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Oregon undoes groundbreaking drug decriminalization law

Measure 110, an experiment approved in 2020, gets overhauled as state grapples with fentanyl crisis and growing public drug use

Oregon lawmakers have moved to reintroduce criminal penalties for the possession of hard drugs, in effect ending the state’s groundbreaking three-year decriminalization experiment.

In 2020, nearly 60% of voters moved to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs with the passage of Measure 110, but the new law had grown increasingly controversial as the state grappled with the fentanyl crisis and growing public drug use.

Lawmakers had recently reached a bipartisan deal to undo a key aspect of the law and make minor possession a misdemeanor, while also allocating millions of dollars toward specialty court programs as well as mental health and addiction treatment.

Maeve ,

Had anyone tried addressing conditions that create despair on a wide level?

Uranium3006 ,
@Uranium3006@kbin.social avatar

Measure 110 had nothing to do with it, drug problems are big in neighboring States without similar laws

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

110 has been a disaster, glad to see it go.

The idea was to provide a path for treatment.

The problem was a) treatment was optional and b) addicts don’t want treatment.

Here’s the way it “worked”:

  1. You get busted for what would have been a typical drug offense.
  2. Cop doesn’t arrest you, gives you a $100 ticket.
  3. Tells you the ticket is waived if you call a toll free number and ask for treatment.
  4. Addicts:

youtu.be/5rVQGT01Kzg#t=16s

Initially, they gave out around 16,000 tickets.

Less than 1% called the helpline.

opb.org/…/oregon-drug-decriminalization-measure-1…

Then what happened was the cops stopped even pretending to enforce the laws. Honduran gangs started operating an open air drug market literally blocks from police headquarters.

wweek.com/…/on-portlands-fentanyl-corner-a-dance-…

koin.com/…/feds-drug-traffickers-using-honduran-n…

Overdoses went through the roof:

opb.org/…/data-show-overdoses-deaths-rising-in-or…

Robberies to support the drug habits went up:

kgw.com/…/283-28745fda-0cd7-4588-978d-448529460b4…

Car thefts went way up.

oregonlive.com/…/car-thefts-declining-in-portland…

So, yeah, this is why we can’t have nice things.

And the supporters are still going “Buh, buh, in Portugal…” completely ignoring that Portugal has universal health care and provides penalties for people who don’t seek treatment.

conditional_soup ,

Okay, I’ll probably make a few posts as I work through this, please forgive the shit format, but I have only small breaks. So, your link on robberies only focuses on one business, it doesn’t provide any information about whether actual burglaries (which is what this properly is) or general property crime is increasing, and whether it’s increasing disproportionate to the pacific region or the rest of the country. We don’t have this law in Cali, and I saw stories and articles like this here, too. I think your evidence in this regard is very wanting.

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

The law passed in 2020, the dramatic increases in crime started happening virtually immediately.

That’s just one story, there are many, many like it.

kgw.com/…/283-1f1d2229-20ad-42a4-bd5d-58c24143dab…

bizjournals.com/…/portland-small-business-break-i…

conditional_soup ,

Alright, first of all, I want to let you know that I’m speaking with you from a place of respect. Tone gets lost in text, and I don’t want to convey contentiousness. Thank you for taking the time to have this discussion.

Okay, you have anecdotes and surveys. That’s really all the first link is, and I find it to be, again, lacking in any kind of hard evidence about an increase in property crime that’s statistically significant. The second link is paywalled, so I can’t speak to it.

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Same survey group asking small busineses in 2022 “Hey, you been broken into?” 63% say yes.

2023 - 78% say yes.

Not a good look. And this is only small business, like this one who closed after being broken into 15 times (!):

koin.com/…/rains-pdx-closes-cites-employee-safety…

It’s not counting places like REI:

oregonlive.com/…/rei-to-close-its-only-portland-s…

Or Target:

wweek.com/…/target-has-been-complaining-to-city-o…

Or Nike:

oregonlive.com/…/nike-wants-to-hire-off-duty-poli…

Or Fred Meyer (Kroger):

oregonlive.com/…/portland-partners-with-fred-meye…

conditional_soup ,

Okay, I’m not interested in the big retailers because they made a lot of noise lying (yes, lying) about big increases in national theft rates. This could easily be part of the same narrative that they’ve been using to shutter stores without scaring the shit out of shareholders.

I will listen to small businesses. So, the next thing we need to know is we need burglary statistics from other big cities in the pacific region outside of Oregon to determine if the increase is statistically significant or if it’s just noise. 19 other cities is the minimum of what we need. I think the FBI has publicly available crime data in a machine readable format, I’ll see if I can’t run it down. If we get a P-value < 0.05, there’s less than a 5% chance that the null hypothesis (Oregon’s property crime isn’t meaningfully different from the nation) is true. If I have the time to do it, I’ll get back to everyone with what I’ve found.

Xanis ,

So… decriminalization does work, when coupled with active, non-passive programs. However, you can’t just decriminalize and then do essentially nothing to support individuals found with or taking drugs. This leads me to believe this was likely expected to fail from the start. If I put on a tinfoil hat I’d even argue it was done to help regain some lost support on the War on Drugs.

SeaJ ,

And the supporters are still going “Buh, buh, in Portugal…” completely ignoring that Portugal has universal health care and provides penalties for people who don’t seek treatment.

This has always been my issue with it. While a ticket is technically a penalty, if there is no weight behind it, it means jack shit. Treatment should be free and mandatory.

betz24 ,

I don’t know if anyone has been to Portugal recently, but it has gotten a lot worse.

Stern ,
@Stern@lemmy.world avatar

If Fent hadn’t gone buck wild in recent years I think things might have played out different. Obviously 'rona didn’t help things either.

Corkyskog ,

Fent has been prevalent for over a decade now. It’s just that the other drugs have evaporated, so its almost the only opoid available. Heroin is non existent on the east coast, and anything other than tar is fent no matter where you are. Pills are selling for more than a dollar a milligram, and you can’t always even be sure that they aren’t a fent press anyway.

Stern ,
@Stern@lemmy.world avatar

Fent has existed since before like 2010 but it hasn’t been the opiod du juor until much more recently. 2013 it was a radar blip, but 2024 its the whole damn radar.

BaalInvoker ,

The real problem with decriminalization of drugs is the lack of support for those who are using drugs.

Drugs become an avoidance coping mechanism for many of the users. If their lives sucks, they’ll keep doing drugs. Some of them keep using drugs because it’s also very addictive.

If you really wanna implement a decriminalization of drugs, you must also implement health care and social security care, probably for free. It’s necessary that people have access to psychologists, social services, medics and job opportunities.

As the psychologist Bruce Alexander said: The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection.

conditional_soup ,

From the article:

Lawmakers had recently reached a bipartisan deal to undo a key aspect of the law and make minor possession a misdemeanor, while also allocating millions of dollars toward specialty court programs as well as mental health and addiction treatment.

So, no, it’s modifying the law, not undoing it.

But research has so far showed no correlation between the rise in overdoses and decriminalization.

HMMMM.

Still, the public health crisis, coupled with a shortage in affordable housing that has fueled homelessness, has become more visible and residents and business owners have grown increasingly exasperated. City residents report seeing people openly smoking fentanyl in downtowns while small towns that had historically low rates of homelessness are now seeing encampments.

“What has developed in the last three years is not the utopian Shangri-La that we have been promised with ballot Measure 110,” Christopher Parosa, the Eugene district attorney, said at a community forum this year, “but rather a dystopian nightmare that is akin to a grim Hollywood movie.”

Ah, yes, the west coast, famously devoid of homeless people, suddenly inundated with them. Couldn’t have anything to do with, idk, it costing $600 just to rent a room in even a smaller city? $900-1100 for a one bedroom apartment? The cost and supply of housing has nothing to do with the homelessness crisis that’s basically been stewing since 2008, it’s definitely just the last two years of decriminalization? Okay.

Also notably absent: actual, verifiable data-backed evidence that this has been a policy disaster. Plenty of anecdote, though, so I’m sure they’re onto the truth of the matter.

AnarchistArtificer , (edited )

I read an article recently about the failure of this measure. It attributed a large part of the failure to a lack of training. For example, police were significantly less likely to hand out tickets for minor possession than they were to make arrests (before the measure), because they didn’t see what the point was. To them, it was just a significantly more lenient system and the article argued that training could’ve helped them to see that the ticket isn’t meant to be a punitive measure, but a way to pull people towards the increased support.

The police were essential outreach, but they weren’t given training to understand how their role was different. The tickets that were being handed out were a standard one, instead of a custom ticket made for this new citation, which would’ve explained that you can get the ticket waived if you call the support number listed.

Edit: found the article opb.org/…/oregon-drug-decriminalization-plan-meas…

ShepherdPie ,

As an Oregonian, I find their explanation to be horseshit and this change as nothing more than the Democratic party trying to sway potential voters in an election year and funnel even more money into the police and prison system. This shit was just as bad before 110 passed but now we’re not wasting money keeping people in jail for months only to dump them right back out on the street.

The biggest issue with 110 is that the state hasn’t actually dispersed any of the funding in order to open up new rehab facilities. Furthermore, police here are still butthurt about all the protests and refuse to do their job 90% of the time (while still collecting their fat paychecks) which makes people believe things like public drug use are legal.

Enk1 ,

This is it. A lack of training for officers and a lack of infrastructure to support rehabilitation. The bill was set up for failure, as none of the above happened prior to the law going into effect. It’s like removing your physical fence before installing an invisible fence and wondering why your animals all ran away.

Pacmanlives ,

I wanna have those rent prices! A studio in Denver is closer to 1200

conditional_soup ,

Get a few people together and start raising hell at city council. I’m doing it. Together we can all demand better cities.

Pacmanlives ,

I wish that would work but not in a real city it would take a few thousand with pitchforks and mortars basically killing everyone and everything.

So you going full Detroit or Cleveland both cities I love and love to visit but would not live there

conditional_soup ,

Well, you could always just wait and see if things get better, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Pistcow ,

Who could have possibly predicted this!?

ShepherdPie ,

The police and democratic leadership who torpedoed this law from the get go?

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