California should follow Oregon’s lead and decriminalize all illegal drugs
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”This stuff is a little different from what you bought last time,” my dealer, we’ll call her M, said to me the last time I picked up a gram of coke from her. “It’s a little speedier. And it made my mouth numb.”
M tests all the drugs she sells to ensure they’re safe and as-advertised.
A few blocks away, in my neighborhood, men stand on the sidewalk, waiting for cars to pull up so they can exchange small baggies for wads of cash.
By December a record 621 people had fatally overdosed in San Francisco, far more than the 173 people COVID-19 had taken from us by that point.
The main cause of overdose is prohibition.
Prohibition increases the cost of drugs, incentivizing sellers to dilute them with fillers. This makes it impossible, without lab equipment, to know how strong drugs are until they’re in your system. Underestimating how pure your heroin is will kill you.
The high price of drugs also incentivizes sellers to replace more expensive drugs with cheaper alternatives with similar effects.
Unfortunately, it’s far easier to overdose on cheaper drugs like meth and fentanyl than the coke and heroin they can mimic.
The same measures that sellers use to avoid arrest and imprisonment keep buyers from being able to use trust networks to verify whose drugs are safe and tested and whose aren’t.
The difference between me and an SF resident who dies of an overdose isn’t that I’m smarter or more virtuous. While it’s technically the same amount of illegal for me to buy drugs as it is for anyone else to do so, the experience of actually buying drugs varies incredibly based on class and income.
When I can’t buy drugs from someone I trust in my community, I don’t buy drugs. That’s not an option for someone in the throes of addiction. If banning the sale of stopped people from buying them more than 600 people would be alive in SF right now.
The War on Drugs has not worked to stop drug use, drug addiction, drug-related crime, or overdose deaths. It has only made drug use more expensive, more dangerous, and fueled other criminal enterprises.
Measure 110 recently went into effect in Oregon. It decriminalizes possession of all illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth and oxycodone. It refers addicts to rehab instead of prison and shifts money away from policing voluntary transactions and toward wraparound services to help people get out of the cycle of poverty, homelessness, and prison. Ultimately every state must decriminalize and destigmatize the sale, purchase, possession, and use of all psychoactive substances. But this is a great first step toward reducing the needless harm caused by prohibition.
There’s no reason California shouldn’t follow Oregon’s lead and decriminalize possession of all illegal drugs. We should absolutely replace prosecuting the failed War on Drugs with a functional safety net for our citizens.
The experience of buying and selling drugs shouldn’t be dictated by class and income. There should be no “You must make this much money to survive” sign on using drugs. It should be as safe as possible for all.
Sadly, people have been saying this forever. Criminalizing consensual personal behavior not only doesn’t work, but creates undesirable results -- like stacks of dead bodies.
I think one major impediment to rational fact based public policy on drugs or anything else is the outsized influence of Christian ideology. Here I’m not just thinking about the religious right.
The problem is Christianity creates an obsession with the need for punishment. While Christians, especially evangelicals, talk endlessly about “forgiveness” the real driving force for them is the need to punish the unrepentant sinner. (I grew up immersed in a small fundamentalist Baptist church in rural Georgia which gave me some insight on the way Christianity shapes our thinking.)
This way of seeing the world--the need for revenge really against sinners--permeates our society.
That’s why law enforcement is always the vehicle for “saving” women from sex work. And why so many proponents of this approach are oblivious to the damage it causes.
It influences even those who don’t think of themselves as being Christian or even religious. But clearly America is an extremely religious country. We are in fact more like Islamic Middle Eastern counties in this regard than we are secular Europe.
It’s also worth noting that religious groups and societies are more prone to conspiracy theories than the secular. This is another trait Americans share with fundamentalist Muslim societies.
Ultimately if you believe in magic and dictates faxed from heaven then there’s no need to conform public policy to fact.