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I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...
Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.
Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.
As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.
Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.
By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes
At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.
Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.
This sort of reminds me of teh debate over statistical trends right after somewhere legalizes prostitution.
I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions, and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.
Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...
The long-term vision is that we move to a model of treatment rather than criminalization, and lifting stigmas and fear of arrest makes it easier for people to find treatment or be targeted for it. But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?
The long-term vision under legalization is that reputable, regulated corporations can start selling safe versions of drugs, complete with doctor-approved dosing instructions and Surgeon's general warnings and hotlines to call for help on the side of the package, instead of people getting unsafe street drug fro dealers that are incentivized to push them into more and more addictive shit. But did the measure even make it legal for corporations to operate in such a way, let alone have they actually started doing so?
The long-term vision is that people growing up under legalization can seek treatment and talk to people about the problems early in the process, and be less stigmatized and less pushed into a criminal part of society, and therefore make better decision and have better average outcomes. But what we're seeing today is mostly existing long-term heavy addicts suddenly having an easier time getting their fix, not anything about long-term trends for people growing up in the system.
And, of course, if a particular vice is legal one place and illegal everywhere surrounding it, lots of 'enthusiasts' will travel/move there to indulge, tainting the statistics.
Again, obviously this data is not good for the legalization argument, it is in fact evidence against it. But there's lots of reasons to expect short-term reactions to be bad in a way that the long-term equilibrium might not be. Especially in the case where you want to replace a bad solution to a problem with a good solution to a problem, but have so far only taken the step of removing the bad solution, which is mostly what I think is happening here.
I'm still optimistic about long-term trends, particularly if people actually devote the resources and effort into installing the new solution.
How do we define "short-term" reactions? A year? A decade? A century? How do we disambiguate from the highly convinient and entirely degenerate "n + 10 years, where n is equal to the current time since the policy's introduction"?
Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?
If implementing a policy locally will cause it to fail disastrously and the only way to do it properly is to implement it globally, isn't it on the people supporting the policy to know this ahead of time and not to push for local implementation?
I would certainly agree that complete drug legalization dropping OD deaths 50% is not a realistic expectation. Of course, I am not an advocate for total drug legalization. What did the advocates expect? What predictions did they make about what their policy would achieve? were those predictions accurate? If not, why should people trust their new predictions?
If these steps were necessary for the policy to succeed, how did the policy address them, and when it became clear that they would not or could not be addressed, why was the policy not promptly reversed?
...Every point you make superficially resembles a valid critique, but at no point do you explain why these issues were not foreseen and accounted for, or why the policy was implemented despite them. Would you expect this policy, as implemented, to dramatically increase drug deaths, drug abuse and human misery generally? I would, because I think the policy itself is ideological lunacy spouted by idiots who have no understanding of how the world and humans in it function. If you think the general idea was good but the implementation sucked, it behooves you and people like you to make that clear in advance, and to fight like hell to prevent the bad implementation from happening. Because what actually happened here, it seems to me, is that a standard pillar of Progressive ideology was implemented under favorable conditions by true believers, promptly failed catastrophically, and that you are now explaining why we shouldn't learn anything actionable from the highly visible and extremely dramatic results. This is probably the best possible play, given the givens of situation and commitments, but one feels justified in pointing out that it is not a very good play in an objective sense.
Meanwhile, other questions linger. How many people has this policy killed? How many lives has it ruined? Where does it sit on the scale of contemporary American atrocities, in a concrete sense? I have no actual idea, but I'd be interested to know. It's very easy to be carried along by the journo-engineered affect of a story while establishing zero grounding to what the facts of the story actually mean in concrete terms. This story describes a lot of bad things, but "a lot" is not very specific. Maybe it really is not that big of a deal! But if it is a big deal, people should be able to recognize the bigness, right?
If Reds implemented a policy with similar consequences that you feel were entirely predictable, would you take a similar long view? How does this compare, in concrete terms, to the Red repeal of Roe v Wade? Better? Worse? Different, and if so, why? I'm sure if Roe has resulted in a dramatic, undeniable uptick in horrifying outcomes, that information should not be hard to find. If, in an objective sense, this policy killed more people than the repeal of Roe, should we consider it a worse policy than the repeal of Roe? If people nonetheless considered this no big deal and Roe a five-alarm emergency, is that interesting information? And obviously the facts could go the other way, and the reverse would be true as well, and Roe is a national policy versus a state policy in this case, etc, etc, but I imagine you get the drift.
How likely do you think it that some other location within the US is going to try the same policy again, and are you willing to predict the results of a reproduction? I personally think it's quite likely, given the long history of our social systems proving incapable to learn from experience, never mind example.
I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.
Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.
(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)
Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)
Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.
Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.
Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.
Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.
The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?
My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.
I think this reasoning fails to get off the ground, for reasons that may be coincident with what FC is getting at. "Prohibition of X" is different for different values of X. What is the nature of X? How does it come to be? Where? By who? What is its size? Use? Alternatives? Etc. That is, people have prohibited alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, small guns, large guns, of course you can throw in F-16s and nuclear weapons, or even just Chinese drywall. The list goes on. People have also tried prohibiting things that are less than tangible, like encryption or killing babies, or all sorts of stuff. I see almost no reason why there should be a single schema that dictates how every possible prohibition of every possible X will (not) work. Different things are different. Some may be extremely difficult to prohibit; others may be relatively easier. It is likely impossible to do any with 100% success everywhere, because 100% success is just not a thing in law/public policy (I guess there's probably some guy out there who is just really determined to bring over some Chinese drywall... and for Sagan's sake, we can't even get to zero killed babies), so we usually have to use some other metrics for success.
I accept that you are 95% right about the big picture. The huge difference between coffee and fentanyl is the only thing that really matters.
Notice though, that I zoomed in on the specific issue of timing. Who dares to doubt an intervention that works well for the first year? I dare.
Looking at my reasoning, we see that it is mostly about social dynamics. Friends put out feelers to friends. The black market slowly becomes monetized and professionalized. Since it is illegal to offer bribes to policemen, there are several years of nudges and winks before police corruption takes hold. The social dynamics set a slow time scale that is not obviously related to specifics of what has been prohibited.
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