And again, literally written into M110 is the idea that treatment is supposed to be cheaper than incarceration. Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape, but the treatment programs are not looking terribly cheap or effective.
I don't think it's red tape as such, but rather that Portland suffers from a problem SF also has, which is that government social services are mostly run via the NGO-Industrial Complex. Money is shoveled into a patchwork of local governments, and then shoveled out into a patchwork of local non-profits, and there's almost no accountability for turning $X into Y results, like you might have with a transportation department or a school district.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/11/portland-oregon-tree-...
That was really depressing to read. She nuked the program because of her ego and then let her black spokesperson blame it on race and gender instead of her own lies and deliberate mismanagement.
Likewise, when people/groups fail today we want them fired or cancelled. This promotes the "blame someone else" as a self preservation tactic.
The treatment programs implemented so far have been incredibly cheap, in the sense that we simply haven't spent any money on them.
M110 has been more expensive than expected, because by not spending money on treatment programs, we caused an assortment of other issues.
M110's effect on society is confounded by its coexistence with a statewide housing crisis that is pushing people into homelessness, and from there it's easy to fall into drug use.
The first problem is that the people we're really talking about, the ones living/defecating/etc on the street do not want help.
The second problem is that in order to want to get better, an addict has to hit their personal rock bottom. Programs that keep people floating above their personal rock bottom are like family members enabling addicts. It ultimately doesn't help them.
It's VERY difficult to create social programs that help people want to not be ill, while simultaneously not letting them fall to their own rock bottom.
And then consider the position from the legislature of creating incentives for government programs/NGOs which align with the desired outcomes and it becomes expoentially harder.
Also, while the whole rock bottom trope probably holds some truth for many people, when you make every story all about it you kind of lose the plot. If you try hard enough, you can look at just about anyone's life who has recovered from addiction and create a narrative based on an upward trend after the "worst" moment or period of their addiction. If they had two periods that were basically exactly as bad, you dig around until you find some trivial reason to label the second period as worse, and thus the "real bottom." If someone had their worst period of addiction many years before they actually got to a place where they could maintain sobriety long term it was just a long journey for them. Etc.
You make a good point. When we look at a program that hasn’t been implemented we must judge all other unrelated programs that were implemented to some degree or another at the same time.
People might want to “see how it works out after implementation” while ignoring the necessity of “going back to the status quo that led to coming up the ideas on the first place”
E.g. what is the outcome of CA Proposition 2 that passed in 2018?
Huge sums were collected, but they haven't really been spent. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the first detox center built with M110 money only opened two months ago, and only has 16 beds: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-se-portl...