Oregon case study: CA’s drug decriminalization comes at a steep, frightening, cost?
California’s no stranger to up-and-coming drug legislation. SCC’s DA no longer files charges for many minor drug possession cases, and SF’s own Sen. Scott Wiener is spearheading SB 519 (to make possessing/using psychedelics legal throughout the state). However, Thomas Hogan’s analysis of Oregon’s decriminalization efforts in City Journal provides a different, more sobering, picture than what local legislators envision. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.
On the issue of reducing addiction and overdoses, Oregon’s decriminalization of drug use has been a tragic failure. Overdose deaths rose by over 33 percent in Oregon in 2021, the year after the law was passed, compared with a rise of 15 percent in the rest of the United States. As for the claim that the law would provide a pathway to treatment for addicts, less than 1 percent of the people eligible for treatment under Measure 110—a paltry 136 people—ended up getting help. In fact, out of the 2,576 tickets written by police for drug possession, only 116 people called the help hotline to get the ticket waived, with the vast majority of the others choosing to pay the minimal fine instead. As Coelho warned, without the threat of incarceration and the mandatory court programs that come with an arrest, addicts seldom have any interest in getting treatment.
The impact of decriminalizing drugs did not stop with addiction and overdoses. Police in Portland report that all categories of crime jumped in reaction to Measure 110. Drug addicts need money; they got it by stealing items and reselling them, so property crimes rose. Once a drug market opens up, drug dealers move in to service it. As a result, the streets of Portland are awash in guns and drugs. With drug dealers battling for turf, gun violence increased. Portland recorded 90 homicides in 2021, shattering the old record for annual murders in the city. “We’ve seen more guns than we’ve ever seen in our investigations,” a Portland police supervisor bluntly stated. “Almost everybody is armed. . . . Criminal organizations are robbing other criminal organizations. That’s kind of our big push right now—trying to stop the gun violence and the drug violence that goes with it, because they’re hand in hand. It’s not one or the other. It’s not related to the pandemic, it’s not related to Covid, it’s because we have a criminal environment that’s tolerated and allowed to flourish here.”
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once noted that “a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Oregon has chosen to run a novel social experiment in decriminalizing hard drugs. Let’s hope the other 49 states are paying attention to the results.
This article originally appeared in City Journal. Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity