A reckoning with drugs in Oregon

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2020, the people of Portland, Oregon - a famed city of progressives and counterculture - voted to pass Measure 110, the USA’s boldest drug policy reform yet. It came after years of campaigning, and was aimed at inverting the thinking of the war on drugs.

Measure 110 decriminalised possession of all illicit substances, including heroin, methamphetamine and oxycodone. The campaigners accurately predicted that the new law would ease tensions around racial disparities within policing, but it also coincided with the spread of the deadly and addictive drug fentanyl, and a tidal wave of homelessness.

Fentanyl is up to 50 times stronger than heroin, and is now the drug of choice for nearly all heroin users. It’s also more deadly - activists and the police now regularly carry the opioid-blocking drug Narcan to treat people overdosing on the streets. Homelessness also continues to rise as the cheap and available fentanyl spreads, creating an epidemic on two fronts.

Local journalist Winston Ross explores the complex issues behind Portland’s fentanyl crisis, speaking across the political divide and to many of those in the eye of the storm.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi Namalanta Combo here with some very exciting news.
0:04.0	Dear Daughter is back for a new series.
0:07.0	I'm putting together a handbook to life for daughters everywhere
0:10.0	full of stories and advice to help navigate life.
0:13.0	That's Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service.
0:16.0	Find it wherever you get your BBC podcast.
0:19.0	For this edition of the documentary from the BBC World Service, I'm taking it to one of America's most progressive states to explore their experiment with a radical drug decriminalization policy.
0:34.0	This is a reckoning with drugs in Oregon,
0:37.0	with me Winston Ross.
0:39.0	For the past three years, Oregon, one of America's most progressive states, has wrestled with the country's boldest ever attempt at undoing the war on drugs through a groundbreaking new law, measure 110.
0:55.0	Well overnight Oregon became the first state in the country to decriminalize most
1:01.7	street drugs.
1:02.6	Suddenly, everything we knew about drugs and drug policy changed.
1:07.2	The state's new drug decriminalization law turns possessing small amounts of street drugs
1:12.1	into a violation, like a traffic ticket.
1:15.0	Overnight, any drug anyone wanted to carry, to shoot, to snort, to smoke, was no longer an arrestable offense.
1:23.6	So if you're holding up to two grams of methamphetamine or cocaine,
1:27.8	up to a gram of heroin, you get a citation and a $100 fine. I'm Winston Ross and I've lived in Oregon for two decades.
1:36.0	Since Measure 110 passed, I've been speaking to lawmakers,
1:40.0	non-profit executives, and people who work and live on the streets at the coal face of the state's drug crisis.
1:47.0	In the three years since Measure 110 became law, drug-related overdoses are on a devastating upward trend.
1:54.0	Between 2019 and 2023, there's been a 1,500% increase in fentanyl overdose deaths.
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