Decriminalizing drugs is a bad idea. Who would have thought?
Apparently, not the Oregon government until this Monday, when Governor Tina Kotek signed a bill recriminalizing certain drugs.
In 2020, the Oregon legislature passed a bill that decriminalized possession of small quantities of drugs. If caught with drugs, users had the option to either pay a $100 fine or receive a health assessment through an addiction recovery center.
Here’s the thing that the authors of this bill - and the 58% of Oregonians who supported it at the time - failed to realize: most addicts don’t want to admit that they’re addicted, and $100 is not a lot of money.
Furthermore, the bill explicitly stated that there would be no penalty for failing to pay the $100, rendering it a bit of a moot point.
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“So it rolls out in early 2021. It’s finally happening. Police, instead of arresting people, they start handing out these $100 citations. But the rollout is a bit rocky from the start,” New York Times reporter Mike Baker said of the measure in March, continuing,“Pretty soon it becomes clear that very few people are calling this state hotline to be guided into treatment, and over the following months and then years, what people see on the streets of Portland in particular, but also in other parts of Oregon, is a sense of lawlessness.”
Baker stated that thanks to this new permissive measure, Portlandians were now using drugs - and overdosing - in the open. Many businesses had to hire private security, and some people even carried Narcan with them in case they witnessed an overdose.
Support for the measure fell, with 56% of Oregonians opposing it as of August 2023.
To nobody’s surprise, the drug legalization experiment failed, and it finally ended on Monday. Hopefully, other states can learn from Oregon’s mistake instead of repeating it.
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