Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg is defending his proposal to decriminalize all drugs, saying it’s more effective to keep addicts out of jail and offer them treatment. While treatment is certainly better than jail time in some cases, an all-out decriminalization of drugs would devastate our cities.

How do I know? I live in Seattle, a city in Washington that has decriminalized personal possession of illicit drugs to disastrous results.

At Friday’s New Hampshire Democratic presidential debate and again on Fox News Sunday, Buttigieg was put on the spot to defend his support for decriminalizing all illicit drug possession.

This is totally bonkers.



Pete Buttigieg: decriminalize all drugs, including heroin and methpic.twitter.com/f2NiFOCmy7 — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 9, 2020

“Possession should not be dealt with through incarceration,” Buttigieg argued, saying he’d still punish drug dealers.

In Seattle and King County (the state’s most populous county), the city attorney and prosecutor decriminalized the “personal possession” amounts of illicit drugs. Much like Buttigieg, local officials believe jail time doesn’t treat addiction.

The policy has been met with national acclaim from liberal journalists in the New York Times and Washington Post, who portray the move as a win for social justice against the evil and failed war on drugs.

But the biggest problem with decriminalization is simply that it doesn’t work. In fact, it makes the problems worse. And despite the glowing reviews of the Seattle policy, it’s been an unmitigated disaster .

Over the last decade, we’ve seen an alarming uptick in overdose deaths. In the years since King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg first stopped charging people with possession, we’ve seen a skyrocketing increase in meth overdoses, going from 18 deaths in 2008 to a staggering 197 in 2019. In the same time period, heroin overdose deaths climbed from 45 to 147. Fentanyl-related deaths jumped from 9 to 106. It’s only February, and we’re already on pace to exceed the deaths we saw at this time last year.

This is a health crisis, not a social justice success story. It doesn’t have to be this way. When you actually talk to law enforcement officers, it becomes pretty clear why this problem is getting worse, not better.

Drug dealers have adapted to the new rules, and they carry less product on them to sell. While it’s slightly more inconvenient to return to their stash to stock up on product, it’s preferable to jail time. Carrying small amounts of illicit drugs, they know if a cop does search them, they won’t face a harsh punishment. They’ll be back on the street selling drugs in no time.

Consequently, there’s a large open-air drug market in downtown Seattle. Is that Buttigieg’s vision for every city in the United States?

While there have certainly been arrests, the police pressure is never consistent. Officers aren’t allowed to police proactively, and drug dealers are taking advantage, preying on homeless addicts who break into cars and homes, sell stolen property, then buy their drug of choice. It’s keeping them addicted and homeless.

I certainly agree with Buttigieg and others who say throwing an addict in jail won’t treat their addiction. I favor treatment on demand.

But since these addicts know they won’t see meaningful jail time, they have less of an incentive to take up offers of treatment. They’re not thinking rationally due to the very nature of their addiction. Without a consequence that they care about, they don’t get the treatment. But it gets worse.

Seattle cops have long complained that they have no leverage to use over an addict to get them to turn on their dealers. If prosecution is a serious threat, an officer can tell the addict that they’ll avoid prosecution but only if they give up info on their drug dealers. Cops could then use that intelligence to arrest drug dealers. Now, no such leverage exists — and it wouldn’t exist anywhere if Buttigieg had his way.

Of course, decriminalization also signals to people that if they’re curious about trying an illicit drug, there won’t be any legal consequences.

Perhaps that’s what made it easier for local Seattle-area high school students to make the deadly decision to purchase what they thought were Oxycodone pills. No legal consequences, right? Well, the pills were counterfeit, and the teens died of an overdose.

Buttigieg and others are blinded so deeply by their political beliefs that they can’t (or won’t) see the consequences of their positions. Unfortunately, while they celebrate their liberal outlook on the war on drugs, we’re losing innocent lives ravaged by an addiction like-minded politicians enable.

Jason Rantz (@jasonrantz) is a Seattle-based talk show host on KTTH 770 AM and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.