Oregon recriminalizes hard drugs

Whenever I visit the small Oregon town where I grew up, I am always interested to see what has changed. A couple of years ago, I noticed a cluster of tents next to City Hall, just across from the library and post office. It was jarring. Poverty is common in rural Oregon, but this variety of homelessness was new—an urban blight had now spread throughout the state.

The consensus was that drugs were at the root of the expanding problem. Oregon legalized marijuana in 2015, and in 2020, voters overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs. The result was the tents, inhabited by those who would not or could not keep clean enough for a shelter, let alone a job and an apartment.

While dealing drugs remained nominally illegal, legalizing possession of smaller amounts made it much harder to investigate and prosecute. Add the resulting drug culture to Oregon’s general soft-on-crime approach and you get danger, disorder, and filth. None of this helped anyone, including the users—instead of jail, they were left to decline and die in tents.

Eventually, even the state’s far-left government had enough, and the state legislature moved to recriminalize hard drugs. Despite the costs of the war on drugs, it became obvious even to Oregon Democrats that legalizing drugs came with evils of its own.

After the Oregon debacle, no one should trust the cheery promises of drug legalization activists. It is not just that their predictions were catastrophically wrong, but that in hindsight—and despite their talk about “help instead of handcuffs”—they clearly cared more about legalizing drugs than helping addicts quit.

Furthermore, help and handcuffs are not necessarily opposites. Laws and even punishments are protective and instructive as well as punitive. Governments have the essential, God-ordained responsibilities to restrain evil and direct citizens toward the good. Laxness in this duty may seem merciful, but it is often cruel and rooted in indifference, even disdain, for the good of others.

As Oregon learned, the use of hard drugs creates a host of negative effects, starting with the crime and chaos that intrinsically surround drug culture—there is nothing kind about telling people they have to navigate sidewalks strewn with filth and used needles and that they should just accept their parks turning into drug markets.

And though those pushing drug legalization purport to care about drug users, they give little heed to how drugs ruin the lives of addicts—and those who love them. Families with addicts do not want them in prison, but even less do they want them rotting in tent encampments until they die of an overdose.

The tent encampments make obvious and undeniable the evils that many already know personally. America is full of mourners for those destroyed by drugs. Some parents have no idea where their addicted child is, except that it’s nowhere good. Others know all too well because they had to select the plot in the cemetery. The foster care system is filled with the results of drug use: neglected, abused, and traumatized children.

Aggressive rehab might do a better job of treating drug addiction than prosecution and incarceration. But that is not what Oregon provided. Rather, it treated drug possession like a parking violation, with a citation and subsequent fine, which could then be waived by completing a program. Predictably, the citations were ignored and the fines were not paid.

As this illustrates, the promise that prosecution would be replaced by treatment was a lie, because there was no real pressure to enroll in it. Complaints from drug legalization activists that treatment options were underfunded are beside the point because they designed the legalization regime to ensure that no one would be pushed into rehab.

This reveals the truth, which is that drug legalization is not about finding a better way to help addicts and ameliorate the evils of drug use but about a view that sees nothing wrong with drugs and addiction. These activists have made an idol of autonomy, arguing that we should respect the choice to use and destroy oneself with meth and the freedom to overdose on fentanyl.

This is a perverse vision of freedom that is utterly divorced from the goods that liberty is meant to serve. And as even liberal Oregon finally realized, there is no obligation to allow people to do evil and destroy themselves through drug use. Indeed, there is an obligation to hold back those plunging toward destruction. There is no dignity, flourishing, or freedom to be had in leaving addicts to live and die in squalid encampments. Rather, reckless drug legalization consigns users to slavery as they are ruled by a diseased and uncontrolled appetite that all too often will culminate in death.