They always claimed to follow other successful implementations like Portugal, but the law was no where near what they implemented as far as requiring treatment.
Whats funny is the Governor is telling the Portland mayor to fix the drug issues...like it didn't stem from measure 110.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/07/19/kotek-and-blumenauer-t...
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/22/economist-magazi...
As I explained in a sibling comment, requiring treatment is not the difference. Very few people who use drugs in Portugal are subject to mandatory drug treatment.
The key difference is that Portugal has a radically different housing policy than Oregon. As of 2019, housing is a formal legal right (and even before 2019, it was much closer to a de facto right than it was to Oregon's current model, which is "if you can't pay for a roof, pitch your tent over there, and hope we don't arrest you for vagrancy").
Most people who use drugs do not meet clinical criteria for addiction, so drug treatment programs are irrelevant and a waste of money for them. For those who do, drug treatment programs are still a waste of money unless they have stable housing, because it is essentially impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety without stable housing.
The big difference between Oregon and the other cities/countries that tried this approach successfully is not diversionary programs - it's housing. In Oregon, housing is not guaranteed, which means any money spent on mandatory treatment programs for people without stable housing is essentially wasted.
Diversionary programs and rehabilitation are a waste of time and money if the recipient does not have guaranteed access to stable housing. It's virtually impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety in those circumstances.
As someone who lives in Oregon we need some way to force addicts into treatment. Jail worked in some cases because it meant that some addicts no longer had access to the drugs they were addicted to. But even better would be more of a therapeutic environment where they actually get treatment for addiction. However, it seems that most addicts aren't going into treatment willingly (big surprise) and this is why we're seeing so much trouble here. I voted for 110, but now I'm thinking that was a mistake. It either needs some major revisions to enable forcing drug users into treatment or it just needs to be repealed (the former would be better, I think).
If someone wants to get high in their home, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in a bar or such, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in one of those places and then walk out in public _without harming anyone else_, I don't care.
The thefts, the assaults, the zombies and crazies in public, that stuff I care about.
There is a middle-ground between "criminalize USE" and "stop enforcing laws, particularly when drug abusers and homeless are involved".
> If someone wants to get high in their home
That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed, and in which almost all "last-resort" housing options (such as shelters) require sobriety. Achieving and maintaining sobriety without stable housing is virtually impossible, and yet somehow society expects everyone to be able to do it and then complains when this doesn't magically happen.
The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs", except that attitude is completely fantastical: it goes against all clinical evidence of how substance use disorders actually work, and all empirical evidence of what resources a person needs to stop using drugs (assuming that is even the end goal, which is not a given).
To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs, then you will wind up with homeless people using drugs in public. And criminalizing drug use doesn't change that; it just moves those people "out of sight" to jails and prisons, where they keep using drugs, at a monetary cost to society that is literally orders of magnitude greater than the straightforward option of just giving them housing.
How many times did I have to say that I don't care if people use drugs?
_I don't care if people use drugs._ I'm not interested in forcing folks into rehab.
But this crap:
> That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed...
> To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs
Is a BS excuse to let folks commit THEFT and ASSAULT because It's Really The System, or expose kids to fent smoke on the train because It's Really The System, or have kids step over zombies on the sidewalk because It's Really The System, or have children and women (and some men) harassed or threatened by crazies because It's Really The System, etc.
I don't care about the drug use. I worked with homeless folks for years and most of them are not OD'ing in public parks or harassing folks on the sidewalk. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Your original comment literally draws a false equivalence between "theft and assault" and "smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit".
Here's your comment:
> How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
Since the article is only talking about decriminalization of drugs (theft and assault are still criminal offenses), the only relevant difference here regards people who are using drugs in public places.
It's a pretty convenient bait-and-switch that allows you to complain about people using drugs (which is neither violent nor criminal behavior), and then when people call you out on it, revert back to complaining about violent and criminal behavior, which nobody in this entire comment chain except for you is talking about.
> Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Nobody's talking about criminal behavior. We're talking about drug use, which, as discussed in the article, is not a criminal offense in Oregon.
You should look up to the folks I was replying to:
"Clearly they had the best of intentions, but Oregon's politicians are terrible at implementing anything properly. Open drug markets, increased property and retail thefts and a homeless population explosion are what happened...when <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36959984
Even from the article:
"Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding.
...
"In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse."
The rest of your comment is just as full of misrepresentations.
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/05/13/survey-shows-ore...
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/03/20/wheeler-slams-mea...
The biggest issue in Portland that's been ignored since COVID started is that downtown Portland never recovered after the shutdown. It has nothing to do with safety, I know I live there, and it has everything to do with prices. The city is too expensive for what you get and what opportunities are here.
I'm no fan of Kotek, but truly Ted Wheeler is among the most shit mayors the city has ever known.
If you have data that suggests some drugs just make rehabilitation impossible or unlikely, I'd be interested to see it, though.
It isn't that famously successful at all, at least in Portugal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available."
It did work well. It doesn't now. What changed in between then and now is funding and commitment to getting addicts into treatment-- the founding principle of the program to begin with.
I have reached a conclusion that in order to evaluate the “success” of Portugal’s policies and how they can translate to other places, then I would like to know what kind of addictions it succeeded for and for what proportion of people and for which addictions.
That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
Generally, successful public programs often stop being successful when they stop recieving funding. That is a fact. The resources used to pay for the portugal program were redirected from enforcement. Perusing the wikipedia page, the stats seemed a lot more encouraging than any similar ones I've seen from a country with war-on-drugs type policies, but I'm not an expert.
Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.
I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?
> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?
I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).
> I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes.
It looks like you don't understand which part you don't actually get. While Portugal's program was being funded properly, the increase in drug usage was no different from nearby countries that did not change their drug laws. Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time. But what about the cost? Well, it seems to have saved a boatload of money on enforcement.
“The most important direct effect was a reduction in the use of criminal justice resources targeted at vulnerable drug users,” says Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the U.K.’s University of Kent, who co-authored the study. “Before, a large number of people were being arrested and punished for drug use alone. They saved themselves a lot of money and stopped inflicting so much harm on people through the criminal justice system. There were other trends since drugs were decriminalized in 2001, but they are less easy to attribute directly to decriminalization.”
https://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experi...
The hippies over at Forbes seem to think that ending canabis prohibition will help the US recover economically from the pandemic like ending alcohol prohibition helped end the great depression.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kriskrane/2020/05/26/cannabis-l...
But what about the collateral damage of all this rampant treating-instead-of-imprisoning-people-for-drug-use? Well, The International Journal of Drug Policy said:
"Taking into consideration health and non-health related costs, we find that that the social cost of drugs decreased by 12% in the five years following the NSFAD's approval and by a rather significant 18% in the eleven-year period following its approval. Whilst the reduction of legal system costs (possibly associated with the decriminalization of drug consumption) is clearly one of the main explanatory factors, it is not the only one. In particular, the rather significant reduction of health-related costs has also played an important role."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...
Surely the stalwart right-wing CATO institute will set the record straight on the fallout from such an irresponsible policy:
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many EU states, those problems—in virtually every relevant category—have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001. In certain key demographic segments, drug usage has decreased in absolute terms in the decriminalization framework, even as usage across the EU continues to increase, including in those states that continue to take the hardest line in criminalizing drug possession and usage."
Yep, they did.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwald...
Marijuana isn't illegal in the US anymore (at least where I live). Fentanyl, which is basically laced into all hard drugs these days, I guess you could argue that they are going to be dead in one or two years anyways? I guess that's tough love for you.
Hey, marijuana should be legal...and here in Washington state at least it is. The biggest problem with marijuana, due to dumb federal rules, is that the (non-marijuana) drug addicts are more likely to do armed robberies of dispensaries because they are cash only businesses.
But let's not bait and switch here: "marijuana has been shown to be manageable, so let's allow people to do all the fentanyl they want" is not very logical. A lot of teens are just dying on their first experience with fent (or something they got that had fent in it that they didn't know about!). These aren't the same things at all.
It's funny that you mention Salt Lake City, because that example is commonly misunderstood and actually illustrates the exact opposite of what you're pointing out.
Utah set out to solve chronic homelessness. The causes and effects of chronic homelessness are completely different from transient or episodic homelessness, and the three require different approaches. Utah eliminated 91% of chronic homelessness within ten years, using a Housing First policy. After they ended the policy, total (not chronic) homelessness increased. The majority of that increase was from non-chronic homelessness, which was not targeted by their policy and which was increasing even before that policy ended (because it was, well, independent of a policy that was... not aimed at addressing it). Chronic homelessness has increased in Utah since the end of the program in 2015, but the overwhelming majority of homelessness that's reported on in Utah is still not chronic homelessness, because chronic homelessness makes up less than 20% of the homeless population.
It's odd to look at that as "the problem never ends", because the problem (chronic homelessness), did very nearly end, until the state decided to end the program and go back to their own ways.
> 2023 report reflects a 96% increase in people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2019, but also indicates Utah is making headway in developing deeply affordable housing
For however you define chronic, I guess.
>Chronic homelessness refers to people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, either continuously or in four or more separate instances within the past three years, while also experiencing a disabling condition such as a physical disability, severe mental illness or substance use disorder.
It's quite a leap of logic to look at an increase in chronic homelessness after ending a program that empirically reduced chronic homelessness using a straightforward mechanism, and conclude that the most probable explanation is "outright fraud, necessitating a decade-long conspiracy involving many people and organizations with opposing goals collaborating with each other, and which somehow has resulted in zero tangible evidence surfacing even years after the alleged conspiracy fell apart".
Like folks with chest pain want it fixed.
But folks who hear voices/are addicted to something/suffer from crippling anxiety often don't want to fix it for a variety of reasons, some of which are even pretty good (such as nasty medication side effects). Crossing that hurdle is tough
And you can talk someone out of a chemical dependency. Or rather, you can talk them into suffering through it, much the same way as you can talk someone into suffering through climbing a mountain or similar.
Given that Oregon stopped its war on drugs and has had a terrible experience, I don't see how anyone can honestly believe that the war on drugs did not reduce the rates of drug use and addiction. This is not a political issue. Come to Portland and see. It's not like any other city. People engage in drugs freely and with impugnity. Correspondingly, people overdose continuously.
It seems obvious to me the war on drugs kept addiction rates and usage rates at a much more acceptable level. At least, it ensured the dangers of drug use didn't spill onto the streets (needles in public parks; drug users in public restrooms... places kids go).
Thus, it correspondingly seems obvious to me that the higher incarceration rate is worth it.
The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.
I think the question is how do we make prisons less cruel and dangerous, and lower recidivism. Of course there is a backlash against enforcement when the solution is locking people in cages.
Considering that thousands of people are arrested for drug possession every year in Singapore, to say nothing of the number of people who use drugs in Singapore and avoid legal action, then yes.
> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary.
Drug use is rampant even inside prisons, which are literally the most surveilled and draconian environments on the planet. If a carceral approach to preventing drug use doesn't work even within prisons, what makes anyone think it can work in society at large, even if people were willing to turn all of society into a police state?
I have not seen that.
> over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure.
It was not. WoD helped to _control_ the amount of drugs. It certainly had not eradicated them, but it helped to reduce their prevalence.
We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything.
> State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures.
And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.
> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.
It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.
But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.