Drug Recriminalization in Oregon

Keith Humphreys and Rob Bovett at The Atlantic:

America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended after more than three years of painful results. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative known as Measure 110: Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed. Although the measure was touted by advocates as a racial-justice policy, support for its repeal was especially strong among African American and Hispanic Oregonians.
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Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon’s drug problems. The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation—and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths. Only one state, Vermont, ranks higher in its rate of illicit drug use.

Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which—in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110—there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime—while such crime was falling nationally—led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy.

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We were not surprised that a trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective. Fentanyl and meth addiction are not like depression, chronic pain, or cancer, conditions for which people are typically motivated to seek treatment. Even as it destroys a person’s life, addictive drug use by definition feels good in the short term, and most addicted people resist or are ambivalent about giving that up. Withdrawal, meanwhile, is wrenchingly difficult. As a result, most addicted people who come to treatment do so not spontaneously but through pressure from family, friends, employers, health professionals, and, yes, the law.

But it wasn’t just that the measure’s proponents misunderstood addiction. They also did not understand Oregon, a state in which the measure’s biggest funders did not live. Branding Measure 110 as a rebuke to the War on Drugs made no sense, because Oregon had never fought such a war. In 1973, it became the first state to decriminalize possession of marijuana. When federal and state mandatory-minimum sentences for drug crimes flowered in the ’80s and ’90s, Oregon went the other way, making it impossible for someone to go to prison for simple drug possession. Overall, the state had the country’s lowest rate of imprisonment for nonviolent crimes. Short local-jail sentences for drug possession were permitted, but diversion programs, including drug courts and community supervision with drug testing, were widely used. However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed.

Deliberative Poll and the Initiative Process

At Fox and Hounds, Pete Peterson writes of current proposals for initiative reform in California, citing a 2011 deliberative poll.

PBS taped the proceedings, producing an hour-long documentary of the event. Here’s what the public discussions on initiative reform looked like. Some of the Deliberative Poll’s results should hearten Senator Steinberg and his colleagues as they push reform ideas, but he might tread lightly with others:

Indirect Initiative: Allowing the Legislature to amend an initiative after it has passed subject to the agreement of the initiative’s proponents.
Beginning of “What’s Next California?”: 43% Support vs. 44% Against
By the end of deliberations: 37% Support vs. 51% Against

(Note: While the publicized Steinberg proposal would involve the Legislature prior to ballot placement, on this and other questions, attendees were very skeptical of Legislative engagement in the initiative-writing process.)

Allowing initiative’s supporters to withdraw it after it qualifies for the ballot.

Beginning of “What’s Next California?”: 88% Support vs. 5% Against
By the end of deliberations: 84% Support vs. 9% Against

But a couple of the most popular initiative reforms to this “California in One Room”, do not appear on any slate of the current proposals:

Create a public review process of an initiative after it has been filed with the AG to “clarify the proponents’ intent”. This might look something similar to the Citizens’ Initiative Review currently employed by the State of Oregon, which I reviewed here. This proposal saw the largest positive jump from pre- to post-deliberation:

Beginning of “What’s Next California?”: 60% Support vs. 21% Against
By the end of deliberations: 76% Support vs. 16% Against

(See this post about the Oregon process.)

At the same site, however, Joe Mathews questions the value of the poll results:

You can safely ignore that deliberative poll. It has nothing to say about initiative reform today.

That’s not to say the What’s Next CA poll didn’t have value. It did, as I recounted here back in June 2011. Stanford Professor Jim Fishkin did a terrific job putting it together. There were some fairly clear and informed findings on representation. And there was no ideological bias that I could detect.

But the initiative piece of the polling effort was very weak – the weakest piece of the poll. The information provided about the initiative process was poor, both in quality and quantity, and there were barely 45 minutes in groups for deliberation. And in a panel discussion to inform the deliberation, the panelists often avoided the question in favor of broad, generalized (and somewhat inaccurate) statements about the process.

Direct Democracy and Deliberative Democracy

Previous posts have discussed the tension between direct democracy and deliberative democracy. Shortly after the recent election, John Gastil wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer about an effort to reduce this tension:

One of the most promising contemporary institutions is the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review, which became a permanent part of the state's electoral process under bipartisan legislation passed last year. The review convenes a demographically balanced, random sample of 24 citizens for weeklong deliberations on every state ballot measure.

The citizen panelists interrogate advocates, opponents, and experts on each initiative. They then examine the evidence and arguments to produce a one-page analysis, which appears in the official pamphlet the secretary of state mails to all registered Oregon voters.

Research my colleagues and I conducted in 2010 showed that the reviews had a significant impact on the wider electorate, helping voters sort through complex ballot questions. Consider, for example, two reviews held this year.

Panelists studying a proposed change in the state's tax laws discovered that it could not guarantee the increased education funding it promised. In a less reflective process, such a "gotcha" finding might have led the measure to be rejected. But a majority of this sober citizen panel endorsed the measure anyway, on the grounds that it appeared superior to the status quo.

The measure passed on Tuesday.'

Another panel tackled a controversial proposal to allow non-tribal casinos in the state. The polished arguments of the initiative's proponents collapsed under the panel's weeklong scrutiny, and the panelists ended up with doubts about its benefits and concerns about adverse effects on tribal revenues. This is likely why casino proponents suspended their campaign before Election Day, when the initiative was rejected.

Citizenship at 104

Our chapter on citizenship describes the importance of the concept and the ways by which Americans attain it, by birth or naturalization. A recent case in point comes from Oregon. Marion Pringle, age 104, recently had an unpleasant surprise when she tried to renew her driver's license. Oregon requires proof of citizenship, which she did not have. The Oregonian reports:

She was born in Vancouver, B.C., but her parents were U.S. citizens. Her father worked the railroads and died when Pringle was a girl, and her mother brought her and a brother to her mother's hometown, Portland. Another brother stayed in Vancouver.

Pringle never left the United States after that, so she never got a passport. She voted in Oregon elections and eventually collected Social Security. She renewed her driver's license religiously; she was driving until four years ago, and she said Tuesday that it was "terrible" to surrender her blue 1979 Volkswagen Beetle that she'd bought new.

Her niece, Darcie Buzzelle, came up with a solution.

She called the Oregon Historical Society, which discovered records from the 1920 Census showing Pringle, her mother and brother in Portland. She later found 1890 census records listing Pringle's father in his native Wisconsin.

Those records, Buzzelle said, proved that Pringle's parents were citizens, thus conferring citizenship on Pringle though she was born in Canada.

Marion Pringle turns 104