This Is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Drug policy feels very unsettled right now. The war on drugs was a failure. But so far, the war on the war on drugs hasn’t entirely been a success, either. Take Oregon. In 2020, it became the first state in the nation to decriminalize hard drugs. It was a paradigm shift — treating drug-users as patients rather than criminals — and advocates hoped it would be a model for the nation. But then there was a surge in overdoses and public backlash over open-air drug use. And last month, Oregon’s governor signed a law restoring criminal penalties for drug possession, ending that short-lived experiment. Other states and cities have also tipped toward backlash. And there are a lot of concerns about how cannabis legalization and commercialization is working out around the country. So what did the supporters of these measures fail to foresee? And where do we go from here? Keith Humphreys is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who specializes in addiction and its treatment. He also served as a senior policy adviser in the Obama administration. I asked him to walk me through why Oregon’s policy didn’t work out; what policymakers sometimes misunderstand about addiction; the gap between “elite” drug cultures and how drugs are actually consumed by most people; and what better drug policies might look like. Mentioned: Oregon Health Authority data Book Recommendations: Drugs and Drug Policy by Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins and Angela Hawken Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. In 2020, voters in Oregon passed a ballot measure, a drug reform policy that was beyond what I ever thought would pass in any state in America.
0:33.8	Overnight Oregon became the first state in the country to decriminalize most street drugs.
0:40.6	Even drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth and oxycodone.
0:43.6	It's a C change. Measure 110, which was passed by 58% of Oregon voters, treats active
0:50.1	drug users as potential patients rather than criminals.
0:54.0	I've been involved in drug policy reform for a long time. I got into it in high school.
0:59.0	And this was not a politics that seemed possible back then.
1:03.6	In that era, the idea that you would have a state decriminalize heroin possession.
1:08.7	I mean, it was unthinkable.
1:11.5	But in the coming decades, there would be a real turn on the war on drugs, the over-plicing, the mass incarceration, the racism, the broken families.
1:20.0	It was not achieving as far as anybody could tell anybody's policy goals.
1:24.5	So we began to move in this other direction.
1:27.8	Oregon was at the vanguard of this, but it wasn't alone. In Washington State, you saw the Supreme Court overturned the law
1:34.6	that had made a lot of drug possessions and felonies.
1:37.7	In a bunch of different cities,
1:38.7	you have these very liberal district attorneys
1:41.3	who instead of running on tough on crime platforms were running against
1:45.4	over-plicing against mass incarceration. Something that had really never been
1:49.6	tried before in America was all of a sudden being tried.
1:52.8	We are moving towards a radically different equilibrium
1:55.4	than anybody had imagined, even just to fears before, on drugs.
1:59.8	You could walk down the streets, you can right now in many states and by all kinds of
	...

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