Decriminalizing Drugs Failed Abysmally in Portland

Homeless encampment under the SE Morrison Bridge in downtown Portland Oregon

When it comes to legalizing drugs, the skeptics were right all along — and money, it seems, can’t buy everything.

Originally published at the American Spectator (Jan. 26, 2025)

“My priority going forward is to build support in the United States for decriminalizing drug possession,” George Soros declared in 2019, “as Portugal and some other European countries have done.” Never mind his age, either. The 94-year-old mega-donor’s son Alexander plans to carry his father’s multi-billion-dollar torch into a brave new world of drug decriminalization and legalization, having taking over the Soros family hedge fund and foundations in mid-2023.

So how’s that working out across the pond?

In 2001, Portugal became the first country to decriminalize possession of all illicit drugs — fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc. — earning it “progressive” plaudits. Liberals call this policy “harm reduction,” a soothing and compassionate approach to drug addiction. Two decades later, however, the Portuguese are “having doubts” about that once-vaunted policy, writes the Washington Post. Instead of nirvana, it has led to skyrocketing crime, heroin paraphernalia littering sidewalks outside elementary schools, and homeless addicts lighting crack pipes in front of helpless policemen.

“It is forbidden to smoke tobacco outside a school or a hospital …. [or] advertise ice cream and sugar candies,” Porto Mayor Rui Moreira told reporters, “and yet, it is allowed for [people] to be there, injecting drugs. We’ve normalized it.”

If drug addiction was a problem in late 1990s Portugal — when Lisbon earned the dubious honor of Europe’s “heroin capital” — it’s an epidemic today.

LSD, ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamine use is up among Portuguese age 15–34. The percent of adults using narcotics has dramatically risen from 7.8 to 12.8 percent since decriminalization. Opioid use is among the worst in Europe. Overdose death rates quadrupled from 2008 to 2019 — the same year Soros boasted of importing the Portuguese model to America.

From Decrim to Recrim

Liberals who support such measures in the U.S. boast that Portugal’s drug-related incarceration rates fell dramatically after decriminalization, as expected. What they ignore is the surge in drug-related crime that followed — spiking 14 percent in a single year from 2021–22 in Porto, the nation’s second-largest city. Violent crime hit a 10-year high in 2023.

Today’s Porto constantly struggles to clean up the drug refuse piling up in its streets. Sewage is rife with cocaine and ketamine traces.

Understandably, Rui Moreira — who once backed “harm reduction” policies — now wants to re-criminalize drug use in public spaces. That earned him fire from a U.K.-based advocacy group, Harm Reduction International, for “risking decades of progress in public health.”

That “progress” was bankrolled by at least $3.7 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, including grants made as recently as 2023 to support “development of the general comment on drug policies.”

A “general comment” is a statement that interprets international human rights documents from the United Nations to establish guidelines for future legislation. It’s a way for globalist groups to force policy changes on sovereign countries.

In 2022, Harm Reduction International convened such a general comment consortium to interpret the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — a treaty whose right to health is “interpreted” to guarantee abortion — to mandate “social and cultural rights for people who use drugs.” The late President Jimmy Carter forced American entry into the treaty in 1977 — one of his many international blunders — though the Senate has never ratified it. Leftist groups such as Human Rights Watch pressured President Obama to demand ratification, but it went nowhere.

Instead, pro-drug groups have tried another route: Conquering the Democratic Party.

Veering Left

Oregon’s 2020 Measure 110 turned possession of scheduled drugs like heroin and cocaine from a misdemeanor to a fineable offense. Even that $100 fine can be wiped away by calling the state’s Lines for Life treatment helpline. Voters approved it 58–42 percent. The “yes” campaign outspent the opposition by close to $6 million, nearly 36 times the “no” campaign’s meager $168,000 budget.

Decriminalization’s top funder: Drug Policy Action (DPA), itself bankrolled by at least $11 million from Soros’ Open Society Action Fund. DPA, which called Measure 110 “the biggest blow to the drug war to date,” similarly claims credit for drafting and passing ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana in Colorado and Washington in 2012, as well as a 2000 California ballot initiative (Prop. 36) that offered drug offenders “treatment services instead of jail or prison time” (i.e. harm reduction).

Soros’ Open Society Foundations is the single largest contributor to DPA’s 501(c)(3) sister group, the Drug Policy Alliance, funneling nearly $28 million into it since 2001. George Soros himself sits on the group’s board. But his involvement goes much further back.

One of the Open Society Foundations’ earliest campaigns in the U.S. was ending the Reagan-era War on Drugs by backing medical marijuana initiatives, starting with California’s 1996 Prop. 215 (the “Compassionate Use Act”), which passed 56–44 percent in a great election year for Democrats. At the time, Soros heaped scorn on critics who accused him of wanting to legalize drugs — precisely the policy he pushes today à la Portugal.

California’s adoption of medical marijuana proved decisive in shifting national Democrats — who took a tough-on-drugs stance under President Bill Clinton and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder — toward legalization under Obama.

As California Goes, So Goes America

As a U.S. Senator, Obama himself clearly wanted to decriminalize marijuana; he said so plainly in 2004 at a private event. Then he ran for president, and his campaign hurriedly walked back those comments in Feb. 2008, when polls showed him losing to Hillary Clinton — who warned the public that marijuana is a “gateway drug.”

“I don’t think we should decriminalize it,” she told supporters in Oct. 2007.

Just two months after taking office in March 2009, now-Attorney General Eric Holder announced a moratorium on federal raids on medical marijuana distributors. (He now supports full decriminalization of weed.) By 2016, Obama was busy pardoning or commuting the sentences of federal inmates convicted of narcotics charges and recasting marijuana “as a public-health issue” akin to “cigarettes or alcohol,” following Portugal’s harm reduction over criminal justice logic. But it wouldn’t end there.

Using cultural Marxist language, the Drug Policy Alliance today excoriates “punitive drug laws … as a tool of oppression” used to “aggressively target people of color and people experiencing poverty.” It refers to legalization as “marijuana justice,” centering it on “racial equity and social justice” and other revolutionary objectives.

“We’re building a future where bodily autonomy is protected and respected,” the group proclaims, “a future where drug policy is grounded in evidence, health, equity, and human rights.” In practice that means abolishing the ban on food stamps for drug felons and allow inmates to apply for those benefits.

How times — and parties — change. Here’s that same Drug Policy Alliance webpage from the delicate Obama days of March 2009, when the Left didn’t view the Reagan drug policy as white supremacist:

Our supporters are individuals who believe the war on drugs is doing more harm than good. Together we advance policies that reduce the harms of both drug misuse and drug prohibition, and seek solutions that promote safety while upholding the sovereignty of individuals over their own minds and bodies. We work to ensure that our nation’s drug policies no longer arrest, incarcerate, disenfranchise and otherwise harm millions of nonviolent people. Our work inevitably requires us to address the disproportionate impact of the drug war on people of color.

Fast forward to 2020, when every Democrat running for president endorsed some form of legalization. Ex-“tough-on-crime” Attorney General Kamala Harris bragged that “I have supported treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation over incarceration for drug-related offenses.” She backed full decriminalization of marijuana.

Andrew Yang went further by endorsing decriminalization of opioid possession, including fentanyl: “We need to decriminalize the possession and use of small amounts of opioids. Other countries, such as Portugal, have done so, and have seen treatment go up and drug deaths and addiction go down,” his campaign website argues. The United States suffered 70,000 deaths from opioid overdoses that year, 81,000 more the next year.

Then there’s South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who vowed to cease arresting people for all drug offenses — effectively decriminalizing all drugs, including heroin and fentanyl, by simply not enforcing federal law (an evolution of the 2009 Obama-Holder non-enforcement policy).

For his part, Biden flirted with legalizing marijuana but otherwise ducked the issue by leaving it to the states. Yet even he later pardoned 2,500 drug offenders shortly before leaving office, over a quarter of his unprecedented 8,064 presidential pardons.

By 2024, marijuana decriminalization featured in the Democratic Party platform. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris accused the federal ban on marijuana of “hold[ing] Black men and other Americans back,” so her bold new promise of $20 billion in forgivable loans to start businesses would ensure “Black men — who have, for years, been overpoliced for marijuana use — are able to access wealth and jobs in this new market.”

Still, none of these ideas go far enough for the Drug Policy Alliance, which blasted Biden’s proposal last year to reclassify fentanyl as a Schedule I drug for perpetuating the War on Drugs. Fentanyl, which is 100 times more potent than morphine, is the leading driver of drug overdose deaths in the nation. From May to October 2024, Border Patrol agents confiscated enough of the junk to kill all 350 million Americans twice, and it was fentanyl that ultimately foiled the march toward full legalization.

Portlandia Lost

Decriminalization was supposed to destigmatize drugs, Democrats lectured, making it easier to reach addicts with compassionate care. So how’d that vision turn out in Oregon?

In the wake of Measure 110, fatal overdoses reached record levels 1,500 percent higher than before 2021, homelessness jumped 65 percent, and crime exploded 17 percent amidst a state locked down by Democrats’ Covid policies. Between 2020 and 2022, Oregon’s overdose deaths rose 75 percent compared to 18 percent nationally. Deaths from opioids rose 101 percent; those involving meth by 112 percent.

“Portland just became complete lawlessness” with “needles everywhere,” one bar owner complained. “Right now in Portland, you can’t stand out [on the street] and drink a beer but” — as in Portugal — “you can go ahead and shoot heroin or smoke fentanyl, and it’s fine.

“It’s like an apocalypse,” she said.

Decriminalization also coincided with an explosion in fentanyl smuggling by Mexican cartels aided by Chinese pharmaceutical equipment — and the synthetic opioid flowed like water. Fentanyl prices fell to 50 cents a pill when just 2 milligrams is enough to kill. As a result, Oregon experienced the largest proportional increase of fentanyl deaths anywhere, rising 40 percent in a single year.

Oregonians legalized marijuana in 2015, marketing it as a way to undermine the cartels. Instead, it created a black market of thousands of unlicensed pot farms, many of which are run by Mexican drug cartels employing virtual slave labor. “We were prisoners, because we couldn’t go out. We worked very long hours, sometimes until 2 or 3 in the morning. They were constantly pushing us to work faster, to trim the pot,” one “narco slave” reported.

If Oregon’s legal cannabis industry is worth $1.2 billion, the black market is worth double that — and is vastly more dangerous for rural people living near these virtual fortresses populated by armed drugrunners from Mexico, Russia, China, and Bulgaria. “It’s fucking Mad Max out there,” one ex-Oregonian told me.

Paradoxically — to the Left, anyway — states with the largest legal marijuana industries are home to the worst illegal cannabis rings in America. And like the 1930s Mafia, they don’t pay taxes on their product.

Progressives promised, and expected, a “utopian Shangri-La” with Measure 110, Eugene District Attorney Christopher Parosa told residents in early 2024. What they got was “rather a dystopian nightmare akin to a grim Hollywood movie.”

The reports are as endless as they are grim. Small towns are overrun by homeless encampments; efforts to clear them are shot down by professional protesters. People openly smoke fentanyl while their friends lie unconscious nearby. Others shoot up on playgrounds.

The New York Times reported on one wine bar owner who “sidesteps needles, shattered glass and human feces” on her daily walk to work. “Often, she says, someone is passed out in front of the lobby’s door, blocking her entrance…. At 4 in the afternoon the streets can feel like dealer central. At least 20 to 30 people in ski masks, hoodies and backpacks, usually on bikes and scooters. There’s no point calling the cops.”

Police, already embittered by the 2020 George Floyd “Summer of Rage” riots, now hand out get-well-soon health service cards instead of handcuffs. “I’ve actually seen a couple of parents with an infant buy fentanyl from a dealer and then take turns smoking,” one officer said.

Another officer choked up while describing to the legislature a 15-year-old boy he found lying “on the floor, motionless and blue” from opioid overdose. “I don’t think I can embrace another mother to tell her her son is gone,” he said amidst tears. “I need you to do the right thing.”

Rehab… for Rehab

As for compassionate rehabilitation, it turned out almost no one wanted to be rehabilitated. Of the 7,600 drug violations reported while the law was in effect, just 200 resulted in calls to Portland’s $3 million much-touted health assistance line — set up to pay fines and offer treatment options. “It has cost taxpayers $7,000 a call,” notes the Economist.

In Dec. 2023, “newly invigorated” authorities pledged a daring new strategy to draw in ailing drug users. They reached 30 people.

Harm reduction policies were also supposed to correct America’s systemic racism, as the Left sees it, by cutting non-white incarceration rates. Yet 64 percent of blacks and 67 percent of Hispanics polled demanded Measure 110 be completely repealed — far higher than the 48 percent of Asian Americans and 54 percent of whites who thought so. Progressives whined that true harm reduction policies had yet to be tried, but in Salem Democrats quietly moved to recriminalize drug possession.

Predictably, that angered the all-knowing (and mostly white) ACLU, which argued that “black, brown, and low-income people will continue to be jailed at the highest rates” should drugs be recriminalized. Which they were on April Fools’ Day 2024, when Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek signed HB 4002 into law.

To the Drug Policy Alliance, it was Jim Crow 2.0. “The law marks Oregon’s return to the broken, racist system of cycling people in and out of jail without connection to accessible addiction services or voluntary treatment,” the group moaned.

“America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended, after more than three years of painful results,” the Atlantic eulogized.

The Last Laugh

The Beaver State experiment may prove a mortal blow to the decriminalization movement. Every bill introduced since then has stalled, including in ultraliberal Vermont, the target of a feverish Drug Policy Alliance lobbying campaign. Yet even there a bill to reduce drug possession from a misdemeanor to a $50 fine couldn’t make it out of committee.

There were drug legalization initiatives on the November 2024 ballots in Florida (Amendment 3), Massachusetts (Question 4, which included psychedelic drugs), Nebraska (Initiative 437), North Dakota (Measure 5), and South Dakota (Measure 29). All but one failed catastrophically, most losing by double-digit margins even after massively outspending the “no” campaigns.

In Florida, “yes” outspent “no” by a jaw-dropping $154 million to $34 million, virtually all of it from the largest cannabis company in the world, Trulieve, and even secured President Donald Trump’s endorsement in a state that backed him by 1.4 million votes. Regardless, Amendment 3 failed to secure the required 60 percent of the vote.

“Yes” spent $8 million to a meager $137,000 from “no” in Massachusetts, only to lose by 14 points. In South Dakota, the opposition spent just $38,000 and won. They didn’t spend a dime in North Dakota, and the marijuana legalization measure still went down in flames.

Will that deter Alex Soros and the Open Society Foundations from pushing decriminalization in the future? It’s hard to say. But two things are clear: When it comes to legalizing drugs, the skeptics were right all along — and money, it seems, can’t buy everything.

(READ MORE: After Hunter, How About Pardoning the Gun Owners Biden Criminalized?)

Hayden Ludwig is Founder and Managing Editor of Restoration News, launched in 2023, and Executive Director for Research at Restoration of America. He specializes in election integrity and dark money, authoring the first investigations into the 2020 election "Zuck Bucks" scandal and unearthing the world's largest dark money network run by Arabella Advisors. He publishes regularly at RealClearPolitics, American Greatness, and the American Conservative.

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