Oregon Votes to Re-Criminalize Drugs

"I had someone from Drug Policy Alliance use the phrase, 'apples and oranges,'" says a reporter on the 2023 "fact-finding" trip Oregon officials took to study the Portugal's harm reduction model

The Oregon Senate yesterday passed House Bill 4002, by a vote of 21-8, amending Measure 110, the Drug Treatment and Recovery Act that stumbled out of the gate in 2020 and, to some people’s minds, offered addicts further immiseration rather than help. In addition to pledging increased funding toward treatment and recovery, HB 4002 reintroduces legal penalties to those caught possessing and using small quantities of drugs, penalties that could be expunged should the user choose to enter drug treatment; those who refuse could face jail time and fines.

The changes are opposed by proponents of Measure 110 as originally conceived, including the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, which put an estimated $5 million into getting Measure 110 passed.

As I wrote earlier this week in “Drugs 1 - Oregon 0”:

Those who did not want Measure 110 amended claim they want full decriminalization and to fund treatment and recovery, while leaning into the Drug Policy Alliance pitch point that “forcing people into treatment is unethical and ineffective."

I would counter it is unethical to promise people "help is on the way!" and then renege, especially on people who, the deeper they slide into addiction, become exponentially less able to help themselves… I would further counter that there's a difference between full decriminalization in theory and in practice, or at least the way it's being practiced in Oregon.

How full decriminalization is practiced in other countries was on the minds of Oregon officials in 2023, when they took a “fact-finding” mission to Portugal, which in 2001 decriminalized the personal use and possession of all illicit drugs.

It is understandable that Oregon would look for a role model, but what they found was perhaps not heartening, in terms of applicability. As a reporter covering the trip said, "I had someone from Drug Policy Alliance use the phrase, 'apples and oranges.’”

If this is the case, I continue to not understand why DPA, or any organization, would fight to keep Measure 110 as-is. Such a position seems to me predicated more on an antipathy toward law enforcement, and damn the torpedoes. As I wrote last time:

The "autonomy above all" argument; that those who choose to use and perhaps kill themselves with drugs have every right to do so without state interference, makes me wonder whether the overriding goal of some Measure 110 supporters is to get law enforcement out of people's lives, with those in the throes of addiction as the pawns du jour.

On the cusp of HB 4002 becoming the law of the land, a prismatic view of Oregonians’ positions on drug use, from a hardliner to someone in the recovery trenches who insists any measure meant to help addicts needs time.

“LIVES ARE BEING LOST. STREETS ARE UNSAFE. IT’S TIME TO FIX BALLOT MEASURE 110” reads the homepage of the Coalition to Fix and Improve Ballot Measure 110, which last September proposed plans they believed would get more drug treatment to more people more quickly. Backed by contributions from in-state luminaries, including $300,000 from Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and $200,000 from Nike founder Phil Knight, the “fixes” prohibited the use of hard drugs in public; made possession of fentanyl, meth and heroin a crime again, and replaced voluntary with required addiction treatment. Those who completed treatment would have their charges dismissed and automatically expunged.

“I believe if a secret ballot was taken, it would pass,” said political consultant Dan Lavey, of the proposed changes to Measure 110. “But there remains a small but very committed progressive minority in the legislature who remain more ideologically committed to drug legalization than practically committed to fixing the flaws of Measure 110.”

Others say any amendments is like sticking a band-aid on a hemorrhage. “Measure 110 is a fundamentally bad law, conceived in bad faith,” former Clatsop County DA Josh Marquis wrote in the Bend Bulletin back in October. “The time has come to put this deeply flawed law back before voters.” In January, a member of the Oregon ACLU said attempts to change Measure 110 reflected “a massive failure of leadership… they are working on the failed policies of the war on drugs, which we know don’t solve addiction.”

Photo by Tara Faul

“Do we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater?” asks Joe Bazeghi, director of engagement at Recovery Works NW, a drug treatment center in Portland and recipient of a $1.1 million grant from Measure 110. As a former addict, Bazeghi has spent decades trying to bring treatment to other addicts and cautioned that it was too soon to judge the efficacy of Measure 110.

“We have had a historic disinvestment in healthcare capacity to treat addictions in the state of Oregon,” he says. And yes, Measure 110 was rolled out too slowly, and yes, in a perfect world the infrastructure for treatment would have been in place before drugs were decriminalized. But you cannot build with invisible money. 

“The measure is what created that capacity,” he says, which Recovery Works NW has capitalized on, using Measure 110 grant money to provide online services for 600 in an underserved section of rural Oregon, and to build a facility in Portland that can support in-patient detox stays for up to 1200 people a year.

“So that’s beautiful,” he says, while acknowledging it falls far short of what is needed; the new 16-bed facility, for instance, increased the city’s capacity by 18%, in a state where many thousands await treatment.

“This is the part of the problem that people need to understand: there is not currently the treatment available to meet demand,” he says, which makes the “mandatory treatment” a nonstarter. 

“You ​​round up everybody that has taken drugs in the last month and mandate them to treatment in a system that doesn't have capacity,” he says, comparing it to forcing everyone to eat an orange when there are no oranges to be found.

Photo by Tara Faul

Backers of Measure 110 understood that citizens were nevertheless impatient; that they wanted things fixed faster, that they were tired of stepping over bodies and medical waste in the street. In a bid to find solutions and inspiration, a delegation of 24 Oregon officials last October took a "fact-finding" trip to Portugal, to study that country's vaunted harm reduction model. 

"It was like that dysfunctional American style of meeting where everybody gets up and makes a statement,” says Patrick Symmes, a journalist based in Portland and Lisbon who joined the delegation, made up of people from aid organizations, politicians from both parties, and members of law enforcement. “And yet ultimately I think it was a rational exchange, the pro-drug addiction services people having to acknowledge the police union head’s perspective and the senate majority leader saying, 'My constituents are yelling at me over 110!'"

As for whether the group came away with workable ideas, Symmnes thinks, not so much.

"I had someone from Drug Policy Alliance use the phrase, 'apples and oranges,'" he says. "The Portuguese police, if they catch you with drugs, they go through your backpack, they go to your apartment, which is not allowed in the United States. They're trying to get people into some, at least initial consultation on healthcare, within 24 hours in Lisbon. Portugal also has national healthcare; when they pursue harm reduction, it's for the addict, but also for the whole of society. They don't have the politics that we do about this. It's like a Portuguese police officer told me, 'Nobody wants their cousin to go to jail.'"

“They've got a lot of advantages that I think Oregon doesn't have, besides the politicking,” says Bazeghi, who was part of the delegation and appreciated Portugal's commitment to the harm reduction model.

"The only goal behind harm reduction is extending life,” he says. “Every time we reverse an overdose, that is one more instance of a person that has the opportunity to enter recovery, stability, wellness. I can't enter recovery today if I died of a fentanyl overdose yesterday."