Oregon legalized it and then skipped doing any of the other stuff that was advertised as coming with it, like free addiction treatment, social programs, etc. It's a 'we've done nothing and we're all out of ideas' approach consistent with the state's approach to homelessness at various levels, where agencies won't even spend the money they already have because they don't even know roughly how many homeless people there are per county.

The argument was that the drug problem was caused by prohibition, but obviously that wasn’t the whole of it. The argument that the public should pay a bunch of money to deal with drug problems is a different argument.

> argument was that the drug problem was caused by prohibition

To be fair, Oregon never reached the point of legal sales channels for drugs. Drug users still had to purchase drugs from a dealer. Their supply chains were the same as in other states.

Actual legalisation would establish a legal purchase channel. That would come with quality controls, et cetera.

Fair point. We should have Purdue make fentanyl.

Oxy is a pretty good example of the pros and cons of legalizing it.

Deaths from prescriptions were relatively rare - but it created a huge number of addicts with escalating tolerances.

Then as progressive efforts were made to reduce distribution, pill-mills and secondary markets appeared (i.e. crime). Then with further restrictions, addicts moved off oxy entirely, onto heroin, and then fentanyl flooded in - and bodies piled up.

Just "legalizing" might reduce the harm, but would increase number of addicts. Prescriptions for existing addicts is good for them - but dealers aren't just going to give up, they'll focus on creating new users.

I don't think I've ever seen a perfect solution - but things like distributing naloxone or creating supervised places to self-administer seem like no-brainers in the meantime. Resistance seems to come from a somewhat ugly place where people see users dying as the problem being solved.

Some people say we should legalize drugs and then spend billions on drug addiction treatment, because somehow people should feel free to try and get addicted to drugs, because society will pay the bill to make them better afterwards? Either people should take responsibility for their own actions, or we should disallow the actions, I’m not sure how allowing the actions without personal responsibility for the consequences was ever going to workout from a moral hazard standpoint.

The problem with local approaches to dealing with the homeless crisis is that the better you do, the worse your problem becomes. Portland doesn’t just grow homeless on trees, they have one of the busiest greyhound stations in the country, and everyone else is just so much at dealing with the problem.

Drug addiction is a social problem

Criminalising drug users does nothing about the social problems, and makes them worse

Are we at the "real legalization has never been tried" stage already?

Oregon decriminalized simple possession by end users. You would still need to purchase the drugs from the exact illicit supply chain the DEA is profiling here, so it's no surprise it didn't solve the overdose crisis. Under legalization you could buy an exact dose from a licensed supplier.

I’m not sure legalization would change much: fentanyl is so popular as a street drug because it is so cheap. Providing a much more expensive alternative isn’t going to suck away demand from the illicit version

These are not intrinsically expensive chemicals. A small charity could give it away for free. I would wager dysfunctional drug addicts don't value their time too highly, and wouldn't be put out by having to talk to someone every day to get their fix. Meanwhile it's a great place to push interventions. It's obvious fundamentalist prohibition is straight up not working.

If you gave it away for free, how would the OD rate not go up? You will still have the street market if you are at least somewhat restrictive however; that is unless we start enforcing laws against dealers again, but that isn’t going to happen without any leverage over users.

At best what we can achieve is what Portugal achieved, which is mixed success that no one is really happy about.

How would the OD rate go up? I'd say that most overdoses are caused by people not knowing exactly what they're taking. The pathological case being someone buying pills they expect to contain no opioids, but yet still ending up being cut with fentanyl because it's cheap to smuggle and provides a stand-in psychoactive effect.

Also I don't see why there needs to be leverage over users to enforce laws against dealers. Does buying food need to be illegal in order for the government to regulate food safety? Of course those laws for dealers need to be sensible like only selling pills made with Good Manufacturing Practices and other quality control, otherwise we're right back to draconian prohibition.

There is dumb high school kid OD, the drug they think is safe is actually laced with too much fent. I assume you aren’t going to let these kids buy from legit sources anyways, so I’m not sure how they are avoiding buying from the homeless encampment next to their city bus stop (something that actually happened here in Seattle). Then there are people that don’t care, and do as much drugs as they can get their hands on, the people who are in crisis all the time.

If you can’t go after the users, you have to find some other way to get to the dealers. Portugal has that problem, since they can’t go after use, the police aren’t finding an effective way to go after dealers either.

How many high school kids buy alcohol and cigarettes from homeless encampments? And when they do, how much of that is dodgy hand-crafted mixtures of unknown provenance, versus sealed packages directly from the regulated supply chain?

There's never money for treatment, but there's always money for police and prison.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.

"We had a great success. Then we defunded it and it quit working."--Cue shocked Pikachu face

There is always money for treatment, actually, just never enough money for an ever expanding problem. And it’s all locally allocated, while the problem is national, can Portland or even Oregon solve a problem that spans several states? Vancouver nearby (BC not WA) has similar problems, better funding (and more federal help as well), but it is still far from enough.

I don't believe what I read. Giving away fentanyl for free?

You have a romantic view on drugs. In such, you either are really young (and still idealistic, which is good but lacking life's experiences) or you never drink more than a beer and don't really have contact to the addicted.

The aim should be to get them off this, so they stop doing EVERYthing just for getting the next high. The aim is not to even supply more of these highs to them.

You have to take it away and to help the people. Or they will take something away from you (just as it is meant in EVERYthing for the next high..)

I say no. I'm not agreeing here.

Where did I say the goal was to "supply more of these highs" ?

You say "take it away" like there is a magic wand that hasn't been waved, and just needs to be waved to make drugs disappear from existence. But rather this idea is actually just the widespread approach of prohibition, which has been tried for the past five decades, with its main result of causing great personal and societal harm.

Currently, we already have plenty of addicted people seeking out their next high, and they will have very little problem getting it. If there is a problem getting it, it's simply a lack of money - which means it can be straightforwardly solved by stealing. Their dealer, in the best case, wants to keep them alive and addicted rather than ever pushing them to seek help. And every fix they get has a high chance of outright killing them due to lack of quality control and standards.

So no, I don't buy into this vague handwaving that the current highly corrosive and grossly ineffective legal regime deserves any credit for keeping the problem from being somehow worse. At this point we've had five decades of fundamentalist prohibition, and it is responsible for the current state of affairs.

I can understand you, but I'm thinking it doesn't have anything to do with prohibition. If it were so, then the addicted to opiates would be distributed evenly through All countries. It's not the case with, I'm from Germany, in Germany. We have drug addicts too, but it's not a problem here. You know why?

Because opiates are forbidden and you have to fear your freedom if you handle them with lack.

For example it's not possible to get them prescribed easily. If you got them prescribed, it's an act of getting it. We have the BTM law where everything is written down.

Instead, America's physicians prescribed that to easily in former times and still doing it (pain killers on oxy basis?). The drugs and addiction epidemic started much earlier. And now it's already full swinging.

It's not the problem of prohibition, it's the problem of way too easy to get access and hands onto. And you call it prohibition.. I name it regulation. There is a difference between these both two words. So, America should regulate it much more. Each world's country should regulate this the much the people can't by compounds or ready for usage stuff. This is the case for addictive drugs, which in my eyes includes alcohol too.

But, may be I'm wrong in here and I don't see the true "why" But I'm thinking, I'm not wrong in here though.

https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/prescription-opi...

So what you want basically is to open the market, to talk to people not to do it (so they educated enough to decide on what they want) and then hope that the abuse of drugs won't get more and even sink? And that with highly effective and addictive stuff? NO, H3LL!

You seem to have absolutely no experience with drugs. Absolutely No Experience with opiates. I have, I one got it in the hospital and I remember it as a wonderful time. I would like to repeat that experience, but I know, if I do , I might get into big trouble and am strong enough not to touch it. But if one would give me 1 pill. I would take it because it was high pleasure experience. There my drug addiction career would have started.

You talk about quality controls and standards. I'm talking about ban it completely, make everything unreachable for everyone. Make it highly regulated. That's the only way not to have people easy try it and get hooked on the feeling, like me. You can think what ever you want, but I'm happy that we're living on a democracy and laws are for each and every ;) and there are still enough people who so No, like me :) I do it out of experiences.

> So no, not they way they did it.

I am advocating legalisation, not decriminalisation.

Oregon legalized it and then never funded ANY of the treatment programs it was supposed to.

Um, yeah, that's not gonna work ...

It also doesn't help that many of these drugs are still illegal at the federal level. Consequently, you cannot create a legal manufacturer who can sell drugs of a known quality since the Feds can kick their door in at any point in time.