Drug Legalization

Did Decriminalizing Drugs Lead to More Deaths in Washington and Oregon?

The Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman overstates the evidence supporting that conclusion.

Aaron Brown | 7.24.2026 10:15 AM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

In a recent City Journal article headlined "No, Seriously, Decriminalizing Drugs Kills People," the Manhattan Institute's Charles Fain Lehman claimed a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper provided conclusive evidence that "should lay to rest the debate over legalization." I published a rebuttal in Reason, arguing that the study did not close the debate. That provoked a response from Lehman on X.

I will respond to each of Lehman's substantive points and delve more deeply into the research. I communicated with the NBER study's co-authors, including University of Oregon economist Benjamin Hansen, who told me that the researchers "do not end any debate" with their report. I was also in touch with the co-author of a study on crime that Lehman cited on X. He offered a much more sober interpretation of his own research than the one Lehman presented in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The NBER paper focuses on Oregon and Washington's brief experiments with decriminalizing drugs, which began in February 2021 as a result of a ballot initiative and a court ruling, respectively. This topic is worthy of careful attention. States are policy laboratories. If other locales plan to try decriminalizing drugs, they should study closely what happened in Oregon and Washington.

The issue is complex because the decriminalization periods were marked by disruptions from COVID-19, fentanyl, and a season of social upheaval. Serious researchers using defensible methods are reaching different conclusions. I took issue with Lehman's claim that the issue was settled by the NBER study and his assertion that "it's hard to see decriminalization as anything but an abject failure."

The paper's authors don't see it that way. "Our research, if anything, restarts the debate," Hansen wrote via email, by raising new questions, such as why decriminalization was associated with more deaths and whether a future iteration of the same policy could avoid them. 

The precise cause of the spike in fatalities during decriminalization is hard to tease out, according to David Hall, a doctoral student in economics at the University of Oregon and another co-author of the NBER paper. In an email, he said that decriminalization bundled together with many simultaneous changes caused the rise in overdose mortality. Identifying which of the factors drove the results, he said, "will be important and also really difficult."

Hansen emphasized that most of the rise in overdose deaths in both states came from the spread of fentanyl. The paper aims to estimate the extent to which decriminalization made the fentanyl crisis worse. Contrary to Lehman's claim, the broad debate on decriminalization of drugs has not been laid to rest.

Jumping to Conclusions 

This isn't the first time advocates have claimed victory for their side. When a 2024 paper found no association between decriminalization and overdose mortality in Oregon, Scientific American quoted Todd Korthuis, the chief of addiction medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, who called it "the study that we were all waiting for." Korthuis said the study showed that fentanyl, not changes to the law, was "the whole story."

Emergency medicine physician Jeremy Faust offered a similar take in an Inside Medicine article. "Study debunks link between Oregon drug decriminalization and overdose deaths," the headline said. "Now we know that neither drug decriminalization nor drug recriminalization was responsible for increases in drug overdose deaths in Oregon and Washington," Faust wrote. "Fentanyl was (and is) the problem." 

With one more year of data, the research points the other way. That's how social science works. But by declaring the issue settled for his side, Lehman committed the same error of leaping to an unjustified conclusion. 

We do know that decriminalization in Oregon and Washington did not deliver the dramatic short-term benefits that advocates (including me) had hoped for. The NBER paper strengthens the case that it caused harm.

A Valuable Study

Is the NBER paper a good study that's worth taking seriously? I think so. Yet I noted that Lehman had selected "a single non-peer-reviewed working paper with equivocal findings from an even more equivocal literature" to slam the door on the debate. He replied:

A good rule of thumb is that anyone who uses "it's not peer reviewed!" as a rebuttal to a study probably doesn't know how to evaluate evidence. https://t.co/TI7Q97J8tx

— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026

Lehman's underlying point........

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