They always claimed to follow other successful implementations like Portugal, but the law was no where near what they implemented as far as requiring treatment.
Whats funny is the Governor is telling the Portland mayor to fix the drug issues...like it didn't stem from measure 110.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/07/19/kotek-and-blumenauer-t...
The biggest issue in Portland that's been ignored since COVID started is that downtown Portland never recovered after the shutdown. It has nothing to do with safety, I know I live there, and it has everything to do with prices. The city is too expensive for what you get and what opportunities are here.
I'm no fan of Kotek, but truly Ted Wheeler is among the most shit mayors the city has ever known.
If someone wants to get high in their home, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in a bar or such, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in one of those places and then walk out in public _without harming anyone else_, I don't care.
The thefts, the assaults, the zombies and crazies in public, that stuff I care about.
There is a middle-ground between "criminalize USE" and "stop enforcing laws, particularly when drug abusers and homeless are involved".
> If someone wants to get high in their home
That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed, and in which almost all "last-resort" housing options (such as shelters) require sobriety. Achieving and maintaining sobriety without stable housing is virtually impossible, and yet somehow society expects everyone to be able to do it and then complains when this doesn't magically happen.
The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs", except that attitude is completely fantastical: it goes against all clinical evidence of how substance use disorders actually work, and all empirical evidence of what resources a person needs to stop using drugs (assuming that is even the end goal, which is not a given).
To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs, then you will wind up with homeless people using drugs in public. And criminalizing drug use doesn't change that; it just moves those people "out of sight" to jails and prisons, where they keep using drugs, at a monetary cost to society that is literally orders of magnitude greater than the straightforward option of just giving them housing.
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/22/economist-magazi...
The big difference between Oregon and the other cities/countries that tried this approach successfully is not diversionary programs - it's housing. In Oregon, housing is not guaranteed, which means any money spent on mandatory treatment programs for people without stable housing is essentially wasted.
Diversionary programs and rehabilitation are a waste of time and money if the recipient does not have guaranteed access to stable housing. It's virtually impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety in those circumstances.
As someone who lives in Oregon we need some way to force addicts into treatment. Jail worked in some cases because it meant that some addicts no longer had access to the drugs they were addicted to. But even better would be more of a therapeutic environment where they actually get treatment for addiction. However, it seems that most addicts aren't going into treatment willingly (big surprise) and this is why we're seeing so much trouble here. I voted for 110, but now I'm thinking that was a mistake. It either needs some major revisions to enable forcing drug users into treatment or it just needs to be repealed (the former would be better, I think).
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/05/13/survey-shows-ore...
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/03/20/wheeler-slams-mea...
