An impending decision in Oregon to recriminalize drug possession three years after it stopped being a crime in the state is expected to have a chilling effect on similar efforts in other parts of the country to treat addiction as a disease and not a crime, Carmen reports. If “people feel like public order and public safety are deteriorating around them, you will lose the citizenry and you will lose the politicians,” said Brandon Del Pozo, an adjunct professor teaching international drug policy at Georgetown University. “Nationwide now, decriminalization is going to be off the table for a while,” he said. What happened: Riding a wave of racial reckoning sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, Oregon voters decided in November 2020 to decriminalize possession of small quantities of hard drugs for personal use. Black Americans have historically been disproportionately arrested for drug-related offenses. To stop such arrests, Oregon elected to treat addiction as a public health problem instead of a problem for the police to fix. At first glance, that change now looks spectacularly bad. Drug overdose deaths spiked almost 50 percent, from 1,171 in 2021, when possession of drugs for personal use was decriminalized, to 1,683 in October 2023, according to the latest data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioids, particularly fentanyl, caused most of the deaths, according to the Oregon Health Authority. Public drug use in Portland — Oregon’s largest city — grew rampant, leading state and local leaders to declare a 90-day fentanyl emergency in January. But decriminalization advocates said the ballot measure is unfairly blamed for rising drug use and homelessness. The spike in overdose deaths and public drug use were, in their view, caused by an unaffordable housing market exacerbated by the pandemic and the arrival of illicit fentanyl on the West Coast in 2020, years after it had hit other parts of the country. Decriminalization also came at a time when the state ranked the lowest in the nation for its capacity to provide addiction treatment. And new funding for more treatment services didn’t roll out until some 18 months after decriminalization. Last month, Oregon lawmakers voted to make drug possession a crime again, with users facing up to six months in jail if they don’t take one of the several ramps provided in the new measure to seek treatment. “We knew we had to intervene in public drug use. And we needed to make sure that it wasn’t just easy to be a drug addict on the streets of Portland,” said Kate Lieber, a Democrat who’s the majority leader in the Oregon State Senate. What’s next: Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek is expected to sign the bill in the coming days.
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