Published September 18, 2024
Whenever I visit the small Oregon town where I grew up, I am always interested to see what has changed. A couple of years ago, I noticed a cluster of tents next to City Hall, just across from the library and post office. It was jarring. Poverty is common in rural Oregon, but this variety of homelessness was new—an urban blight had now spread throughout the state.
The consensus was that drugs were at the root of the expanding problem. Oregon legalized marijuana in 2015, and in 2020, voters overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs. The result was the tents, inhabited by those who would not or could not keep clean enough for a shelter, let alone a job and an apartment.
While dealing drugs remained nominally illegal, legalizing possession of smaller amounts made it much harder to investigate and prosecute. Add the resulting drug culture to Oregon’s general soft-on-crime approach and you get danger, disorder, and filth. None of this helped anyone, including the users—instead of jail, they were left to decline and die in tents.
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Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His primary research interests are American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is currently working on a study of Kierkegaard and labor. As a cultural observer and commentator, he is also fascinated at how our secularizing culture develops substitutes for the loss of religious symbols, meaning and order.
