Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization program has failed. America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended, after more than three years of painful results. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative known as Measure 110: Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed.
We strongly believe that drugs used illegally are bad news for individuals and for employers. We saw this article about Oregon reversing previously liberal policies regarding the use and possession of drugs. We wanted to bring it to your attention. We know employers have been struggling with marijuana in the workplace. We hope this trend begins to gain a foothold in our nation. Below is a high-level summary of the article. We encourage you to read the article in its entirety.
The key elements of Measure 110 were the removal of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs such as methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, and a sharper focus, instead, on reducing the harm that drugs cause to their users.
Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Advocates of the previous liberalizing legislation foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all.
But disappointments stacked up rapidly. Measure 110 failed because its advocates misunderstood addiction, and because they misunderstood the culture and political history of Oregon.
Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon’s drug problems. The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation—and then kept rising.
Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking.
The trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective.
The measure’s proponents misunderstood addiction. They also did not understand Oregon was a state in which the measure’s biggest funders did not live.
Does the repeal of Measure 110 mean that drug-policy reform is dead? Oregon’s drug policy attracted national and international attention, and its high-profile failure will likely discourage other states and countries from pursuing maximalist decriminalization policies, at least for a time.
But the lessons from Oregon’s troubles should not be overdrawn. One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon’s addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded, with access to care frequently ranking at the bottom of national indicators. The mechanism that the measure created to manage new spending was clumsy and didn’t work well, but the new law acknowledges the problem and provides extensive new funding for immediate needs, including detox facilities, sobering centers, treatment facilities, and the staff to support those services.
Though our polarized politics tends to frame policy choices as on-off switches, in truth they are more like a dial with many intervening settings. That dial can be productively turned in many parts of the country. Many states are far more punitive toward drug users than Oregon was before Measure 110 passed. They overemphasize incarceration of people who use drugs, they do not provide adequate, publicly funded health treatment and health insurance, and they do not use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use. If these states could be persuaded to dial down their criminal-justice approach to approximate what Oregon had before Measure 110, except with adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment, substantial gains in public health and safety would likely follow. The future of successful drug-policy reform is not greater laxity in states that are already quite progressive in their approach to drug use; it is using criminal justice and public health together in a balanced, pragmatic fashion, as Oregon is now poised to do.
James P. Randisi, President of Randisi & Associates, Inc., has been helping employers protect their clients, workforce and reputation through implementation of employment screening and drug testing programs since 1999. This post does not constitute legal advice. Randisi & Associates, Inc. is not a law firm. Always contact competent employment legal counsel. To learn more about the rights of employees who test positive for marijuana, Mr. Randisi can be contacted by phone at 410.494.0232 or Email: info@randisiandassociates.com or the website at randisiandassociates.com
