Plus: How to Get Drug Policing Right
Proponents of “decriminalizing” drugs claimed that doing so would help get sky-high overdose death rates under control. Decriminalization, they said, would allow drug users to come out of the shadow of criminalization to seek the treatment they needed. Oregon, British Columbia, and Washington State adopted such measures in North America’s first experiment with drug decriminalization, replacing criminal penalties for possession with fines or other civil remedies.
But in the last couple of months, these audacious experiments in drug policy have collapsed. In April, Oregon officially repealed key parts of Measure 110, the 2020 ballot initiative that had made possession of small quantities of all drugs — including methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl — a non-arrestable offense. And in early May, Oregon’s Canadian neighbor, British Columbia, amended its own previously liberalized rules, once again making the use of drugs in public an arrestable offense. This was after Washington had ended its own short-lived experiment last year.
To be fair, the research on the effects of decriminalization in Oregon and Washington, specifically, has been ambiguous. Dueling peer-reviewed studies using slightly different data find that decriminalization either increased or had no effect on the overdose death rate. A recent preprint paper argues that there really was no effect by controlling for the level of fentanyl penetration in the two states’ markets—statistically downplaying the effect of decriminalization on the spread of fentanyl.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Public
______________________
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Based on a recent report.
Photo by Natalia Shabasheva/Getty Images