The scene is chaotic, in broad daylight, in a peaceful residential area in the Southeast district of Portland: in the middle of hastily erected tents, a woman moves between a pile of garbage, a box filled with bicycle parts and a survival blanket caught in flight by a mesh fence and now fluttering in the wind.
Behind her, three men, their bodies swaying, leaned against a wall to find some semblance of balance, glass pipes in hand, to smoke. Fentanyl, “meth” or other toxic substance. Their conversation is confused, sometimes crossed by lamentations.
It is noon. Just a block away, on Stark Street, a brasserie, two nicely decorated cafes, a hairdresser, a pet store and a primary school liven up an otherwise ordinary day, in a city where two worlds now coexist: one , with these workers hipsters waiting for their latte at the window of a truck and these women, yoga mats slung over their shoulders, walking with a determined step towards their classes, the other, with these penniless retirees, with shaggy hair, these unemployed, these excluded people camping in the street in front of a church and these itinerants knocked out by drugs and slumped on a sidewalk. Both visible equally.
“The city has changed in recent years, and not for the better,” says Diana Rempe, a volunteer with Street Books, a library on wheels that walks the streets on bikes to lend books to the homeless. We are in the middle of a major crisis. And I don’t think our politicians are responding adequately. »
” It’s a mess “
Oregon had dreamed of becoming a model in 2021, by adopting a law decriminalizing drug possession, a first in the United States. The progressive measure, inspired by street drug management policies in force in Portugal, was supposed to put an end to repression and above all bring the State into a new era. The one treating drug addicts no longer as criminals, but as sick people, to whom health and rehabilitation services had to be offered.
But a pandemic later, accompanied by an explosion in fentanyl consumption, which is now dousing the entire west coast of the United States, and a governance crisis that has reduced the number of affordable housing available, the results are far from to be what was hoped for.
“It’s a mess,” says Maher Makboul, owner of a Turkish sandwich restaurant in the Northwest neighborhood. Look around: there are homeless people everywhere. In the morning, I have to pick up their excrement and waste on the steps of my business. The City sometimes comes to make them leave, but they come back a few days later. Lots of people came here to Oregon, thinking that they would be able to consume drugs freely, and have shelters to sleep and eat. But in the end, where do we end up and with what? All these policies are a failure. » A failure admitted by state elected officials.
After declaring a 90-day state of emergency in downtown Portland in early January, hoping to combat the effects of fentanyl and blatant homelessness on the streets of the state’s largest city, Oregon lawmakers voted in early April to overturn the statewide drug decriminalization measure. A gesture which returns to a policy approved by referendum by 60% of the inhabitants of the State in 2020.
The new law was signed the next day by Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek, making possession of small amounts of drugs a felony punishable by up to six months in prison. However, offenders remain faced with the choice of avoiding criminal sanctions by agreeing to be referred to drug addiction and mental health services.
The urgency to act
“With an overdose mortality rate increasing by more than 40% per year, we should not have waited another 12 months before returning to criminalization,” said in an interview with Duty Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and specialist in street drugs at Stanford University in California. This could have meant a thousand additional deaths. »
An opinion shared by Max Williams, former Oregon parliamentarian and former director of state corrections, who for months led the charge at the head of a coalition calling for a reversal of decriminalization policies. In the name of public health and safety. And today he is enjoying his victory.
“With the substantial influx of cheap fentanyl that entered the community at the same time as this law was passed, it simply created cataclysmic conditions,” he said. The number of fatal overdoses has skyrocketed, from 280 to 1,250 per year between 2019 and 2023, according to data from the Oregon Health Authority.
He adds: “The mistake was made from the start. When the state chose the path of decriminalization, our state was ranked 49e out of 50 in terms of access to drug treatment. The result is that we have been lax on drug use, while at the same time being woefully incompetent when it comes to investing in treatment capacity. And this couldn’t have gone well. »
Suffering and insecurity
In the streets of Portland, the image that emerges is edifying with these colonies of basic tents covered with tarpaulins which multiply on the sidewalks of the city center, in the parks of residential areas, in the parking lots of industrial districts or below motorway interchanges. Sometimes a smoky head comes out. Other times, it’s a cry of despair, like near Union Station, where a woman just noticed that her goldfish, contained in a tiny plastic aquarium, was dying in its murky water. . City employees came to his aid, pouring the contents of a bottle into it… before continuing to dismantle his camp.
An audit conducted by the joint office of the municipality and Multnomah County, which includes the greater Portland area, indicated in mid-April that nearly 12,000 people are living without a home, half of them outside. Far too many for the 2,600 beds offered in shelters, the number of which has quintupled since 2015.
“This is generating a lot of outrage among Portlanders, who are tired of seeing all the homelessness, drug abuse out in the open, and the crime that goes with it. People no longer feel safe, summarizes Alicia Ellingwood, manager of a thrift store run by a community organization in downtown Portland. But was it necessary to put an end to the decriminalization policy? I do not believe that. This probably remains an effective measure, which was poorly implemented and above all repealed too early, before having had the chance to work. »
A political gesture
“From a social science perspective, there is no data and certainly not enough time to justify reversing decriminalization,” comments political scientist James Moore from Forest Grove, where he teaches at Pacific University. What motivated this choice was the frustration caused by fentanyl and the link that was made by people and several elected officials between this crisis, homelessness and the new framework around drug consumption. »
“It’s a political gesture above all,” adds Jeffrey Bratberg, professor of pharmacy and addiction specialist from the University of Rhode Island. “A move that is nothing more than a false promise of change intended to distract from the incompetence of politicians and the negligence of Oregon government agencies in implementing this policy, and this, as an electoral campaign approaches where their re-election is at stake.”
“But the fact remains that it is chronic underfunding for affordable housing, effective addiction services and accessible health care that is at the root of the heartbreaking suffering we see on the streets of Oregon,” he concludes.
From a social science perspective, there is no data and especially not enough time to justify the cancellation of decriminalization.
If Oregon’s failed experiment in drug addiction now becomes a stain on the state and the city of Portland, it is as much on the roadmap of Democrats as of Republicans, who worked jointly on the establishment of this decriminalization policy and who remained just as united to cancel it during a bipartisan vote in early April, underlines Max Williams. His coalition wanted to bring back the criminalization of street drugs by referendum, during the vote next November, for the sake of democracy, the measure having been adopted this way. “No one had any interest in this issue ending up in the voting booth,” he says, because of the political burden that the failure of decriminalization places on both camps. “This is why elected officials wanted to act early and quickly. »
But going backwards also risks becoming a liability, for “the proponents of this non-repressive approach who, over the coming years, will have great difficulty promoting it elsewhere in the country,” he assures.
“As for us, it took us three or four years to dig the hole we find ourselves in today. And it may take us that long to get out of it. »
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-International Journalism Fund.The duty.