Less than three years after Oregonians went to the polls and backed Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs within the state, a majority now support repealing the measure.
“It is part of a radicalized social justice movement that gives a person a right to use known as bodily autonomy,” one Portland drug and alcohol counselor told Fox News. “It has very little to do with helping a person recover.”
“It is about a person having the right to do anything they want without consequences.”
A poll of 1,000 registered state voters by Emerson College found that 56 percent of Oregonians are now in favor of overturning Measure 110 and reintroducing criminal penalties beyond the $100 maximum fine it currently imposes. Support was even more pronounced among racial groups, with at least two-thirds of Latino and black voters backing Measure 110’s end.
The poll echoes a similar survey conducted by DHM Research in April 2023 which found that 60 percent of 500 Oregon voters thought “Measure 110 has made drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse.” The study also found that nearly two-thirds of respondents (63 percent) were in favor of reinstating “criminal penalties for drug possession while continuing to use cannabis taxes to fund drug treatment programs.”
“More voters believe that the root cause of homelessness is drug addiction and mental health problems than a lack of access to affordable housing.”
Some proponents insist that more time is needed for trial and error to build the infrastructure needed to support drug decriminalization. “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” a supervisor of a homeless services provider in Portland, Ore., who advocated for Measure 110, told the Atlantic in July. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work…It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Measure 110 was originally passed in November 2020 by a nearly 17-point margin. Between November 2021 and 2022, overdoses in the state increased by almost 5 percent, surging past the national average sevenfold.
“I don’t think Oregonians want to restart the drug war,” one local trial lawyer told Fox News back in May. “I think we didn’t realize that what we were signing up for was the deterioration of civilized norms and the public spaces being ceded to people in late-stage drug addiction and engaged in all sorts of criminal activity to keep that addiction going.”