It turns out that legalizing hard drugs is not a great idea. The state of Oregon has reintroduced penalties for drug use because decriminalization failed miserably. It turns out that when hard drugs are legal, people die more. Who’d have thought!?
Three years ago, Oregon “decriminalized user possession of hard drugs—including fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin—making it a noncriminal violation on par with a traffic ticket.” It offered users an option of rehab but most of them did not take up that option. Instead, overdoses skyrocketed by 61%. Overdoses from fentanyl alone surged by 600%.
The treatment program cost the state tens of millions of dollars and “only a few dozen people” used it while the rest went wild and died. This is not a compassionate drug program. It’s more cruel to let people destroy themselves. As journalist Michael Shellenberger points out in his book “San Fransicko,” when users are not forced into treatment and given free access to drugs, those in on the homeless industrial complex will say that “the experiment was a success but the patients died.” That’s not a success, is it?
