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.