Drug Legalization

No, a New Study Does Not 'Lay To Rest' the Debate Over Drug 'Legalization'

The Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman misstates the findings of a new paper to claim he was right all along.

Aaron Brown | 7.15.2026 9:47 AM

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(Adani Samat)

Oregon and Washington both effectively decriminalized drug possession in early 2021 in two short-lived experiments. During these periods, overdose deaths rose sharply in both states. Nationally, they followed a broadly similar upward path during the same period.

Naturally, policy analysts seized on the experiments to tease out the effects of decriminalization from the factors driving the national trends.

While it's clear that the decline in overdose deaths the proponents of decriminalization were hoping for did not occur, the evidence is mixed about whether decriminalization drove an increase in overdose deaths once you control for the fentanyl epidemic and COVID-19's impact on social isolation and street encampments.

In a piece at City Journal titled "No, Seriously, Decriminalizing Drugs Kills People," Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Charles Fain Lehman argues that the debate is settled. A new study, he writes, shows "conclusively" that decriminalizing drugs caused overdose deaths "to explode."

Lehman's analysis is riddled with errors and misconceptions, starting with his claim that this study should "lay to rest the debate over legalization." (Emphasis mine.) What was tried in Oregon and Washington has nothing to do with legalization. Decriminalization at the state level left all federal laws in place, and all laws against distribution. It only reduced penalties for possession of small amounts. Under legalization, drug users would be able to purchase their narcotics from established sources, mitigating the problem of black market drugs tainted with fentanyl. A grim reminder of the recurrent pattern is the 2019 vaping-injury outbreak, which hospitalized roughly 2,800 people and killed 68. The culprit was neither nicotine nor THC but vitamin E acetate, a cheap thickener that black market sellers cut into counterfeit cannabis cartridges; it showed up in victims' lungs and almost nowhere else. Regulated, tested products weren't the problem. The illicit supply was, exactly as it is with fentanyl.

Far from laying anything "to rest," the study's conclusions were mixed and nuanced, and other studies reached different conclusions. Lehman's article is a case of a partisan selecting a single non-peer-reviewed working paper with equivocal findings from........

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