[dminor]

Measure 110 did two things:

- recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the ticket or going to treatment

- funded treatment with $300mm from cannabis taxes

The problem is Oregon took years to decide who to give the treatment money to. Only last year did they actually start funding treatment.

In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.

Essentially drug use was entirely ignored for a couple years.

So is measure 110 a failure? It's too soon to say. Certainly the rollout has been.

One unintended consequence is that Oregon has no law against public drug use, leaving this issue to cities/counties. If they don't have such a law, public drug use is essentially legal, since police used to rely on possession to stop it.

One thing that has gone right is the reduction of the burden on the court system. The state saved about $40mm over the first 3 years.

[scheeseman486]

Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored). If I weren't so ready to lean on incompetence as the most likely reason, I would think it's sabotage.

[seanmcdirmid]

Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore? If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?

[gary_0]

The Drug War is massively, massively expensive. You have to pay for all that policing, plus the massive resources needed to convict and incarcerate people. All that pointless, wasteful cat-and-mouse with addicts and dealers. Not to mention people in prison for drug offenses don't pay taxes, and a criminal record makes it even harder to find productive work.

However, the staggering budgets and ridiculous inefficiencies of the Drug War won't all go away the minute the laws are changed. And in the meantime, you can't just leave diseases of despair untreated.

[jrumbut]

It's also massively complicated and tied into all kinds of things you might never imagine (the education system, the healthcare system, foreign policy, etc, etc).

Unwinding any aspect of it would be like refactoring a legacy codebase larger and older and cruftier than any software in existence.

One of the underrated issues in civics today is how well a piece of legislation is crafted.

I sympathize with the people suffering in jail and with the burden of a criminal record resulting from drug arrests. If I were in that position I wouldn't want to wait for the legislature to catch up to public opinion. At the same time, if we are going to keep passing laws by direct vote we need to have those laws be written more carefully.

[WalterBright]

> Isn’t decriminalization of X simply a matter of not making it against the law anymore?

It remains illegal. It's just that the penalties for it are removed. It means no legitimate, tax-paying business will get into it, leaving it for criminal black market operations.

What it needs to be is legalized.

[Gud]

The decriminalization doesn’t cause the damages from drug use, they were already there.

[bnralt]

Right. The line we were being fed for a long time was that ending the drug war and decriminalizing possession was a good thing in its own right. Not that decriminalizing would make things worse if it wasn’t also met by other policies. Sure, people suggested these other policies as well. But I’ve never heard anyone say that decriminalization is a bad idea if they’re not in place (which is appearing more and more likely).

We saw the same thing with drug use in Portugal. Lots of people for years were saying that the Portuguese decriminalized drugs and it was a tremendous success, so we should follow suit. But there was an article here recently talking about how it’s a mess there, and the responses were “Well, of course, because the government didn’t _also_ do XYZ.”

Also, the decriminalization movement seems to overlap mostly with the deincarceration movement. And if you have both, what incentives do you actually have? The above poster said to just threaten them with a fine. That’s what they did with fare evasion here, now people just give false names or ignore the fine.

Honestly, given we’re now seeing things we were told we wouldn’t see by the decriminalization advocates, a lot of this is sounding like “No True Scotsman” arguments. It seems like no matter the failure, someone is just going to come along and say that it’s not a real failure because the government messed up.

[ipaddr]

It sounds like you are picking and choosing what information to accept. You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.

[bnralt]

> You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.

I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.

A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.

This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.

[Kim_Bruning]

The Netherlands also decriminalizes drugs to an extent, but -just like in Portugal- that is part of a larger plan to keep drugs and drug addicts under control. It just so happens that merely treating drug addicts as criminals doesn't give you all that much control, hence. Letting go of control entirely is the exact opposite of what Netherlands and Portugal have been doing.

[rainonmoon]

Sometimes it's worth doing things that are compassionate, moral, and expensive.

[vkou]

> If society is expected to also provide a huge amount of new resources to counteract damage that decriminalization of X enables, then maybe it just shouldn’t decriminalize X in the first place?

Just because drug use is illegal doesn't mean that the damage of drugs is free.

You either spend XYZ millions of dollars (in both direct costs and wasted human potential) and inflict untold human suffering by 'treating' that damage through prisons.

... Or you decriminalize it, and spend QRS millions of dollars by treating it through other means.

Society still pays, the difference is in how and how much it pays.

[Nursie]

a) It's cheaper to fund the new resources than it is to continue the pointless war

b) You may be able to tax the activity too, further offsetting costs

c) Ruining lives by attaching criminal charges to activities should not solely be a cost-benefit analysis anyway. Or if it is, it needs to take into account the lost opportunities and lost years of those who are caught up in the criminal system

[seanmcdirmid]

I get decriminalization, let people be responsible for their own choices that don’t affect others. But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions, probably more like trillions of dollars to fix the consequences of those decisions. This isn’t cheap at all, supporting an unhoused neighbor with a fent problem runs around $100k/year just to shelter (before treatment can even start, usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop), sucking the air, empathy, and resources out for the rest of our homelessness problem. And…fent is cheap, taxing it via legalization is a non-starter (the illicit questionable stuff would still exist because the users don’t want to and cannot pay high prices).

If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away. I can really admire countries like China that don’t coddle their addicts and instead apply pure tough love.

[Anticlockwise]

If you're going to make this argument, I really wish you'd make it more explicit. I think what you're suggesting makes cities unlivable. The homeless drug users have to exist in space somewhere. What do you propose to do with these people? There's nowhere to ship them to that's not owned by someone who objects to their presence.

[seanmcdirmid]

It is just really expensive, it would be better if they didn't do drugs rather than just letting them do it and having society responsible for picking up the pieces. If society has to be responsible for paying for these problems, then its no longer a personal decision with personal effect. We as a society have to decide whether we are going to allow hard drug abuse and "pay the bill for that decision" or not.

[mrguyorama]

You seem to be pretending that the "pure tough love" option is somehow NOT billions of dollars?

How much do you think we have spent on the DEA, ATF, and 2 million prisoners?

[vidarh]

Have the overall societal costs of dealing with the consequences of drug use gone up due to decriminalization?

Furthermore, you could use the same argument about the effects of a whole lot of other mental health and healthcare issues. It'd be cheaper to let a whole lot of people suffer or die. It'd also be grossly inhumane. Like China.

[Nursie]

> But I don’t see why we are also expected to pony up billions

You already are ponying up billions. What's more, what you're ponying up for is making things worse. Doing nothing at all is hardly likely to be an economically optimal strategy either, but at least we wouldn't be sinking billions in actually making it worse, as we are now.

The argument that we should take some or all of the enforcement money and spend it on services can be a utilitarian one. Think about why we educate children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, why we have social security programs. It benefits us all to have a functional, productive population.

> usually they just keep doing drugs because no incentive to stop

Firstly, no, oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society. The constant need for money and the insecurity of the supply seem to ensure that addicts are in a state of perpetual turmoil and instability, which makes their situation worse and their chances of recovery slimmer.

Second - you'd rather that addicts still commit petty crime to support their habits, when we know better and cheaper ways for both them and us?

> If we just decriminalize and let people reap the consequences of their actions, the problem also goes away.

No, it really doesn't. You'll end up with a different set of social problems. Not as bad without the legal consequences attached, but not simply "gone away" either.

> I can really admire countries like China...

That don't value human life? That dictate what people can do, how many kids they can have, that sort of thing? By all means, go live in an authoritarian paradise.

And from your other comment -

> it would be better if they didn't do drugs

Yes, and it would be better if people didn't drink, or smoke, or hurt each other, or steal stuff, or crash cars, or rape each other, or...

But we don't live in that world, and we never will. We have to deal with the world we live in and the human race as it is, and try to figure out how to get the best outcomes.

And that includes messy things like addiction and the fallout of that. You know what really cuts down on the number of young people getting addicted to opioids? Seeing a load of middle-aged addicts queuing up for their morning hit at the local clinic. Knocks the glamour right out of it, and has worked very well in Switzerland.

[gamblor956]

oddly enough a most people don't want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. When given access to things like a stable supply and clean places to satisfy their addiction, many are able to hold down jobs, take steps to get clean and become productive members of society.

There are plenty of people who really do want to spend their entire lives addicted to opioids. LA's homeless "crisis" is proof of that; there are literally thousands of shelter beds that go unused each night because almost all of LA's homeless shelters are sober facilities which do not allow alcohol, drugs, or related contraband, and the addicts would rather be on the streets using drugs than have shelter, food, and stability.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Addiction is also a symptom of other social issues.

The problem isn't that some people are weak willed. It's more that there are many cultural elements that covertly value antagonism and hostility, and the poor bear the brunt of that.

The rich bear the brunt in other ways. No one much cares if $billionaire is clearly off his head on coke, because he/she has the protective support system that makes prosecution unlikely - even though their decision-making can be ridiculous, self-harming, and catastrophic for millions.

That aside - wealth really doesn't mean they're models of mental and emotional health.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/poverty-homelessness-and...

[fungiblecog]

people have to pony up to mitigate the consequences of alcohol being legal and many other things...

[bitcharmer]

> damage that decriminalization of X enables,

This is a pretty ignorant comment to see on HN. So far we have strong evidence to show delegalisation causes huge issues and legalization works as expected. Have a look at any country that went that route.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Such as Portugal. Although decriminilisation was part of a wider social shift towards treating drug use a health issue rather than a legal issue.

https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...

[bombcar]

Apparently it worked well for awhile, but WaPo now reports that people aren't as happy with it anymore:

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

[clairegraham]

It sounds like a big part of the issue is that Portugal has substantially pulled back on funding after COVID...

"Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. "

Prior to that, the numbers seemed quite impressive:

"By 2018, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. Portugal had the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. HIV infections from drug use injection had declined 90%. The cost per citizen of the program amounted to less than $10/citizen/year while the U.S. had spent over $1 trillion over the same amount of time. Over the first decade, total societal cost savings (e.g., health costs, legal costs, lost individual income) came to 12% and then to 18%."

Source: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...

[thaumasiotes]

> Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored).

If we're ignoring them now, what's the problem with continuing to ignore them?

[scheeseman486]

Because that's just maintaining the status quo. Are you suggesting the status quo is acceptable?

[thaumasiotes]

I'm suggesting that it makes no sense to label maintaining the status quo a "failure". If you make a policy change, and the circumstance you were already fine with continues to obtain, your policy change has not thereby failed.

[nerdponx]

One negative consequence is that it becomes more of an open-air problem that you see in day to day life, not something that gets hidden away in the seedy side of town after hours.

[api]

Governments aren’t really great at anything except law, police, and military. All they have is a hammer.

It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.

[Karrot_Kream]

Anglo governments are especially bad with this. In general Anglo governments have a huge problem with trying to run government on the cheap operationally but inflating their budgets for projects and tort defense. They try to keep taxes low to appease their citizens but when new infrastructure or systems need to be built, they hire contractors who are less efficient than on-site dedicated staff and can be paid for with a 10/20/30 year tax increase. Instead of relying on a large bureaucracy to create ministerial due process, they rely on tort reform and an army of expensive lawyers and unclear judicial processes instead. The end result is a lack of state capacity.

In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)

[kridsdale3]

Is Quebec noticeably better? I'm intrigued at learning more about the deep cultural roots of this, dating back (I presume) to viking days.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah actually, Quebec is a lot better at building infrastructure and creating bureaucracy than the Anglo provinces. I'm not sure how effective their bureaucracy is though. I don't really know much about the cultural roots of this, but I will say it's sticky enough that immigrants to Anglo areas end up picking up the same attitudes toward taxation even if their families were not originally from an Anglo area/culture.

I also want to emphasize that the tax increases and tort protections that Anglo governments have end up usually costing individuals more than they would under a system that is willing to pay up front for a larger government, but that these costs are hidden in terms of tax garnishes, fees, and other things instead of upfront tax costs.

[lazide]

Ok, but do you think that is going to get better anytime soon?

[Karrot_Kream]

As a community activist, I hope so. I certainly spend my time and energy talking to regular people and lawmakers about these issues. But my activism is only at the local level.

[ajmurmann]

What you say is true, but mostly about the US government. Other governments seem to have much more state capacity.

[mbrumlow]

You should be worried that any system they required government intervention was a good idea.

The entire idea is insane. Let’s make drugs legal and provide treatment for the problem we created.

It’s the same of saying hey! Lawn darts are now legal, don’t worry we will increase our EMS staff during the summer.

[beej71]

> You should be worried that any system they required government intervention was a good idea.

Like having drugs be illegal?

[scheeseman486]

Should lawn darts be illegal? There's a good argument to say it shouldn't be sold as a toy for children, but in terms of it's danger to the public there's a whole host of adult activities that cause considerably more capacity for harm that are considered acceptable and legal.

[wombatpm]

My family plays horseshoes. 16 oz metal ‘U’ shapes being tossed through the air while drinking beer. One could argue that the problem with lawn darts was that they were too light, allowing children without proper sense to throw them too far.

[CraigRo]

Lawn darts used to be sharp and had fins. A horseshoe is blunt

[leetcrew]

so what? for one thing, children can legally play with (though not necessarily "own") guns, bows, model rockets, etc in most states. those all seem as dangerous, if not more so, than lawn darts.

I don't think children should be going anywhere near such things without adult supervision, but completely banning sale seems like a wildly disproportionate response.

[jasonboyd]

I haven't touched a lawn dart since 1989.

I was a nine years old and I tossed it as high and as far as I could. I realized it was coming dangerously close to a friend. Everybody had their backs to me. I yelled, but nobody heard me.

In my memory it landed inches from them, but that could be because I was young and scared shitless. Maybe it landed fifteen feet behind them. All I know is it scared me enough that I have never touched a lawn dart after that.

[unethical_ban]

Drugs were already being used. Some of the drugs that were decriminalized are not causing issues. Some do cause issues.

The "issue" drugs and their users existed no matter what, and decriminalization of them (I suspect) hasn't caused a spike in users of the bad drugs.

I for one, will not try meth or heroin no matter how accessible it is.

Decriminalization says "okay we don't want this stuff on the shelf at Walgreens, but trying to jail people for it isn't working, so let's try something else".

Jailing costs money. Treatment costs money. The question is which tool is better for society and each citizen?

[lazide]

Using treatment as the option when there is no treatment available (let alone any with signs of real efficacy) is a bit odd though?

[unethical_ban]

This the argument that the failure here is not the decriminalization as a concept, but the lack of a replacement for removing users of the "bad drugs" off the streets.

[lazide]

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, mind restating?

[ajmurmann]

You would be correct if we could simply declare drugs illegal and then they all just vanish. But that's not how it works unfortunately.

[jwestbury]

> You should be worried that any system they required government intervention was a good idea.

You mean like providing basic infrastructure to ensure society and commerce can function?

There are plenty of things which can and should require government intervention. Unless you're a hardline anarchist, there's not a lot of wiggle room on this one.

As for drugs, let's be clear, they weren't made legal, they were made to function like traffic citations, with required treatment instead of prison time. Are you going to argue that we shouldn't have traffic citations, because they require traffic court and the necessary infrastructure to process the fines?

[lazide]

If not one issues the traffic tickets and just ignores it now because none of the actual mechanisms mentioned actually exist, then defacto it was made legal no?

[amanaplanacanal]

Legal and unregulated maybe. Oh they were really legal they would have to be regulated, so when you bought them at the store you would know that the product was unadulterated and of a known dosage. Which is pretty important info for things you are putting in your body.

[foota]

Does enforcing the law not require government intervention?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Also just for some context, a perennial problem in Oregon is that many of the people in government agencies are opposed to the majority view of Oregonians.

One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction.

Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown.

And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine.

So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.

[kibwen]

> police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here

The history of Oregon is grimly fascinating. It was more-or-less illegal for black people to live in Oregon from 1844 to 1926 (although this became complicated to enforce thanks to the 14th amendment in 1868). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

[amanaplanacanal]

Yes. Oregon was a big Klan state. You can still see the results in how few black people there are here. The high school I went to in the 70’s had only two black kids in over a thousand students.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, there's a really ugly history of racism here and the remnants of that remain very real problems.

Not that long after that law was struck down, there was a large migration of black families to Portland to work in the shipyards during WW2. Kaiser et all built a factory town a bit north of Portland proper named Vanport. This place is a fascinating bit of history because it was racially integrated with no real tensions. After the war was over most of the families decided to stay.

Then some years later a flood destroyed Vanport. It was clear rebuilding it would result in the same thing in the future. So the wonderful leaders of Portland asked themselves "where can we put these black people?"

They decided on my neighborhood, Albina. At the time it was mostly germanic people here, because they had been forced into this area in the same way decades before in a prior immigration wave. One interesting sign of this is if you check out all of the now black baptist churches, you'll find cornerstones written in german memorializing their construction.

That said, the black community here thrived. They built a flourishing downtown with lots of business, banks that would not discriminate, etc. Note that this was the only neighborhood black people could live in. Overt redlining continued here until the 1970s.

Flash forward to that time and two different projects were deliberately used to destroy that downtown as well as steal a portion of the neighborhood. Building a freeway interchange for one, and the construction of a hospital as the second.

The hospital is particularly galling as they used eminent domain to take people's businesses and houses, paying far below market value, and even worse stole vastly more land than the hospital needed. At the time they justified it as needed for "future expansion."

Just about 15 years ago in this neighborhood you'd find the hospital surrounded by several blocks of either nothing but grass, or grass and just one or two small buildings.

And then Portland got hit with the massive migration wave creating our housing crisis. So the hospital started selling the land to developers to build apartment and condo buildings.

While we definitely needed more housing, it's revolting that black businesses and homes were stolen and destroyed under a lie, only for the hospital to profit off selling the land to developers building housing for upper income folks a few decades later.

We're definitely on the trajectory of progress, but there is still so far to go, and the fight over it is very real.

I hope this helps give people here some context as to why the BLM protests here were so intense. There's real anger and it is justified. Many of the people at those protests either experienced this directly, or are the children of people who did.

[araes]

From an outsider perspective, it looks like a siege that's escalating. Apparently now setting attack dogs on prisoners in dead ends cells. (context: from what I read the prisoner refused to be handcuffed and insulted a guard, resulting in [1] @ approx 30 sec.) Apparently this is getting rather common in US incarceration though.

[1] https://www.insider.com/how-dogs-are-trained-to-attack-us-pr...

[WalterBright]

Heavy trucks clog I5 and crack the freeways into rubble. An efficient and environmentally friendly solution is to incentivize long haul containers to be shipped by rail.

[ChainOfFools]

Quite a lot of them are but there are relatively few branch lines that run directly into business districts, which tend to shift and metastasize far faster than new rail construction can keep pace. NIMBYs are generally accommodating to new job-producing office park proposals but will dig their heels in at the slightest suggestion of running a new branch or god forbid a new ramp into any part of town. So rail infrastructure is stuck with whatever was built out during wartime exigencies, which means there's nothing really newer than the late '60s in terms of infrastructure for rail.

The upshot of this is that you get the trucks on the local roads and thoroughfares anyway, they're just last-mile intermodal or short-haul drayage instead of long-haul, but that doesn't eliminate the perfusuon of 80,000 lb 54 ft metal boxes milling around on streets 7 days a week, streets that were seldom if ever engineered with this kind of abuse in mind.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

No, on that specific section of I5 there are a large amount of long haul trucks too. It is not at all just last mile and local delivery stuff. Note I'm sitting approximately 1/4th mile from the section I'm talking about so please don't say I'm clueless.

[yowzadave]

This general story outline is very common: some initiative that has a good idea at core has poor execution; it “fails” in its popular perception; the initiative’s ideological opponents claim that the failure is a result of the original idea being bad.

Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea.

There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike.

Bad execution kills good ideas!

[0xpgm]

The article says a police officer stopped arresting people and started handing out tickets to a drug rehab helpline once the measure went into effect. He stopped a few months later because it felt like a waste of time, as so few were following through.

It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding.

The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.

[ajmurmann]

I don't know what percentage of addicts want treatment, but I understand that the treatment centers in Portland metro are very hard to get into because they are so busy.

Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...

[insanejudge]

fully agree on the failure of the rollout. There's also going to be issues with rolling anything out involving medical treatment into our gutted public health system and fragmented private system, so it has to be done through a lengthy (and apparently trivially abused) system of private organizations applying for the money, but the new treatment infrastructure should have been at least somewhat in place before changing the laws.

Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion.

In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility.

The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here.

It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization.

IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.

[jauntywundrkind]

This thing where decisions are made too early, too polar-ly: this rush to judgement & condemnation feels like one of the most damned & sad trends, such a strong sap of societies good energies. There are some more known cases, but not being so sure to rush into negative judgement feels like such a relieving positive sign, is so much what I seek as a trust marker.

[seanmcdirmid]

I don’t think cities have any control over felonies at all, they can just issue civil fines and misdemeanors, or is it different in Oregon?

[corethree]

What is a failure is legalizing the use of drugs. You're getting into the technicalities.

When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.

[anon291]

> In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet.

I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it.

Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them

[freedomben]

Where are you getting those numbers from?