thoroughfares anyway, they're just last-mile intermodal or short-haul drayage instead of long-haul, but that doesn't eliminate the perfusuon of 80,000 lb 54 ft metal boxes milling around on streets 7 days a week, streets that were seldom if ever engineered with this kind of abuse in mind.
The history of Oregon is grimly fascinating. It was more-or-less illegal for black people to live in Oregon from 1844 to 1926 (although this became complicated to enforce thanks to the 14th amendment in 1868). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
Not that long after that law was struck down, there was a large migration of black families to Portland to work in the shipyards during WW2. Kaiser et all built a factory town a bit north of Portland proper named Vanport. This place is a fascinating bit of history because it was racially integrated with no real tensions. After the war was over most of the families decided to stay.
Then some years later a flood destroyed Vanport. It was clear rebuilding it would result in the same thing in the future. So the wonderful leaders of Portland asked themselves "where can we put these black people?"
They decided on my neighborhood, Albina. At the time it was mostly germanic people here, because they had been forced into this area in the same way decades before in a prior immigration wave. One interesting sign of this is if you check out all of the now black baptist churches, you'll find cornerstones written in german memorializing their construction.
That said, the black community here thrived. They built a flourishing downtown with lots of business, banks that would not discriminate, etc. Note that this was the only neighborhood black people could live in. Overt redlining continued here until the 1970s.
Flash forward to that time and two different projects were deliberately used to destroy that downtown as well as steal a portion of the neighborhood. Building a freeway interchange for one, and the construction of a hospital as the second.
The hospital is particularly galling as they used eminent domain to take people's businesses and houses, paying far below market value, and even worse stole vastly more land than the hospital needed. At the time they justified it as needed for "future expansion."
Just about 15 years ago in this neighborhood you'd find the hospital surrounded by several blocks of either nothing but grass, or grass and just one or two small buildings.
And then Portland got hit with the massive migration wave creating our housing crisis. So the hospital started selling the land to developers to build apartment and condo buildings.
While we definitely needed more housing, it's revolting that black businesses and homes were stolen and destroyed under a lie, only for the hospital to profit off selling the land to developers building housing for upper income folks a few decades later.
We're definitely on the trajectory of progress, but there is still so far to go, and the fight over it is very real.
I hope this helps give people here some context as to why the BLM protests here were so intense. There's real anger and it is justified. Many of the people at those protests either experienced this directly, or are the children of people who did.
[1] https://www.insider.com/how-dogs-are-trained-to-attack-us-pr...
Part of it is the frustration that drug companies got rich from opioids, yet the addicts got to serve the crimes.
Well, you can make stepwise rational choices all the way down into oblivion and watching your cities and states fall apart. It may be kind and more rational, but you've removed disincentives to use drugs and find yourselves in a society where you've attracted and created the conditions for this behavior to continue.
No matter what your policy stance on the potential solutions, it is not good to be having a society where people are using serious drugs without penalty.
Oh well, lesson learned, especially for people who thought they were liberal. Unfortunately at great expense and pain.
Alcohol?
It’s addictive, makes you fat, causes diabetes, screws with hormones, metabolism and sugar levels and costing society a fortune. Center of domestic violence usually, car crashes etc.
What’s not serious about it?
Prohibition worked extremely well. The data is unequivocal: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit.... Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.
This is a good point. We often see this pathological behavior in training neural networks (HN's latest interest du jour). It's easy to find local minima and think this is the best it's going to get, even if the global minima is in a completely different direction. Given the general danger of a stochastic optimization algorithm which would see us changing the law to increase harm, perhaps stepwise optimization algorithms are not the way one should run a government, yet this seems to be the only accepted political methodology these days. If someone suggests something completely new, even if they have ample evidence or a good causal model, they are often ignored.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/09/27/oregon-drug-decrimina...
This is definitely not a decided issue.
Due to a quirk in state law, Portland can enforce a prohibition on drinking in public (outside of OLCC regulated establishments) but cannot enforce a prohibition on smoking or shooting up meth or fentanyl in public.
A big problem with American leftism is that it's all young people whose primary goal is looking cool. They think drug users are cool and police are uncool. So if you complain that some guy is smoking crack on the subway, they'll yell at you because they think the act of watching the guy smoke crack is giving them street cred and will get them laid because they're not like those boring suburbanites.
But what it actually means is parents are going to drive everywhere and not take the subway.
People who do drugs in an enclosed space in public are doing an antisocial act and as such are the type of people willing to do other antisocial acts. It's different from simply being homeless.
If someone is a domestic abuser who smokes crack on the subway, I think they should go to prison for domestic abuse and be kicked off the subway for smoking crack on the subway.
I do hate that people smoke on the Philadelphia subway, although it's mostly cigarettes and not crack in my experience. I think those people should be kicked off the subway. I just don't think that's the sort of thing someone she ould go to jail for.
* what constitutes "working", and
* "working" for whom?
The article makes it clear to me that the main problem is that since there are no criminal sanctions, there is less incentive to hide drug-taking activity. The streets are now cluttered with filthy, homeless fentanyl and meth addicts. Many right-thinking citizens are upset by how untidy it all looks.
What a surprise that not making an addict's life harder by locking them up has not magically led to them getting clean. The uptake on support services is not what one would hope.
Some people would like to return to criminalisation, presumably because "out of sight, out of mind". I think people with poverty, addiction and mental health problems should be given more support instead.
You also suggest they should be "given more support" what to do if this does not work, and does not keep the rest of society safe?
Restated: perhaps there was wisdom in prohibitions against drugs heavier than nicotine/alcohol? Maybe there was a line that stabilized society in general?
Will there be a sufficient level of "finding out" this side of the grave that will trigger thought?
Unless you get to that point you have not decriminalized them enough... And it will clearly fail as it stays underground.