In 2019, Oregon recorded 280 opioid-related deaths but that number had exploded to 955 in 2022. What happened between those two dates? Oregon voters had approved Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, which promised to push addicts to rehab instead of jail. In reality, the first-in-the-nation referendum decriminalized possession of heroin, meth, cocaine, and fentanyl.
Police veteran Randy Sutton, of The Wounded Blue, says anybody in law enforcement could have predicted the outcome.
“This was the expected outcome,” he says, “from the lunacy of the Left decriminalizing all hard drugs – basically all drugs.”
In neighboring California, retail stores there are being looted daily by roving gangs of young people who are walking away without a store security guard, or even a cop, attempting to intervene. What's allowing that to happen? In 2014, California voters passed the Safe Streets and Schools Act, which decriminalized shoplifting from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Jim Cooper, the Sacramento County sheriff, told Fox News last week California voters were “duped” into supporting the 2014 referendum known as Prop 47. It decriminalized seven crimes involving drugs and theft, he said, and now shoplifting has reached a “crisis” level in the city’s state capital.
In a Twitter post that went viral, Sheriff Cooper had criticized retailer Target when its corporate executives blocked sheriff’s deputies from stopping and arresting shoplifters inside its stores. The corporate executives are fearful of bad publicity, he said, but the store employees are witnessing the crimes happen right in front of their eyes.
Much like Sheriff Cooper’s assessment, Sutton suspects the criminals can thank low-information voters who were fooled by a nice-sounding law.
“The public voted for it,” he tells AFN, “because they had no idea what they were voting for.”
Sutton also blames the “warped ideology” common among Democrats and the Left, the secular humanist belief that people are basically good by nature. So it only takes a caring nudge, such as a free rehab clinic or clean needles, to correct bad behavior.
“It's not born from any common sense, or any part of the real world, and it's like this weird utopian thought process that this is the way to go,” Sutton complains.
