Overdoses are at an all time high in Portland. The entity that responds usually gives the person overdosing Narcan, addiction help is then offered for those who recover and 99% of those offered recovery options refuse.
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/08/01/overdose-911-call...
Firefighters (and others) are quitting due to the trauma of responding to these calls over and over and over, with no concrete progress. It takes it's toll mentally to respond these calls which are taking up and increasing percentage of the calls they have to respond to.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/portland-do...
The main failure of this experiment, imho, is the missing component of forcing detox/rehab/etc when x amount of drug related crimes are committed. The measure explicitly said the addict has to seek the help on their own volition. That might work for alcohol and cannabis, but the vast majority of opioid based drugs are so addictive they can't even fathom not getting their next high or life without it.
Also in many many places that aren't Portland, so not sure why that's relevant?
1) Drug runners drive to Oregon (or wherever - but it's always going to be Oregon first) and pick things up and take them back to their home state.
2) When the first state goes recreational - people expect that things are generally becoming more LAX and eventually it will be allowed there too. And often that LAX expectation is what literally pushes that state to go there too, voters gonna vote.
But I'm definitely guessing the pandemic in general was just a huge event that has pushed probably millions (potentially billions worldwide) of people into general depression.
Have you thought this through? This is beyond evil. Same energy as "no organ transplant if you didn't get the vaccine"
>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves" I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.
The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.
In an ideal world, I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves, of course, so as best to preserve bodily autonomy. I think you can make the case that the Oregon experiment is showing how in practice that doesn't happen.