“There’s always the hope that states function as laboratories of democracy, and when one state does something that makes sense and seems to work, that other states will adopt it,” says Davis. “Arrests went way down, overdoses didn’t change: To me, that’s an improvement over the previously existing system.”
That and the corporate vampires of the prison industrial complex lobby against decriminalization because it costs them their (predominantly POC) slave labor. Selective enforcement against communities the people in power don’t like (i.e. POC and/or poor) is an added bonus.