Nate Hochman of National Review Online learns lessons from Oregon’s experience with recent drug laws.
In a November 2020 referendum, Oregon voters approved a reform that downgraded the punishment for possession of any and every drug to a civil citation. Today, the Oregonian reported that this experiment with hard-drug decriminalization has failed to deliver on one of its central promises: that treatment would take the place of criminalization. The Oregonian article, titled “Oregon’s drug decriminalization effort sends less than 1% of people to treatment,” reports:
“Two years after Oregon residents voted to decriminalize hard drugs and dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to treatment, few people have requested the services and the state has been slow to channel the funds.” …
… “But Oregon still has among the highest addiction rates in the country. Fatal overdoses have increased almost 20% over the previous year, with over a thousand dead. Over half of addiction treatment programs in the state lack capacity to meet demand because they don’t have enough staffing and funding, according to testimony before lawmakers.” …
… The operating premise of the decriminalization effort was that governments should treat addiction as a disease rather than a crime. …
… “To reduce stigma and combat the addiction crisis, drug policy must be liberated from the idea that without criminal penalties, no one would ever quit drugs,” Szalavitz continued. “Because far from spurring recovery, arrest, incarceration and having a criminal record can exacerbate drug problems.”
Well, fine. … [T]he exceptional thing about the “laboratories of democracy” theory of federalism is that state governments can experiment with a variety of different approaches to public policy. When they go right, those experiments serve as a model that other states can emulate; when they go wrong, they don’t drag the rest of the country down with them. Judging by the standard set by the advocates of hard-drug decriminalization, Oregon’s most recent experiment has gone disastrously wrong.