[badlucklottery]

Part of the problem (as I understand it) is Oregon didn't really have the actual treatment capacity to make their decriminalization approach work when the law first rolled out.

Oregon has since poured tons of money into treatment centers and capacity is much, much better. But it unfortunately appears to be too little too late w/r/t public sentiment on decriminalization. Hopefully the next state to try it can learn from Oregon's mistakes and make sure their plan includes ramping capacity beforehand instead of simultaneously.

[cameldrv]

People say that treatment is the solution, but a fentanyl or meth addiction is like being involved in a terrible car crash. You give people back surgery and physical therapy and accommodations at work, but it's extremely expensive and most of them will never be the same afterwards, and a lot of them die. This was the situation in the 60s with cars, and it's the situation today with serious drugs. You have to prevent the car crash and you have to prevent addiction to these drugs, or you wind up with a ton of broken people that we can't really fix.

[Gud]

Yes, and a huge part of that is treating users of heavy drugs(coke, opiates)while they are still functioning individuals.

That means removing the stigma around the usage, accept that these individuals either will quit using these substances themselves by supporting them, or that they will be users until their (probably) untimely passing by again supporting them.

Making it a police matter is not the solution.

[DougN7]

That’s a great analogy

[somethoughts]

I wonder if its partly an issue when there is a combination of :

- decriminalization of drug use

- free access to treatment centers

- lax laws regarding unauthorized camping

that would a large number of dedicated drug users to migrate from out of state to Oregon (or whichever state tries it) from across the entirety of the US.

This would easily swamp any treatment facility capacity plan.

[StewardMcOy]

There's a nugget of truth that Oregon's decriminalization drew people to the state. However, free access to treatment centers wasn't part of that. Badlucklottery is correct that Oregon did not have the treatment programs, even for the people already living in the state.

And there's a lot of reasons for this. Measure 110, which decriminalized possession and usage of drugs, envisioned funding treatment with money from the tax on legal marijuana sales. There are a variety of reasons it failed, but the tl;dr is that it took $100 million from other state programs handed it to the state, and said, "Here you go. Create treatment programs." And the state replied, "But how do we do that?" The legislative branches of the Oregon state government is generally incompetent at administering programs it's been running for years (e.g. public defense). They had no idea how to even go about creating a treatment program or what one even looked like.

And Measure 110 also created a weird bureaucratic structure for dispersing the funds across multiple entities. IIRC 10% would go to the cities. And there's some 200+ cities. I'm sure they tried to allocate the money proportionally, but imagine being a small or medium sized city and the government says, "here's $30,000 for you to establish a drug treatment program." What are you going to do with that? Probably look at it, confused, and put it in a bank account where you'll forget about it.

There were lots of other reasons the attempts to establish treatment programs failed. NIMBYism of people not wanting treatment centers near them, for one. For another, few people ever actually expressed interest in treatment, which became a topic of much time-consuming debate about why we're spending this money on programs addicts don't want. And part of that was because the police basically never enforced the part of the law where they would ticket public users. The users would either pay a fine or call a substance abuse hotline. There are multiple reasons the police never felt it was worth their time to hand out the citations, and that's a topic for another time, but the fact that the treatment centers were being funded by tax money that went to law enforcement before decriminalization probably didn't help.

So yeah, can't swamp treatment facilities that don't exist.

[lotsofpulp]

The second any state or city or whatever non federal entity pours the enormous resources necessary to rehabilitate opioid or meth addicts (if even possible with sufficiently high probability of success), other locales will send their addicts to there and reap the rewards of lower taxes.