In April this year, Oregon state legislators voted to repeal a portion of Measure 110 which decriminalized small possession of controlled substances. The changes took effect September 1st. I sat down with Haven Wheelock, a chief petitioner for Measure 110 and Harm Reduction Manager with Portland nonprofit Outside In, to discuss how global and national events contributed to and challenged her efforts and to ask her what challenges exist in the future and present for Oregon drug policy.
Me: Now that the decriminalization has been repealed, what do you expect to do next? Do you expect to be writing new legislation? And generally, what does Oregon need in this realm? It seems like the whole landscape has changed since 2020.
Haven: Those are big questions, right? Will I continue to fight for same drug policy that continues to move our state to a health-based approach to substance use? Always. I will keep pushing in that direction forever, because that’s the right thing to do for the people I am in service to. Do I think that is going to happen soon? Probably not. Right?
I think that our state took a big step back by decriminalizing drugs. I think there was a lot of political pressure, a lot of fear, a lot of conflation of decriminalization with more societal issues that we’re experiencing here in Portland, and decriminalization got blamed and scapegoated for things like the housing crisis and the slow recovery from the pandemic. People wanted the easy, new thing to be the reason things are hard so that it could just go back to the way it was. People forget that it was bad before we decriminalized drugs, right? We were in an overdose crisis before decriminalization. We were in a housing crisis before decriminalization. It’s not like, magically, decriminalization happened and we were in a brand new crisis. I think because of that reactionary push, there was a lot of pressure for the legislature to recriminalize drugs. And I find it hard to think that there is going to be much political will to push progressive drug policy in Oregon for a while. Also, everything considered, if we would have left it to the legislature to decriminalize drugs rather than as a voter initiative, it wouldn’t have happened.
That said, I also don’t think decriminalization would have happened without the racial justice protests. I think that was really the first time a lot of white people, in particular, really evaluated the role of the criminal legal system and the war on drugs on the communities of color. And unfortunately, because people are gross, some of that like thinking has reverted back to same old, status quo kind of thinking.
So, you know, I, while I remain hopeful and acknowledge that we’re playing a long game, not a short game with drug policy. I think it’s going to be a while before we see lawmakers be brave enough to try again for something like decriminalization.
Me: So would you say your focus is the work that you do with Outside In, or do you have-
Haven: Oh, no, I’m always scheming something. Yeah. I’m always scheming something, right?
But I’m also really realistic about moving policy and doing policy work. Being strategic about it is important. Reading the room, gauging interest, and judging what’s possible. I just don’t see people in a space where they’re willing to be brave and push back at this point in a way that- Just looking at how the vote went in the legislature, and the number of policymakers who I know and believe are brave and are savvy and are kind and progressive who voted to re-criminalize drugs. I find it really hard to think that in the next two or three years, they’re going to be in a place to try and do something different, right? And with what happened in the election on Tuesday, I think it’s going to be a hard four years to try and move progressive drug policy in the U.S.
Me: Timing seems to have played like a huge role, like you said, in like blaming one 110 for a lot of problems that were happening. I’m curious, at what were you committed – like, this is on the ballot? Would you have preferred to change the timing?
Haven: So, we started working on this early in 2019, pulling together coalitions, pulling together people, trying to see if it was even feasible, right? We got a bunch of us in a room talking about like, ‘What are the options?’ ‘Is Oregon the right place to do a decriminalization push?’ It was decided that we were.
So, we started figuring out what it would look like in 2020. We formally launched our campaign and started collecting signatures February 29th of 2020. That was also the same day as the first recorded case of COVID in Oregon. At that time, we knew that there was a respiratory pandemic that we were paying attention – that the nation should have been paying more attention to – but we held an event with about 250 people at it on February 29th to formally launch this campaign and then stay-at-home orders went into effect the 14th of March.
We were collecting signatures, trying to collect signatures, trying to figure out how to collect signatures.
Me: How does it look during a pandemic? Were physical signatures required?
Haven: Yeah, you have to have signed signatures to submit to the Secretary of State. We did a lot of mail in forms. I’ll never forget the first day I showed up at my house and, like, signature forms started coming in the mail for me. I spent months with a signature form hung on the door of my house and doing social media like, ‘come to my house, sign the petition, it’s on my door, don’t knock, I’m not coming out.’
Those kind of things… it was pretty wild and pretty different than how campaigns historically would have been run and how we would have done that work. But would I change the timing? No, I wouldn’t.
In addition to like politically timed, like, putting people in cages isn’t working, hasn’t been working, won’t work in the future. And the harms that are happening to people in their lives because of criminalization, we knew had to try. I mean, working in harm reduction and overdose, people I care about are fucking dying.
And like I still believe that the work is so important that like, like I was going to keep pushing and we’ll continue to keep pushing, like indefinitely. Going to jail is not healthy for anyone and it definitely doesn’t end addiction. The idea of being like, ‘oh, we’ll put it off for another two years or another four years… Is that what happens? Absolutely. I’ve been talking about getting legislation for overdose prevention sites since 2016 and they keep pushing me back and what I hear back is, ‘oh, we’ll do it in two years.’ And okay, fine. As long as you acknowledge hundreds of people are going to die between now and then that might not have had to die.
Me: What is the role of fentanyl in what has happened over the last few years?
Haven: Okay, so there’s a couple things to keep in mind with fentanyl, right? And the reason overdose deaths went up on the West Coast – not just in Oregon, the West Coast in total – was that, before 2020, we didn’t have a lot of fentanyl here. We did not see a lot of fentanyl on the West Coast until 2020, 2021. Which also coincides with all the mess that was 2020 and 2021.
There was just so there was so much turning in the world. So, I worked with some researchers from all over the country looking at how we do good research on decriminalization. How do we evaluate if it’s working? What metrics are important to be monitoring what’s not working? We did focus groups with drug users to see what their metrics were. We really put a lot of work into thinking about it and like, we also were thinking about, ‘what are the confounding factors that would make our data less reliable?’ At that time, the increase in fentanyl wasn’t as obvious yet. Instead, we were talking about the role of like detoxes shutting down in 2020 and limited capacity for folks to access treatment, the number of like support meetings that, anyone who was relying on like a 12 step community. The number of people I saw resuming use in 2020 was like, terrifying for me, to be honest, because people are home and they’re bored and they’re out of work. And all of that intermixes and makes measurement harder.
Fentanyl has been a game changer in how we do our work, how we do, like, it is, it is a different thing. A different beast. You know, because it’s true, but the reality is it’s just messy. And, watching like how drugs are used, how it’s impacting the community, I don’t think we could have foreseen that because it does look so much different on the west coast than it did on the east coast.
Me: I’m interested what models, if any, you were looking at when you were designing this bill. I know they’ve tried similar laws in Vancouver. And I think at the time I was reading about that, it looked like Vancouver was working. I think I’ve heard that Vancouver has not worked as well since then…
Haven: I think it depends on how you define working. Right? Like and I think that’s something that I like push back on. The question is, like, working for who? Working for what metric? Right? For me, the goal was always to keep people out of jail, right? Measure 110 worked well for that. Decriminalization was effective in keeping people out of jail, which was important. Are we reducing the number of people who are being incarcerated? That was my priority. And it worked great for that. It did that. Like, no one can argue that it didn’t.
Me: Yeah. Well, I wonder, with the pandemic confounding any data, you don’t have any of the normal baselines.
Haven: This is something we talked about. Enforcement completely changed in 2020 and 2021. We do actually have incarceration data that shows like pandemic drop in incarcerations, right? And then another drop after decriminalization. So, we actually do have some of that data.
Now, how much of that is related to the work stoppage by law enforcement?
Me: So, when you say work stoppage, is this a formal thing in any sense?
Haven: No, it’s just the appearance that law enforcement was less interested in enforcing some types of laws. I mean, they could have always been busting dealers. They could have always been busting people with large amounts of drugs and they really didn’t. They could have interrupted public use in ways that they chose not to.
Me: So, you said they could have interrupted public use. My conception was that public use would have still been illegal, but law enforcement seemed to be looking the other way.
Haven: It’s messier than that because technically, while public use of alcoholic and cannabis have their own specific laws, when we decriminalized drugs, we did take away some mobility for law enforcement to interrupt public use. Before decriminalization, they were going to charge you with possession if you were found using in public. When we lost that, there wasn’t a designated crime for public use the way that there is for alcohol and cannabis. So, like they’re not wrong that it’s like messier.
But, I also don’t believe were things that they could have changed. Instead of going to full recriminalization, we could have like created a rule around public use and criminalized public use.
Me: So, you had a magic wand, if you could have transformed Oregon to an already working state in this sense, what would you have included? Was access to clean drugs ever on the table?
Haven: I mean, you know, because it was a citizen’s petition, you can only do a small number of things.
Me: Is that a formal thing or is that about-
Haven: No, that’s like in the statute. You can’t change more than two things in any citizen’s petition.
Me: So for you, it was the money and decriminalization.
Haven: Yup. Yup. Money and decriminalization. Like, we couldn’t even change the thresholds for how much drugs you could have and have it be decriminalized. Right? It’s like, you can have one gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, two grams of methamphetamines, 60 hits of acid, and you can have it all be decriminalized. And I was like, can we at least use some science to figure this out?
And we weren’t allowed to change. It was like, we can move this class of crime to a different class of crime. We can reallocate the money. But we can’t add anything in addition to that. So, if I had a magic wand and could have like all of the policies I want in place… that’s a long list, right?
I think housing – everyone would have a house, right? Because then people wouldn’t have to use in public, right? I would want universal healthcare. So that everyone has access to like high quality healthcare. Part of why we chose Oregon as the state to move forward with this legislation was not only because we’re progressive, but also because we’re 49th or 50th in the nation for access to addiction services.
Me: I saw that in the legislation. Has that changed since 2020, since 110 passed? I’ve seen that a lot of money made it to the BHRNs, but-
Haven: I mean, so there’s a ton of money out there but it was really slow to get out there. It took 18 months to get the funds disbursed and we’re still trying to build up that system. I’m still hopeful that it’s going to change and that it’s going to get better, but it hasn’t yet. That seems like maybe the slowest process of all this. It takes a long time to spend $300 million.
Me: Especially effectively.
Haven: Yeah. Exactly. And with any level of accountability. It takes time. You wouldn’t want us to spend it all in the first year because then what we do the second and third year, you know? And I think that the general public just doesn’t understand how slow building anything really is, right? It takes time to like launch new programs, to build new things. And people got frustrated quickly that it wasn’t ‘magic wand’ fixed.
Me: Do you have a favorite model?
I mean, do I look to Portugal and want to learn from them? Absolutely, right? Do I look at like the harm reduction work that happens in Vancouver? Absolutely. But I think the U.S. context, is pretty unique, right? Because one, we don’t have access to health care. Two, we have access to guns. It’s like those are two big things that are very different than most of the European models. We as a country have decided that it’s okay for people to not have access to health care, but it is okay for them to have unlimited access to guns. It makes for a different dynamic. So, I think we do have to be creative in thinking through how we do these things in ways that are different.
But at the end of the day, I believe that having a substance use disorder or an addiction is a public health issue that deserves a public health response and that the criminal legal system, while they have tried for decades to fix this problem, have proven that they can’t. And, so, it’s time to start working on different approaches that are less centered in the criminal legal system because clearly, if they could have fixed it, we wouldn’t be in this mess. They’ve had plenty of time. If their approach was going to work, it would be working better than it is right now.
Me: I want to ask, who was the coalition that you mentioned?
Haven: So, Drug Policy Alliance [DPA] was one of the big funders in the initiative. They were also really instrumental writing the legalese. We don’t know how to write like that. I can write a lot of things, not that. But also, it was local drug policy activists. It was the recovery community locally that really was the backbone, the how’s and the why’s and the where’s. It wasn’t like DPA was like, here, do this thing, y’all.
The three chief petitioners were me, my friend Anthony Johnson, who did a lot of cannabis reform work and was really instrumental in the push to legalize cannabis, and then Janie Gullickson, who runs the Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon. So, it was the peer recovery community who were doing the work on the ground. We were advising on what it needed to look like and what was feasible. Contrary to some of the media, that’s like, oh, it was an ‘out-of-state’-
Me: It’s interesting to hear that this was an accusation thrown at this.
Haven: I mean it yeah, it always will be In general. I think that in order to run a campaign like is really expensive. To find the revenue to do that here would be very difficult. We needed the money. We needed the expertise. But it also was a locally grown coalition. Our ability to generate as many endorsements as we did for the campaign and as early as we did really shows the importance of this to the community.
Me: What were the risks of the transition from criminalization to deep room that you foresaw? And what were the costs? What was the effort that the general public – everybody – needed to put into this to make it work? It’s not any small thing. And, so, how could people have been prepared?
Haven: I think with the state of the world then, like it was a much bigger lift than we thought it was going to be to get this passed. Like we knew it was going to be a big deal and it was big.
We were really relying on the Oregon Health Authority to get this money out, to move this revenue, we weren’t anticipating that Oregon Health Authority would also be dealing with a respiratory pandemic and trying to figure out how to deliver vaccines equitably across the state at the same time, right? We didn’t anticipate that, any of that.
And so, if I was sitting down with somebody working to decriminalize again today, there are lessons learned, right? There are things that we tried to, writing tickets, for example, that I would never suggest as an option again. It literally just didn’t work. So, why do that? Like, tickets for possession, it didn’t work. We have plenty of data to show that, one, cops didn’t write them, two, people that got them didn’t do anything with them. So why do that?
Also, there was a high emotional cost. That push to recriminalize drugs was really ugly, right? In the beginning, there was some fierce debate in the recovery community around whether decriminalization was the right thing to do or not. I personally believe it was, other people don’t think it was. People get to believe what they need to believe, or want to believe, I guess.
I still have hope that we will continue to push for providing people compassion and care and grace. You know, even though we did recriminalize drugs, we’re in a better place. I think we helped educate people about what addiction is, how it is treated. Before 110 passed, a lot of folks were, like, ‘just lock up the drug users, throw away the key.’ Today, even very conservative folks that were very pro-recriminalization, that isn’t how they were talking about it anymore in the legislature. Instead, it was, like, ‘we just need to force people into treatment. I don’t believe forced treatment is the way to do the thing, but it’s better than what they were saying before 110. I do think we we’ve changed the conversation and changed the narrative a bit, which, while not the best, is better.
Me: Would you say it’s a success overall? I mean, the money piece …
Haven: The money piece is huge. The money piece is huge, and I think it’s going to be beautiful to see what happens over the next 10 years if we continue to invest in services for people who use drugs and people who want to stop using drugs.
I think it’s complicated. And there are a lot of we-don’t-knows yet.
Me: Great. Awesome. Last thing, do you have a list of books or media that you would recommend on the topic?
Haven: Fighting for Space is a great one. Travis Lupick. That’s about the harm reduction efforts in Vancouver. It’s pretty damn dope. The New Jim Crow. That’s a good one. I mean, Chasing the Scream is like my basic like go to. It’s wonderful. I mean, Johann Hari is a complicated person and I don’t love him as a person, but it is a very good like Drugs 101.
Me: The book reads so wonderfully. And the narrative of it is just beautiful.
Haven: I have another meeting.
Me: Awesome.
Haven: I’m kicking you out.
Me: Yes, please.
Haven: If you have follow-up questions, feel free to email me.
Me: Thanks so much.