It’s the first law in US that decriminalizes small amounts of drugs

This is interesting.

Firstly, I love that states inherently have the power to set their own laws. This allowed Oregon to be a great large scale experiment for drug policy.

I saw some interesting quotes:

But estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show, among the states reporting data, Oregon had the highest increase in synthetic opioid overdose fatalities when comparing 2019 and the 12-month period ending June 30, a 13-fold surge from 84 deaths to more than 1,100.

Despite public perception, the law has made some progress by directing $265 million dollars of cannabis tax revenue toward standing up the state’s new addiction treatment infrastructure.

I guess since only cannabis is sold, it’s the only taxable substance in the mix.

Some lawmakers have suggested focusing on criminalizing public drug use rather than possession. Alex Kreit, assistant professor of law at Northern Kentucky University and director of its Center on Addiction Law and Policy, said such an approach could help curb visible drug use on city streets but wouldn’t address what’s largely seen as the root cause: homelessness.

Homelessness leads to drug use? Or drug use leads to homelessness? Couldn’t it be either?

In the first year after the law took effect in February 2021, only 1% of people who received citations for possession sought help via the hotline, state auditors found.

Critics of the law say this doesn’t create an incentive to seek treatment.

Thoughts:

  • Maybe just start with cannabis and see how that goes? Or do we really need to progress collectively to heroine, meth, cocaine, MDMA?

  • Is the major public health crisis the use of more illicit drugs, or overdoses? Is possible that recreational use of cocaine/MDMA/others wouldn’t be as big of a crisis as meth and fentanyl?

  • Should heroine be legal for use?

  • Should MDMA be legal for use?

  • Should cocaine be legal for use?

( I am not advocating for or against use of these substances with this post. Posted for discussion/interest. Questions are posed for discussion. )

  • admiralteal@kbin.social
    8·
    9 months ago

    You can set up a justice system that is designed to reduce harm and to make the victims whole.

    But doing so seems to be pretty incompatible with seeing up a penal system designed to harshly punish offenders. Because harsh punishments do not seem to be effective at preventing bad actions that create victims.

    Especially in the US, we’ve made the choice to have a penal system instead of a justice system. And so our system does not exact justice, it just passes down punishments.

    I’m for drug decriminalization and all the various kinds of harm mitigation strategies to make drugs safer to use. But I also will admit without hesitation that modern synthetic opioids and amphetamines are black holes that consume a person’s entire being. If we want widespread drug decriminalization we need to do a lot of other side work to stop people from being spaghettified. We need housing and healthcare and an expectation of a baseline dignified life for everyone because if your life is going to be without dignity either way you may as well be injecting heroin while doing it.