Once upon a time, California’s jails were stuffed with low-level drug offenders.
This was wastefully expensive for the public and wholly ineffective for the drug offenders, reformers argued.
So in 2014, with the best of intentions, voters passed Proposition 47. This reduced a great many drug-related offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, and kept a great many low-level drug offenders out of jail. The money saved on incarceration would go into effective addiction treatment, among other things, reformers said.
Since then, there has been an interesting, and perhaps tragic, convergence of events:
- Drug offense arrests have plunged 85% — from 137,054 in 2014 to 20,574 in 2022, according to data from the California Department of Justice.
- While drug overdose deaths have more than doubled — from 4,519 in 2014 to 10,410 in 2022, according to data from the California Department of Public Health.
Is there any relationship between these numbers? There’s heated debate over that.
Some folks — notably law enforcement and parent types — lament the loss of jail time as a carrot-and-stick to prod users into drug treatment. There are essentially no consequences now, they say.
Others — notably policy experts — say jail time was always an ineffective and dangerous response to drug use, and lament the dearth of effective treatment and harm-reduction strategies that can actually save lives.
This all plays out on a terrifying backdrop: The migration of cheap, powerful, deadly fentanyl into just about every single street drug; a global pandemic that destroyed any semblance of normalcy for years; and doctors’ tepid embrace of buprenorphine, the gold standard for opioid treatment.
“A perfect storm,” Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said.
Enlightening, perhaps, are the overdose death rates in two states with very different approaches to drug criminalization — California and Texas.
They’re the largest states in America, population-wise. Both border…
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