TITLE: Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Aimed to Make Cops a Gateway to Rehab, Not Jail. State Leaders Failed to Make It Work.
https://www.propublica.org/article/oregon-leaders-hampered-drug-decriminalization-effort
EXCERPT: Ballot Measure 110, approved by voters in 2020, created a new role for law enforcement in Oregon. While there’s evidence people living with addiction in the state are increasingly finding their way into treatment, the failure to turn police encounters into successful on-ramps to rehab has been cited by critics as prime evidence the measure isn’t working. Oregon lawmakers, noting an ongoing rise in overdose deaths, are now looking to restore jail time for drug possession.
But Oregon’s political leaders themselves played central roles in failing to deliver on the potential for law enforcement to connect people with lifesaving services under the new measure, documents and interviews with a wide array of people involved in the system indicate.
The Legislature, the court system and the bureaucracy under two governors ignored or rejected proposed solutions as seemingly straightforward as designing a specialized ticket to highlight treatment information. They declined to fund a proposed $50,000 online course that would have instructed cops how to better use the new law. They took no action on recommendations to get police, whose leaders campaigned against the ballot measure, talking with treatment providers after decriminalization passed.
Leaders involved in the process pointed to the rapid timeline for implementing the measure amid the pandemic, among other developments, as a factor hindering what they could accomplish.
Both a leading critic of Measure 110 and its most prominent supporter agree that leadership failures took away any chance for Oregon to truly test the measure’s potential.
Tera Hurst, of Oregon’s Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a nonprofit that represents many of the addiction service providers the measure now funds, said law enforcement and providers needed to be brought together to talk in order to translate its vision into reality.
“The people who are literally on the ground were not really engaged in the beginning to say, ‘How do we make this work?’” Hurst said.
Mike Marshall, director of the rehab and prevention advocacy nonprofit Oregon Recovers, said he considered the threat of jail an important motivator and didn’t want voters to pass Measure 110. But once they did, he was dismayed that state officials didn’t step forward to fulfill the measure’s goals.
“They didn't see that the voters gave them this really imperfect tool but were committed to reducing substance use disorder rates and increased access to treatment,” Marshall said.
“Instead,” he said, “they simply tried to do the least amount of work to administer it to the letter of the law.”
TITLE: As drug criminalization debate rages, Oregon lawmakers consider creating a new misdemeanor
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/12/drug-criminalization-oregon-politics-addiction-drugs-misdemeanor/
EXCERPT: As Oregon Democrats and Republicans tussle over how to reintroduce criminal penalties for possessing drugs in the state, much attention has fallen on whether that offense should be a class C misdemeanor, the least serious type, or class A, the most serious.
But with Democrats’ leading bill on the matter facing an uncertain path, some members of the two parties have begun discussing another option. They are looking at creating an entirely new misdemeanor to accomplish what both sides say they want: to offer police a greater ability to disrupt open drug use and create a new tool for steering users toward treatment.
“The conversation in the building is, what is an alternative to a misdemeanor A, what is the alternative to a misdemeanor C?” said state Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, who serves on the joint committee charged with tackling addiction. “Can we as a body come to an agreement on our own definition that serves Oregonians, serves justice and provides mercy?”
The closed-door discussions haven’t yet arrived at an answer, sources on both sides said. But the negotiations reflect a tricky political math. Recriminalization in any form is bound to be unacceptable to some Democrats, but Republicans might not get on board without stronger potential consequences. Complicating matters, a coalition that includes some of the state’s richest people is threatening to pass a ballot measure including potential tough penalties if lawmakers don’t act.
Tess Seger, a spokesperson for Senate Democrats, said the idea of creating a new “unclassified” misdemeanor for drug possession is “one of the many different ideas [committee] co-chairs are considering to get the policy right, but no one has agreed to anything.”
Democrats’ proposal for combating Oregon’s addiction crisis is laid out in House Bill 4002, a wide-ranging bill that looks to expand access to medications that ease opioid withdrawal, expand drug treatment services, and make it easier to prosecute drug dealers.
The bill also would make possessing small amounts of drugs like heroin, meth and fentanyl a class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail. The offense is currently a noncriminal violation, punishable by a ticket that can be ignored without consequence.
Democrats leading the effort to address addiction — Sen. Kate Lieber, D-Portland, and Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend — say their bill would offer drug users options to avoid prosecution, emphasizing their intent to steer people to treatment.
But a growing coalition that includes Republican lawmakers, cities, counties, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers has argued that only a class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, is adequate to convince people to accept help.
Supporters of that approach showed up to a four-hour committee hearing last week, urging Democrats to beef up their bill. They were opposed by Oregonians who are adamant that reintroducing criminal penalties would be a harmful and costly mistake that would disproportionately affect people of color.
Opponents of recriminalization point to research recently presented at a symposium in Salem. Among other things, it suggested that a flood of cheap fentanyl throughout the West — not the voter-approved Measure 110 — is to blame for soaring overdoses Oregon has experienced in recent years.
TITLE: Did Decriminalization Boost Drug Deaths in Oregon?
https://reason.com/2024/02/14/did-decriminalization-boost-drug-deaths-in-oregon/
EXCERPT: Decriminalization under Measure 110 took effect in February 2021, and a 2023 Journal of Health Economics study estimated that it was associated with a 23 percent increase in "unintentional drug overdose deaths" that year. But "after adjusting for the rapid escalation of fentanyl," Brown University public health researcher Brandon del Pozo reported at the Salem conference, "analysis found no association between [Measure 110] and fatal drug overdose rates."
Kral and his collaborators concurred, saying "there is no evidence that increases in overdose mortality in Oregon are due to" decriminalization. That is consistent with the results of a 2023 JAMA Psychiatry study, which found "no evidence" that Measure 110 was "associated with changes in fatal drug overdose rates" during the first year.
The expectation that decriminalization would boost overdose deaths hinges on the assumption that it encourages drug use. Yet an RTI International study of 468 drug users in eight Oregon counties found that just 1.5 percent of them had begun using drugs since Measure 110 took effect.
Because Measure 110 did nothing to address the iffy quality and unpredictable potency of illegal drugs, it is not surprising that overdoses continued to rise, consistent with trends in other Western states. Those problems are created by drug prohibition and exacerbated by efforts to enforce it.
When drug consumers do not know what they are getting, as is typical in a black market, the risk of a fatal mistake is much greater. That hazard was magnified by the crackdown on pain pills, which pushed nonmedical users toward more dangerous substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with products of uncertain provenance and composition.
Worse, the crackdown coincided with the rise of illicit fentanyl, which is much more potent than heroin and therefore made dosing even trickier. That development also was driven by prohibition, which favors highly potent drugs that are easier to conceal and smuggle.
The perverse consequences of these policies soon became apparent. The opioid-related death rate, which doubled between 2001 and 2010, nearly tripled between 2011 and 2020, even as opioid prescriptions fell by 44 percent. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted more than 80,000 opioid-related deaths, nearly four times the number in 2010.
Although it is hard to make much progress in reversing these depressing trends without addressing the underlying legal regime, harm reduction tools such as fentanyl test strips, naloxone, and supervised consumption facilities can make a dent in the death toll by preventing or reversing overdoses. Treating drug users as criminals, by contrast, compounds the harm caused by prohibition, unjustly punishing people for conduct that violates no one's rights.
"It is no longer 2020," Albany, Oregon, Mayor Alex Johnson told state legislators last week, urging recriminalization. "The world has changed. Fentanyl has become a death grip." Before legislators take Johnson's advice, they should reflect on how that happened.