In November 2024, California’s ten-year long experiment with Proposition 47 ended as voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36.
Its passage came as a result of voter despair over tens of thousands of drug overdose deaths, rampant and increasing crime, increasing homelessness, and a profound decline in the quality of life in many communities. These problems grew worse despite years of assurances that the state’s efforts to address them were adequate, only needing more time and funding to generate positive results.
The question being raised in Sacramento today is if the governor and the Legislature fund Prop. 36 enforcement. Based on the initial reaction at the State Capitol, this appears unlikely.
Some background: Prop. 36 mandates that repeat offenders for narcotics sales are no longer diversion eligible. Convictions now carry county jail or even state prison sentences depending on the severity. It increases sentences for repeat theft offenders to up to three years in county jail and establishes “treatment mandated felony” drug crimes obligating chronic offenders to accept treatment or face incarceration.
The independent Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) estimated that Prop. 36 could potentially increase inmate populations by a “few thousand”, with implementation costs estimated in the “several tens of millions of dollars to low hundreds of millions annually.” While not insubstantial, this doesn’t make much of a dent in the $322.2 billion proposed 2025-26 state budget.
Looking back, Prop. 47’s much ballyhooed savings through de-carceration and de-criminalization has never really materialized. The LAO estimated that 2025 budget “savings” for Prop. 47 funded education, treatment, and anti-crime measures at $95 million if every dollar was spent on education and prevention, but it’s not. These funds are also earmarked for treatment. The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics states the average cost for drug rehabilitation is $13,475. Prop. 47 never made a dent in these problems and voters knew it.
Drug addiction, homelessness, and criminality are linked even if California’s progressive leadership won’t admit it. Illicit drug use perpetuates homelessness, drives crime, and exacerbates mental illness. It should be no surprise that voters passed Proposition 1 in March 2024, a bond-funded program to treat the mentally ill and drug addicted. Soon after, Governor Newsom committed $3.3 billion in block grants for psychiatric treatment and drug rehabilitation.
Though many dismiss the idea that the threat of incarceration has a positive effect on drug use and rehabilitation, research indicates that it does.
A voter-approved measure in 2000, also called Prop. 36, proved it by offering treatment as an alternative to incarceration. A subsequent UCLA study on its effectiveness concluded that treatment backstopped by court monitoring “indicates that at treatment discharge, Prop 36 offenders had reduced drug use, engaged in less criminal activity, were less likely to be homeless, and experienced reduced levels of family conflict compared to their levels on these measures at admission.”
This progress was all undone by Prop. 47, which reduced most drug crimes to misdemeanors rather than felonies. Once addicts understood that failure in treatment no longer meant jail time, many stopped trying.
In addition, Medi-Cal has been offering qualified low-income addicts two 90-day residential drug treatment programs per year with a possible 30-day extension since 2015. However, without the threat of incarceration, most addicts are not motivated to participate.
The sad reality is that illicit drugs work. Addicts report the feeling of being high on opiates in particular as the most pleasurable experience of their lives. Yet, being addicted to heroin, or any drug, can place users on an ever-declining addiction sine curve. The horizontal axis contains a line called normal and the sine curve peak is the high. As the high wears off, users descend below normal.
Over time, the highs become less high and the lows, lower. Eventually becoming high isn’t as high as addicts struggle with their own brain chemistry to just get back to normal. Meanwhile the low is so painful that drug addicts will do anything to avoid it. And anything means anything. They will prostitute themselves, abandon their children, quit their jobs, steal, live on the streets, and defecate anywhere in order to live a surreal Matrix-like existence perpetuated by the blue pill of opiates and fentanyl. This must end.
Americans are understandably protective of their civil rights, but those rights are meaningless if they’re dead.
California has misspent tens of billions on failed homelessness programs, so-called street treatment, and harm reduction. It’s time to repurpose some of the existing Prop. 47, Prop. 1 and Medi-Cal funds to fulfill the voters’ overwhelming Prop. 36 mandate.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute.