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Oregon criminalizes hard drugs again | WELT

Whenever I visit the small Oregon town where I grew up, I'm always interested to see what's changed. A few years ago, I noticed a cluster of tents next to City Hall, right across from the library and post office. It was jarring. Poverty is common in rural Oregon, but this kind of homelessness was new – an urban plague that had now spread across the state.

There was a consensus that drugs were the cause of the growing problem. Oregon legalized marijuana in 2015, and in 2020 voters overwhelmingly supported a ballot proposal to decriminalize possession of hard drugs. The result was tents inhabited by people who couldn't or wouldn't keep themselves clean enough to have shelter, let alone a job and a place to live.

While drug trafficking remained nominally illegal, legalizing possession of small amounts made investigations and prosecutions much more difficult. Add the resulting drug culture to Oregon's generally lenient approach to crime, and you get danger, unrest, and filth. None of this helped anyone, including the users – instead of going to jail, they were left to rot and die in tents.

Eventually, even the state's left-leaning government had enough, and the state legislature voted to re-criminalize hard drugs. Despite the costs of the war on drugs, even Democrats in Oregon realized that drug legalization brought its own evils.

After the Oregon debacle, no one should trust the cheery promises of drug legalization activists. Not only were their predictions disastrously wrong, but in hindsight – and despite their talk of “help, not handcuffs” – they clearly cared more about legalizing drugs than helping addicts quit.

Moreover, help and handcuffs are not necessarily opposites. Laws and even punishments are protective and instructive as well as punitive. Governments have a fundamental, God-ordained responsibility to contain evil and guide citizens toward good. Neglect of this duty may seem merciful, but it is often cruel and rooted in indifference, even contempt, for the welfare of others.

This brings to light the truth: legalizing drugs is not about finding a better way to help addicts and alleviate the evils of drug use, but about a perspective that sees nothing wrong with drugs and addiction.

As Oregon has learned, hard drug use brings with it a number of negative effects. Starting with the crime and chaos that are inextricable from drug culture, it's not a nice thing to tell people they have to navigate sidewalks littered with dirt and used needles and just accept that their parks are turning into drug markets.

And while drug legalization advocates claim to care about drug users, they pay little attention to how drugs ruin the lives of addicts—and their loved ones. Families of addicts don't want to see them in prison, but they even less want to see them rotting in tent camps until they die of an overdose.

The camps make the evils that many already know personally obvious and undeniable. America is filled with mourners for children destroyed by drugs. Some parents have no idea where their addicted child is, except that he or she is nowhere good. Others know only too well because they had to choose the grave in the cemetery. The foster care system is rife with the consequences of drug use: neglected, abused and traumatized children.

Aggressive rehabilitation might be more effective in treating drug addiction than prosecution and incarceration. But that's not what Oregon is doing. Rather, it treats drug possession like a parking violation, with a citation and subsequent fine that can then be waived by attending a program. Predictably, the citations were ignored and the fines were not paid.

As this shows, the promise that treatment would replace law enforcement was a lie, as there was no real pressure to sign up for it. Complaints by drug legalization campaigners that treatment options are underfunded are beside the point, as they designed the legalization regime to ensure that no one is forced into rehab.

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

This is a perverse vision of freedom, completely divorced from the goods that freedom is supposed to serve. And as even liberal Oregon eventually realized, there is no obligation to allow people to do evil and destroy themselves through drug use. In fact, there is an obligation to restrain those who plunge into destruction. There is no dignity, flourishing, or freedom in allowing addicts to live and die in filthy camps. Rather, the reckless legalization of drugs consigns users to slavery, ruled by a sick and uncontrolled appetite that all too often culminates in death.

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