March 4, 2024 - 1:15pm
In 2020, Oregon became the first US state to decriminalise the possession of small amounts of hard drugs, including heroin. The law, known as Measure 110, was passed by ballot (i.e. a referendum) with 58% of voters in favour. Four years on, the law has just been repealed following a growing backlash against a surge in crime, antisocial behaviour and overdose deaths.
If Oregon’s radical experiment was a famous victory for the liberalisers, then its unravelling is a severe setback. Indeed, it may be a turning point in the war against the war on drugs.
Of course, there are rival explanations for the situation in Oregon: the impact of Covid-19 and lockdowns, elevated levels of lawlessness after the George Floyd protests, the housing crisis, and — most obviously — the opioid epidemic. However, these factors have been felt across America.
So which of the 50 states suffered the highest increase in opioid deaths? It was, of course, Oregon, where fatalities rose by 1,530% since 2020. It turns out that fostering a culture of public drug abuse and addiction is a really bad way of preparing for the depredations of the fentanyl trade.
It’s a lesson to the rest of the world, especially countries with reason to fear that the opioid crisis is heading their way. Fentanyl is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. But across Europe, the death toll is measured in mere hundreds. That’s not because European drug users are more discerning, nor European drug dealers more ethical; rather, the difference comes down to a hugely underappreciated factor in drug policy, which is availability.
As regards synthetic opioids, Europe has yet to be flooded. But that could soon change. Fentanyl isn’t just potent, with effects 50 times stronger than heroin: it is also cheaply manufactured, readily transported and easily added to other drugs. From a European point of view, it is a public health catastrophe waiting to happen.
Those on the progressive side of the drugs debate were, until very recently, on the front foot. For instance, the former lord chancellor, Charlie Falconer, could call for the legalisation of all drugs without being being run out of town on a rail. Indeed, he received a respectful hearing.
Though ministers haven’t rushed toward total decriminalisation, bien pensant opinion leans in favour of liberalisation. When the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, set up his London Drugs Commission in 2022, he asked Falconer to chair it.
And yet, almost two years later, the Mayor isn’t exactly rushing out its conclusions. Could it be that the experience of Oregon, and other liberal states, is giving him pause for thought? After all, there aren’t many votes for replicating the degradation of Portland and San Francisco on the streets of London. To give another example, Portugal — once a place of pilgrimage for reformers and the inspiration for Measure 110 — isn’t looking so good these days.
In any case, fentanyl is a game-changer. Even if the principle of respecting individual autonomy extends all the way to hard drugs, there are limits. In this case, the duty of prohibition cannot be shirked.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThe war on drugs can never be” won”. The damage done by inappropriate drug consumption can only be contained. So it is asinine to argue that because drug abuse, and drug related crime, exist, that the war on drugs has failed. Drug abusers are a danger to themselves and, crucially, a threat and a cost to others, most particularly to their families and children. Society cannot afford to be neutral on this point. Anyone who suggests the decades long war on drugs failed should look at the consequences of just giving up on fighting it – not just on levels of theft, homelessness, family breakdown and pressure on health services, but also on economic productivity. This is not just a public health issue – fundamentally society needs to defend itself, by treating illicit drug production, distribution, sale and abuse as crimes, in some cases promoted by hostile foreign powers.
The war on drugs seem to be working in Singapore. In 2020 there were 19 drug-related deaths in the country (well that is if you don’t count the 17 drug dealers that were hanged as “drug-related”).
Singapore is a tiny place. I’m sure that any Singaporean who wants to take drugs goes somewhere else to do it.
I would always take statistics produced in Singapore with a pinch of salt because they rarely count their temporality migrant underclass
The war on drugs is like the war on rats. If politicians had grasped this analogy, they would never have stopped this war.
So you think that if the “War on Drugs” stopped, everyone in the world would be doing Fentanyl in a short space of time?
Except the ‘war on’ has failed. Like Prohibition and the war on poverty before it, it succeeded mostly in creating a massive criminal enterprise while dramatically expanding the power of govt and weaponizing law enforcement agencies to military-like standards. Otherwise, the problem was not arrested; it got worse.
First, people whined about unfair prosecutions and disproportionate arrests. Today, not only is this ‘war’ not being prosecuted, neither is its fallout, at least not in the US. Those charged with solving the issue, or mitigating it, have far more incentive to perpetuate it.
Amen to society defending itself. This is how Singapore sees it. Drug dealers are coming for our children’s lives and we should hang the big dealers.
Even if you do, people are still going to take drugs. It is human nature.
Legalisation / decriminalisation of drugs is a brilliant policy as long as nobody ever actually tries it.
All you had to do to prove that progressive drugs policy is so brilliant is point to how badly traditional criminal justice approaches to drugs policy are doing at “winning the war on drugs”. So, a bit like a professional sportsman who gets better in everyone’s perception when he’s not actually playing, it is assumed the opposite approach must be the right one.
The problem is of course that A does not follow B. Criminal justice approaches may not be winning the war on drugs (largely in my view because such a war can’t be won) but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing the best in impossible circumstances or that progressive approaches will necessarily do better.
Unfortunately for pretty much everyone, theory turned into practice with some pretty disastrous results, which were nevertheless entirely predicable to everyone not ideologically committed to excusing their abject failure.
Don’t worry, they will be justified. It’s like with communism – everyone before us made mistakes, but we are sure we will succeed
One of my favourite quotes about Communism:
“A Communist is someone standing on a pile of skulls promising it will all be different next time.”
Exactly!
Nearly every Left Wing policy produces the Cobra Effect in the Law of Unintended Consequences.
A war on drugs can be won we just haven’t hard enough
And we don’t legalise murder because making it a criminal offence has failed to stop it
“ Fentanyl is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.”
But American criminal prosecutors prefer to focus on the effect of cow farts on the global climate.
And destroying millions of families. It’s time to have a real war against drugs and start hanging big dealers and smugglers.
Stupid post
More drug addicts are dying of overdose due to fentanyl. OK, so what. The point of legalizing drugs wasn’t to save lives or make the world better. The point was to save taxpayer dollars by putting fewer people in prison and lessening the burden on law enforcement so those resources could be used on more serious crimes. Part of the legalization movement is a grim but pragmatic ‘let them die’ mentality. If people are determined to kill themselves with drugs and it’s more expensive to stop them from doing that than to simply give up and let nature run its course, why are we doing it? When economic times get harder, choices have to be made on what we can afford and maybe protecting idiots from themselves is not something the government should be doing.
Honestly, there’s an argument to be made that fentanyl killing addicts is a net gain for society. It makes so much narrative sense that there’s probably dozens of conspiracy theories that say some government or international cabal invented fentanyl as a way to purge unproductive drug addicts from society and unburden healthcare systems that will soon be swamped with senior citizens.
As harsh as that worldview is, addicts don’t just kill themselves. They commit crime, defecate on sidewalks, smash and grab, leave infected needles around, set fires and generally destroy the communities they reside in.
They commit crime to get money to buy drugs. Would they do that if the drugs were free?
There’s something to be said for the Roman approach of simply giving the people basic sustenance and entertainment, drugs and otherwise, simply to keep them pacified. Has our society reached the point where this approach would be less expensive than what we’re doing? Honestly maybe it has.
That’s a good counterargument. Drugs are associated with all sorts of other crime. The question is how much that other crime will increase as a result of legalization. The answers are debatable.
It should reduce. For one thing, the criminals wouldn’t be selling the drugs. I mean, during Prohibition, criminals sold alcohol.
But the inconsistency with the legalization advocates, at least up in neighboring WA, is that unlike pure libertarians, they also want state-supported “injectoriums” where addicts (my bad, persons with “substance use disorder”) can be resuscitated ad infinitum, and Narcan available everywhere.
Please understand that I’m NOT advocating for a pure libertarian approach to drug abuse. Far from it; after seeing the misery that ever more progressive policies have caused in the Pacific NW, I’m on the side of maintaining laws against hard drugs, vigorously prosecuting dealers, and taking a tough love approach with addicts that would make detox/rehab the carrot and prison the stick.
If you really think that will work, you must have slept through the last 50 years.
You make a fair point. It’s one thing to leave people to their own devices and quite another to enable self-harm and basically fund social decay. I agree that’s definitely not libertarianism. Don’t ask me to explain the logic behind some of the policies of California, Oregon, and Washington. I honestly don’t think there is any.
You should be free to put what you wish into your own body, but let’s not pretend that this can occur without tradeoffs. If the war on drugs has not worked and decriminalization has not worked, then there may be no solution, just options that come with fallout.
After all, there aren’t many votes for replicating the degradation of Portland and San Francisco on the streets of London. –> SF’s problems were/are far more systemic, longer-lasting, and farther-reaching than just rampant drug use. A once-manageable homeless situation was allowed to spiral out of control, aided by prosecutors who refused to prosecute, giving license to criminals, not just abusers.
It would be a mistake to legalise drugs, I didn’t used to think that way but I’ve changed my mind. The US example is clear enough for me. Being an addict is not an identity with rights, it’s a person in need of help. I am in favour of not criminalising anyone for small amounts of personal possession they happen to get caught with. Policing efforts should be targeting dealers only. It’s the only sensible way because as others have said it’s an unwinable war that must be fought in perpetuity with the knowledge it can’t be won.
If it were legalised though and sold in shops, in theory you would have much stricter quality control on the gear being peddled. You shouldn’t end up with people doing a line of Charlie and ending up dead because a dealer has cut it full of Fentanyl. You also wouldn’t have addicts being pushed onto opioids by unscrupulous dealers who have run out of other drugs.
I’ll admit to still being undecided on drugs legislation. I think prosecuting addicts for possession is pointless, but the yanks all of nothing approach of either locking loads of them up or leaving them to fend for themselves on the streets is simply moronic.
Surely a middle ground of forcing addicts into rehab centres while coming down hard on dealers would be a much more sensible solution?
Many addicts are unable to work consistently. So where do they get the money to buy legal drugs? Don’t say the government because my tax dollars should not be used to accommodate addictions that frequently prevent users from working and paying taxes themselves. It is not compassionate to hand out needles and spaces to use drugs either. I don’t know what the answers are, but what we are doing now isn’t working.
“The duty of prohibition.”
Oh yes. The anti-saloon gang is still at it, 100 years and endless bodies later. Reee!
On the other hand, the legalization forces seem to be trapped at the moment in the “harm reduction” cul-de-sac. You don’t go out and starting handing out “safe” alcohol to the drunks on Skid Row and expect that to somehow fix the situation.
You do if they are mugging people to get the money to buy alcohol.
The “war on drugs” lost the moment it was coined, because its advocates chose a war they can’t win and maintain a liberal society. But it also loses because it doesn’t differentiate – like the writer and many commentators – on the differences between drugs. And like every other war it misunderstands the problem. Drugs are are symptom, as well as a cause, of social problems. My response is effectively the one western society used before the “war” concept: to choose the drug or narrow selection of drugs you think are more damaging and police those hard.
Whether so called “hard drugs” are legal or not, people are still going to take them. That much is a given.
Prohibition always fails. The best policybis legalisation and regulation with a view to harm minimisation. If people wish to.ppison themselves then that isn’t a problem as long as they do it in private and it afrcts nobody else. This is effectively the policy with alcohol which is legal but there is an offence of being drunk and disorderly.
A warning to Europe? When I lived in south London (Peckham) in the mid 90’s, the local police decided to be lenient with possession of cannabis and the public smoking of it. Same thing happened. It became a no go area where antisocial behaviour and petty crime went on the increase.
If you think Oregon is, or was, bad, just have a look north to British Columbia where the official response to the failed policy of “safe injection sites” and the free drugs to go with them, is simply to double down on the same policy and distribute even harder drugs.
Those statistics are horrific but they suggest something widespread which, like Sars Cov2 was the monster under the bed which scared whole rational societies to throw away hard won freedoms without a second thought. As with the virus, the risk is focused in certain areas, specific to certain known vulnerable groups and disproportionately devastating when those two collide. I’m also not sure the OP really identified why the US has been so much more vulnerable than Europe which also suggests that the statistics are really not being used accurately or in an informed manner
I really don’t get the thing about going after ‘big dealers.’
Big dealers can afford big lawyers.
They got to be big dealers because there was a market that was lucrative enough to be worth the risk of supplying.
So they’re quite motivated and able to spend big on avoiding detection.
That market can be removed quickly, by gaoling and hanging users.