"Controversial Take: Cities Shouldn’t Let Drug Addicts Rot in the Street"
Jesse Singal on why "Criminal Justice Reform Is Good, But, Like Everything, It Requires Common Sense And Moderation"
My friend Jesse Singal just published "Criminal Justice Reform Is Good, But, Like Everything, It Requires Common Sense And Moderation."
Anyone hanging around this feed knows I've been writing about Measure 110 this week, in Drugs, 1 - Oregon, 0 and Oregon Votes to Re-Criminalize Drugs. Jesse’s piece prompted some additional thoughts:
It should not be a “Controversial take: cities shouldn’t let drug addicts rot in the street,” and yet somehow, it became one. I’ve been accused of being a reactionary and a bootlicker when I pointed out Portland’s full decriminalization of drugs WAS NOT HELPING ADDICTS. I believe it was the aim of the voters, who in 2020 passed Ballot Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act with 59% of the vote, I am not sure I believe the backers of the law much had the addict in mind. I believe their goal was, as Jesse talks about, criminal justice reform. Which is fine and laudable. We always can do better. And I agree that people should not be locked up for possessing small amounts of drugs. They should be offered help, which is what voters were told would happen under 110. That's not what happened, for a variety of reasons.
1. The roll-out was terrible and money did not get to addicts for more than a year.
2. There was zero ban on public usage. To suggest there should be was met with accusations of intolerance, racism, cop-loving and etc.
And 3, which is really driving me insane: the contention that people should not be allowed to suffer and rot and die in the streets was met with condescension, “Gotta let people put what they want in their bodies, Nancy.” Okay, but am I as a citizen and a taxpayer obliged to abet this plan of action? To celebrate it?
Drug Policy Alliance, which pumped an estimated $5 million into getting Measure 110 passed in 2023, put out the following messages when Oregon lawmakers sought to amend parts of Measure 110: that "Oregonians overwhelmingly voted for Measure 110," which strikes me as a sort of "you break it you buy it" position, and, that "forcing people into treatment is unethical and ineffective." As opposed to what?
I've interviewed addicts living in tents, girls getting sexually abused; I’ve asked, how is Portland helping? Sometimes people bring water, I was told. Oh, and straws and foil and syringes. As for food, health care, housing help, people are on their own, people who become exponentially less able to help themselves. Is this the best we can do? There is a woeful paucity of available drug treatment; there should be more, and while I do not have the answers as to how you coerce people into treatment, I believe not even trying to do so - by maintaining that doing so is "unethical and ineffective" - is cynical and cruel. As I recently wrote:
"The 'autonomy above all' argument; that those who choose to use and perhaps kill themselves with drugs have every right to do so without state interference, makes me wonder whether the overriding goal of some Measure 110 supporters is to get law enforcement out of people's lives, with those in the throes of addiction as the pawns du jour."
I don’t want a police state. I want a world that places human lives over ideology. Measure 110 did not, for all its ostensible good intentions, do that. And let’s just put a button on it, shall we? There was a rep from DPA on the Portugal fact-finding mission Oregon officials took in 2023, seeking what they could learn from that country's harm reduction model, and conveniently forgetting, maybe, that law enforcement is involved in every step of that country's policies.
“It’s apples and oranges,” the DPA rep said to a reporter, meaning, there was no way to compare the Oregon's law to Portugal’s, but, you know, gotta break some eggs.
And who is behaving unethically here?
Like most Portland activists who've made the houseless their cause, proponents of drug decriminalization in the Rose City employ thought-stopping rhetorical tactics that have the effect of shaming and silencing critics. Sometimes they even use the same ones, which is not surprising since there is overlap in their ideologies.
Hence, homeless activists and their allies in the media rail against local government's efforts to "coerce" campers into relocating to Portland's so-called safe rest villages. Likewise, activists who oppose the recent re-criminalization of hard drugs are trying to keep the battle alive by stirring up public opinion against "forcing" addicts into treatment. The audience for this rhetoric must be liberals and the sort of elected officials who would be mortified if anyone believed they were in favor of strong-arming the most helpless among us.
Does it ever occur to those nice people that activists' manipulation of language is coercing them into tolerating social conditions that they surely would have considered unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago?
One lasting consequence of Measure 110 has been to shift the Overton window for discussions about drug policy in Oregon. While the notion of decriminalizing (why don't we just call it what was: "legalizing"?) the possession of personal quantities of hard drugs likely would have shocked all but a few of the most radical Oregonians 20 or 30 years ago, the M110 experiment has had the effect of making talk of re-criminalizing the same drugs sound transgressive in some quarters today. Likewise, prolonged exposure to the scolds who claim without offering proof that making addicts go into treatment against their will is coercive and ineffective may have caused segments of the public to abandon contrary views they used to hold.
The proper response to attempts to quash critical thinking is to embrace the thing we're being accused of doing. Yes, I do want to see the homeless coerced off the streets and other places they are camping provided it is done peacefully, legally and in compliance with their constitutional rights and they are offered adequate substitute shelter. Time has shown that some houseless people will not pack up voluntarily. Yes, I do favor applying measured pressure to addicts to enter treatment so long as applicable medical and ethical standards are observed. There are human zombies in our midst who will never get there on their own.
In his book "San Fransico: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, " Michael Shellenberger posits that activists view homeless people and addicts as the marginalized victims of systems of oppression. Perhaps that is why progressives are so fixated on honoring addicts purely notional autonomy. In activists' peculiar world view, addicts' supposed autonomy is the only thing that hasn't been taken from them. It would seem their philosophy doesn't admit the possibility that members of an oppressed identity group can oppress themselves by the poor choices they make.
Your voice on this issue has been remarkable. So well done. Thank you.