And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder.
Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed.
Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance.
The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Not enough emphasis on identifying the actual root cause of the drug use which may be infection. They are probably worried about things like spreading HIV by needle sharing, not "So, does this person have an undiagnosed infection for which their drug of choice is medical treatment?"
Also: Are they building substantial amounts of new affordable housing with good access to transit and essentials like nearby grocery stores? Without that, trying to help homeless people get housing is a joke. If the housing they need simply does not exist, no amount of acting like homeless people are merely badly behaved and need to try harder fixes fuck all.
>"Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance."
This isn't an academic study; if people are dying and the treatment funding is not being increased immediately, keeping this 'experiment' going seems very unethical.
Agreed. Without the requisite funding already secured, this policy basically amounts to a half-baked pipe dream. Declaring the policy a failure really isn't a joke. The policy was not implemented as it was proposed (perhaps "imagined" is a better word), and the end result is that it failed.
When we talk about "not giving the policy a real chance", what are we talking about exactly? Are we referring to an idealized version of the policy, in which everything goes exactly as it was imagined? Or are we referring to the actual implementation of the policy, in which "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" (Mike Tyson quote)?
> Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
I don’t think there’s any safe injection sites in Portland either, or some safe supply system.
There has to be something in the policy which discriminates between “wrong direction entirely” and “not doing enough”.
Decriminalization on its own seems to be just everybody turning a blind eye and otherwise doing nothing to help, so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t work.
> Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance.
Even if it had been funded, Oregon wouldn't have been starting from zero, it's been in a deficit for mental health and addiction treatment for almost 20 years prior. It didn't have enough people and beds for chronic treatment against demand at any point in the 5 years before Measure 110 passed, even if you only consider the demand for them from housed people with health insurance and serious-but-not-hard-drug addictions,[1] nevermind the 2020 meth problem, then the 2021 fentanyl problem, and now the 10x larger 2022 fentanyl problem that's made it the cheapest drug available.
Aside from all that, the death rate spike steeper than the US average's spike or neighboring Washington spike over the same timeframe, but not by much, and Oregon's per-capita death rate is still lower than either; it's #35 out of the 50 states and DC.[2]
So even if Measure 110 had been passed, say, 5 years prior and had the time to fully distribute funding to and staff the existing need for treatment measures across the board before taking effect, the sheer scale of the fentanyl crisis since 2022 would've overwhelmed those resources anyway.
But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts. The authority to distribute funds went to an unqualified council that lacked the resources to vet agencies, so most of the allocated money's just sat there unused. Everything — from the council membership to its administrative structure to its term limits to its lack of data collection to measure any outcomes from the funding — has made distributing the funds harder than it needed to be, and determining if the funds have had any effect impossible.[3]
> I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
For opioid deaths, most of the rise came in the last three months of the 2022 and first three months of 2023, defying the typical trend of declining during the winter.[4]
It's also nearly all fentanyl. If there's been an uptick in decriminalization-specific drug tourism, it'd be dwarfed by the totality of fentanyl use (or if all the new fentanyl use is tourism, Oregon's population would've grown by a half-million people or so over a few months). Seizures of fentanyl went from fewer than 1 million dose-equivalent units in 2020, to more than 4 million in 2021, to 32 million in 2022. Meth and especially heroin dropped over the same span and coke stayed level.[6]
Measure 110 also didn't change the Portland metro police response rate to calls, but who knows what to make of that with PPB being a giant crib of whining babies since 2020.[5]
But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts.
This sounds like a very reasonable conclusion and I hope people who want real solutions can make this nuanced distinction going forward and advocate for decriminalization as part of a broader solution to the problem while saying "This specific law doesn't work. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water."
If I could upvote this a hundred times I would. Oregon's social services are a disaster and have been for decades. Governance here is a wreck, in part because of badly designed programs implemented by initiative. If there is a constituency for good government here, they haven't been showing up to elections. If Measure 110 was designed to fail it wouldn't have been much different. Unfortunately I think it's going to set back the cause of drug law liberalization by decades.
Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed.
Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance.
The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Not enough emphasis on identifying the actual root cause of the drug use which may be infection. They are probably worried about things like spreading HIV by needle sharing, not "So, does this person have an undiagnosed infection for which their drug of choice is medical treatment?"
Also: Are they building substantial amounts of new affordable housing with good access to transit and essentials like nearby grocery stores? Without that, trying to help homeless people get housing is a joke. If the housing they need simply does not exist, no amount of acting like homeless people are merely badly behaved and need to try harder fixes fuck all.