It's really happening. This week a bill aimed at rolling back Oregon's previous decision to decriminalize drugs (known as Measure 110) is making progress through the legislature. It was passed out of committee on Tuesday.

Oregon lawmakers on the joint addiction committee on Tuesday evening voted for a proposal to backtrack on Measure 110 and reshape the state’s approach to the drug addiction and overdose crisis after months of planning and an intensive three weeks of debate and reworking the proposal.

The committee’s bipartisan 10-2 vote to send the bill to the House came after wrenching testimony in a series of hours-long meetings by family members who lost loved ones to fentanyl as well as opposition from civil rights advocates and public defense attorneys. To become law, the bill needs to pass the House and Senate and be signed by Gov. Tina Kotek.

Democrats, who control the Legislature, say they have enough support for it to pass.

The real story here, which most of the news outlets writing about this completely skip over, is that the city of Portland has been a mess ever since 2020. That's when police were defunded and crime began to go up sharply. And thanks to the passage of Measure 110 (also in 2020) drug use on the streets and homelessness have gotten worse as well. 

Portland has been doing what it can to deal with these problems including passing a city ban on open drug use last September. But of course the city can't ignore state law which says drug use is legal statewide. So the ban on drug use in Portland hasn't taken effect and won't until Measure 110 is overruled.

Meanwhile, Portland's tourism has also taken a hit because people aren't eager to attend conferences or take vacations in a place where violent crime is up and addicts roam the streets with no fear of arrest. Simply put, Portland has not recovered well from pandemic and it has gradually dawned on everyone that many of the reasons for that are self-inflicted problems.

For the last several months, Gov. Tina Kotek has gone through a series of steps involving a task force making recommendations about what to do about these problems. All of this was political theater designed to reach the obvious conclusion that the state needed to do something about Measure 110. And that's where we are now. 

Just a few years ago, Measure 110 was sold as a bold new vision for dealing with the drug problem, one that would replace the old, harsh system of imprisoning people. The results have been a disaster.

When Oregon voters passed Measure 110 with nearly 60% support, the vision that advocates laid out was grand.

The state would deconstruct the existing punitive and ineffective system that criminalized drugs, and build a new apparatus in its place. People would no longer face criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of substances like fentanyl and methamphetamine; long-calcified pathways through the criminal justice system that reinforced societal inequalities would be abandoned; treatment options for those struggling with addiction – funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s legal marijuana tax – would be widely available...

Recent federal data show Oregon had the steepest increase in the country of overdose deaths since the pandemic started – by a staggering 1,500%. Nearly 1,000 people in Oregon died from opiate overdoses in 2022. Public health officials warn the crisis shows no signs of abating.

Nevertheless, activists continue to believe Measure 110 just needs more time and have pushed back against the efforts to repeal or revise it.

The ACLU of Oregon, Latino Network and Urban League of Portland pushed hard against the proposal on Monday, demanding that lawmakers not cave to the wishes of law enforcement and cities.

Sandy Chung, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon, called it “step backwards.”

“The ACLU of Oregon urges you to vote for an Oregon filled with healing and thriving communities, not more jails and prisons,” Chung said.

But it looks like the ACLU is going to lose this round. People are just sick of the chaos in the streets. 

Rob Stuart, the CEO of OnPoint Community Credit Union, said crime and public consumption of drugs has forced the company to spend more on security. His staff feel unsafe. “In the past year we’ve had 25 branch robberies,” he testified.

Recriminalization, Stuart argued, would be the only way to give law enforcement the tools to curtail public drug use.

My own take on this, having watched the downfall of Portland from afar for many years now, is that neither decriminalization nor locking people up with solve this problem because this isn't a problem that can be solved. There is no magic pill that turns homeless addicts into reformed, productive members of society. Offering clean needles and endless services won't do it and neither will putting them in jail. Even those interventions that work can't keep up with the pace of new addicts showing up on the streets.

But the addicts aren't the only ones who matter. 

That's what I think the ACLU and similar activists tend to overlook. We can't solve the problem of fentanyl addiction, but we can keep the street cleaner and open for business so people who aren't fentanyl addicts have a nice place to live. We can make it possible for people with physical handicaps to move down the sidewalk rather than being forced to traverse the streets because of all the tents blocking the way.

Locking people up is a brute force means of doing that but it's better than not doing anything at all. If the choice is between lots of addicts walking around, stealing and pissing on the street and lots of addicts locked up in jail, jail is the better option for everyone else. At some point, everyone else has to matter.

You don't have to take my word for it. It's Oregon Democrats who are about to repeal Measure 110. They have learned this lesson the hard way. The new bill should pass sometime in the next 10 days.