Psychedelics are about to become a casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis
Psychedelics are about to become a casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis
Four years ago, the state decriminalized all drugs. Now it’s trying to course-correct — and might make a mistake in the process.
States that didn't change their drug policies are also experiencing an opioid crisis.
Yeah, much has been written in the past week or two about how Oregon is misguided and it’s a knee jerk reaction. Similar to how a (relatively) small spike in violent crime recently has caused many states to introduce harsh penalties. Our crime rates are nothing like in the 80s anyway
The availability heuristic at work. Media attention (including social media) draw attention to more extreme examples of crime, and people then perceive these events as being more likely because they are more readily accessible to the mind.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
By treating all drugs as an undifferentiated category, Oregon is set to deliver a major blow to advocates of psychedelic use who don’t want to see expensive clinics and tightly controlled environments be the only legal point of access.
While regulated and supervised models for using psychedelics are showing growing promise for treating mental illness, decriminalized use allows for a much wider spectrum of user motivations — many of which have occurred for millennia — no less deserving of legal protection, from recreational and spiritual to the simple pleasure of spicing up a museum visit with a small handful of mushrooms.
Beyond the death toll, critics — fairly or unfairly — connected decriminalization to the rising visibility of drug use and homelessness in Oregon towns and cities, including open-air fentanyl markets popping up in downtown Portland.
On the whole, psychedelics are far safer than many other legally accessible substances, and the list of therapeutic, spiritual, and creative benefits seems to grow each month, from alleviating depression and addiction to combating eating disorders and helping find meaning in life.
Instead of Class E violations, personal possession of controlled substances will be considered a “drug enforcement misdemeanor,” which carries a maximum of 180 days in jail, though with a series of intervening steps designed to “deflect” individuals toward treatment rather than incarceration.
By failing to fund programs that would have trained law enforcement (who were generally skeptical of decriminalization to begin with) on how to direct drug users toward rehabilitation or designing a ticketing system that emphasized treatment information, even advocates of Measure 110 were dismayed with the form it took through implementation.
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110 was a massive failure that needs to be un-done, any issues with less problematic drugs can be handled on a one by one basis like we did with marijuana.
The measure was a good idea. The implementation was a failure. The plan included opening rehabs and encouraging/requiring addicts to get treatment if caught, but that part of the plan was never implemented.
So they never really committed to measure 110. They only tried half of it. So strange that a good idea would fail when only half of it was implemented.