Replacing prison time with treatment isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But that treatment cannot be voluntary, as Oregon’s experience shows.
Replacing prison time with treatment isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But that treatment cannot be voluntary, as Oregon’s experience shows.
I n November 2020, Oregonians voted overwhelmingly in favor of a ballot measure to decriminalize hard drugs, including methamphetamine and heroin. The measure, the first of its kind in the nation, replaced the threat of jail time for people convicted of possession of hard drugs with a maximum $100 citation and an invitation for the cited individual to call a toll-free number to undergo a drug evaluation in lieu of paying the fine. The measure reallocated about $100 million from the state’s robust cannabis-tax fund to drug-treatment programs in an effort to bolster treatment options.
Supporters of the measure, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Drug Policy Action, a national drug-liberalization group affiliated with George Soros, argued that it would usher in a more just, humane, and effective approach to managing addiction. Results from the first year of Oregon’s experiment with hard-drug decriminalization, however, suggest it is failing.
Data compiled by the Oregon Judicial Department from the first eleven months of decriminalization show that police issued few citations and that cited individuals largely failed to avail themselves of the promised treatment resources. Police statewide issued 1,777 citations for drug possession, and another 49 cases were reduced to citations from infractions occurring before the effective date of decriminalization, for a total of 1,826 individuals engaged with the new legal process. Many counties, particularly those in the Portland metropolitan area, reported few citations issued. For example, police in Multnomah County, population 820,000, issued only 108 citations.
When police did issue citations, they were almost always ignored. Of the 1,314 citation convictions in 2021, the vast majority, 816 of them, arose as a result of the defendant’s failing to show up for his or her court date. Moreover, just 55 of the 1,826 people cited (3 percent) completed the offered assessments and screening. According to the Oregonian newspaper of Portland, as of October 25, 2021, nearly nine months after the decriminalization measure took effect, only eight people cited under the law requested treatment information after undergoing an assessment.
Meanwhile, Oregon has been caught in a tsunami of deaths resulting from overdoses on the very drugs the state decriminalized. According to Willamette Week, another Portland newspaper, there were 291 deaths from methamphetamine overdose in the first half of 2021, versus 391 in all of 2020. The first half of 2021 saw 237 deaths from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, compared with 230 in the entirety of 2020.
To be sure, Oregon’s overdose deaths were climbing before decriminalization. And overdose deaths are on the rise in many other states as fentanyl and a new form of methamphetamine, made on an industrial scale in Mexico and inflicting extreme mental derangement on many if not most who use it, become more prominent. However, Oregon’s newfound reliance on voluntary treatment — as opposed to involuntary incarceration or mandatory treatment — is ill-timed in light of these drugs.
Sam Quinones, former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, believes decriminalization is the opposite of the correct approach in light of the drugs prevalent on the street today. In an interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting, he said:
It may be in fact extraordinarily damaging to people, not an act of benevolence, but an act of torment to actually keep someone on the street. Taking someone off the street using jail somehow to detox people — people are doing this across the country now — might be a more benevolent, more kind way of dealing with someone. Certainly just saying, well, you’re on the street and we’ve got you with these implements that are kind of misdemeanors or low level felonies or maybe you have some stolen property or whatever, but we’re going to leave you here and we’re going to wait till you’re ready for treatment. The idea that people need to be ready for treatment is an idea that’s made completely obsolete by this meth.
As the drugs available on the street have become more addictive, more ravaging of users’ mental state, and more deadly, Oregon has empowered those users to choose whether to continue to use the drugs that are killing them or to seek treatment. Unsurprisingly, as the treatment data laid out above describe, the vast majority are not choosing treatment.
Drug possession is often described as a victimless crime. If a person wants to use drugs, the thinking goes, the impacts of those choices redound almost entirely on him. Unfortunately, the collateral damage of the use of hard drugs currently available, cheaply, on the streets in Oregon and elsewhere is evident. Those drugs are propelling a nationwide homelessness crisis that, unsurprisingly, is nowhere worse than in Oregon.
Quinones, in that same interview, tied the proliferation of homeless tent camps directly to the new meth:
[Meth is] not a social drug anymore. It’s not a party drug anymore. On the contrary, what it seems to breed is a very sinister kind of schizophrenia, horrible paranoia, great amounts of hallucinations and with that of course comes homelessness. And I think, also, you can chart the rise of the tent encampments so common in the West, but also now all across the country in many areas.
Oregon’s Multnomah County, home to Portland, recently released its analysis of the 126 deaths of homeless people in the county in 2020. Of those deaths, more than half were the result of drug use, and of drug-related deaths, 79 percent involved methamphetamine and 41 percent involved opioids (some deaths involved multiple types of drugs). Those deaths occurred before decriminalization, but the situation is unlikely to have abated in 2021. Moreover, the recent sprouting of homeless encampments in cities outside Portland, such as Bend, where I live, tracks with the increased availability of the new generation of hard drugs. Now, Oregon has decriminalized those very drugs.
The homeless encampments in Oregon and elsewhere lead to increased criminality such as property crimes committed by addicts looking to buy drugs, and violent crime within the camps themselves. The camps destroy the communities in which they’re located — many a suburban Portland mom will no longer take her kids to downtown Portland, for example — and threaten the revitalization of urban centers. The drugs beget the camps, which in turn beget community decay. Oregon’s decriminalization of those drugs is making that problem worse.
The fact that Oregon’s hard-drug decriminalization is failing should be a warning to other states considering a similar approach, but it does not mean that replacing prison time with treatment is a bad idea. But that treatment cannot be voluntary — it must be mandatory and supervised, or it will not work. Today’s hard drugs are simply too addicting and too mind-destroying for optional treatment like that relied on by Oregon to work. The cost to the people using the drugs, and to the communities in which they live, is too great.
Editor’s Note: When first published, this report contained an incorrect statistic about the percentage of deaths of homeless people in Multnomah County in 2020. Seventy-nine percent of the drug-related deaths involved methamphetamine, and 41 percent involved opioids.