Oregon’s attorney general takes aim at the growing fentanyl crisis, saying: ‘It is everywhere’

Last week, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum gathered experts from different fields together to talk about the fentanyl crisis facing the state. The all-day event in Portland included discussions of the scope of fentanyl addiction, what works to treat it, how to boost efforts to educate young people about the dangers of the synthetic opioid and how law enforcement can effectively address the crisis while keeping the general public safe.

Attorney General Rosenblum spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller about what she learned from the community event and how best to prioritize and focus efforts to confront the fentanyl crisis in Oregon.

The following highlights from the interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Why Rosenblum wanted to convene this meeting on fentanyl with experts drawn from different backgrounds:

Rosenblum: I didn’t feel like we were doing enough and …we’ve had some great results with policy initiatives in areas like bias and hate, internet privacy, human trafficking, public records, police profiling. So why not this? …We have to do something about it because young people are dying and it is obviously a huge problem in our urban center but also in our rural areas. … I also was told that there had never been a convening where law enforcement, public safety experts were brought together with the health care, public health treatment providers and that they’re kind of in the silos of working on this subject but not bringing folks together. And that’s what we did.

Why she supports expanding harm-reduction efforts, including making the opioid reversal medication naloxone more widely available:

Rosenblum: We need to focus on what is commonly referred to as harm reduction. I think of it more in terms of saving lives of people who are using and who are addicted, frankly, and who are finding it extremely difficult when they are trying to get off of it. … So what I’m focused on a lot … is harm reduction, the dispensing and the delivery of Narcan/naloxone to places in our community that traditionally wouldn’t have thought you would be able to reverse an opioid overdose, in a restaurant or in a bar or in a bathroom.

While she won’t say if she supports or opposes efforts to overhaul Measure 110, she is concerned about losing one of its key features:

Rosenblum: We need the funding that comes from Measure 110 to ensure that we have SUD, substance use disorder treatment. We need more of it. We need more workforce to provide it … So I think you need to look at Measure 110 in that context, because what it was really all about was funding, taking the funds that are used to incarcerate people and and pay for them to be in jail, not receiving treatment, not really benefiting in terms of their addiction and then being put back on the streets, versus having funds for treatment programs and providers.

Her top priorities regarding fentanyl in her last year in office:

Rosenblum: I think our youth are pretty naive about this and I’d like to start out by saving the lives of our young people, and you hear one story and then you hear another and you can’t even believe that that’s what’s happening. So that would be number one, and right up there would be addressing the problems in our jails and prisons because it’s just not right to be incarcerating people and then letting them out on the streets without the tools to survive. And what we’ve seen is that the greatest number of overdoses and deaths are occurring with people who are being released from jail and prison without any treatment being even offered to them, and if it is with long delays before they can actually get into any kind of program, it’s too late at that point.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation: