Oregon’s experiment to curb overdoses by decriminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs is in its third year, and life has changed for most everyone in the city of Portland.
Thank you. It’s good to hear the perspective of someone who knows what it’s like.
I think the problem with the American legal system is the ongoing insistence that we use it to punish rather than reform. I know that there is a small subset of people who cannot be reformed, and for those we maintain imprisonment. But that’s not the majority. Most people would thrive if given the opportunity for true reformative justice.
And the secondary problem, in my opinion, is the dismantling of psychiatric facilities. Yes, we need to prevent closed-door facilities from becoming the abuse factories that they used to be. But replacing them with nothing is what got us a lot of the problems we see today (overcrowded emergency departments, deadly encounters with police, homelessness and drug use in public).
Some people need good inpatient or residential psychiatric facilities. Instead we just dumped them on their families without any social support of any kind.
Thank you. It’s good to hear the perspective of someone who knows what it’s like.
I think the problem with the American legal system is the ongoing insistence that we use it to punish rather than reform. I know that there is a small subset of people who cannot be reformed, and for those we maintain imprisonment. But that’s not the majority. Most people would thrive if given the opportunity for true reformative justice.
And the secondary problem, in my opinion, is the dismantling of psychiatric facilities. Yes, we need to prevent closed-door facilities from becoming the abuse factories that they used to be. But replacing them with nothing is what got us a lot of the problems we see today (overcrowded emergency departments, deadly encounters with police, homelessness and drug use in public).
Some people need good inpatient or residential psychiatric facilities. Instead we just dumped them on their families without any social support of any kind.