Friend, media outlets, politicians, and our well-funded opponents have been spreading lies and misinformation to scapegoat Measure 110 for overdose, homelessness, and other public suffering as a ploy to recriminalize drugs. Sadly, their scapegoating will waste time playing politics, but not saving lives or improving communities.
The full story is finally being told and it’s what we’ve been saying all along: the media and politicians have misled the public about Measure 110.
- Independent fact checker, Media Matters, just published a story confirming “media have been misleading audiences about overdose statistics in Oregon to blame Measure 110...for an increase in deaths.”
- A new briefing by the Prison Policy Initiative goes into further detail showing “there’s no evidence Measure 110 is responsible for crime, overdoses, homelessness, or increased drug use” and urges lawmakers not to “undo one of the most important criminal legal system improvements of the 21st century.”
- A new story from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica exposes how state leaders failed to make Measure 110 work as intended by voters: “Both a leading critic of Measure 110 and its most prominent supporter agree that leadership failures took away any chance for Oregon to truly test the measure’s potential.”
- And Oregon judges are warning lawmakers that the criminal legal system can’t accommodate the caseload that will result from their flawed recriminalization proposal.
It’s clear that politicians blocked the full potential of Measure 110 by failing to effectively implement or improve it along the way. They chose a “hands off” approach and have neglected every chance to strengthen the law. And now they are reverting to failed approaches rather than being accountable for their role in misleading the public.
Despite their failures, drug decriminalization via Measure 110 still met its goal of dramatically reducing the harms of criminalization by reducing arrests and the barriers to jobs and housing that come with it. It’s also expanding lifesaving health services and social supports statewide. And the data is clear that it did no harm. There is not a shred of evidence that supports claims that decriminalization efforts increased crime, overdose, or homelessness rates.
Yet lawmakers are doubling down on their failed leadership by rushing to recriminalize drugs in the coming weeks. With your support, we are doing everything we can to stop it.
They claim criminalization is a “quick fix” for public suffering – but it’s a false promise of change. Criminalization doesn’t keep people off the street. It temporarily hides them from public view, without making streets safer, until they end up right back on the street with a criminal record that makes it harder for them to access services, find work, and find housing.
Politicians need to do their job and focus on real solutions that strengthen and centralize responses to people who are in crisis with care, not handcuffs. In addition to scaling up addiction and health services, they must increase street outreach, offer more housing and humane shelter, and create community-led crisis-response teams that connect people to care, get them off the streets, and make communities safer.
Drug decriminalization alone will not solve the full scale of public suffering. Lawmakers must also step up to solve for the systemic government failures that fuel these crises without reverting to criminalization which is doomed to fail just like it always has.
