If readers have not done so already, they should read Ryan Mills’ eye-opening reporting from Oregon, where even some liberals and progressives have concluded that the state’s decriminalization of hard drugs has turned into a social catastrophe.
Over the last few years, as drug-overdose deaths have skyrocketed in the state, as squalid homeless camps have proliferated in Portland and beyond, and as the treatment and recovery options Oregonians thought they were voting for failed to materialize, many residents have changed their views. Increasingly, they are saying that drug decriminalization hasn’t worked, and many believe that nibbling around the edges will not be enough to reverse the damage.
“I do think there are a lot of people like me, left of center, who are realizing it was a mistake,” said Lisa Schroeder, a downtown Portland restaurant owner who voted for Measure 110. “If I could turn back time and repeal Measure 110 tomorrow, I would do it.”
Critics of Measure 110 who spoke with National Review said they believe most Oregonians, even in uber progressive Portland, are coming to a similar realization — despite their good intentions, drug decriminalization has had a devastating impact on the region. An April poll found that more than 60 percent of respondents believed that the passage of Measure 110 has contributed to the increasing number of drug overdoses in the state, and that it has worsened the homeless crisis. A similar percentage, including a majority of Democrats, supported amending the law to reinstitute some criminal punishments for illegal drug users.
I note that just as progressive Oregonians are realizing that decriminalizing the use of hard drugs has been a disaster, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is moving in the opposite direction, telling an audience in New Hampshire earlier this summer, “I think in the long run, and I’m talking about over a long run period of time, decriminalization, serially, is an important part of the long run solution here… That’s gotta be part of the solution.”
This is not an either-or issue; you can look at the War on Drugs and find it counterproductive, ineffective, and turning otherwise law-abiding people into criminals simply for being curious about the feeling of getting high. You can heed the lessons of Prohibition and conclude that certain human activities can be unsavory, unpleasant, or potentially self-destructive, and should still remain legal. But you can also recognize that making something legal will increase the demand for it, and that the bad consequences of those newly-legal actions are likely to proliferate rapidly.
Sometimes human behavior surprises us. For example, many people think, or would expect, that legalizing prostitution would reduce sex trafficking. Alas, quite a few studies have found that when prostitution is legalized, it increases demand, and criminal groups and other unsavory characters move in, creating more supply with trafficked and abused prostitutes. “Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.” If legalizing prostitution indisputably reduced sex trafficking, it is likely more people would support it.
If decriminalizing hard drugs made places like Oregon safer and more pleasant places to live, more people would sign off on that change in the laws. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be the case. Ryan’s report is chock full of jaw-dropping and disturbing figures and anecdotes. “Portland police investigated a record number of drug-overdose deaths in the city. This year, they topped that record in early August.” “Oregon topped the nation in the percent of its population that misuses prescription opioids (4.46 percent) and uses meth (1.93 percent), and was third in the nation for the percent of its population that had a serious mental illness in the past year (7.15 percent).” A Portland drug counselor tells Ryan he encounters about one dead body per week on the streets. And the promised expansion in treatment and addiction facilities hasn’t materialized.
Decriminalization has given the state all of the downsides of much more widespread drug use and addiction, and few if any of the promised upsides. In the end, what Americans really want is fewer people succumbing to addiction and ruining their lives, and dying of overdoses. We’ll support whichever policy generates the best results in reality, not in theory.