The Daily Caller – by Anders Hagstrom
The Oregon legislature passed two bills Thursday decriminalizing small amounts of six hard drugs, including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and ecstasy.
The first of the two bills now headed to the governor’s desk, HB 2355, decriminalizes possession of the drugs so long as the offender has neither a felony nor more than two prior drug convictions on record, according to the Lund Report. The second, HB 3078, reduces drug-related property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
Republican State Sen. Jackie Winters claimed the war on drugs as it currently exists amounts to “institutional racism” due to how more frequently minorities are charged with drug crimes than whites.
“There is empirical evidence that there are certain things that follow race. We don’t like to look at the disparity in our prison system,” Winters said during a hearing. “It is institutional racism. We can pretend it doesn’t exist, but it does.”
The second bill reduces mandatory minimum sentences for many property crimes and also increases the number of previous convictions necessary for a felony charge. It provides $7 million in funding for diversion programs to help lower Oregon’s prison population.
Winters and other supporters of the bills argue the answer to America’s drug crisis is treatment, not prison time.
“It would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes,” Democratic Rep. Mitch Greenlick told the Lund Report. “This is a chronic brain disorder and it needs to be treated this way.”
All drugs should be legalized, but as usual, the leftists err in framing the issue as a matter of racial fairness. This is to be expected, as dividing people along the social fault lines of race, sex, etc., is what modern leftism is principally about.
The principle supporting drug legalization is much more basic and universal: no mortal men have the right to tell other people what they can do to their own bodies. If someone wants to snort coke, shoot heroin, or hit himself repeatedly in the head with a hammer, that is his absolute prerogative and none of government’s concern. People with drug addictions need treatment, not prison.
As for property crimes, they should be judged on their own merits, regardless of whether they were committed due to drug-seeking behavior. But it should be noted that drug legalization would cause the prices of most drugs to plummet, leading to a decrease in the number of addicts committing crimes to support their habits.
Portland! That socialist paradise, the new drug magnet, attracting every junkie in Cali-Kornia, Arizona Nevada Washington and Idaho. Those states owe the ‘legislators’ of Oregon a great debt of gratitude!
Interesting…isn’t Oregon also about to pretty much take everyone’s guns away from them (or am I wrong, Henry? You live there). And now they want to “decriminalize” meth and the rest of the opioids as long as you have no felony or have two or more prior drug convictions…in other words, “decriminalize” drug use, then if you have two or more drug offenses or (perhaps if that other “law” passes about owning guns) get a felony conviction for owning a gun, they can put you in jail for drug use…Cute Oregon, cute! (Or am I just engaging in jibber-jabber?)
I moved here to escape Commiefornia’s insanity.
Highly contagious, apparently. 🙁
Not that drugs should be illegal in the first place, mind you, but there’s plenty of unrelated insanity going on here now.