A Halfway Sensible Column on Drug Abuse and Progressive Permissiveness

I definitely can’t vouch for everything in this column by Nicholas Kristof but I will give him credit for making some admissions against interest, ones that most people on the left are still unwilling to make.

The column is focused on a person named Drew, an adult who started using drugs when he was 12-years-old. Drew has had moments of sobriety as an adult when, for a time, he becomes a different person, but on drugs he became a homeless thief and a drug dealer. Kristof says part of the problem is that the west coast is far too permissive.

As a good liberal, I used to oppose arresting people for using drugs. They need health care, not handcuffs, I thought. But then to my surprise and dismay, I found myself praying that my old pal Drew Goff would be arrested.

Drew, 40, was homeless, using fentanyl and also selling it. His wife, who was with him, was pregnant and had overdosed 27 times, including twice in a single day. It seemed only a matter of time before Drew killed himself or one of his customers. So Drew’s mom and I confided to each other our hope that he would end up in the relative safety of prison and get treatment there…

Drew’s most recent tumble into addiction came in part because of a permissive liberal culture toward drugs on the West Coast. This was meant to be compassionate, but it almost killed him (and has killed many of my other friends). In Portland, a person could be arrested for drinking a beer on the sidewalk but until recently not for smoking fentanyl. Smoking cigarettes in public places was often limited or banned on the West Coast while fentanyl use was tolerated.

Around the time of the pandemic, Drew was clean and was getting all kinds of money from the government with which he bought new furniture, a big TV, etc. At some point he decided to spend some of the cash on drugs and within a year he was homeless and selling fentanyl to feed his own habit. He and his wife also shoplifted on a daily bases from major retailers.

“Me and Sydney probably stole $30,000 or $40,000 worth of stuff from Target, and maybe $20,000 or $30,000 from Lowe’s over a year,” Drew told me. “Shopping carts full of $300 coffee machines and bikes,” which they resold to pawn shops.

Drew said that they carefully chose which stores to steal from, avoiding those like Walmart that they thought would send security guards after thieves. They preferred places like Target where, he said, the policy was not to pursue them.

“It was easy,” Drew said. “We just go in and grab stuff and walk out.”

And because he was in Oregon, drug-addict Drew also benefitted from a change to the law.

Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs in a 2020 referendum, and Drew says that the lack of penalties played a role in his decision to return to drugs. “The benefits outweighed the consequences for me,” he said.

Likewise, his sister, Shelly, who had been clean for nine years, resumed using heroin in 2024 and told me that decriminalization was also a factor for her: “If I knew that I would go to jail for it, I wouldn’t have done it,” she told me.

Oregon and California eventually realized drug decriminalization, defunding the police and ignoring misdemeanor crimes by the homeless were terrible ideas which made the problems much worse, something which any conservative could have told you at any point along the way. But it wasn’t just the legal approach to drugs that was the problem, it was also the social idea that drug use musn’t be stigmatized.

One billboard, funded by the San Francisco city government, showed a group of healthy-looking young people partying and laughing. “Do it with friends,” the billboard advised…

Dwight Holton, executive director of Lines for Life, a Portland-based organization that aims to prevent addiction, draws an important distinction. “It’s not OK to stigmatize drug users,” he told me. “It is imperative to stigmatize drug use.”

In Drew’s case he hit bottom and basically handed himself over to police. He asked a judge to put him in prison where he could get treatment. It probably saved his life.

From there the column wanders a bit into suggestions for how to bring treatment to more addicts using carrots and sticks. And at this point I think you reach the really insoluble part of this. Drew got help because he asked for it. Many, many addicts and alcoholics living on the street don’t ask for it. Their plan, to the degree they have one, is to keep living so they can keep doing drugs and the street is the place where the drugs are readily available. That’s why many homeless people, given an opportunity to move off the streets, say no.

Had Drew said now because he wanted to keep using, he would have been allowed to do so. Maybe he’d be arrested or maybe not but he’d have been back out on the street in no time. What do you do for the people who want the drugs more than everything else life has to offer? So long as we take the libertarian position that it’s their choice, even when they are hardened addicts, there’s nothing we can do for them. Not really. Until we decide that addicts don’t get to choose their own path in life, many of them will keep choosing the path of drugs and homelessness and petty crime.