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Measure 110 did two things: - recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the tick

by dminor 3y ago

Measure 110 did two things: - recreational drug possession became a ticketable offense, similar to traffic violations. You have the choice of fighting the ticket or going to treatment - funded treatment with $300mm from cannabis taxes The problem is Oregon took years to decide who to give the treatment money to. Only last year did they actually start funding treatment. In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet. Essentially drug use was entirely ignored for a couple years. So is measure 110 a failure? It's too soon to say. Certainly the rollout has been. One unintended consequence is that Oregon has no law against public drug use, leaving this issue to cities/counties. If they don't have such a law, public drug use is essentially legal, since police used to rely on possession to stop it. One thing that has gone right is the reduction of the burden on the court system. The state saved about $40mm over the first 3 years.

yowzadave 3y ago
This general story outline is very common: some initiative that has a good idea at core has poor execution; it “fails” in its popular perception; the initiative’s ideological opponents claim that the failure is a result of the original idea being bad. Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea. There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike. Bad execution kills good ideas!
anon291 3y ago
> In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet. I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it. Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them
- freedomben 3y ago
  Where are you getting those numbers from?
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
Also just for some context, a perennial problem in Oregon is that many of the people in government agencies are opposed to the majority view of Oregonians. One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction. Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown. And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine. So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Heavy trucks clog I5 and crack the freeways into rubble. An efficient and environmentally friendly solution is to incentivize long haul containers to be shipped by rail.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
This thing where decisions are made too early, too polar-ly: this rush to judgement & condemnation feels like one of the most damned & sad trends, such a strong sap of societies good energies. There are some more known cases, but not being so sure to rush into negative judgement feels like such a relieving positive sign, is so much what I seek as a trust marker.
corethree 3y ago
What is a failure is legalizing the use of drugs. You're getting into the technicalities. When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.
scheeseman486 3y ago
Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored). If I weren't so ready to lean on incompetence as the most likely reason, I would think it's sabotage.
- api 3y ago
  Governments aren’t really great at anything except law, police, and military. All they have is a hammer. It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    What you say is true, but mostly about the US government. Other governments seem to have much more state capacity.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    Anglo governments are especially bad with this. In general Anglo governments have a huge problem with trying to run government on the cheap operationally but inflating their budgets for projects and tort defense. They try to keep taxes low to appease their citizens but when new infrastructure or systems need to be built, they hire contractors who are less efficient than on-site dedicated staff and can be paid for with a 10/20/30 year tax increase. Instead of relying on a large bureaucracy to create ministerial due process, they rely on tort reform and an army of expensive lawyers and unclear judicial processes instead. The end result is a lack of state capacity. In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)
    - 3y ago
0xpgm 3y ago
The article says a police officer stopped arresting people and started handing out tickets to a drug rehab helpline once the measure went into effect. He stopped a few months later because it felt like a waste of time, as so few were following through. It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding. The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I don't know what percentage of addicts want treatment, but I understand that the treatment centers in Portland metro are very hard to get into because they are so busy. Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-crisis-representative-pettersen https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
I don’t think cities have any control over felonies at all, they can just issue civil fines and misdemeanors, or is it different in Oregon?
insanejudge 3y ago
fully agree on the failure of the rollout. There's also going to be issues with rolling anything out involving medical treatment into our gutted public health system and fragmented private system, so it has to be done through a lengthy (and apparently trivially abused) system of private organizations applying for the money, but the new treatment infrastructure should have been at least somewhat in place before changing the laws. Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion. In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility. The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here. It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization. IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.

by dminor 3y ago

yowzadave 3y ago

This general story outline is very common: some initiative that has a good idea at core has poor execution; it “fails” in its popular perception; the initiative’s ideological opponents claim that the failure is a result of the original idea being bad. Just a cautionary tale about how execution can be equally as important as being right about the main idea. There are many examples I could cite for this pattern, but one simple one: the street that runs past my apartment was adapted to provide separate bike lanes. Great! But it was done in a non-sensical way, resulting in a one-way road that dead-ends into another one-way road, requiring cyclists to cross from one side of the street to the other in the middle of the intersection, and motorists who continually violate the posted signs and turn through the flexible barriers. Now everybody hates the new road, cyclists and drivers alike. Bad execution kills good ideas!

anon291 3y ago

> In the meantime, police hadn't been writing tickets, since the treatment options didn't actually exist yet. I mean it doesn't really matter, because even if they have treatment options less than 1% of the ones they write tickets to actually do anything about it. Here's how it goes. The drug user gets a ticket and has to either pay a fine or go to rehab. I think less than 100 people, out of thousands of tickets, decided to actually even call the number to get information on the rehab program. It doesn't matter thaht they don't exist because no one wants them

freedomben 3y ago
Where are you getting those numbers from?

jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago

Also just for some context, a perennial problem in Oregon is that many of the people in government agencies are opposed to the majority view of Oregonians. One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction. Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown. And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine. So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.

WalterBright 3y ago
Heavy trucks clog I5 and crack the freeways into rubble. An efficient and environmentally friendly solution is to incentivize long haul containers to be shipped by rail.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

This thing where decisions are made too early, too polar-ly: this rush to judgement & condemnation feels like one of the most damned & sad trends, such a strong sap of societies good energies. There are some more known cases, but not being so sure to rush into negative judgement feels like such a relieving positive sign, is so much what I seek as a trust marker.

corethree 3y ago

What is a failure is legalizing the use of drugs. You're getting into the technicalities. When you lower law enforcement surrounding addictive drugs to a state where it's basically equivalent to legalizing drugs and you take this action independent of other actions like treatment and other stuff, you get net bad effects to society.

scheeseman486 3y ago

Every time I read about how "decriminalization of X was a failure" it's because the governmental bodies responsible didn't properly set up the support structures and procedures that were meant to mitigate the problems that arise (or more accurately, already exist but are ignored). If I weren't so ready to lean on incompetence as the most likely reason, I would think it's sabotage.

api 3y ago
Governments aren’t really great at anything except law, police, and military. All they have is a hammer. It’s pretty clear that just decriminalizing very hard drugs doesn’t work without something else, but governments lack institutional expertise in anything else.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  What you say is true, but mostly about the US government. Other governments seem to have much more state capacity.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  Anglo governments are especially bad with this. In general Anglo governments have a huge problem with trying to run government on the cheap operationally but inflating their budgets for projects and tort defense. They try to keep taxes low to appease their citizens but when new infrastructure or systems need to be built, they hire contractors who are less efficient than on-site dedicated staff and can be paid for with a 10/20/30 year tax increase. Instead of relying on a large bureaucracy to create ministerial due process, they rely on tort reform and an army of expensive lawyers and unclear judicial processes instead. The end result is a lack of state capacity. In the end all of this probably ends up costing society more, not to mention the eroding trust in the state, but it keeps getting politicians reelected because Anglo citizens hate paying taxes. I do activism for transit and pedestrian safety in the US and I see the desire for low taxes to cross almost all party and class lines (though I admit I live in a Blue area.)
  - 3y ago

0xpgm 3y ago

The article says a police officer stopped arresting people and started handing out tickets to a drug rehab helpline once the measure went into effect. He stopped a few months later because it felt like a waste of time, as so few were following through. It doesn't seem to me that there are any who actually sought help but were held back by lack of available funding. The sense I get from the article is that very few addicts are in a state of mind to voluntarily seek help.

ajmurmann 3y ago
I don't know what percentage of addicts want treatment, but I understand that the treatment centers in Portland metro are very hard to get into because they are so busy. Edit: this is an interesting podcast episode with a Congresswoman from Colorado about the problem. Her own mother was addicted to opioids and she talks about how hard it was to get treatment for her mom's addiction. Her mom wanted treatment badly and despite her being a prominent politician it was extremely hard to get the treatment. Meanwhile insurance and the government kept paying huge amounts of money the many times her mom overdosed: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-crisis-representative-pettersen https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-fixing-the-opioid-cri...

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

I don’t think cities have any control over felonies at all, they can just issue civil fines and misdemeanors, or is it different in Oregon?

insanejudge 3y ago

fully agree on the failure of the rollout. There's also going to be issues with rolling anything out involving medical treatment into our gutted public health system and fragmented private system, so it has to be done through a lengthy (and apparently trivially abused) system of private organizations applying for the money, but the new treatment infrastructure should have been at least somewhat in place before changing the laws. Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion. In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility. The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here. It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization. IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.