EDITORIAL: Time to let voters reconsider drug measure

Jan. 26—Oregon voters should have a chance to reconsider Ballot Measure 110, the 2020 measure that made the possession of relatively small amounts of hard drugs the equivalent of a traffic ticket.

That was clear even before Secretary of State Shemia Fagan released an audit of the program on Jan. 19.

Oregon has the second-highest rate of substance use disorders in the nation.

Even worse, it ranks last for access to treatment for addiction. Yet the measure's proponents touted the measure as the path to improving access to treatment.

Despite these dismal statistics, Fagan declined to brand the measure as a failure.

"Incomplete" was her assessment.

But others were much more critical — which in this case equates to being realistic.

Kip Memmott, the state's audits director, gave Measure 110 a grade of D.

Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher and professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, and former senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the program has been a "complete failure" in its ostensible purpose — to give people an incentive to seek addiction treatment.

More than half the nearly 3,800 people cited under Measure 110 through the end of 2022 didn't even show up to court.

The state botched the program to divert marijuana tax dollars to treatment providers, and even after the money started flowing, few people are seeking treatment.

Meanwhile, fentanyl — one of the drugs decriminalized under Measure 110 — is largely responsible for an increase in overdose deaths, many of them unintentional. Fentanyl was implicated in 47.5% of unintentional or undetermined overdose deaths in the state in 2021, up from 32.1% in 2020 and 14.3% in 2019, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

Fagan and other apologists for Measure 110 insist that Oregon needed to try a different approach because the previous system, when possession of hard drugs was a criminal offense, wasn't working.

Except the situation has gotten worse, not better.

It's plausible to think that some voters who favored Measure 110 more than two years ago, even if they still believe that possession of "personal-use" amounts of hard drugs should not be a crime (notwithstanding that the legal limit for fentanyl, anything less than 5 grams, is quite enough to kill a large number of people), they might be swayed by the measure's failure to help addicts.