[insanejudge]

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.