Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed a bill Monday restoring criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of hard drugs, reversing a first-in-the-nation law that advocates had hoped would help quell a deepening addiction and overdose crisis.
Under the new law, the possession of small amounts of drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine will be classified as a misdemeanor and punishable by up to six months in jail.
Drug treatment will be offered as an alternative to criminal penalties.
Ensuring full coordination between the state and participating agencies, such as the criminal justice system and health providers, is vital to the law's success, Kotek said in a letter to state legislative leaders.
"Courts, Oregon State Police, local law enforcement, defense attorneys, district attorneys, and local behavioral health providers are all critical to these conversations and necessary partners to achieve the vision for this legislation," the letter read in part. "We must balance local programmatic design with the need to achieve statewide consistency and standardization where appropriate."
Last month, legislators overwhelmingly passed House Bill 4002, undoing a key part of a voter-approved initiative that decriminalized small amounts of drugs.
Opponents of the bill, including treatment service providers and public defenders, said the new law marks a return to the failed war on drugs, which filled jails but did little to curb drug addiction.
Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed the decriminalization measure, known as Measure 110, in 2020. It reduced penalties for possessing small amounts of hard drugs and established a framework to help people access treatment services.
“We were too progressive,” said Jovannis Velez, an outreach worker with Recovery Works Northwest, which operates treatment centers throughout Oregon. “Society wasn’t ready for it.”
Advocates of the original measure touted it as an opportunity to help people struggling with addiction get the help they need rather than face jail time.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of marijuana tax revenues were meant to go into drug treatment and harm reduction programs. But that didn’t translate into an improved care network for a state with the second-highest rate of substance use disorder in the country and ranked 50th for access to treatment, according to an audit report released last year.
Services were difficult to access and were never fully implemented, frustrating lawmakers who opposed decriminalization from the start. Spikes in overdose deaths, largely driven by fentanyl use, and an increase in homelessness created a political backlash.
Opponents of the decriminalization bill argued that the pilot program had not achieved its intended results and had only worsened open-air drug abuse.
"Combatting a problem by decriminalizing the problem is bad policy," Oregon Senate Republicans said in a statement last month. "Never again."
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber, of Portland, one of the bill’s authors, said its passage would “be the start of real and transformative change for our justice system.”
“With this bill, we are doubling down on our commitment to make sure Oregonians have access to the treatment and care that they need,” she said in a statement.
