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This year, Oregon lawmakers overhauled their highly experimental drug law. That policy had decriminalized small amounts of hard drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine. There was a public backlash, though, due to widespread public drug use and spiking overdoses. In September, new criminal penalties for drug possession went into effect. From Oregon Public Broadcasting, Conrad Wilson brings us a view of how that is shaping up in the state's most populous county.
CONRAD WILSON, BYLINE: It's a warm fall day as Portland police officer Donny Mathew swings his leg off his city-issued mountain bike to arrest a woman named Amber for drug possession. NPR is only using Amber's first name because she was using drugs and unable to consent.
DONNY MATHEW: Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk...
WILSON: Mathew, along with several Oregon State police troopers, tests a substance in her possession.
MATHEW: You're pretty sure it's fentanyl?
AMBER: Um, yeah.
MATHEW: Yeah.
WILSON: Before September 1, a stop like this would have amounted to a citation and a hundred-dollar fine. Under the old law, drug users could call a state-funded hotline to get connected with treatment, which would make the penalties go away. But so few called that many Oregonians came to see the system as toothless. Now, each county gets to decide whether to arrest someone or give them treatment options. That treatment alternative is called deflection.
MATHEW: So you have two options. You can either go to jail today for the possession of fentanyl - it tested positive. Or we can call for deflection, which is, like, some social workers that will come out that have had prior addiction problems as well in the past. And they come out and talk to you and you don't get charged. So you get...
AMBER: I would love to talk to somebody.
MATHEW: ...Treatment.
WILSON: Amber tells Officer Mathew that she'd love to talk to someone. The idea behind deflection is that what drug users need is treatment, not jail. That same idea was behind drug decriminalization, but deflection adds an enforcement component. If you don't get treatment, you could face criminal consequences. A few more minutes pass, and a team from 4D Recovery, a nonprofit drug treatment provider, arrives on the scene.
ELLEN STAAS: Hi. Are you Amber?
WILSON: That's Ellen Staas. She's with 4D, as is Mina Gilson.
MINA GILSON: Sounds like she's agreed to work with us to get her into detox, so...
STAAS: It's what we're going to do.
WILSON: In the three months since the new law went into effect, this process has rapidly evolved. Police in the Portland area are now more commonly sending people to a center where they can get treatment rather than sending out mobile teams to the site of an arrest. Other counties are still getting their deflection programs up and running. Twenty-eight out of 36 counties are participating, and a handful aren't and are just arresting drug users. Ken Sanchagrin is executive director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a state agency that's helping counties roll out their treatment options.
KEN SANCHAGRIN: The legislature gave really broad discretion to counties to set up their deflection programs as long as it was a program that connected folks with behavioral health or drug addiction issues into the public health system.
WILSON: Sanchagrin says, since the new law went into effect, law enforcement officials in Oregon have filed 1,300 drug possession cases that likely wouldn't have existed otherwise. At the same time, he says, many people have also been connected with drug treatment. But, Sanchagrin says, it's way too soon to know if more people are getting into recovery compared to when drugs were decriminalized.
SANCHAGRIN: Is this a better pathway than what we had before?
WILSON: He thinks it will be years before researchers can definitively say. One of those researchers who will be watching is Keith Humphreys, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies addiction.
KEITH HUMPHREYS: Oregon, you know, is an unusual state in drug policy.
WILSON: Humphreys says what the state is trying to do is find a balance between the nation's historical war-on-drugs approach to addiction and Oregon's experiment in decriminalization.
HUMPHREYS: We've treated this as, like, a big switch that has only two settings. Neither of those gave us the outcomes that we wanted, and so Oregon's looking for something in between. And, you know, I'm rooting for Oregon. And, you know, I'm hoping that we can all learn from Oregon's experience.
WILSON: For Humphreys, success in Oregon would mean more people in long-term recovery and fewer of the consequences that public drug use brought to Oregon communities.
For NPR News, I'm Conrad Wilson in Portland, Oregon.
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