Under the new law, possession of small amounts of drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine will be as a misdemeanor and punishable by up to six months in jail.
Under the new law, possession of small amounts of drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine will be as a misdemeanor and punishable by up to six months in jail.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed a bill Monday restoring criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of hard drugs, reversing a first-in-the-nation law that advocates had hoped would help quell a deepening addiction and overdose crisis.
Under the new law, the possession of small amounts of drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine will be classified as a misdemeanor and punishable by up to six months in jail.
Drug treatment will be offered as an alternative to criminal penalties.
Exactly. The elected officials of Oregon failed and now they are covering for their failure by undoing the will of the voters instead of enacting the will of the voters.
Possession of heroin and methamphetamine should absolutely be legal in my opinion, but the legalization will only work with a universal healthcare system also in place. It's not even about people who get addicted after taking them recreationally. Drug addiction, especially opioid addiction, is often about treating chronic pain, not getting pleasure out of it. People either got addicted to them from their doctors getting them hooked on them in the first place and they can no longer afford to get them by prescription or they resorted to them out of desperation because they couldn't afford to see a doctor about the chronic pain in the first place.
And then there are the people who resort to these substances because they have no other way to escape, even temporarily, from the horrible conditions that come from being poor in America.
Sure, there are wealthy drug addicts too, but they aren't going to be the ones being put in jail over this.
The wealthy ones still get good quality cocaine without having to worry that they're getting an accidental speedball. That's even hard as a middle class casual user.
Drug decriminalization is a great way to bring people back from the fringes of society. But it only really works if you invest in their rehabilitation. previously we were attacking them for trying to escape their poor life circumstances through whatever means available to them. Stopping that is great, but is only half the equation. It's like we have a victim of a random shooting, and all we've done is stop external bleeding. The hard part, the rehabilitative part, means putting in the effort to stop internal bleeding, pull out the bullet, and prescribe antibiotics. I was just reading on another Lemmy comment section about how much retired Military people have come to rely on the basic income provided to them through the armed forces. They were talking about how much it helped them, and how it should be given to everyone. I'm in agreement.
When Sweden solved homelessness, they did it by giving people what they needed to survive. An apartment, healthcare, help.
The Atlantic had a good article on this a couple weeks ago (no paywall). It sure feels like a move in the wrong direction, but the authors note Oregon's overdose deaths grew way faster than the rest of the country after decriminalization. Their take is that Oregon already had pretty good laws place, and that a little bit of a legal threat can help to encourage addicts to seek treatment (and that the treatment system needs to be better funded).
Private prison needs workers? Why else would you send someone to jail for a gram of coke and 6 fucking months. Its not that they will get better in jail, at least not in the us.
“We were too progressive,” said Jovannis Velez, an outreach worker with Recovery Works Northwest, which operates treatment centers throughout Oregon. “Society wasn’t ready for it.”
Not it's not. The problem is that Oregon only did half of the work and never invested in public health solutions to handle drug addiction (as the article points out). This is not about being progressive or conservative, it's about half-assing policies.
If someone tried to build a house without a roof the problem is not that houses are too progressive but that the guy building the house is an idiot.
Yeah, this. It’s the story the world over when neoliberalism tries to be progressive, because neoliberalism is quite happy to be progressive when it doesn’t cost anything.
Lax drug enforcement laws were great! You could spend less on police and incarceration, and it’s fine since the fallout from drug related crimes only affects poor people anyway.
Once it started to affect rich people, though, then the calculus starts, and there's no way to effectively monetize treatment, mental health care and public housing, so enforcement it is!
Right, society wasn't progressive enough to follow through on the drug treatment part. Now they are back to criminal punishment and still lacking enough drug treatment so it is worse than it was with it decriminalized for society even if it 'solves' drug use in public areas.
I heard they never implemented the corresponding treatment centers because of Covid or something. In any case, this isn't something that's going to be fixed without a boatload of money....it's too bad the Sacklers are so poor, otherwise I would say they should pay for it, on account of how they did this to our communities.