How Oregon turned on its own trailblazing drug law: ‘Not the utopia we were promised’
Holding his five-month-old daughter, Danny Schlabach sways gently on his feet in their small room at a youth shelter in Eugene, Oregon. Their room is scattered with the detritus of a new baby: A+D ointment, formula, baby shampoo, bottle brushes, six pairs of miniature shoes lined up in the closet.
Schlabach, 23, is wildly in love with this child – his first. Her tiny fuchsia sweatsuit, her shock of dark hair. He’s raising her mostly alone. “I wasn’t really on the right track, until I got her,” he says. “When that happened I realized – I have to shape up.”
Housing has been a constant challenge in his life, given his history with drugs, addiction and arrest, and his troubled relationship with his daughter’s mom, and he marvels at his luck in finding a place to live that’s safe, free and comfortable. “I never want to live in a car with my kid,” he says. “But I’ve seen how it happens.”
The shelter where Schlabach and his daughter live is run by an organization called Looking Glass, and is funded primarily through Oregon’s Measure 110.
When voters approved Measure 110 in 2020, they made Oregon the scene of a novel social experiment in the US by decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs and funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into substance abuse treatment.
The vote was celebrated as a groundbreaking step toward a compassionate approach to substance use disorders, one that prioritized treatment over punishment. But nearly three years after its passage, the law has become the subject of fierce debate as Oregon, like many US states, grapples with a spiraling opioid crisis.
In recent months, residents, business owners and law enforcement agents in Oregon have all pointed to spiraling drug use – in downtowns, where people openly smoke fentanyl while others lie unconscious in doorways; in small towns, where mayors unaccustomed to homelessness are suddenly grappling with encampments; in terrifying newspaper stories about middle-class families grieving teenagers who lost their lives due to one bad pill.
Lawmakers are now considering a number of bills that would reinstate criminal penalties such as fines and jail time for drug possession – a decision that could come any day. A coalition led by prominent business owners have threatened to mobilize an effort to hobble the law even more by putting it back to the public in a ballot measure in the fall. Recent polling has shown more than half of voters support a total repeal.
What happens next is seen as a national litmus test for public tolerance to a harm-reduction approach to addiction and drug use, particularly in cities like San Francisco, where lawmakers are grappling with similar complaints from residents over open-air drug use. While advocates acknowledge the measure hasn’t been perfect, many fear the backlash has been driven by emotion rather than data, and argue the state’s new system for dealing with addiction and substance use needs time to mature.
At the heart of all this is a question: what does society owe people like Schlabach, and to what extent should they be considered criminal?
For Haven Wheelock, a harm-reduction advocate whose works for an organization in Portland that has received funding from Measure 110, the danger of walking back the law is, in part, existential. “I think it’s going to make policymakers less brave,” she explained. “Oregon was a leader in this space. It will set us back.”
A bold vision, or a ‘dystopian nightmare’?
When Oregon voters passed Measure 110 with nearly 60% support, the vision that advocates laid out was grand.
The state would deconstruct the existing punitive and ineffective system that criminalized drugs, and build a new apparatus in its place. People would no longer face criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of substances like fentanyl and methamphetamine; long-calcified pathways through the criminal justice system that reinforced societal inequalities would be abandoned; treatment options for those struggling with addiction – funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s legal marijuana tax – would be widely available.
But Measure 110 passed on the eve of a tsunami of twin public health crises in Oregon: an epidemic of cheap, widely available and extremely dangerous fentanyl, and a sharp escalation in the shortage of affordable housing.
Recent federal data show Oregon had the steepest increase in the country of overdose deaths since the pandemic started – by a staggering 1,500%. Nearly 1,000 people in Oregon died from opiate overdoses in 2022. Public health officials warn the crisis shows no signs of abating.
Critics point to this steep overdose rise as a sign of Measure 110’s failing, but any definitive insight as to the law’s impact is likely years away. A recent study of its reach so far – by research organization RTI International – showed no correlation between the rise in overdoses and drug legalization. Other western states such as California and Washington are also overwhelmed by a devastating fentanyl crisis, the study’s authors point out, and have seen similar trends in overdoses and addiction without passing a sweeping decriminalization law like Oregon’s.
Still, there’s growing debate about whether Measure 110 has galvanized these problems or mitigated them, and how the law should be changed accordingly.
In early February, lawmakers held a public hearing on the debate over Measure 110. Speaking to a crowded room in Oregon’s capitol building, a 55-year-old police officer from a Portland suburb recounted watching a child die from an opioid overdose. After three decades on the job, said Erin Anderson, he rarely was emotional about work. This case got to him.
He was one of dozens of members of the public who had come to offer public testimony on Measure 110. Legislators, seated at a panel in front of him, listened somberly.
“All of our attention was on that 15-year-old boy who lay on the floor, motionless and blue,” he said tearfully. “You guys – sorry,” he went on, his voice faltering. He made a final plea to the lawmakers. “I don’t think I can embrace another mother to tell her her son is gone. I need you to do the right thing.”
What constituted the right thing was not a matter of consensus in that room, or across the state.
“Please address drug addiction and homelessness,” Sandy Chung, executive director of the state’s ACLU chapter, asked legislators. “But do so with real solutions, not political theater.” Fentanyl, she pointed out, is also available in prisons. Punishing people with jail time, she argued, will not force them into recovery.
For others there testifying, especially business owners, the priority was putting an end to public drug use. Rob Stuart, the CEO of OnPoint Community Credit Union, said crime and public consumption of drugs has forced the company to spend more on security. His staff feel unsafe. “In the past year we’ve had 25 branch robberies,” he testified.
Recriminalization, Stuart argued, would be the only way to give law enforcement the tools to curtail public drug use.
‘People just don’t want to see it any more’
One thing people on both sides of this debate agree on: Measure 110 has not solved the problem of drug addiction in Oregon. Some parts of the law have failed spectacularly. A hotline set up for people to call as an alternative to receiving criminal penalties – meant to provide an on-ramp to treatment – has been widely acknowledged as ineffective.
A report by the Oregon secretary of state showed that, given how few people used the hotline in its first few years, each call cost roughly $7,000.
“There’s no quick fixes to the crisis we’re in,” says Wheelock, the harm reduction advocate, who supports the law and also works in the field of recovery. “I’m confident that without Measure 110 things would be far worse.”
Wheelock stands in downtown Portland at the needle exchange site for the organization she works for, Outside In. She and her team have fostered a sense of community with substance users here, but they stop short of allowing drug use on site. “Please do not buy, sell, or use drugs within a three block radius of here,” reads a sign on the door. “Our neighbors hate us and want to shut us down and it makes us look bad.”
Her organization has received more than $1m from Measure 110. They use it in part to pay for the harm reduction services they hand out – clean needles and pipes, overdose kits. They see an estimated 100 people a day here.
Wheelock observes that for all the controversy it’s caused, recriminalization may not have much immediate impact. Measure 110 funding for organizations like hers will likely continue. With an already overwhelmed system of law enforcement and public defense, it’s unclear how aggressively the police will be able to enforce any new laws.
Oregonians are, understandably, she says, growing weary of homelessness and the fentanyl crisis. “I know there are a lot of people that really hope they just, like, lock everyone up and throw away the key,” she says. “I think people who just want it to be different and just don’t want to see it any more.”
‘You have to build trust’
The debate over Measure 110 isn’t just raging in Oregon’s capital. A little over two hours south of Portland, with a population of close to 200,000, Eugene has long been known as a hippie town, a mecca for stoners and nature lovers.
But conservative streaks run through its suburbs. Recently, as in the rest of the state, Measure 110 has been in the region’s crosshairs.
At a community forum in January, the Eugene district attorney Christopher Parosa summed up the recent prevailing mood. “What has developed in the last three years is not the utopian Shangri-La that we have been promised with ballot Measure 110,” said Parosa, “but rather a dystopian nightmare that is akin to a grim Hollywood movie.”
For Schlabach, though, the law has helped turn his life around. He recalls his first time being incarcerated. He was 14 and arrested for stealing a car. Schlabach grew up in his early years speaking Spanish, though he can’t remember it any more. Adopted when he was four, he never bonded much with his new family members, who are white. “I was with them for a good chunk of time of my life,” he says. “But they weren’t really my people.”
He went to high school in a facility for incarcerated youth, where he graduated at the top of his class with a 3.9 GPA. But when he got out, he says, he didn’t have the skills to be emancipated. He took some wrong turns. He started smoking fentanyl. “I guess I ended up in my underwear” one night, he recalls. “Like somewhere in front of a 7-Eleven, wrapped in a blanket.”