Mr. Kellen Russoniello:

That is a very good question and a difficult one to answer. I am not sure I would recommend there is a place because, as I mentioned earlier, decriminalisation in itself has its own benefits and is harm reduction and should be thought of that way. I caution against waiting until a certain threshold is reached because it is very easy not to reach that threshold, push off decriminalisation and continue all of the harms criminalisation causes.

In terms of the structural support for decriminalisation, however, all of the major bodies that are going to be involved in the implementation should be on board and involved in the process prior to it commencing. We did not have that luxury in Oregon because it was a ballot initiative measure that went through the voter approval process. We also ended up having to implement it in the perfect storm of Covid, fentanyl and all of these other things.

Covid, in particular, really took the attention of the Oregon Health Authority, which was the main state health authority charged with the implementation of measure 110. It was also the state's main body charged with response to Covid-19 so, understandably, its attention was on responding to that. Unfortunately, that meant the Oregon Health Authority's attention was not on implementation of measure 110, and there was not enough support being given to the bodies that were established by measure 110 to ensure the health services were being implemented in the way they should have been. Ultimately, that resulted in a delay of the funds getting out.

Another body that would have been good to engage from the beginning would have been the Oregon State Police agency. It is not really itself its own enforcement agency but it provides the training for all of the agencies within the state. It would have been great to engage because it would have been the one who could have provided training to the agencies on how to issue citations, why to issue citations and effective ways to engage people. It also could have provided a uniform citation form as throughout measure 110's decriminalisation, there was never a uniform citation form developed which would have been useful for police to provide to people and which could have provided information on how to access the healthcare screenings in order to avoid getting a ticket.

For things like that it really would have very helpful to have all of the bodies on board and engaged but unfortunately we did not have that luxury, partly because of the ballot initiative process and partly because of the unpredictable and unforeseen implementation challenges we faced.