#and if you read the peer review section of the study you'll see the author repeatedly getting told to tone down their conclusions

[tunnaa-unnaa]

Important additional context for the article:

[vaspider]

Measure 110, or the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

So if y'all aren't local to Oregon, you may not have heard that the Oregon state legislature just voted to -- essentially -- gut Measure 110, the ballot measure which decriminalized all drug possession and use in the state. It turned all drug use into a citation instead, and the citation and fine could be waived by completing a health screening. The entire point of Measure 110 was replacing jail with health care and services to help people instead, and while I could probably write a very long side post on the imperfections of that approach, it was at the very least a move in the right direction after decades of the pathetic failure and absolutely racist mess that is the "War on Drugs."

You may hear this pointed to in coming years as a reason why we have to just throw people into jail for using drugs, because Measure 110 failed. And like... it did fail, kinda. Sorta. It failed in that it did not manage to fix everything immediately, and it created some new issues while also exposing older issues more sharply.

It also saved the state $40 million in court costs prosecuting low-level drug offenses, kept thousands of people whose literal only crime was putting a substance into the body of a consenting adult (themselves) out of jail, put at least one addiction services center in every county in the state, invested $300 million in addiction services, and an awful lot more. See the end of this post for more reading.

But where it failed, it failed because it wasn't supported. Police and advocacy groups both asked for specific tickets for this new class of offenses which had the phone number to call to go through the health screening and the information about how going through that health screening would make the ticket go away printed on it prominently - lawmakers declined to fund this. Governor Kotek budgeted $50K to train officers on how to handle these new citations and how to direct people to the treatment and housing supports, but lawmakers thought that training officers on this new law at all was a waste of money. Money moved extremely slowly out to the supports that were supposed to come into play to help people obtain treatment or get access to harm-reduction strategies. People freaked the fuck out about clean-needle outreach, fentanyl testing strip distribution, Narcan training, and other harm-reduction strategies.

And at the end of the day, Measure 110 gets called a failure because it wasn't a silver bullet. Never mind that thousands of people are not sitting in jail right now for basically no fucking reason. Never mind that people have gotten treatment, harm has been reduced, overdoses have been prevented...

So, yeah. You'll probably start hearing this trotted out as proof that, well, we triiiied decriminalizing drugs, but look what happened in Portland! Well, what happened in Oregon is that we got set up to fail, and still didn't fail, just didn't totally succeed.

Measure 110 highlights, quoted directly from Prison Policy Initiative:

The Oregon Health Authority reported a 298% increase in people seeking screening for substance use disorders.

More than 370,000 naloxone doses have been distributed since 2022, and community organizations report more than 7,500 opioid overdose reversals since 2020.

Although overdose rates have increased around the country as more fentanyl has entered the drug supply, Oregon’s increase in overdoses has been similar to other states’ and actually less than neighboring Washington’s. A peer-reviewed study comparing overdose rates in Oregon with the rest of the country after the law went into effect found no link between Measure 110 and increased overdose rates.

There is no evidence that drug use rates in Oregon have increased. A cross-sectional survey of people who use drugs across eight counties in Oregon found that most had been using drugs for years; only 1.5% reported having started after Measure 110 went into effect.

There has been no increase in 911 calls in Oregon cities after Measure 110.

Measure 110 saves Oregonians millions. Oregon is expected to save $37 million between 2023-2025 if Measure 110 continues. This is because it costs up to $35,217 to arrest, adjudicate, incarcerate, and supervise a person taken into custody for a drug misdemeanor — and upwards of $60,000 for a felony. In contrast, treatment costs an average of $9,000 per person. The money saved by Measure 110 goes directly to state funding for addiction and recovery services.

There is no evidence that Measure 110 was associated with a rise in crime. In fact, crime in Oregon was 14% lower in 2023 than it was in 2020.

Further reading/sources:

[eldritadh]

My top tip (as a PhD candidate) for doing scientific readings in the Social Sciences is this:

Break it up. Read out of order. Then critique.

Read the abstract first, then the intro, then the conclusion. Then go back and read the discussion (usually the discussion comes before the conclusion). At this point, you should have a pretty solid understanding of the paper; these sections are where The Information is.

Now go back and read the rest. This is where you'll find context for The Information. If you're bored out of your skull, pretend you're a reviewer and need to critically evaluate whether this study is done well.

Is it clear what question(s) the text is trying to answer or address? Sometimes the question is broad, but present; that's fine. But if it's hard to figure out what the question is in the first place, that's bad academic writing!

(This does not apply to readings for Literature or related courses. Obfuscation is often the point of literary texts and it's up to the reader to interpret, analyze, and read between the lines).

In science, the opposite is true. The more clearly stated something is in scientific literature, the better. So you can ask yourself if the author has succeeded in this regard.

Have the authors sufficiently explained their methodology? Do you think that they can reasonably draw the conclusions that they did based on that methodology?

There are always limitations. Have the authors sufficiently addressed them? Can you see any limitations that the authors didn't notice or mention?

What theoretical or conceptual framework is this study based on? Is it stated clearly, or do you have to make a guess?

Hard mode: Why do you think you've been assigned this reading in particular? What do you think your instructor wants you to take from it?

I used to seriously struggle with doing readings in undergrad. Part of it was because I had unmedicated depression and ADHD and couldn't retain written information to save my life, but part of it was because I didn't know how to approach the texts.

I learned the above techniques during my Master's and these first two years of my PhD. For me, at least, it's been really effective to put myself in the shoes of a peer reviewer and be critical of the papers I'm reading (bearing in mind that critique does not mean criticism! You can do a critical analysis of something and decide it's a thing of beauty!)

But at least for me, it has really helped with information retention and active engagement with academic texts.

So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:

Do the readings.

Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.

What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.