Right now this morning we're just going to do a drive-through downtown.

Janina Rager works for the police department in Eugene Oregon. She's a community engagement specialist.

And one day in October,

Rager was making her usual rounds

when she stopped at a store downtown.

People often loiter outside the store, getting high.

Pretty much every single night people are just camped out in front of their audience and

they get to work every morning and there's people camp there, there's feces, there's drug paraphernalia.

When Rager arrived, she spoke to one of the men who were there.

Just do you give you a favorite.

Would you pick up all your garbage with you and take it with you?

You know what I do doing.

I'm going around picking up all and everybody else is junk

I appreciate that it's just weird out of the people that just leave stuff everywhere

yeah it's just terrible yeah I'm'm going to give it a few minutes to get that untied and stuff and we'll be back out and see how things are going in a few, okay?

The garbage includes bits of tin foil that are typically used by people who smoke meth or fentanyl.

These kinds of interactions are pretty typical for Rager these days.

Public drug use has skyrocketed across the state. And many blame a law that went

into effect in 2021. This law made Oregon the first state in the country to

decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs like heroin, fentanyl, and cocaine.

It's called Measure 110 and it effectively made all drugs legal.

The idea was to shift drug use from being a criminal justice issue to a public health one.

...