In November 2020, Oregon became the first state in the nation to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs with the passage of Measure 110. The measure also directs money from cannabis tax revenues to expand drug treatment and recovery services. Researchers at Portland State University are now studying the effects of Measure 110 with a three-year study funded by the National Institute of Justice. They interviewed 23 police officers from 10 different agencies in rural and urban counties in Oregon for their first report which focuses on the impact of Measure 110 on law enforcement. Officers expressed frustration with Measure 110 and said they were reluctant to issue citations for drug possession which they felt amounted to unnecessary paperwork. Christopher Campbell is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Portland State University and a co-author of the study. He joins us to talk about the findings and goals of the study.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. “Police officers don’t like Measure 110.” That’s the headline from a recent study by researchers at Portland State University. It’s not exactly a surprise that law enforcement would be skeptical of this voter passed law that took away one of their major tools to respond to the use of illegal drugs. But the reasons behind their misgivings say something about the implementation of Measure 110, and the future of criminal justice reforms in Oregon and potentially around the country. Christopher Campbell is an associate professor of criminology at Portland State University and a co-author of this new study, and he joins me now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Christopher Campbell: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Why did you start with law enforcement for this first study of a series of three total studies?
Campbell: The primary reason why we started with law enforcement was largely because people who are using substances are typically coming in contact more often with law enforcement, and it can be the most consequential contact that they’ll have. And on top of that, if we really wanna know how well Measure 110 is actually doing, then we need to know how it’s being implemented on the ground. And so getting the perspective and the experiences of the line officers is gonna be pretty critical in that.
Miller: You talked to 23 law enforcement officers across 10 agencies in rural and urban areas. You kept them anonymous, along with the counties they’re in to make it easier for them to talk with you. Was it hard to find officers or sheriff deputies who wanted to talk to you about this?
Campbell: It was a little challenging at first. Once we got the ball rolling a little bit, and we started using what’s often known as a snowball sample, we would get someone in contact with one of the brass or the supervisors and we’d talk to them about what we’re asking about, and then they would tell their line officers “you can talk to these people, it seems it’s gonna be fine,” so we would have a little bit more buy in. Or we’d have line officers actually saying “can I go talk to these people because I have something to say.”
Miller: What were the main themes that emerged from these series of conversations?
Campbell: So there were five main themes. And instead of breaking them down because it would take a little bit of time to break each one of them down, we kind of bundled them together in three major takeaways, one of which is that officers are largely skeptical about Measure 110′s ability to motivate people to actually voluntarily seek treatment. So as a result, they’re hesitant to actually provide the citations that Measure 110 requires them to do.
As a quick review, Measure 110 requires officers when they come across someone using a substance, they’re supposed to give them $100 citation, essentially akin to a traffic ticket. And then the person is supposed to take that citation and call a hotline, called Lines for Life, and essentially tell them this is what happened. Lines for Life, gives them this assessment, and then the person either takes the treatment or doesn’t, it’s up to them. And then they call the courts with the information that they got from Lines for Life, and then the courts can waive the $100 fine.
Miller: That’s how it’s supposed to work?
Campbell: Essentially, yeah. So when we talk about hesitancy among officers to actually issue citations, that can be a rather kind of a big problem, because now we have no real metric of understanding how often officers are actually coming across people using substances.
Miller: Why did they say they’re hesitant to issue citations?
Campbell: A lot of it is because they’re really skeptical about how people are actually gonna be voluntarily seeking treatment. They often say “we might give them the citation, they’ll wad it up and throw it back at us.” Or they might say that “I’ve come across this person two or three times, and I’ve given her two or three citations, and I’ve come across her more like 50 times. I know where she’s at, I know where she’s gonna be using. And I go there and basically check on her and tell her you can’t be using this right now, and she says ‘what are you gonna do? Give me a citation-type thing?’”
And I think what a lot of the officers relayed though, in that frustration and the belief that people aren’t actually seeking treatment voluntarily is that they also believe that a lot of folks are kind of wanting treatment. They believe that the criminal justice system isn’t necessarily the clear path to getting people towards treatment, but they also don’t see another path. They don’t see a clear point of contact, and that’s really a major point of concern as well.
That kind of wraps into a second takeaway, which is they feel a little bit of ambiguous feelings towards what their role is in society, especially now that a lot of their tools are being taken away incrementally. So, it seems, and in some ways rapidly when you think about the appellate decisions as of late, which has required that they can’t stop a motor vehicle due to a busted light, for instance, or they can’t talk to the person outside of the actual stop reason.
A lot of times, they’ll feel those tools being taken away from them, and then they’ll relate it back and say “the biggest thing that I can point to is Measure 110. This is really the impetus for it.” And so they’re kind of confused about what they should be doing, and how they should be doing their job.
Miller: Are there numbers to support the lack of citations? If you compared citations now to possession charges pre Measure 110, what do you find?
Campbell: If you were to examine, which we did, the number of arrests and even proactive stops compared to the number of citations that are given, even when you add the citations and the current arrest, because you can still get arrested for a misdemeanor, they’re still at about 31% less than what you saw prior to the pandemic. That has to do with possession arrests.
Miller: So the numbers bear out what the officers have been telling you, unless there was a huge drop in usage of illicit substances, which is very unlikely over that time period.
So police officers are saying that they’re not giving out citations because citations are not really leading to treatment, that the linkage is broken there. But did the old system work? Did the criminalization of hard drugs actually lead large numbers of people to get clean?
Campbell: There’s very limited evidence to support that it did. And there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that a lot of particular marginalized communities were negatively impacted by that policy and approach, which was often characterized by the war on drugs.
Miller: And then everything you’ve just said, that was one of the biggest reasons that the proponents of Measure 110 would talk about. When they were trying to get voters to pass it. That’s exactly what people would say.
Campbell: Yes, precisely. One of the biggest arguments is that you shouldn’t need a felony on your record, or even a misdemeanor on your record, in order to get some type of substance abuse treatment that you would otherwise need insurance for, which a lot of these folks do not have insurance, obviously. So putting that forward, it’s an easy way to say, yes, make substance use a treatment available for everybody. Unfortunately, as of late 2020, Oregon was ranked 47 of 50 in terms of availability for substance use treatment.
Miller: One of the issues that we heard from Portland police chief Chuck Lovell last week is that because of the decriminalization and the inability to sort of roll people up higher in a chain, it’s harder to build cases against dealers. Is there data to back that up?
Campbell: We don’t have a ton of quantitative data that would allow us to peer into the practice of using informants, and the practice of actually investigating various types of drug manufacturing and sales, that type of thing. But when we look at the overall use of essentially arrests, we can see that it’s obviously decreasing. You would expect once a law to say you can no longer really arrest for a misdemeanor or a felony unless there’s a particular quantity, and it’s really difficult to determine that quantity unless you can actually find it on that person probably for a different type of stop, then yeah, those those possession arrests are gonna fall off the map, which they have.
Miller: Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially when we’re talking about really complex systems that are all tied together. Here, I’m thinking about the gigantic gap in public defenders on the criminal justice side, or the rise of fentanyl that happened right around the time that Measure 110 was being passed. How do you control for all this? How do you separate all this out as a researcher when you’re trying to figure out what Measure 110 has meant?
Campbell: I think that’s a really good question, and it’s an important point as to why we’re saying it’s too early to tell. We need more follow up time, we need more measures that we’re able to collect at the aggregate level, at the county level, to say what is it about the county or the state or at this time compared to times previously that has changed, or has impacted the trends as of late. So the more follow up time we have, the more we’re able to actually control for different things like single parent households, folks who are below the poverty line, the proportion of a county that got their high school education. So those types of large aggregate and economic kind of factors we’re trying to control for as we examine, but there hasn’t been enough time since Measure 110 took hold, and especially since the money got rolled out for the substance use treatment to be beefed up.
Miller: I know you didn’t focus for this study on overdose rates or drug related hospitalizations. But you did include a fascinating graph at the end of your study. It shows drug related deaths from all 50 states from 2008 until last year. And basically, the whole time, Oregon has been in the middle of the pack, which was a little bit of a surprise to me given the way we talk about or see the severity of the crisis here. And then you can see an increase in drug overdose deaths or drug related deaths since Measure 110 was passed in Oregon, but it’s basically the same exact increase that we see nationwide. Every state has gone up significantly. The trend is the same in Oregon as all around the country, likely due to fentanyl, at least that was my read on that graph. What does that graph tell you?
Campbell: I appreciate that question a lot because it blends right into this third major takeaway, which is this concern over our public safety, and what Measure 110 means in relation to public safety, especially when it comes to drug overdoses. And that graph really tells me that it can’t just be Measure 110, at least not right now we don’t have enough evidence to suggest that it is just Measure 110, because if it was just Measure 110, then we would see only overdose deaths spiking here in Oregon, and everywhere else would be either decreasing from the pandemic or they’d be flat lining, and that’s not necessarily the case. Especially when you think of what we’ve been examining, talking to folks who do high drug trafficking corridor investigations and drug addiction. They’re talking about how fentanyl gets here, the process that it goes through either through California or other southern states off to the east. We see these similar types of spikes, especially in Arizona, that we would be seeing here. And it might have something to do with fentanyl, it might also have to do with methamphetamine and the fact that that substance seems to be getting a little bit stronger according to recent reports.
You can’t say that it’s Measure 110 alone. It has much more to do with the pandemic, because it’s really a sustained increase since the beginning of the pandemic, which has been a much more fastening larger phenomenon.
Miller: Christopher Campbell, thanks very much.
Campbell: Thank you.
Miller: Christopher Campbell is an associate professor of criminology at Portland State University and the co-author of a new study - this one looked into law enforcement’s attitudes of Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs in Oregon. Future studies by this same team will look into prosecutors and other aspects of this major change in this state.
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