Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.

Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. … But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession.

[There was an argument for legalizing marijuana, based on domestic-supply potential and less-serious consequences with its use. While the “harmless” argument was always shaky, the argument that civil-rights encroachment in the prohibition of marijuana was more damaging than the drug to American society was at least a tenable position. Decriminalizing “hard drugs” had no such argument, and the disaster in Oregon proves what any reasonable person should have predicted all along. At some point, a reassessment of marijuana legalization will come, too — and may be overdue already. — Ed]