Their main excuse? Police were never properly trained on how to handle possession and use cases so they now want to offer immunity for a misdemeanor if you take treatment instead. If not, you get a misdemeanor and the draconian shit starts all over again. Source
I am an Oregonian. The Legislative Assembly is caving to public pressure.
I want to first say that this isn’t about whether decriminalisation works. The views I am about to present are not necessarily held by me, but I am merely talking about the existence of these opinions because they deserve discussion.
People, in Oregon, generally viewed the decriminalisation programme as a failure. The Legislative Assembly failed to fund the necessary companion programmes and police training that would have been needed to give it the best chance of succeeding. Instead, when the referendum passed and decriminalisation came into force (without the involvement of the Legislative Assembly), they decided to just let it fail.
The reasons why decriminalisation failed are debated, but only a small subset of voters are privy to this debate and even understand the arguments. The rest see a failed experiment where the Government just legalised all drugs. It’s easy to believe the latter and since it sounds logical to most people, that’s where they stop thinking about it.
As a result, a majority of Oregonians believe that decriminalisation has failed, and the Legislative Assembly is acting on that.
Some people in this thread are blaming pharmaceutical companies and lobbying. That is a knee-jerk, unreasoned and ignorant reaction that fails at any amount of serious scrutiny and reflects an utter ignorance of what Oregonians actually think. If anything, pharmaceutical companies would have everything to gain from people having easier access to their products.
We didn’t do the access to treatment part correctly, from my perspective. OPB’s Oregon On the Record had some good interviews about this. The real heavy lifting was getting people into treatment and off drugs, but we didn’t fund it well.