The recently passed bill makes it a crime again to possess small amounts of fentanyl and heroin, punishable by up to six months in jail.
Some of the loudest opponents of Oregon’s disastrous drug-decriminalization effort, many of whom were skeptical of Democratic proposals to fix the failed experiment, are cheering a re-criminalization bill recently approved by the legislature with bipartisan support.
Oregon House Bill 4002, which reintroduces criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of hard drugs, including fentanyl, is a “strong repudiation of radical decriminalization policies,” said Ben West, a commissioner in Clackamas County, part of the Portland metro area.
West, who is also a nurse, told National Review that Oregon’s three-year experiment with drug decriminalization was an utter “failure, and thousands are dead because of it.”
But West and other Oregon leaders said they still have questions about portions of the bill, including a provision that allows counties to establish so-called “deflection” programs that would allow people accused of drug possession to get treatment in lieu of prosecution.
“We are listening and we are open, but we need the details,” West said, referring to questions about state funding and “how many strings are attached to it.”
The 65-page H.B. 4002 was supported by majorities of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers in deep-blue Oregon. It’s a complex bill with many parts, including provisions that set up various task forces, crack down on drug dealing, and establish new requirements around access to substance-abuse medications, including buprenorphine.
But most importantly the bill makes it a crime again to possess small amounts of hard drugs such as fentanyl and heroin. Starting in September, offenders could face up to six months in jail, though there are many off-ramps along the way to get treatment instead.
“It creates real consequences, and I think we are going to really help people who are on the street get into treatment,” said John DiLorenzo, a Portland-area lawyer who largely blames drug decriminalization for the homeless camps that have sprung up around the city in recent years. In 2022, DiLorenzo sued the city for surrendering its sidewalks to the homeless.
Democratic governor Tina Kotek ran against repealing Measure 110, calling jailing drug addicts a “failed approach.” But she announced last week that she will sign the new bill sometime in the next 30 days.
The bill, he said, is “going to send a message that Oregon, and Portland in particular, is not a destination for people who just want to do whatever they want to do with respect to drug use.”
The bill is a clear repudiation of Measure 110, the drug-decriminalization experiment a majority of Oregon voters approved just over three years ago. Also known as the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, Measure 110 promised a new progressive approach to addressing drug addiction. It was promoted by the far-left, George Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for a “non-punitive, equitable, and regulated drug market.”
Measure 110 decriminalized possession of user amounts of hard drugs and promised to prioritize “harm reduction.” People found with drugs would get only a citation and a $100 fine, which could be dismissed if the offender called a treatment-referral hotline and completed a health assessment. Most offenders didn’t bother paying the fine or calling the hotline.
Over the last three years, Oregonians have increasingly blamed the measure for exacerbating the spiraling addiction crisis and rampant homelessness that has gripped the state.
With polls showing a clear majority of Oregonians supporting Measure 110’s repeal, Democratic and Republican lawmakers introduced bills to reform the effort.
A Republican bill, which would have reestablished drug possession as a Class A felony, punishable by up to a year in prison, went nowhere. For their part, Democrats initially proposed re-upping drug possession from a Class E misdemeanor to a Class C, which includes a maximum sentence of only 30 days in jail and a $1,250 fine.
Critics balked, saying that with penalties so low, police were unlikely to make arrests and prosecutors would have little incentive to invest their time in drug cases. Writing in National Review in January, Jeff Eager, a lawyer and the former mayor of Bend, Ore., called the proposal “recriminalization in name only.”
But Eager is now calling the bill that passed a “big time” win.
“After I wrote that, they significantly strengthened certain parts of the bill,” he said.
Rather than reestablish illegal drug possession as a Class A misdemeanor, Democratic leaders created a new unclassified misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail.
The bill that passed is not perfect, Eager said. It’s too complex, he said, and he would have preferred to simply reclassify offenses as Class A misdemeanors. But he said it was a “big deal” for Oregon Democrats to break with the Drug Policy Alliance and left-wing activists involved with the nonprofits that benefited financially from Measure 110.
“Hopefully, that means we’re seeing some daylight between the elected Democrats who run the state here and the really far-left, progressive, kind of activist groups that have led that party way, way far left, not only on drugs, but on all kinds of other stuff,” Eager said.
Eagar said he believes the new bill also fell short because it left Measure 110’s funding mechanisms in place. The measure redirected money from the state’s marijuana tax to recovery services. But the money was slow to roll out, and an audit last year found the grant process was inefficient and inconsistent, and the people in charge lacked experience.
State representative Christine Goodwin, a Republican from southern Oregon, was one of the six chief co-sponsors of the GOP reform bill. She, too, was critical of the early Democratic proposal, which would have made drug possession on par with littering, “which we didn’t believe would do much to restore recriminalizing in Oregon,” she said.
But the Democratic proposal came a long way. Goodwin agreed that the final bill was too complex, but “in this case, I was not going to let perfect be the enemy of the good,” she said.
“It is rare, being a minority party, that the Democrats on anything as big as this ever move in our direction,” she said. “They were in disarray about this. They had many in their party that did not want to recriminalize in any way.”
She credits the Democratic move toward the Republican position to public polling that showed even most Oregon Democrats are fed up with the devastation wrought by fentanyl and other hard drugs in Portland and elsewhere. There was also the leverage provided by a proposed ballot measure that would have taken the Measure 110 rollback out of the Democrats’ hands.
“I think the Democrats actually knew if this went back to Oregonians, they would totally recriminalize,” Goodwin said. “This is not what they were sold, at all.”
Goodwin, too, said she has some concerns about the deflection programs authorized by the bill. The legislature passed a separate bill that authorized $211 in general fund spending to get the deflection programs off the ground, according to an Oregonian news report.
Goodwin said she has questions about how those programs will be built out across the state in the coming months, and what the criteria for success will be.
“The counties are not mandated to go along with the deflection program,” she said. “Most of the counties will attempt it. We’ll see how that works.”
Opponents of the recriminalization effort argued that bill was poorly thought out, that it will strain the criminal-justice system, and that at its heart the drug war is racist.
“I simply cannot have faith that there will be an equal compassionate treatment given the history of these official anti-drug efforts,” state senator Lew Frederick, a Portland Democrat, said of his decision to vote against the bill, according to the Oregonian.
The Drug Policy Alliance argues that the recriminalization bill passed due to “an intense disinformation campaign by drug-war defenders and by Oregon leaders who scapegoated Measure 110 for every issue in the state.” The alliance’s leaders say that policy-makers could have made Measure 110 stronger, but they ignored advocates’ recommendations.
DiLorenzo said there’s little debate that Oregon needs to provide more resources for drug treatment. The state’s population has one of the highest rates of illicit drug-use disorder in the country, and Oregon is at the bottom in terms of providing treatment.
The real question, DiLorenzo said, is how should Oregon funnel people into treatment?
“Having no consequences for drug use whatsoever doesn’t funnel them into drug treatment, because drug treatment is hard,” he said. “The consequence has to be harder than the drug treatment, because otherwise human nature is to take the path of least resistance.”
Eager said he sees Oregon’s recriminalization of drugs as part of a bigger-picture moderation of West Coast Democrats after years of soft-on-crime policies that led to skyrocketing overdose deaths, increasing crime and homelessness, riots, and the general deterioration of their cities.
“Democrat voters are fed up with the results of these progressive criminal and drug reforms, and they’re dragging their elected officials with them, slowly,” he said.
“Oregon isn’t going to be a red state anytime soon,” he added. “So, if the Democrats here can start acting more like they used to — which is too liberal for my taste, but at least valuing social order and safety — that’s an improvement.”
Goodwin said it took years to create “this devastation in our state,” and it is going to take time, as well, to restore order. After recriminalizing drugs again, she said the priority now is to ensure that Oregon doesn’t forget the lesson it learned and reverse course.
“There are still a lot of Democrats very unhappy about this,” she said. “The Democrats tend to be pretty soft on crime in general, so we’re going to have to be tenacious about that, and make sure that we are really requiring treatment.”