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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 02 2021, @10:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.

Oregon law to decriminalize all drugs goes into effect, offering addicts rehab instead of prison:

"I lived in the bottom for years," says [Janie] Gullickson, 52. "For me and people like me, I laid there and wallowed in it for a long time."

But if she has to pick the lowest point – one that lasted years, not days, she says – it came shortly after she hit 30 in 1998. At that time, Gullickson had five kids, ages 5 to 11, by four different men. She came home from work one day as a locksmith to find that her ex-husband had taken her two youngest and left the state. Horrified, devastated and convinced that this was the beginning of the end, her life spiraled: She dropped her other son off with his dad, left her two daughters with her mom and soon became an IV meth user.

In prison six years later, Gullickson was contemplating joining an intensive recovery program when a "striking, magnetic gorgeous Black woman walked in the room, held up a mug shot and started talking about being in the very chairs where we were sitting," Gullickson remembers. There was life on the other side of addiction and prison, the woman said. But you have to fight for it. Gullickson believed her.

"I remember thinking, I may not be able to do all that, be what she was, but maybe I could do something different than this," Gullickson says. "That day, I felt the door open to change and healing."

Now Gullickson, executive director of the Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon, is determined to give other addicts the same opportunity. That's why she pushed for the passage of Measure 110, first-of-its-kind legislation that decriminalizes the possession of all illegal drugs in Oregon, including heroin, cocaine, meth and oxycodone. Instead of a criminal-justice-based approach, the state will pivot to a health-care-based approach, offering addicts treatment instead of prison time. Those in possession will be fined $100, a citation that will be dropped if they agree to a health assessment.

The law goes into effect Monday and will be implemented over the next decade by the state officials at the Oregon Health Authority.

[...] "I hope that we all become more enlightened across this country that substance abuse is not something that necessitates incarceration, but speaks to other social ills – lack of health care, lack of treatment, things of that nature," says Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., an outspoken critic of the War on Drugs.

[...] Watson Coleman also points out that it's far more expensive to pay to incarcerate someone than get them treatment. Rehab programs not only empower people, she says, but they also save communities money.

Also at: CNN.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @02:53PM (15 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 02 2021, @02:53PM (#1107938) Journal

    Is this just not going to be a transfer from the prison-industrial-complex to the rehab-industrial-complex? Or if you like "nicer prison".

    Maybe. But, if it is more humane, that is reason enough to do it. On the plus side, a person can escape this new prison system, easily enough. All he need do is to learn the lessons offered, follow the steps, and beat his addiction. Amsterdam has set the example for 25 years or more.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands [wikipedia.org]

    When you get down to brass tacks, it is cheaper in terms of money, misery, and human life to decriminalize drugs, and to treat addicts like humans with value. What has our "War on Drugs" cost us? We have a huge police force chasing people down alleys, oftentimes shooting them in the back, to enforce unenforceable law. We have armies of men and women in prisons, lives wasted.

    Stack up all the costs for each course of action, and weigh them.

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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02 2021, @04:48PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02 2021, @04:48PM (#1107972)

    For the person living out on the street, doing tricks and injecting junk in the veins with a rusty needle... you think *more* punishment is going to solve their problems?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @06:15PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 02 2021, @06:15PM (#1108037) Journal

      Where, and how, did you get the impression that I want to punish anyone? I've stated pretty clearly that police shouldn't be chasing such a person down. Just leave him alone. If he wants help, he can ask. If he's caught committing a crime to support his habit, well, he can be punished for that. Maybe he'll ask for help, maybe he won't, but I don't want to see him punished further for simply possessing an old blunt needle.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 03 2021, @12:37AM (12 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday February 03 2021, @12:37AM (#1108189)

    This presumes, of course, that the purpose of the "War on Drugs" was to prevent drugs, when there's plenty of evidence that it was and has always been a tool for oppressing people the government didn't like.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 03 2021, @12:48AM (3 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 03 2021, @12:48AM (#1108195) Journal

      So, you think that those people who fear the "super predators" might not also fear drugged up peasants? Fearful people tend to fear a multitude of things. The stated purpose of the war on drugs seemed perfectly valid to all of those cretins in congress who voted for 100,000 more cops on the streets.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 03 2021, @01:11AM (2 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday February 03 2021, @01:11AM (#1108206)

        The initial efforts to make opium illegal in the US were explicitly sold as an anti-Chinese-immigrant measure. The efforts to make coca-based drugs illegal were explicitly sold as an anti-Latino measure. The efforts to make cannabis-based drugs illegal were explicitly sold as an anti-black measure. (By "explicitly sold", I mean that you can read quotes given by members of Congress and testimony to Congress along these lines. Members of the Nixon administration reported, years later, that they had wanted to make it illegal to be black or a hippie but couldn't, so they turned those laws into the War on Drugs (tm) because that was how they could lock people up they didn't like. The crackdown on crack in the 1980's was notable because crack (favored by poor black people) was super-illegal and targeted heavily by cops, while powder cocaine (favored by Wall Street types) went basically untouched.

        I'm not saying there aren't drugs that are friggin' dangerous, but I am saying that there's approximately zero correlation between how drug laws exist and are enforced and how dangerous the drugs are, and a very strong correlation between how drug laws are enforced and who the government would really like to just lock up as "undesirable".

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 2, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 03 2021, @01:25AM (1 child)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 03 2021, @01:25AM (#1108219) Journal

          Can't argue any of that - but the super predators and 100,000 extra cops were Clinton era. Democrats. The same bunch of hypocrites who have been pushing identity politics ever since.

          • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:04PM

            by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:04PM (#1108437)

            Yeah, and it's one of the big reasons I'm not a fan of the Clintons and those that exemplify their brand of politics. Heck, Joe Biden was also involved in that travesty: The only advantages he had over his opponent in the last election was that (a) he by all appearances does not want to overthrow American democracy, and (b) he's experienced enough in politics to know what he's doing.

            --
            The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:32AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:32AM (#1108264) Homepage

      Reportedly the two main factions lobbying for tougher drug laws are the for-profit prisons, and the Mexican drug lords.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 04 2021, @02:55PM (6 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday February 04 2021, @02:55PM (#1108912) Homepage Journal

      I think you and I have very different standards of what constitutes evidence. The war on drugs was very plainly Prohibition 2.0, for the exact same reasons.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 04 2021, @06:10PM (5 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Thursday February 04 2021, @06:10PM (#1108983)

        The kind of evidence I'm referring to:

        You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

        - Nixon domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman

        More recently, cops have gone on record complaining about legalizing pot because they used to be able to search any vehicle they wanted to by claiming to smell pot whether or not they did.

        It was not just "Drugs are bad, m'kay" or "Just Say No", it was often intentional excuses to arrest people the government didn't like for reasons that had nothing to do with whether they used drugs.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 05 2021, @02:24PM (4 children)

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday February 05 2021, @02:24PM (#1109305) Homepage Journal

          Man, I think you need to get off the drugs your own self. Nixon was the last president to give the slightest of fucks about the race of citizens. Well, except Obama.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 05 2021, @05:35PM (3 children)

            by Thexalon (636) on Friday February 05 2021, @05:35PM (#1109358)

            Nixon was the last president to give the slightest of fucks about the race of citizens.

            Oh yes he did: Richard Nixon, on the White House tapes, discussing ideas of racial superiority with regards to intelligence [youtube.com] (specifically, the guy he's talking about would go on to co-author "The Bell Curve" based on the same idea that while there are some exceptions, on average white people are smarter than black people.)

            And that's hardly the only evidence of his racism, and not just against black people.

            --
            The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 05 2021, @08:38PM (2 children)

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday February 05 2021, @08:38PM (#1109402) Homepage Journal

              Oh yes he did...

              Yes, I just said that. Nobody since him gave the slightest of fucks, except Obama.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 05 2021, @08:53PM (1 child)

                by Thexalon (636) on Friday February 05 2021, @08:53PM (#1109408)

                Nixon wasn't the last one, either: Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are also both on the record being very racist.

                --
                The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.