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Florists are usually cheerful places. But Gifford’s Flowers, in downtown Portland, has been going through it of late. It’s been broken into three times and employees have been attacked and even bitten, says Jim Gifford, who has been running the store for half a century. Mr Gifford blames Oregon’s decriminalisation of the possession of drugs, which, he says, has led to more “people in drug episodes” coming to his shop. “A blue city in a blue state should be leading,” the lifelong progressive Democrat says. “But also not forgetting about the people that work hard and play by the rules.”
In 2020 Oregonians voted to decriminalise the possession of small amounts of hard drugs, including fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin. It was the first (and so far only) state in the country to do so. The change was a massive experiment in treating addiction as a public-health problem. But the state has now concluded that the experiment failed. This month, in the face of ever-increasing overdose rates and public complaints such as Mr Gifford’s, the Democratic-controlled legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure recriminalising the possession of drugs. The governor, Tina Kotek, has said she will sign it.
Overdose deaths have spiked in Oregon, increasing by 42% in the year to September 2023 (compared with a national increase of 2%). Researchers disagree on how much decriminalisation versus the spread in fentanyl is to blame, but none thinks that the state’s experiment managed to decrease deaths. Oregonians are frustrated. Open-air drug use has become particularly blatant.
The replacement law makes the possession of a small amount of drugs a misdemeanour crime punishable by up to 180 days in jail. It does provide paths to addiction care, by offering drug offenders the chance to go directly to detox facilities instead of jail (and to try it again if the first time doesn’t work). “It’s time to reset our guardrails,” Andy Mendenhall, the head of Central City Concern, an addiction-services provider in Portland, told lawmakers. He pointed to people who found choosing between prison and treatment to be a “powerful part of their pathway of recovery”.
Praising the bill, Paige Clarkson, the district attorney in Marion County, believes that the new provisions will allow prosecutors to focus on drug dealers while prioritising treatment for addicts. “Police, sheriff’s deputies, district attorneys, we don’t want to criminalise addiction,” she says. “We want to use the criminal laws to motivate those individuals to get healthy.” Oregon’s new regime would still be quite enlightened.
But its drug experiment is likely to become a cautionary tale anyway, says Floyd Prozanski, the state senator who led the charge in enacting it. Although he still believes in the mission, Mr Prozanski recognises that advocates are going to “have to rebuild the confidence of people not only in Oregon, but around the country. And realise that when we implemented it, we did it wrong.” ■
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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.
Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.
“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.
“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.
That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.
“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”
“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”
In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.
The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.
Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.
“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.
“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”
“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.
IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.
A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.