How Oregon's Drug Experiment Backfired
The lesson isn’t that decriminalization can’t work. It’s that Portland-style governance is broken.
In 2020, Oregon became the first state in America to decriminalize all drugs. Was it a catastrophic mistake? Has this famously progressive city been mugged by reality?
Reason visited Portland and talked to drug users, politicians, and police to find out what actually happened and uncovered a very different story.
As we shadowed Officer Eli Arnold, a cop and army veteran, we encountered a homeless man who had been trying to chop down a tree. It's the sort of bizarre occurrence that you often see in downtown Portland, which these days feels like a fallen city. Arnold and his fellow officers confiscated the hatchet and gave the man a warning. At least they showed up. Arnold pointed to the console in his car displaying a dozen or so 911 calls that had gone unanswered by the Portland Police Bureau that Monday afternoon.
"This, like, constant shortage [of officers] is making it very tough," Arnold says.
Arnold is looking to catch drug deals in progress now that Oregon's three-and-a-half-year experiment with decriminalization is over. Last September, the state legislature overrode the ballot initiative, known as Measure 110, and recriminalized drugs.
"Measure 110 was not what Oregonians thought it was," Oregon state Sen. Tim Knopp (R–Bend) said during the debate over whether to repeal decriminalization. "Because they were told that their family and their friends were gonna get treatment for addiction. And what it turned into was a free-for-all of public drug use, increased fentanyl, opioid deaths increasing exponentially, and Oregon becoming seen as a national dumpster fire."
There was a widespread perception among voters that decriminalization had brought chaos to Portland, with open-air drug markets, raucous Black Lives Matter protests and riots, and a growing homelessness problem, visible in large outdoor encampments. In the last few years, this prosperous West Coast city—once a progressive mecca for homesteaders and hipsters—has been in sharp decline. Portland's population began shrinking in 2020 after 15 years of growth.
"This is the concentration of people with the most severe dysregulation in the city," Arnold tells me as we drive through an area of downtown Portland full of tents and people wandering aimlessly. "Unsheltered homelessness, schizophrenia, unmedicated, very severe addictions because this is where it's historically been easiest to acquire drugs on the street and use."
Arnold says the law didn't work as intended. It was still illegal to deal drugs, but in practice, it became nearly impossible to tell the difference between the dealers and the users.
"You might find 60, 70 people on a block hanging out and using. And unless you caught the entire transaction just by luck…you had nothing," explains Arnold.
Possessing a small amount of drugs became a civil violation. Police could issue $100 citations. Recipients could get their tickets dismissed by calling a treatment hotline. But there was no enforcement. Most cops didn't bother issuing citations because it seemed pointless.
"You're not sure you have legal authority to do anything if the person just runs away from you….When they can crumple [the ticket] up, and like, there's no penalty," says Arnold.
But former Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who championed decriminalization while in office, thinks it's a mistake to write off Measure 110 as a failure.
"It's been very frustrating to see people nationally say, 'Oh, well, of course it failed. Obviously, you knew if you decriminalized drugs, that was going to be a massive disaster.' And they just kind of flippantly write it off," says Schmidt, who argues that decriminalization was doomed by terrible timing.
Schmidt, one of a slew of so-called "progressive prosecutors" of the era, won his primary election six days before the killing of George Floyd set off protests and riots across the country.
"The streets in Minneapolis, and then Portland, and then across the country and across the world exploded," says Schmidt.
By the summer of 2020, the peaceful demonstrations had turned violent, and protesters were smashing windows, setting trash cans on fire, and shining lights into people's homes in the middle of the night to wake them up—literally and figuratively—to the revolution that was supposedly underway.
Rioters demanded the city defund the police as they set fire to a precinct with cops inside. Tents filled the sidewalks as the city suspended anti-street camping laws during the pandemic. Political activists erected billboards with Schmidt's face, calling Portland a "Schmidt show." Even the president called him out by name as Portland's "radical left district attorney."
Schmidt says Portland became a political battleground for the entire nation as President Donald Trump called in federal law enforcement to protect federal statues and buildings. The Proud Boys and Antifa clashed in the streets.
As 2020 came to a close, Portland had sustained six straight months of civil unrest. Downtown businesses were boarded up, and the city had recorded its highest homicide rate in 26 years. And then, a month into the new year, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize all drugs.
"It just really kind of couldn't have happened at a worse time," says Schmidt.
The Oregon Health Authority, charged with caring for drug users who in the past would have been locked up, was overwhelmed. Oregon regularly ranks last in the nation in available substance abuse treatment beds, meaning the state lacks the infrastructure to support a shift from prosecuting drug users to treating them.
With few treatment facilities and lax enforcement, Portland became a safe haven for drug users to pitch tents on the street and get high out in the open. A meth user named Michael, who lives in a tent with his girlfriend on a Portland sidewalk, told Reason that he saw more drug users flow into the city after decriminalization. He says he barters for drugs with supplies he obtains from the local harm reduction centers, which receive Measure 110 funding.
"I can get a free pipe from here and say, 'Hey, I'll trade you this pipe for a tenth of this [drug],'" says Michael.
Haven Wheelock, the manager of Outside In, one of the nonprofits that receives state funding under Measure 110 and provides clean needles, anti-overdose medication, and other life-saving supplies for drug users, says she still believes that jailing drug users is wrong. She played a lead role in getting decriminalization on the ballot in Oregon, and appeared in campaign ads urging voters to approve the measure.
"No one who has diabetes goes to jail for eating a donut," says Wheelock. "Yet we still are jailing people because of symptoms of their addiction."
Drug use is a classic victimless crime. But being imprisoned for only drug possession is quite rare both nationally and in the state of Oregon. In 2023, there wasn't a single state prisoner locked up just for drug possession.
While drug use itself may be victimless, decriminalization advocates like Schmidt acknowledge that when it happens out in the open, it tends to negatively impact quality of life.
"When you look at the frustration that was built up by people who were just doing the things that everybody gets to do, get to take their kids to school, go to work. I mean, I felt it the same way," says Schmidt. "I don't like seeing people shooting up where I have to explain to my kids what's happening right now, and then also maybe not feeling safe because you're not sure if a person's in their right mind. Like, that's not okay."
Was there any way that Oregon could have decriminalized drugs without destroying the quality of life in Portland? Or does Oregon's example prove that decriminalization simply can't work?
Ethan Nadelmann, founder and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit that helped craft Oregon's decriminalization law, says decriminalization as a concept is "obviously not" doomed to fail. He points to several Western European countries and cities that have successfully implemented decriminalization policies for years.
Portugal became the first country to decriminalize all drugs in 2001. Overdoses and disease transmission fell, inspiring similar approaches in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich, where the police enforced "zero tolerance" against open-air drug scenes with the goal of moving drug use off the streets and indoors.
"When you decriminalize drug possession, that doesn't mean that you're decriminalizing drug use on the streets. It doesn't mean that you are decriminalizing disorderly behavior on the street. Those things need to go hand in hand. That's what the European approach taught us," says Nadelmann. "That sort of pragmatism is really what we need in the U.S."
Portugal's drug czar explained to a Vancouver journalist that "decriminalization is not a silver bullet. If you decriminalize and do nothing else, things will get worse."
A robust treatment infrastructure and protection of public spaces made Portugal's decriminalization sustainable. When the country decriminalized drugs, police stepped up enforcement as the policy took effect. The authorities in Lisbon dismantled shanty towns, relocated their inhabitants, and broke up an open-air drug scene known as "the supermarket of drugs." As Zurich decriminalized, authorities took a "zero tolerance" approach towards large public gatherings of drug users, which they described as "destructive to co-existence."
In Portland, by contrast, decriminalization coincided with the defund the police movement and a 6 percent budget reduction for the Portland Police Bureau.
"When [the Europeans] did decriminalization, it came with a policing policy that said, 'We're not gonna tolerate this stuff in our parks and our streets,'" says Nadelmann. "There's no way you can have a progressive drug policy and a decriminalization policy without taking care of that issue. The Europeans were very clear about that."
But as decriminalization took effect in Portland, the city effectively paused street camping removals because of COVID-19, exacerbating a decades-long unsheltered homelessness problem.
Mark Stell owns a Portland coffee shop and distillery located across from a newly opened treatment center. As we talked, campfire smoke wafted into the sky from an encampment adjacent to his property.
"It's not good for business when you have a cafe or a place where people want to come to relax and you have an unpleasant living situation right close to your building or sometimes in your doorstep," says Stell. "You have people that are afraid to come to work at six in the morning when it's dark out, and you have to hire two people versus one….In certain cases, you could be hiring a barista who turns into a social worker. That's not right."
Nadelmann says that advocates of drug decriminalization need to take these quality-of-life concerns seriously if there's ever any hope of improving America's drug policy after Oregon's reversal.
"There's been a growing awakening on the left that we need to step back and not just pursue whatever the more radical elements of criminal justice reform were calling for, but really do a pragmatic drug policy reform, criminal justice reform policy that addresses the concerns of ordinary citizens not involved in criminal activity who want their streets to look somewhat orderly," Nadelmann explains.
But even if Oregon policymakers had managed to closely follow Portugal's approach, 2021 was still awful timing for reasons outside of their control.
Two years before decriminalization, Portland's drug market was saturated with the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl from Mexico after the cartels learned to mass produce it. The fentanyl wave hit neighboring states just as hard and at roughly the same time.
The fentanyl epidemic caused a surge in overdose deaths in Portland starting in 2016. Overdoses soared in 2019, two years before decriminalization was implemented.
Only full commercial legalization could stop the fentanyl crisis because it would allow users to buy the drugs they're seeking from reputable manufacturers, as has happened with cannabis, instead of a black market dominated by cartels selling extremely potent and deadly fentanyl.
Of course, fully legalized heroin probably isn't coming soon to Oregon or any other state after the rollback of decriminalization.
"The tragedy [of Oregon] is that [decriminalization] itself retains its validity, as we know from looking around the world," says Nadelmann. "If Oregon had succeeded, we might have seen Washington state and California and some Northeastern states and some more and more blue cities in the red states beginning to do more on this front."
Though major legislative changes to drug laws are likely dead on arrival for the foreseeable future, several cities, including Portland, are implementing some best practices anyway.
"What we may see is a growing embrace of pragmatic strategies based upon the principle of decriminalization without the laws actually changing," says Nadelmann.
I witnessed this shift in Portland firsthand, where even though the law changed, a version of decriminalization seems to be happening anyway.
Janie Gullickson oversees a new collaborative program for outreach workers, police, and emergency responders based on the Portugal model, which the city has been able to pilot even though, officially, the state reversed decriminalization.
"Essentially what happens is law enforcement just calls a dedicated cell line that we have and [outreach workers] go out," says Gullickson.
One outreach team that Reason shadowed was responding to a complaint about a man camped outside a local business. The team offered to escort him to a nearby shelter and begin the process of setting him up in a tiny home.
Rico Meija, an outreach coordinator, once lived on these streets himself. "I've been in every doorway, every bus stop," says Meija. "A lot of people said I was beyond help, right? And I had one person that believed in me and helped me get into treatment, get in the housing and employment. I asked that one person, 'Why are you helping me when no one else would?' He said, 'I believe one day you'll be able to help.'"
Arnold, despite believing decriminalization to be an outright failure, sees this program that has developed in its aftermath as a positive development.
"The nice thing about it is, even though I might have to arrest somebody, there's two other people next to them who clearly have addiction problems, who need some sort of intervention," says Arnold. "And I can say, you know, you guys thought about [getting help]? Have you tried treatment?"
What Portland today illustrates is that what may be more important than officially decriminalizing drugs is a shift in perspective: If drug abuse is to be treated like a public health problem, then the public health system must be up to the challenge of providing treatment. To this end, the city is trying a new approach called "deflection." Instead of booking a drug user who isn't committing any other major crime, police are supposed to "deflect" the person to a treatment center.
But Portland is still struggling to match Portugal's success. Reason visited a deflection center while it was open for business. Nobody was there.
"Our numbers have been low because the criteria is only for possession charge," says Anthony Jordan, who oversees the program for Multnomah County.
It's a $21 million program that, in Oregon's largest county, has successfully served just over three hundred people to date. One problem is that if a drug user has committed any other violation, such as trespassing, they're disqualified from coming here.
To officially complete a deflection in Portland, all that a user must do is sober up in the center and take a meeting with a social worker before leaving. Arnold says that after he drops people off at a deflection center, he expects to see them back on the streets a day or so later.
"I basically drive them across the river here, ten blocks, and drop them off. And they can walk out of there," says Arnold.
Are the deflection centers failing because they're all carrot and no stick? Would forcing drug addicts into treatment under threat of punishment solve the problem?
Tony Vezina runs a Portland treatment center that accepts "deflected" drug users and says sometimes the threat of punishment is necessary.
"How do we best motivate people to get into treatment? Sometimes that is the criminal justice system," says Vezina. "It's not humane to take somebody addicted to drugs and lock them in a prison cell forever, my belief. I also don't believe it's humane to sit and watch somebody addicted to drugs live outside in the streets and freeze to death and say, 'Well, that's their choice.'"
Fernando Pena, another treatment specialist in Portland, says the government should help get those with substance use disorder off the street, but it has no right to regulate what people ingest.
"If you are in my backyard trying to break into my house, you should definitely get in trouble for that," says Pena. "But bodily autonomy should be respected. The person should be able to ingest to whatever they would like with no consequence."
What lessons can Portugal teach here? Portugal's system can punish drug users for refusing treatment, but it's rare in practice. Most who appear before the drug panel get off with a warning. Those deemed to have an addiction are referred for treatment. And a small subset of those refuse and face fines or other sanctions.
"[The drug user] will be interviewed, 'Like, what's the issue? Why are you using? What's the problem?' And then it would be like, it sounds like you're ready to get a job, but you just can't find one. Let's see if we can help you with that," says Nadelmann. "I see you've got these abscesses on your arm. Can I make an appointment for you with a doctor? They'll go, 'Oh yeah, I'll go to see a doctor for the abscess'… and that becomes a vehicle for them beginning to take care of themselves. If it's somebody who's got an issue with housing, you know, and well, maybe we can help you with that, right? It's just the little ways of helping people kind of stabilize their lives."
Gullickson, who struggled with a 22-year meth addiction before entering a treatment program in prison, says that if someone had intervened in the way that Nadelman describes, it would have saved her years of bouncing in and out of jail.
"At the point where I started getting arrested, did that encourage me to change? No," says Gullickson. "It was not charges or the criminal justice system…it was the lack of access to treatment, the lack of knowledge about treatment."
Portland isn't waiting for any changes to state drug laws to try its own sort of decriminalization. But to better emulate Portugal, it needs to establish a clearer pathway off the streets and into shelter.
The circumstances that undermined the state's brief experiment with decriminalization have shifted in the city's favor. The fentanyl crisis is abating nationwide, overdoses and drug-related emergency calls are down, crime is falling, and the city's population just ticked back up. Portland can do more to clean up its public spaces and expand treatment, which would help to dispel the notion that decriminalization makes cities unlivable.
The stakes are enormous. The half-century-long war on drugs has destroyed millions of lives. The lesson from Oregon and Portugal is that decriminalization can work, but only if you keep your city livable and safe for drug users and non-drug users alike.
* CORRECTION: This piece originally misstated that Multnomah County's deflection numbers reflected those of the entire state of Oregon.
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