 Mark Thornton has a special offer for fans of minor issues. A free copy of Murray Rothbard's famous work, Anatomy of the State. This is a limited time offer, so act fast. Get yours today at mises.org slash issues free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well, I thought we'd have a little fun today at the expense of the Wall Street Journal and the good people in the state of Oregon. Some of you may know that in recent years, Oregon, through a ballot initiative, decriminalized hard drugs. The Wall Street Journal about a month ago ran an article, Oregon decriminalized hard drugs. It isn't working. So the topic of today is the fact that Oregon decriminalized hard drugs, such as methamphetamine or crystal meth, which you will remember from the hit series Breaking Bad, and then fentanyl as well as another example, really the latest step product of the war on drugs. Now previously, you would be arrested for possession of one of these hard drugs, but under the new rule, you just get a ticket with the rehab number that you could call for help. And this amounted to a waste of time for the police. Drug use became more visible. It was bad for business. And few people were actually taking advantage of the free rehab that was made available by the state. And not surprisingly, there are efforts to recriminalize these hard drugs. There was no new incentive other than these little tickets that the police gave out. They gave out 6,000 tickets, but only 92 people bothered to call and talk to anybody about getting into rehab. And if you didn't call, there was supposedly a $100 fine, but even that wasn't enforced. And you usually don't find drug addicts running around saying, please put me into rehab. Well, the results have been bad. Fatal overdoses have increased by 23%. Overdoses not resulting in death in the city of Eugene, Oregon have increased over 100%. Arrests for drug possession and otherwise for hard drugs has decreased significantly from 11,000 in the state to 4,000 now. But basically they have created a great situation for drug addicts, homeless bums, increased loitering, sleeping on park benches and in front of businesses, littering, all sorts of bad problems. People passed out in the streets, walking around like zombies. One bookstore owner and dead head and also an involved communist voted for this measure to decriminalize drugs. She thought that things would be different and that she and others think now that the laboratory of democracy has failed them and efforts to relegalize drugs are on its way. But this sidesteps all the institutions of a free society meant to clean up these other aspects of drug addiction. My own work points to the fact that prohibition leads us to harder drugs, more dangerous drugs, non commercially produced drugs that are low in quality and safety and high in potency and are therefore harmful and deadly. And this effort to decriminalize drugs did nothing to address that issue. So they still have a lot of dangerous drugs on the street. They still have the existing problems of the war on drugs and therefore they have the same sort of problems with drugs and drug addiction. They also, more importantly, have the existing problem of the socialist thinking in the state of Oregon. Another problem that they have I wrote about it in an article called Needle Park, whereas if you make something illegal in a teeny isolated place, you're going to funnel a lot of the drug use into that one location. However, with the state of Oregon, you could very easily imagine that drug addicts in Seattle and San Francisco, or at least a few of them, might have relocated to Portland in order to not be hassled by the local police. And then there's the visibility problem or public drug use. Prohibiting drug use on public and private property is not an anti libertarian point of view. If it's my home, I make those decisions about who and what can be consumed on my property. If it's my place of business, I get to decide who and what is consumed on my property. And in my city, it's the voters and the citizens that set those rules and set the enforcement. And that's where things have fallen through in the state of Oregon. So yes, we still have overdoses and yes, rehabilitation and treatment is a problem, but we also have a city and a state that actually promotes the homeless problem and promotes the rights of drug addicts and the homeless above those of the good citizens of the state. And as a matter of fact, people have complained about that that street people have more rights than they do. Essentially, what this ballot measure to decriminalize hard drugs did was expose the ideological problem of the state of Oregon. Oregon did not decriminalize hard drugs because they are libertarian liberals or anti government. They did it because their ideological mindset leans very heavily socialist and communist and other forms of badism in general. The solution here is not to recriminalize drugs, but rather for society to exert its will. And when I say society, I'm talking about the nexus of private property owners must exert its will on their homes, their businesses and in public places. This is something that must be imposed on the public sector as well, because that's where the problem lies and the public sector must establish rules for public property or they must privatize or sell public property so that it's controlled by private property owners.