People continually seize upon this 1% figure. The subtext, and explicitly your’s, is “addicts are addicts and they won’t get help if you don’t force them.” The reality is much more complicated and individual than that. It varies from individual to individual and where they are in the addiction and recovery events. Addicts are often in the grips of multiple, complicating issues include mental health and trauma. They usually lack the education and framing to see that clearly and the addiction can be the way they cope. Many want help, want to change, don’t know how to, don’t believe they can, and when do, them moment passes all too quickly.

The solution, of course, is to make them go to treatment. But this does not work and continued thinking that it will is a mixture of hopeful naivete and willful ignorance.

Then, of course, the subtext continues. “People who don’t realize that addicts need to be forced are naive and waste money and time being too gentle with these addicts.”

You cited an article from OPB published in 2022. Here is a more recent article from OPB exactly 2 year later. From the article:

The Legislature, the court system and the bureaucracy under two governors ignored or rejected proposed solutions as seemingly straightforward as designing a specialized ticket to highlight treatment information. They declined to fund a proposed $50,000 online course that would have instructed police officers on how to better use the new law. They took no action on recommendations to get police, whose leaders campaigned against the ballot measure, talking with treatment providers after decriminalization passed.

Police hit the streets with the old traffic citation that said nothing about treatment making the ticket disappear.

Oregon has made it’s decision. I, for one, think it’s for the worse.