Mr. Kellen Russoniello:

Regarding the question about political will, as one of the other committee members mentioned earlier, one of the problems was not enough time was given to measure 110. We had more than 50 years of the war on drugs to entrench ourselves in these problems. Measure 110 was effective for essentially three years and it took all of the heat for basically every social ill that Oregon was experiencing at the time. That was one of the issues.

What happened was this. There were and are social issues that Portland and Oregon are facing, including public drug use. The research shows that measure 110 has not been associated with an increase in those problems, which existed prior to measure 110. To the extent that there has been an increase in those problems, it is more directly related to Covid-19, the arrival of fentanyl and the ongoing housing crisis in Oregon. However, it was very convenient for people to say that measure 110 took effect in 2021 and these problems seem to have become worse since that time and, therefore, measure 110 is causing all of these problems. That is not the case but, unfortunately, it makes a very clean story and it was something that politicians had to respond to. Essentially, they were responding to this political problem of being told that measure 110 is making everything worse for their constituents. Unfortunately, when you focus on the wrong problem, you are going to come up with the wrong solution, and their solution was to roll back measure 110.

What should have happened was that we focused on the correct problem. There is not enough housing, we need overdose prevention centres, we need to increase services and people need economic assistance in the wake of Covid-19. Dealing with those types of things would probably have gone much further to address the issues that people are actually concerned with. We know that going back to criminalisation will not work. Even if we are focusing on people who are using in public, if our approach is to arrest, incarcerate and cycle people through that, we are just going to end up with an extremely expensive system that does not effectively connect people to treatment and, instead, disrupts people's lives. It is something the police do not want to use their resources on. People will just cycle through the system without getting the care they need.

Unfortunately, measure 110 became an easy scapegoat for a lot of the problems that Portland and Oregon were experiencing. It is important to note that other communities in the United States, such as San Francisco, New York and Seattle, are all experiencing the same problems as Portland in terms of increasing homelessness and fentanyl overdose deaths, but none of those other places have had decriminalisation and they cannot blame it on decriminalisation. The fact they did so in Oregon was a way for politicians to respond to what their constituents were saying but, unfortunately, it is not going to have the effect they would like it to.