Oregonians Turning against Drug-Decriminalization ‘Mistake’ amid Record ODs, ‘Dystopian Nightmare’

Ben West was incensed. Oregon’s attempt at drug decriminalization has been “an unmitigated disaster,” he said. People are “dying on our streets.” Voters had been “bamboozled.”

West, a commissioner in Clackamas County, pushed his colleagues to do something about it during a June 7 board meeting. He acknowledged that Clackamas County couldn’t on its own turn back Measure 110, approved by nearly 60 percent of Oregon voters in 2020, but they weren’t helpless either. “We can advocate. We can go to our voters. We can use our bully pulpit,” he said. “We can bring other counties from local government to our side.”

His colleagues on the commission agreed with his concerns.

Measure 110 has turned Oregon into the “wild, wild west of drug abuse,” said commissioner Mark Shull. Board chair Tootie Smith said voters had been the victims of a “bait and switch” — they’d been promised an intense focus on treatment and recovery that has yet to be delivered.

The board voted 3–1 that day to spend up to $80,000 to pose two questions to Clackamas voters during next May’s presidential primary: Should state lawmakers representing Clackamas County introduce and pass legislation repealing Measure 110? And should Governor Tina Kotek call a special session to address the impacts of drug decriminalization on crime and homelessness?

Technically, the ballot measure is toothless. Clackamas County voters can’t force state lawmakers to take drastic action. But Clackamas commissioners intend to encourage other Oregon counties to follow their lead and pose the same or similar questions to their own voters, part of a fledgling effort to build a statewide consensus to force the legislature’s hand.

The approval of the ballot language is notable, in part, because of where it’s occurring. Clackamas County is not a small Republican backwater in rural Oregon. It is one of the three heavily populated counties that make up the Portland metro area. In 2020, about 54 percent of Clackamas voters cast ballots for Joe Biden. About the same percentage of Clackamas voters backed the radical drug-decriminalization experiment in that same election.

But over the last few years, as drug-overdose deaths have skyrocketed in the state, as squalid homeless camps have proliferated in Portland and beyond, and as the treatment and recovery options Oregonians thought they were voting for failed to materialize, many residents have changed their views. Increasingly, they are saying that drug decriminalization hasn’t worked, and many believe that nibbling around the edges will not be enough to reverse the damage.

“I do think there are a lot of people like me, left of center, who are realizing it was a mistake,” said Lisa Schroeder, a downtown Portland restaurant owner who voted for Measure 110. “If I could turn back time and repeal Measure 110 tomorrow, I would do it.”

Critics of Measure 110 who spoke with National Review said they believe most Oregonians, even in uber progressive Portland, are coming to a similar realization — despite their good intentions, drug decriminalization has had a devastating impact on the region. An April poll found that more than 60 percent of respondents believed that the passage of Measure 110 has contributed to the increasing number of drug overdoses in the state, and that it has worsened the homeless crisis. A similar percentage, including a majority of Democrats, supported amending the law to reinstitute some criminal punishments for illegal drug users.

“It is significant. I really do feel like the needle has moved,” said Kevin Dahlgren, a Portland drug counselor, homelessness consultant, and Measure 110 opponent.

West, the Clackamas commissioner, is also a nurse. He has had a front-row seat to the horrors that have accompanied the decriminalization of drugs. He told his colleagues in June that he is “tired of seeing patients and people dying on our streets.”

Last year, Portland police investigated a record number of drug-overdose deaths in the city. This year, they topped that record in early August. Critics have also charged proponents of drug decriminalization and so-called “harm reduction” of enabling drug users. Over the summer, the health department in Multnomah County, which includes most of Portland, drew scorn after it was revealed that they were planning to provide drug addicts with smoking supplies and with educational materials about how to ingest drugs anally.

“The neighborhood I grew up in literally changed quickly from a livable, beautiful, funky, artsy city to being a hollow dystopian nightmare,” West told National Review. He said he could no longer “just sit idly by and step over, basically, people killing themselves on the street, and pretend this is the new norm.”

A ‘Humane’ Approach to Drug Addiction?

Measure 110, otherwise known as the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, promised Oregonians a new progressive approach to addressing addiction in the state. Oregonians suffering from substance-abuse disorders “need adequate access to recovery services, peer support and stable housing,” the act read. They need treatment, “through a humane, cost-effective, health approach,” not to be treated like criminals, it said.

The act promised to prioritize “harm reduction,” and to decriminalize user amounts of street drugs, including hard drugs such as heroin and methamphetamines. Offenses would be punishable with a citation and a $100 fine, which could be dismissed if the offender called a treatment-referral hotline and completed a health assessment.

Money from the state’s marijuana tax would be redirected to recovery services.

It all sounded so nice, and oh so progressive.

Proponents of the November 2020 ballot measure — led by the George Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance — spent millions promoting it. They swamped their underfunded opponents.

The measure passed overwhelmingly, garnering 58.5 percent of the vote statewide, and winning majorities in 17 of state’s 36 counties, including Clackamas.

Progressive reformers saw the win in Oregon as the first strike in a bigger, national push to decriminalize drugs; the Soros-backed Drug Policy Alliance is now pushing legislation to eliminate federal penalties for drug possession, according to media reports.

“I think the voters were sold a bill of goods from a radical special-interest group back east,” West said, adding that he believes Oregon was specifically targeted because of its size and its political demographics.

Lacking Drug-Treatment Infrastructure

There were reasons to believe that Oregon was not prepared for what was to come.

While voters were considering decriminalizing drugs, the state ranked near the top of the nation in the percent of its population twelve and older that already had an illicit drug-use disorder, and at the bottom for getting treatment for people who needed it.

Recently, Oregon topped the nation in the percent of its population that misuses prescription opioids (4.46 percent) and uses meth (1.93 percent), and was third in the nation for the percent of its population that had a serious mental illness in the past year (7.15 percent), according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health report, released in December 2021.

The Measure 110 language acknowledged that “Oregon ranks nearly last out of the 50 states in access to treatment, and the waiting lists to get treatment are too long.”

Despite the acknowledgement, there was nothing in the language of the act to hold off the drug decriminalization until the state sufficiently built up its treatment capacity.

And, once the measure was passed, the marijuana tax money that was supposed to fund recovery services was slow to be dispensed. An audit released by the secretary of state’s office in January found that the grant-application process was inefficient and inconsistent, and people in charge of it lacked experience in grant-making and implementing a statewide program.

“We didn’t have that infrastructure at all here,” West said, “and the elected leaders in this state have chosen not to invest in those things.”

Dahlgren, the drug counselor and homelessness consultant, is a critic of what he calls the “homeless industrial complex,” which he says is overly focused on anti-capitalism and dumping massive sums of money into building affordable housing.  He said that basic and often more important steps, such as homeless outreach and building more detox facilities, have been neglected.

“If I were king for day,” he said, “I would start with at least tripling the amount of detox facilities we have, if not more, to offer detox immediately to people ready for change. And that means always having open beds.”

‘Clearly This Is Not Working’

When Oregon voters decriminalized drugs in 2020, few likely understood the scope of the fentanyl crisis that was in the process of overwhelming the nation, infecting the drug supply and even hooking drug users who had no interest in the powerful synthetic opioid.

Now, with few options to coerce users into treatment, data show that Oregon has been disproportionally harmed by the drug. Last year, 1,364 people died of a drug overdose in Oregon, more than double the 610 such deaths in 2019, according to National Center for Health Statistics data. Nationally, overdose deaths increased by about a third during that period.

In Portland, overdose deaths are similarly skyrocketing, according to police bureau data. Last year, the city shattered its record for drug-overdose deaths, with 159, up from 135 in 2021 and 87 in 2020, the bureau reported. So far this year, the Portland Police Bureau told National Review that as of August 10, its narcotics unit had already received 178 suspected overdose-death notifications, blowing past last year’s record with about five months left to go.

Media reports are filled with scenes of drugged-out people passed out in doorways or roaming downtown like zombies, babbling to themselves, and pushing around carts filled with junk.

As for the citations and $100 fines approved by Measure 110, law-enforcement officers across the state have issued thousands of them, but fewer than 200 people have completed a screening, according to Portland mayor Ted Wheeler’s office.

“There is no other backstop if the citation is ignored,” Wheeler told the Oregonian newspaper. “Clearly this is not working as it was intended to.”

As part of his work, Dahlgren meets with and interviews homeless people in Portland. He said he is often the first outreach worker they’ve talked to. He said many of the people he talks to would like to get help, but there aren’t enough detox facilities in the city.

“I’ve actually never met a fentanyl addict that says ‘I love this.’ They’ll admit it feels good. That’s different than love,” Dahlgren said. “They say, ‘I can’t get off of it. This is slowly killing me. I wish I had a place to go,’ and it simply doesn’t exist.”

The misery on the streets is impossible not to see, Dahlgren said. “I personally see a body about once a week in downtown Portland,” he said.

“We could have never anticipated this,” he said of the fentanyl crisis that he believes has been supercharged in Oregon by Measure 110. “This is why I’m like, we need to repeal this now.”

A Destination for Addicts

Last September, Portland attorney John DiLorenzo filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of ten disabled residents, accusing the city of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to keep its sidewalks clear of debris and homeless camps.

As part of a settlement agreement earlier this year, the city vowed to prioritize removing campsites from sidewalks and to establish a system for reporting problematic camps.

DiLorenzo believes that Oregon’s generally laissez faire stance toward illicit drug use and homeless camping, combined with a Ninth Circuit ruling that concluded it was unconstitutional to prosecute people for sleeping in public when they have no other shelter, have turned Oregon, and Portland in particular, into a destination for addicts and other troubled people.

He said he’s advocated for point-in-time counters to ask the city’s homeless where they are from. But, he said, “they won’t ask those questions, because they know what the answers are.”

“They want to blame everything on landlords, and they want to say, ‘Well, we need rent control,’” DiLorenzo said. “You know what, most of those folks who are in tents right now who have severe drug problems and severe mental illness problems can’t pay any rent. It’s not that the rents are too high, they can’t exist in housing.”

By eliminating penalties for illicit drug use, Measure 110 took away the government’s “hammer” to force people into treatment, whether they wanted to go or not, he said. Under Measure 110,  treatment service providers receiving public grants are prohibited from “employing coercion or shame or mandating abstinence.”

People caught using illicit drugs used to have a choice, drug treatment or jail, DiLorenzo said. “Now,” he said, “your choice is drug treatment or just keep doing what you’re doing.”

He believes that many of the “harm reduction” efforts promoted by the city and by advocates simply enable addicts. He pointed specifically to a recent, much-criticized plan by the Multnomah County Health Department to start providing addicts with drug smoking supplies, including meth pipes, straws, tinfoil, and copper scouring pads. The department also planned to hand out educational materials, including a pamphlet on “boofing” – getting high by inserting drugs anally, the local ABC station reported.

The department defended the program, arguing that smoking drugs is safer than injecting them, and claiming that providing supplies and educational material does not lead to more drug use. The program was ultimately suspended before it began, but not before the department spent more than $80,000 on the drug-smoking supplies.

The Icing on the Cake

Critics of Measure 110 acknowledge that drug decriminalization is just one of several issues that have played on one another to hollow out downtown Portland and worsen the state’s overlapping homelessness and drug-addiction crises.

Schroeder, the owner of Mother’s Bistro & Bar in downtown Portland, said her restaurant was so busy in 2019 that “people couldn’t even get in the front door.” Over two decades she’d grown the restaurant into a nearly $7 million business, she said.

Then a combination of factors conspired to cut Schroeder’s business by more than half: Covid policies stripped Portland’s downtown of its office workers, homeless camps proliferated, and the George Floyd riots of 2020 made the city seem even less safe, driving away foot traffic.

Measure 110 and the exploding fentanyl crisis is just the “icing on the cake,” Schroeder said.

Schroeder said she’s talked to police-bureau leaders and was told there’s not much they can do. Under Measure 110, cracking down on drug users and open-air drug markets is akin to playing a game of “whackamole,” she said. And the city’s progressive district attorney, Mike Schmidt, “doesn’t want to put people in jail for petty crimes,” Schroeder said.

At one point, Schroeder said, she had the windows of her business smashed three times in four months. Someone broke in one night, but didn’t steal anything, she said. She’s found that keeping her lights on at night has helped keep criminals away.

“Before allowing [drug decriminalization] to take effect, we should have had all our ducks in a row. We did not,” Schroeder said. “I’m beating myself up that I didn’t understand, and I think a lot of us are, that we didn’t understand the ramifications of Measure 110.”

“They put the cart before the horse,” she added. “They legalized drugs, and now people have nowhere to go. There’s no alternative.”

Breaking Through Democratic Opposition

Despite growing statewide angst about Measure 110’s impact on Oregon’s quality of life — and recent negative coverage in mainstream outlets like The Atlantic, Esquire, and the New York Times — the state’s Democratic leaders have been unwilling, so far, to make substantial changes. While the legislature did approve a new law this year increasing penalties for fentanyl possession, broader efforts to address Measure 110’s failures went nowhere.

State representative Lily Morgan, a Republican from Grants Pass in southern Oregon, introduced several bills this year addressing Measure 110, including proposals to overturn the measure, to send it back to voters, and to create a tiered system that would have imposed criminal penalties on people caught with drugs more than once. Morgan, a former parole officer, said her preferred tiered approach was an attempt to “honor the intent of the voters.” But, she said, her bills were blocked by the Democratic leader of the house’s behavioral-health committee, who had made promises to Measure 110’s backers.

“What polling shows is the majority of Oregonians have buyer’s remorse,” she said. “They did not vote for people to keep using drugs. They want the money to go to treatment. But they want there to be accountability that people are not using drugs.”

Morgan said there needs to be some form of mandatory treatment for people caught with illegal drugs, with the understanding that different people are in different stages of readiness to receive help, and that many addicts are not in a position to advocate for themselves.

“When you’re under the influence of these substances, it’s not you that is making the decisions,” she said. “It is you under the influence that is making the decisions.”

Schroeder, the Portland restaurant owner, said that when she first started looking into repealing Measure 110, she realized that many of the people who agreed with her were Republicans. “So, I then stopped,” she said. But, she said, she is willing to put in the work to get buy-in for change from critical left-of-center and progressive Oregonians, too.

“There’s ways of going across the aisle and trying to work together toward things that are civically beneficial for everybody,” she said.

DiLorenzo said he is confident that even progressive Oregonians are ready to rethink drug decriminalization. When they were preparing their ADA lawsuit targeting the city for allowing homeless camps to proliferate on the sidewalks they polled residents, he said, “and 75 percent of this very progressive electorate supported what we wanted to do. And that amazed me.”

“Everyone wants to take a humane approach to this, but the question is, what’s the best strategy?” he said. “And the problem we have is we have a number of dug-in so-called experts who are unwilling to change strategies.”

In Clackamas, West and his colleagues hope that by charting a course and building a consensus opposed to Measure 110 through a “federalist” approach they can spur statewide change.

Allowing addicts who are unable to advocate for themselves to rot on the sidewalks and overdose and kill themselves in public is “the most uncompassionate thing you can do,” he said.

“We are watching people throughout the metro area slowly commit suicide on our streets,” West told his colleagues in June. “You pass a crazy policy like this, and we have no infrastructure for recovery, we have no infrastructure to handle this, we have no way to actually induce people into treatment. We are allowing them to die.”