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This project sought to understand the effects of successive drug policy reforms in the state of Oregon. These include three changes since 2013 to reduce the enforcement and punishment of low-level drug possession. House Bill 3194 passed in 2013, which reduced mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana offenses and diverted more driving and drug-related offenses to probation. House Bill 2355 passed in 2017, which reclassified Schedule I and II possession of controlled substance (PCS), reducing these from a moderate felony to a misdemeanor. Then in 2021, M110 was implemented, downgrading certain quantities of PCS from a misdemeanor to a citation, resulting in a maximum 100 dollar fine or completed health assessment.

The researchers conducted a retrospective longitudinal analysis using statewide administrative data to assess the impacts of these drug law reforms. Measures included police stops, PCS arrests, court filings, convictions, jail and prison admissions, crime rates, drug seizures, and drug-related overdose deaths.

With the growing popularity, technological ease of using propensity score modeling (PSM), and the concern over its reliability and validity among scholars and practitioners, the researchers aimed to answer whether PSM methods can replicate the results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In this secondary data analysis, the researchers gathered the datasets of 10 publicly available and restricted RCT studies from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), introduced an artificial selection bias into the treatment groups of these investigations, and then used each PSM technique to remove this selection bias. The team then compared the results generated from the PSM methods to those derived from the original RCT experiments, and meta-analyzed the findings across all studies to reveal the true reliability and validity of PSM in relation to RCTs using criminal justice data.

For each study used in this analysis, the researchers created SPSS syntax for variable recodes and artificial bias creation and a codebook with original study items, recoded variables, and analytic variables. (In one study, two RCTs were conducted and thus two sets of syntax and codebooks were created.) Seven text files contain the Stata and R code used to run each PSM technique. These materials have been zipped into a package and are available for restricted download. Please refer to the ICPSR README for more information.