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Janina Rager: Right now this morning we’re just going to do a drive-through downtown. I already initially…
Jessica Mendoza: Janina Rager works for the police department in Eugene, Oregon. She’s a community engagement specialist, and one day in October, Rager was making her usual rounds when she stopped at a store downtown. People often loiter outside the store getting high.
Janina Rager: Pretty much every single night people are just camped out in front of their awning, so they get to work every morning and there’s people camped there. There’s feces. There’s drug paraphernalia.
Jessica Mendoza: When Rager arrived, she spoke to one of the men who were there.
Janina Rager: Just do me a favor, could you pick up all your garbage with you and take it with you?
Speaker 1: You know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been going around picking up all everybody else’s junk and everything.
Janina Rager: I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: It’s just weird how there’s people that…
Janina Rager: They just leave stuff everywhere?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s just terrible.
Janina Rager: Go ahead and give it a few minutes to get that untied and stuff and we’ll be back out and see how things are going in the pew, okay?
Jessica Mendoza: The garbage includes bits of tinfoil that are typically used by people who smoke meth or fentanyl. These kinds of interactions are pretty typical for Rager these days. Public drug use has skyrocketed across the state and many blame a law that went into effect in 2021. This law made Oregon the first state in the country to decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs like heroin, fentanyl, and cocaine.
It’s called Measure 110, and it effectively made all drugs legal. The idea was to shift drug use from being a criminal justice issue to a public health one. And now that the measure’s been in place for more than two years, our colleague Zusha Elinson went to Oregon to see how it looks on the ground.
Zusha Elinson: We’ve been closely watching what happened. I mean, how is this working out in Oregon, because it can be a bellwether for this idea of decriminalizing drugs?
Jessica Mendoza: Right. It’s almost an experiment in real time.
Zusha Elinson: Exactly.
Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I’m Jessica Mendoza. It’s Wednesday, November 8th. Coming up on the show, Oregon’s big experiment with decriminalizing hard drugs. For years, many states have been slowly decriminalizing drugs, mainly cannabis and mushrooms. Oregon was an early mover in this effort.
It was the first state to decriminalize marijuana possession, which it did in 1973. When Measure 110 appeared on the ballot, it gave Oregon voters the chance to make the state another first, the first to decriminalize hard drugs. When we say drugs are decriminalized, what exactly does that mean?
Zusha Elinson: That means that if you are in Portland, Oregon, you could go out in the street and do a line of cocaine and you cannot be arrested and brought to jail. What they can do is give you a citation, but essentially drug possession, possessing small amounts of drugs and even using small amounts of drugs is no longer a crime.
Jessica Mendoza: What was the argument for decriminalizing?
Zusha Elinson: So in general, the argument for decriminalizing has been the same for a long time, which is that advocates say that we rely too much on the criminal justice system to deal with what they view as a public health issue, addiction. So their idea was we’re going to take a public health approach to this, provide people with services, and those people will get services instead of going into the criminal justice system, either into jail, prison, or probation.
Jessica Mendoza: Measure 110 passed with nearly 60% of the vote. The law changed the way law enforcement interacts with drug users in Oregon. Instead of arresting people who use drugs, officers are now supposed to point them toward treatment.
Zusha Elinson: Yeah, so let me describe this new… They set up this new regime, right? Not allowed to arrest people anymore, but what the framers of this law said, they said, police, what you can do is hand out these citations to people using drugs or possessing drugs in the street. And the idea behind these citations was they carry a $100 fine.
But if the person wants to get out of that fine and not pay it, all they have to do is call an 800 number, a helpline, that will assess them, give them an assessment, and then point them towards services that they might need. And I think the people who wrote the law hope that these citations would be a little bit of an incentive for people addicted to drugs to seek out services.
Jessica Mendoza: While he was in Eugene, Zusha met with Joe Bazeghi. He’s the Director of Engagement for Recovery Works Northwest, which provides addiction treatment.
Zusha Elinson: All right, and this is going to be a not residential treatment, but what kind of treatment?
Joe Bazeghi: Housed intensive outpatient treatment.
Zusha Elinson: Okay.
Jessica Mendoza: The organization received funding from Measure 110 specifically from attacks on cannabis. Bazeghi is using those funds to provide long-term services to people in need. As a former drug user himself, he says it’s easy to relapse without that kind of support.
Joe Bazeghi: And it can result in people basically falling back into acute withdrawal after seeming stable over the course of weeks as opposed to 72 hours.
Zusha Elinson: So people come here and stay for how long?
Joe Bazeghi: Yeah, so what we built with support from Measure one 10 is we set up a detox, 16 beds in Southeast Portland as well. People will be there for anywhere from three to seven days, averaging about five, and there they’re going to receive medications, medical supervision.
Jessica Mendoza: Through Measure 110, Bazeghi’s organization also provides rent-free housing for up to six months. But programs like this take time to launch.
Zusha Elinson: Oregon has for many, many years not had sufficient amount of rehabilitation services for people addicted to drugs at all. And so one part of this measure that most people agree is a good idea and has been working is that they’ve taken the tax from legal cannabis to fund rehab programs. That seemed like a great idea to most people.
No one was objecting to that, but the problem was that it took a long time to get these services online and some of them are still coming online. So when the law went into effect, there weren’t a lot of services to point people towards because they had not been set up yet.
Jessica Mendoza: But even if those services had been available, there was no guarantee that people would take advantage of them. Those citations that officers give out that provide phone numbers for treatment centers, they haven’t been very effective.
Zusha Elinson: So we interviewed police officers who handed out these citations in the beginning and they said often people on the street smoking meth or fentanyl, whatever they were doing, they would take the citation and crumpled it up and throw it on the ground. They didn’t take it very seriously. One Portland officer told us the story of how he gave a citation at one time and the person lit it up and smoked it.
Jessica Mendoza: Back in Eugene, officers also told Zusha that they’re feeling frustrated with how the citation system is going. Police Chief Chris Skinner says that writing these tickets feels pointless.
Chris Skinner: Yeah. I mean, the citations I think in the early stages we were better about doing that than we are now. Like anything, anybody that calls in or anytime we come across anybody that is in possession, using some of the dangerous drugs that would warrant a citation competes with other things that our officers have to do. It oftentimes has not become a priority for us.
And it’s been my history or my experience in law enforcement is that when you put a mechanism in place, that’s designed to have a measurable outcome, and when you’re not seeing the benefits of that outcome, it’s hard to incentivize officers actually to go out and do that work. I don’t even know of one success story of an individual that was written a citation that chose to go to an assessment that ended up in treatment.
Jessica Mendoza: Since Measure 110 went into effect, officers have issued thousands of citations, but only 92 people have called and completed assessments that would connect them to rehab services, according to the nonprofit that operates the helpline. Now, Oregon residents are taking a hard look at the effects of drug decriminalization. That’s next. Across Oregon, a lot of people are thinking about whether decriminalizing hard drugs was the right way to go.
Zusha Elinson: We spoke with this fentanyl addict who was explaining what was going on to the tourist, and this guy’s name was Charles. He was 37 years old. A lot of sores on his body. He looks much older than you would think a 37-year-old would look. What do you think they should change to Measure 110 to make it work better?
Charles: Have an official police order to appear at the recovery location or the place the officer tells you where to go. Because if you don’t follow through, then people like me that want recovery but don’t know how to access it, I won’t. If I was to get stopped by officer and he tells me to be here and here, then I’m going to go there and try to…
Zusha Elinson: Right, like if there’s some requirements.
Charles: Yeah.
Zusha Elinson: Yeah.
Charles: But if I don’t know where to go, then I’m not going to follow through.
Zusha Elinson: He talked a lot about his own journey and he said that he used to use meth and that he went to jail and was on probation. And during that time he had a job and he was clean for a while. He was living in a sober house, but it was only because it was required while he was on probation. And so it’s interesting, right, his story. You could think, well, his story is an argument for having drugs criminalized, because he was clean after he got arrested, was on probation.
At the same time, he said as soon as he got off probation, he went back on the drugs. He said no motivation not to use drugs. And so that really shows us the limitations of the old system and the new system. He said he didn’t think these little tickets would really help him get clean. He said he needed more direction. He said if he was stopped with drugs, he would need the officer to tell him, “You have to be here at this recovery place on this date and this time.”
Jessica Mendoza: From May 2022 to May 2023, fatal overdoses in Oregon rose by more than 20%, putting it behind only two other states. That’s according to preliminary federal data. Advocates say Oregon’s drug problems have more to do with nationwide trends like the rise of fentanyl and increased homelessness. When this measure was enacted, there was already a fentanyl epidemic across the country. At the time, was that taken into account?
Zusha Elinson: So fentanyl has been a problem in many parts of the country for a while now, but what’s interesting is that it’s only become a really big problem in the Northwest in recent years. So the fentanyl problem had not really yet gripped Oregon at this time, which is interesting to note.
And I think when I spoke to several of the voters is they weren’t even thinking of this. They were thinking about meth, mushrooms, other drugs. They had not seen the devastation that Fentanyl had wreaked across the country.
Jessica Mendoza: And now some people who voted for the measure say it’s flawed.
Zusha Elinson: We spoke with a woman who’s a bookstore clerk in Eugene, 56 years old. She told us she was a Grateful Dead fan, had experimented with mind-altering substances herself and always wanted to see Oregon liberalize its drug laws. She considers herself kind of a cynical person, kind of a politically savvy person. Now she thought maybe she was a little naive.
She said this might have worked in a place where there’s a lot of public assistance for people struggling with mental health and struggling with addiction, but obviously America and Oregon is not that kind of place. And so she felt like maybe it wasn’t the best idea.
Jessica Mendoza: Given how this measure has played out over the last three or so years, does it feel like there’s going to be a major backlash to it legally?
Zusha Elinson: Certainly. It seems like the polls show that now the majority of people who voted for this thing no longer want it, right? That’s your starting place. It passes with 58% support. Now, well over 50% of Oregonians don’t want this law.
Jessica Mendoza: There’s a growing call for reforming the measure.
Zusha Elinson: There is a group of people planning to put a ballot measure on the ballot next year to basically criminalize hard drugs, while keeping the funding for rehab in place. And it’ll be interesting to see what people do. The legislator is also meeting right now on a committee to maybe tweak the law and then in the upcoming session at the beginning of next year making some changes as well.
Jessica Mendoza: What else are lawmakers talking about?
Zusha Elinson: So here are some ideas they’re throwing out there. None of them are decided upon, but these are some suggestions that people have. So one state lawmaker said what he’d like to look at is taking people who overdose off the street for 72 hours so they have time for detox, sort of like a mental health hold.
It would be like a drug addiction hold, if you will. That was one idea to give them that space and time to detox like jail used to. Another idea is that if people get a certain amount of these tickets, say five or 10 of these tickets, that it does turn into a criminal case, so there is more of a stick.
Jessica Mendoza: What are some of your big takeaways from this story?
Zusha Elinson: I think it’s a really fascinating story because in some ways Oregon was bold and brave and went out in front of everyone and said, “We’re going to try out this approach that hasn’t been tried in the US.” That’s fascinating that a state would do that. At the same time, you’ve seen places like Washington say, “No, we’re not going to decriminalize drugs either.” I think especially with the way the fentanyl epidemic has ravaged our country, it’s going to make people think twice about passing this type of law.
Jessica Mendoza: That’s all for today, Wednesday, November 8th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We’re out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
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