Oregon has just ended a three-year experiment – one of many west-coast policies during the last decade to dumbfound folks. Plenty of people predicted it would end badly, and they weren’t wrong. Oregon’s Measure 110 decriminalized hard drugs and made possessing small amounts of deadly substances like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines a misdemeanor. The experiment is complete and what remains is an abject lesson in poor thinking.

Police issued offenders hundred-dollar fines, rendered obsolete if offenders called the treatment hotline accompanying their citations. Few did. Not that it mattered. A change to the bill was made in 2021, removing the penalty for either avoiding treatment or not paying the fine. Why inconvenience people, right?

The state had planned to abandon treating addiction as a criminal problem and instead mitigate the crisis using a healthcare approach, funding recovery programs using marijuana tax revenue. But inadequate execution shaped the measure’s dire future. “The Legislature, the court system and the bureaucracy under two governors ignored or rejected proposed solutions as seemingly straightforward as designing a specialized ticket to highlight treatment information,” wrote Tony Schick and Conrad Wilson in a joint-authored article published in February on Oregon Public Broadcasting. “[Lawmakers] declined to fund a proposed $50,000 online course that would have instructed police officers on how to better use the new law,” the duo stated. “They took no action on recommendations to get police, whose leaders campaigned against the ballot measure, talking with treatment providers after decriminalization passed.” Maybe new laws only work when funded and guided by well-informed hands.

Though Oregon’s fatal drug overdoses surged each year during the decriminalization period, a new study published on September 5 by Brown University, conducted by its School of Public Health, shows fentanyl’s emergence in Oregon is primarily responsible for the spike in opioid deaths. Other studies have reached the same conclusion. Still, it’s difficult to believe that letting people smoke, snort, and inject narcotics in public without fear of serious repercussions didn’t contribute to Oregon’s growing drug crisis.

But why did the bill fail? Was it just a bad idea, or did obstinate bureaucrats seemingly indifferent to the public’s health and safety take their hands off the proverbial wheel? Hasn’t the nation seen similar botched policies in other blue states, followed by the eventual slow retreat?

Anomalous Policies

Remember the defund the police movement? Attempting to accede to protesters’ demands after George Floyd was killed in Minnesota, numerous liberal cities decreased police funding. That wasn’t enough, though. Governors in several states signed police reform bills, nearly 300 in total, introducing policies many people claimed made the streets less safe, limiting the tools officers could use to de-escalate situations. Now, despite a supposed decrease in crime in several metro areas, various cities are loosening those restrictions. The crime statistics look good on paper and sound neat when officials recite them, but countless streets countrywide appear ghastly, especially when unsettling images of them are published ubiquitously in newspapers and digital publications.

Earlier this year, many lawmakers and voters expressed concerns regarding the restrictive police tactics. They believed it was time to reduce some regulations. In other places, “they [officials] are trying to address community backlash at measures that have been labeled anti-police, as well as a perception that crime has worsened while police have been hamstrung by policy changes,” a Washington newspaper highlighted. “Louisiana legislators voted in favor of a law that would make it harder to sue police officers; cities including Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles have restored police funding that was cut after Floyd was killed.”

State Rep. John Gillespie (R), who sponsored a bill to void the Tyre Nichols Driving Equality Act, told the paper that Tennessee has become a “safe haven for criminals.” San Francisco, DC, and New York City have also tweaked police procedures and eased reform policies that officials once couldn’t wait to pass and put into action. For now, it seems numerous left-leaning locales want to be – ahem – tough on crime. So it goes.

Other Snazzy Ideas From the Nation’s Great Cities

NYC’s bail reform law is supposed to help people who can’t afford bonds so they don’t get stuck in jail for a fine they can’t pay. Governor Kathie Hochul, New York’s Democrat-in-Chief, has altered the law many times since introducing it in 2020, usually at the whim of the headlines, fearful of the public’s perception of the city’s crime despite supposedly low numbers over the last the year. However, some criminals are returning to the streets only to commit more thefts, robberies, and shootings.

Back in March, Hochul tried to smear the blame on judges for “letting some people who are considered dangerous go without bail,” CBS News pointed out, “but the thing is New York is the only state where judges are not supposed to consider a person’s dangerousness when deciding their bail.” It seems Hochul doesn’t understand her own law, as many critics have noted. Only if a defendant is a flight risk are judges supposed to set bail. No alterations to the law are upcoming, but based on Hochul’s track record, the state might see another proposal to modify its fickle bail reform before the year ends.

On the opposite coast, effective on January 1, 2023, Senate Bill 357 rescinded a California law that prohibited loitering if prostitution was intended. Democratic Sen. Scott Weiner introduced the original bill and said it would protect transgender women from being “disproportionately targeted by police.”

One month after the bill became operational, Southern California saw an influx of scantily dressed people parading the streets. One strip in Los Angeles, known as “The Blade,” was soon flooded with prostitutes and pimps. “Law enforcement officials provided social media accounts to Fox News that showed young women wearing thongs and fishnets, often with their breasts exposed while standing – and even twerking in broad daylight on street corners,” Fox News reported in February of last year. To make matters worse, “The police said that because of the reform they can only make arrests if a suspect admits to prostitution, which they said is a rarity.” Oakland police expressed having similar difficulties, stating that Bill 357 “now hinders officers’ enforcement across the state.”

The bill is also known as The Safer Streets Act. Are people safer? Do parents bringing their children to school feel safer when seeing half-naked prostitutes dawdling on nearby corners, as one mother reported to Fox News? It seems a strange law to enact, but then again, so does the situation in Oregon. At what point did the state’s bureaucrats think: “This is going really well. I see no reason to intervene.”

Some say the bill wasn’t given enough time and pointed to Portugal’s success with decriminalization, which started in 2000. Whether Oregon might’ve succeeded in ameliorating its drug crisis through the controversial bill – if only given enough time – nobody will ever know.

Are all these policies just bad ideas, though? Perhaps they were bereft of proper adult supervision. Many reasons officials and experts have highlighted for the bills’ failures do seem to point to lackluster leadership. Unfortunately, it’s the American people living in these cities and states who are the ones suffering through the consequences. As officials slowly step back or run in place and mutter excuses while letting certain policies run on autopilot, will any apologies be made? Why take such wild risks when the nation already faces so many crises? Maybe the ones responsible think these policies might help them win votes. No – they wouldn’t, would they?