When this happens the reason 90% of the time is usually not because the program wasn’t working but the opposition to the program has made sure to either gut the funding or put in measures that makes those programs not work (only hiring 2 people to handle all the work or excessive operating requirements.
Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.
Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.
In Portland, decriminalization was poorly planned, new treatment options were implemented badly, and the alternative penalties for possession were not meaningfully enforced. It was a failure of execution.
I don’t think it tells us much about how well an ideally functioning decriminalization or legalization effort would work. It does update us in understanding that it’s difficult to accomplish this transition successfully.
Absolutely, Americans love saying “we’ll just send the cops after them.” Because then they don’t have to do any of the hard work of understanding or funding the programs. Americans are lazy when it comes to solving actual hard problems.
In numerous places those efforts have been purposefully sabotaged by police who aren't happy about the loss of court revenues and the eventual cutbacks on police funding for drug prohibition. With them literally refusing to enforce some laws like public intoxication or shooting up heroin in the middle of the street because their more profitable and super easy to get arrests for drug possession laws no longer existed.
Not my area of expertise per se, but the counterargument that I've seen is that the states (e.g. Oregon) that tried it never got the backstops in place to help soften and support the transition (i.e. rehab centers, support programs, social programs). Instead, it was just a hard switch that went expectedly bad.
There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.
We really don’t know that, they had terrible data reporting on drug use before the policy was implemented so we can’t even make a before/after comparison. We also can’t parse out the extent to which changes in drug use stats reflect changes in autopsies or in cultural attitudes and candor about drug use affecting self reports.
