The wave of bold new decriminalization-centered approaches to drug policy reform that swept West Coast cities from San Francisco to Vancouver, B.C. starting around 2020 has failed, according to one the nation’s leading drug policy experts, former Obama White House drug policy advisor and Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys. On this week’s Blue City Blues, we invited Professor Humpreys on to explore why.  

Humphreys, the author of a recent Brookings Institution paper on “The rise and fall of Pacific Northwest drug policy reform,” blames the failure on a sharp shift by reform advocates away from proven public health and harm reduction approaches to new notions about the individual autonomy of drug users, ideas that emerged out of a strange conflation of progressive and libertarian ideas. In an effort to “destigmatize” addiction, reformers created new policy models that rejected the idea that addiction to drugs like fentanyl or methamphetamine is a problem that necessarily even needs solving. 

Humphreys believes these West Coast reformers were right to want to correct the punitive excesses and other shortcomings of the War on Drugs. He does not want society to put more drug users behind bars. But in his view, blue city reformers swung too far, and made the mistake of embracing dubious approaches that sought to normalize addiction to hard drugs and ignored its serious personal and social harms.

Humphreys criticizes reformers for refusing to consider the way addiction can rip families apart, or how crimes associated with drug dealing and rampant addiction can injure neighborhoods. The conversation also gets into the serious challenges posed by the displacement of heroin by fentanyl on the streets of blue cities, and the limitations of the Portuguese drug reform model in the U.S. West Coast context.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

About Blue City Blues

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  

America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.

But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 

The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?