Legalization Is Not the Answer

From flashing lights and cop cars to a chance at freedom, America’s hard stance on drugs is beginning to change. The late 20th century saw a massive legal and cultural onslaught against drug usage in America, with the War on Drugs commencing under the Nixon administration, and Nixon declaring narcotics “public enemy number one.” What followed was the subsequent increase in drug enforcement spending, mandatory sentencing practices, and unprecedented levels of incarceration. Approximately one million Americans per year were incarcerated for drug-related offenses by 2008. These incarcerations have terrorized communities, particularly people of color, with black Americans being 13 times more likely to be sent to prison for drug-related offenses, despite only 2.2 percent of them being more likely than the general population to have used drugs recently.

Over the last 40 years, it’s become clear that this intense crackdown approach is ineffective. Re-incarceration rates remain high, and heavily policed communities do not appear to be improving. The tragedies inflicted by the War on Drugs led many reformers to look for kinder solutions to America’s prevailing drug problem. Many of them set their sights on repealing rules on drug use, modeled after successful European experiments in Portugal and Switzerland. Oregon voted to pass Ballot Measure 110 by a margin of over 17 percent in 2020, legalizing all drugs, including hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. Reformers believed that it would reduce the stigma surrounding drug use, opening pathways for rehabilitation and preventing the destruction of communities due to incarceration. 

However, what has actually occurred is the explosion of open drug use in the entire state, with Oregon’s overdose rate increasing threefold in the year after legalization. The situation has gotten so bad, in fact, that Oregon voters now want to repeal Measure 110 with a 16 percent margin, flipping support on its head.

By legalizing drugs before setting up adequate facilities and incentivizing enforcement to treat addicts, legalization is failing to work in one of America’s biggest drug crises. There was no time to set up adequate support systems to prioritize rehabilitation, and the hands-off approach meant that you wouldn’t try to force anybody into treatment either. Yes, reformers did get one thing right: legalization did reduce the stigma around drugs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more addicts will seek or can find adequate treatment. Efforts to safely wean individuals off narcotics were extremely limited, and as a result, negative consequences have increased. European countries that legalized offered plentiful incentivized ways to get addicts into treatment, slowly taking them off drugs and assimilating them back into society. We need to do the same.

Portugal used high police enforcement and issued summonses for drug offenses. They then incentivized treatment for addicts by taking away certain rights, such as activities like clubbing and transport, unless addicts attended treatment. Switzerland offers a similar approach and even weans heroin addicts off the substance by providing medically pure heroin to make sure they don’t overdose on the condition that they attend treatment. Other countries understand that while legalization can be part of the solution, you must still employ a heavy-handed approach. They will help you if only you make certain commitments, an axiom that the American system lacks. 

The problem with the decriminalization method in the United States is that we’ve taken entirely the wrong approach. We perceived the law as the sole problem, and while law enforcement was obviously way too extreme in the past, we rushed to take it away, believing that a hands-off approach would be the solution. It’s clear that we didn’t fully implement successful models and were too light-handed. Even now, when addicts receive treatment, we focus only on preventing overdoses while not having enough support for their treatment. We decriminalized and flooded the streets with drugs and then offered no effective solutions to solve the mess we created. In order to ensure that people can actually find help, we should open more facilities and incentivize treatment before legalizing drugs. 

We need a fundamental cultural shift in the way we perceive addiction treatment, not as a fight against the law and overdoses, but against the reasons for addiction itself. This will prevent us from hastily legalizing anything without offering solutions, and instead work to provide support systems before ever allowing the streets to overflow. Decriminalization in a vacuum does nothing for addicts; in fact, it normalizes drug use and lets it fester for far too long. Though tempting, let’s not swing the pendulum too far back; rather, we should bring a more measured and holistic approach to America’s never-ending controversy.