America’s decades-long war on drugs has failed, simultaneously causing huge harms — fueling drug-related violence around the world and funneling millions of people into jails and prisons — and not preventing drug epidemics, including the worst overdose crisis in US history with the opioid epidemic. But now Oregon has declared a truce of sorts, and it’s showing the rest of the US what an end to the drug war might look like.

On November 3, Oregon voters elected to decriminalize all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, so possessing small amounts of these substances no longer carries the threat of jail or prison time. The state’s voters also approved another ballot measure to legalize psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, in supervised therapeutic settings. Oregon voters had previously legalized marijuana for recreational and medical purposes, but it’s the first state in modern American history to legalize psilocybin and decriminalize some drug possession.

This amounts to a fundamental rejection of America’s modern war on drugs. The central pillar of the country’s drug war is criminal prohibition — even simple possession of illegal substances carries the threat of jail or prison time. Oregon is chipping away at that regime, if not dismantling it entirely: Drug possession no longer carries the threat of incarceration, and some drugs are even allowed for therapeutic or purely recreational purposes.

The value of Oregon’s moves, both symbolically and practically, is hard to overstate. I’ve been reporting on the war on drugs for years, and have long imagined the end of the US drug war as a three-legged framework: legalizing marijuana, decriminalizing other drugs, and allowing psychedelics for therapeutic purposes.

Read the full article about Oregon's drug decriminalization by German Lopez at Vox.