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?
It's not "the number of people who try hard drugs", which isn't a particularly interesting or meaningful number (lots of people, including myself, try hard drugs but never end up hooked on them and are productive members of society).
Try "the amount of harm caused to society". The drug war destroys more lives than hard drugs. It's a policy failure.
Enforcement is not a form of treatment, regardless we've been trying enforcement since the 70s and it's been a disaster. Why would you want to double down on that?
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.
This is a very un-nuanced take on what happened in Portland, and lines up with what the uncritical and uninformed national reporting about Portland has been saying.
It was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.
You strike me as the type of person who doesn't know that US urban crime decreased in 2023.
The novel thing in world of illicit drugs is that fentanyl is very hard to dose correctly, so death rates are higher than before. That new fact on the scene makes long term comparisons difficult. But, I would say given the dropping crime rates of the last 40 years, we're doing better than the previous waves of "tough on crime" policy including drug wars from the 1980s and 1990s, despite incarcerating a lot fewer people. So I think these "experiments" absolutely are working. That effectiveness may however be overshadowed by the specific dangerousness of fentanyl in the illicit market.
Reagan had his War on Drugs, which resulted in the imprisonment of an order of magnitude more nonviolent drug offenders: https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs