Oregon lawmakers deliver a false bill of goods to public suffering and overdose

Tera: So, the true efforts to roll back decriminalization came from some large corporate business interests. They hired the former director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, Max Williams. They misled Oregonians, who were seeing issues on the ground like visible suffering on our streets and public drug use, to believe that Measure 110 had caused or made these problems worse. Their perspective is that this is a problem we can solve through punishment and forcing people into treatment. And our perspective is this is a complex problem that requires different interventions. For homelessness, that’s more housing and humane shelter. For public suffering, that’s more outreach and connections on the ground. For addiction and overdose, that’s investing in overdose prevention, harm reduction, and more accessible health and addiction services. We know from more than 50 years of evidence that criminalization doesn’t address the root cause of these challenges. It’s often a revolving door of arresting and releasing people, it increases overdose deaths, and takes money away from the services and interventions our communities need.

These corporate folks knew Oregonians were understandably frustrated, but also overwhelmingly support a public health approach and a more treatment-focused, or services-focused approach. So, they basically preyed on that frustration and rebranded criminalization as the solution.

The efforts were really led by criminal systems leadership, and the only tool they understand is shoving everybody back into the system, making sure we can find a way to put them away and out of sight. And yet, their approach doesn’t actually do that. The most likely outcome is people will be arrested and released back to the street due to lack of representation and other issues.

Everybody’s going back to this idea that in order to solve whatever problem they’re trying to solve, we need to have police lead it, and courts help navigate it. Treatment feels like an afterthought, and it’s not being done in a way that’s hand in hand with treatment providers to really be able to address the realities on the ground — how we get people who are struggling actually connected to services they need.

Tera: Deflection came from a political space of wanting to try and soften the blow of recriminalization. Legislators were trying to honor what the voters’ intent was with Measure 110 — that criminalization hasn’t worked, and we need to connect people to treatment.

In theory, deflection meant pre-arrest connection to care. At the beginning, the lead legislators were saying, “All we want is for law enforcement to intervene by connecting the person to a peer, and then the peer can do whatever they need to do with the person, and law enforcement can keep going, and there wouldn’t be a record established.” That was the intent of deflection. But as the behavioral health people got pushed out, and criminal justice folks took over the table, deflection no longer became a real term anymore. It’s really diversion. It’s really keeping people stuck in the criminal legal system or cycled in and out of jails and prisons and likely not connecting them to treatment and care.

What they’re considering a “deflection” now is post-arrest — putting people through a harmful system, then maybe connecting them to care. For example, in Clackamas County, you get arrested, you have to show up in a community court, and there they’re going to decide whether or not you qualify for deflection, which is no longer deflection since you’ve already been arrested and put through a court system.

Law enforcement and the DAs pushed back against requiring everybody to have a deflection program and everybody needing to follow a specific formula for that deflection program. So, whether to have deflection is left to the county’s discretion. Even if a county opts in, it’s up to the officer whether or not they think that they should connect this person to a peer, or they should just jail them.

If statistics play out the way they played out with all the data that we’re tracking around racial impacts, we will see more white people deflected and more Black and Brown people arrested and put through the court system. So there’s so many inequities just on the face of it, not knowing what my rights are from county to county, a cop being the one making behavioral health decisions without any education or understanding of what a person would need, and then every county having a wildly different interpretation of what deflection is going to mean to them.

Of the 20 counties that have applied for part of the $20 million pot of money that was allocated for deflection programs, I don’t know of any that actually said we’re going to fund more services. They’re funding DA offices and funding law enforcement. They’re building up and staffing the system that we were supposed to be deflecting from, but they’re not investing in the system that we’re supposed to be deflecting people to. That’s where their whole “treatment first argument” falls apart. With Measure 110, money that we used to spend on parole, probation, and other law enforcement interactions with people who are struggling or who are using drugs went into services. We’re basically pulling those investments out of services again and investing them back into a system that we know has failed over the past decades.

Tera: Oregon was last in the nation in access to services and within the highest in the nation in addiction rates. We always knew that we had a long way to go. Before, most services would be through drug courts or law enforcement, and they weren’t set up with the mindset of, how do we help people thrive? How do we get them to health?

What Measure 110 did was really invest in those types of services that look at this as a long-term path. It’s really about public health, and we want to build out a public health system. So housing, overdose prevention and harm reduction, peer supports, low barrier treatment, and supported employment. Making sure that when people are accessing services, it’s not just for 28 days. It’s really engaging with them early through harm reduction and making sure that people have what they need and know that they’re worth building relationships with, and worthy of respect, dignity, and access to health care. And most of the people making and setting the policy were the people who had been most harmed by the war on drugs, and are also the ones healing folks from the war on drugs.

What we’ve been able to build is a system of care. Even in just two quarters, Measure 110 services have provided over 3,000 people with housing, over 15,000 with harm reduction, over 12,000 with peer supports, and over 9,000 with treatment services. Real people are getting the support and the treatment that they need when they need it, and also it’s more specific to what is most effective for them. Because of Measure 110, we’ve had some providers that used to provide services in a tent, who now have their own building space where people can come and receive services. We’ve built out culturally specific housing. We have a lot more Spanish-speaking specific houses, African American houses, LGBTQ houses. So, the systems being set up through Measure 110 ultimately have had and will continue to have a huge impact on communities who’ve been most harmed.

Now, Measure 110 was never intended to, nor was it ever going to be able to, solve all of our social issues. When we came out of the pandemic and out of lockdown, people were horrified by seeing how many of our social safety nets had failed, and Measure 110 became the scapegoat. Decriminalization became this kind of boogeyman for every other issue that was happening at the same time, and it really is based in this criminalization of poverty that we’re seeing in so many communities. Oregon has been grappling with a lack of affordable housing, our homeless population is growing. Measure 110 was never intended, nor was it ever going to be able to solve those problems. It was there to help alleviate some of them, and it did. It created recovery, transitional and emergency housing for people who were struggling. It helped connect people to care that they desperately needed. But it’s not going to be, nor was it ever intended to be, the solution for every social safety net failure.

Tera: Voters recognized that communities of color and people experiencing poverty were disproportionately impacted through the criminal justice system, especially for drugs. And they realized that law enforcement being the first responder to someone in crisis was not only ineffective, but was really dangerous for that person and harmful. Police were encountering people with problematic or chaotic drug use, but they didn’t have the right tools and didn’t know what to do with folks.

So, with Measure 110, we started a pilot program. And this is what we wish the response would be in Oregon when police are involved. We reached out to ask police how can we help? How can we support? And what they said is, I don’t know what this guy needs. I don’t know what to do. And I feel really helpless and hopeless, and it’s really frustrating seeing him on the street again. So, we offered to have a peer outreach worker be on call, so that when the police did encounter somebody who was using in public, that they were offered a peer outreach worker. And in just 17 shifts, we were able to connect 150 people into services through this partnership. It’s created a stronger relationship between police and peers. A lot of these peers had been in the back of these police cars before, and being seen as a professional colleague really made them feel more empowered. And the police got to see you don’t need force. You need people who know how to connect people to care.

It was a learning and educational experience for all of us as we’re trying to solve these issues, and making sure that people get connected to the right care by the right people. And that would never have happened without Measure 110, because police couldn’t go up to somebody and just offer support, they would have had to arrest them because they were breaking the law.

Tera: We’ve been in a public defense crisis for at least a decade now. With Measure 110, the voters said, drug possession is no longer a crime. We shouldn’t be wasting our public defense resources on what is really a public health issue.

Now, recriminalization is putting drug possession cases back on the docket. And public defense is saying, we have been taken to court for not giving people their due process, because we don’t have enough public defenders to work with them. We are only able to handle felonies at this point, and we’re not even able to handle all of those.

When you have a system saying, we cannot handle this, you need to believe them and you need to trust them. These are the people on the front lines. Lawmakers kept talking about how we need to trust people on the front lines, but the only people they were talking about were law enforcement and police. During the 2024 legislative session, you had the public defense folks saying we don’t have capacity, we can’t do this. And you also had the harm reduction and addiction recovery services folks saying, we don’t have capacity, we can’t do this. So both systems that would be protecting the person who is getting criminalized are saying, we can’t handle this.

So what will happen now is this person will get arrested. They’ll be booked into jail, and the sheriff probably won’t even accept people into jail. And they’ll probably get a court date and be told to come back when their court date happens. They’re not going to have a public defender, so it’s going to get pushed out and out and out. There’s not going to be somebody who can assess what the person needs or directing them to a deflection program — which is, again, no longer deflection, it’s diversion, because they’ve been arrested. And so, really, the impact of this is we’re going to arrest somebody. We’re going to cycle them through the beginning of the system. And they’re going to get lost in that system.

So the public defense crisis is one of many crises that make this not a sustainable program, in addition to the fact that there’s no uniformity in it, it’s diversion not deflection, and we don’t have the treatment services on the other side.

Tera: We need to continue to focus on investing in Measure 110 services. These services are a lot like the water filling the holes in our current system of care, but without these small, culturally and linguistically specific services, these overdose prevention and harm reduction services, the rest of these interventions just are going to fall flat. We need to be able to meet people where they’re at, figure out and help them identify what they need, and then connect them to that when they’re ready. Without that, we don’t stand a chance to help solve any of these crises.

Reducing or taking away any barriers to care is critical when you’re trying to work with somebody in crisis. One example — we have a lot of providers who weren’t able to support parents before, unless there was Department of Human Services involvement. Now, with Measure 110 funds, providers can find parents housing that enables them to keep their kids with them as they go through treatment. So we’re having less kids cycling in and out of the foster care system, which may help us actually break some of these generational cycles of addiction within families.

And with public drug use, until we have enough places for people to go and call home, we need to create spaces where people can go use safely. So, overdose prevention centers are a critical component in our solutions.

As we’re working with addiction, we also need to focus on reducing stigma. The more we stay in a media narrative of stigmatizing people who use drugs, people who are in crisis, we’re never going to get to a place of healing. You can’t heal when you’re ashamed and stigmatized and punished.

And we need to also educate our law enforcement and other first responders on when a new drug comes into our drug supply, what it means, what it does to the person, why the person is behaving the way they are. It’s very different when you approach somebody understanding what’s happening to them. A real education campaign, for the public and for others who are woven into our response systems, would make it so that they’re not just bringing all of their bias and their assumptions to the table, without any real facts and education.

Tera: When Measure 110 passed and they needed someone to lead the advocacy efforts, it was something that was really personally and professionally relevant to me, to be able to work on policy and push policymakers. Because ultimately, I still believe that decriminalization is the right policy. We just hit some really rough political times for this movement. But we really built a huge coalition of community-based organizations to inform decision makers on what kind of services were needed. And you know, I think we’re the only organization in Oregon that really focuses on interventions — from treatment to harm reduction to overdose prevention to recovery — recognizing that it’s not our job to decide which is best for any one individual. It’s just to make sure that it’s available to anybody and everybody who needs it.