It's a matter of treaty law. States punched out a treaty on drugs and then promised each other to stick to it, pressuring other states to buy in.
Leaving a treaty means you change your relation to the other signatories and possibly a regulatory body that took part in developing the treaty. Sometimes it's cheap, sometimes it's been a justification for horrible atrocities over decades and decades.
In this case the latter is true. Ditching the UN convention is almost like saying you owe a lot of people restitution for the nasty things you did.
Which is why the UN needs to take the blame for the convention on drugs to go away, the signatories most likely won't.
There was a debate in the early 80s on whether the country should concentrate on treatment or enforcement. Reagan introduced zero tolerance policies. He usually chose the wrong approach.
The approach promised in Oregon failed because the original intent of the decriminalization was to also increase support for rehabilitation. This never ended up happening, so drug users were thrown back into the situations that got them into drugs in the first place, instead of being given a way out.
Those policies were not well funded or implemented, we should keep trying alternative solutions to the status quo.
In contrast to the "war on drugs" which has been extremely well funded, and implemented to the cost of our own liberties, tried for years and has not been successful either.
> tried for years and has not been successful either.
What's the measurement for success?
It seems, from a casual observer's perspective, we have fewer people trying hard drugs when the consequences are strict and known. We have more people trying hard drugs when the consequences are removed.
Neither system will achieve 0% drug usage - so which policy results in fewer people trying hard drugs?
On it's surface it seems to have worked better than these experiments. Otherwise the experiments would not be getting rolled back...
There's very few if any fans of what played out in Portland, for instance. Overt drug usage exploded and became a much worse problem. The exact opposite of what proponents had hoped.
Some will say "but they didn't do it right" or similar - tired arguments we hear every time pet policies fail.
US is only lenient when compared to even more severe steamrollers of human rights. Executing individuals for drug possession is absolutely unconsciousable and unacceptable. Incarceration being less diabolical does not mean it is not still highly diabolical. Countless lives were and continue to be destroyed.
The state killing people is always unjustified since you can't prove 99%+ really did the crime. In fact, we can show the states and feds have put to death many of their own innocent citizens.
Compared to selling hard drugs on the street? Technically what you're describing is against the law, but given that people are selling hard drugs on the street, I doubt you could get the cops to care.