It’s below, broken into 3 parts because apparently Lemmy has a comment limit, but TLDR the bureaucracy of providing services that help drug users has been slower to implement than the law that made drugs legal was. Mostly due to republicans constantly trying to attack any bills or laws that would help addicts, though it should be noted that now even a decent chunk of democrats want to undo the law since people aren’t getting help they were promised by the government.
POLITICS
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN OREGON DECRIMINALIZED HARD DRUGS
A bold reform effort hasn’t gone as planned.
JULY 19, 2023
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Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on July 20, 2023
Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.
Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.
For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Oregon’s Measure 110 was viewed as an opportunity to prove that activists’ most groundbreaking idea—sharply reducing the role of law enforcement in the government’s response to drugs—could work. The measure also earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue for building a statewide treatment network that advocates promised would do what police and prosecutors couldn’t: help drug users stop or reduce their drug use and become healthy, engaged members of their communities. The day after the measure passed, Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the nation’s most prominent drug-policy reform organizations, issued a statement calling the vote a “historic, paradigm-shifting win” and predicting that Oregon would become “a model and starting point for states across the country to decriminalize drug use.”
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession. This year’s legislative session, which ended in late June, saw at least a dozen Measure 110–related proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike, ranging from technical fixes to full restoration of criminal penalties for drug possession. Two significant changes—tighter restrictions on fentanyl and more state oversight of how Measure 110 funding is distributed—passed with bipartisan support.
Few people consider Measure 110 “a success out of the gate,” Tony Morse, the policy and advocacy director for Oregon Recovers, told me. The organization, which promotes policy solutions to the state’s addiction crisis, initially opposed Measure 110; now it supports funding the policy, though it also wants more state money for in-patient treatment and detox services. As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
Many advocates say the new policy simply needs more time to prove itself, even if they also acknowledge that parts of the ballot measure had flaws; advocates worked closely with lawmakers on the oversight bill that passed last month. “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Measure 110 went into effect at a time of dramatic change in U.S. drug policy. Departing from precedent, the Biden administration has endorsed and increased federal funding for a public-health strategy called harm reduction; rather than pushing for abstinence, harm reduction emphasizes keeping drug users safe—for instance, through the distribution of clean syringes and overdose-reversal medications. The term harm reduction appeared five times in the ballot text of Measure 110, which forbids funding recipients from “mandating abstinence.”