Democratic state lawmakers propose changes to Measure 110

Oregon lawmakers are deciding whether to make changes to the state’s landmark drug decriminalization law, Measure 110. A bipartisan committee has been meeting since October to hear testimony from law enforcement, addiction experts and treatment providers. Democratic state lawmakers recently put forth a proposal that would recriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs. Republicans have introduced their own proposal that includes harsher penalties for possession and public drug use.

We’ll hear about the Republican proposal later in the week; but first, we turn to Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber, D-Beaverton, and Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego. They join us to talk about Democrats’ plan for M110 and priorities for the short session.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. It’s becoming pretty clear that lawmakers are going to make changes to Measure 110. That’s Oregon’s first in the nation voter-passed drug decriminalization law. Democratic lawmakers recently announced plans for a bill aimed at increasing treatment, availability and quality. They also want to recriminalize the possession of drugs like fentanyl and meth to ratchet up the pressure on people who are resistant to treatment. Republicans have introduced their own proposal that includes harsher penalties for possession and public drug use.

We’re going to hear about the Republican proposal tomorrow. We turn to the democratic one right now. Kate Lieber is a Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat who represents Beaverton and parts of Southwest Portland. She’s also one of the co-chairs of the Addiction and Community Safety Response Committee. Rob Wagner is the Senate President, a Democrat who represents Lake Oswego, Tualatin, West Linn and parts of South and Southwest Portland. Welcome back to the show for both of you.

Rob Wagner: Thank you for having us.

Kate Lieber: Thank you.

Miller: Kate Lieber, first. I want to start with the most basic question. What are the specific problems that you’re trying to solve?

Lieber: Well, as you know and I think your listeners know, the drug crisis that’s unfolding upon the streets of both our urban and rural areas is unacceptable. We are really addressing the urgent need to make sure that our community stays safe, but also make sure that we are saving lives at the same time. We took a pretty unusual step and I think President Wagner and Speaker Rayfield were incredibly supportive in taking a very unusual step of creating a joint committee, and having us meet so many times before the session in order to put together this package.

Representative Kropf and I - he’s my co-chair on this committee - really wanted to listen to what the problems were and really try to craft a solution for what we were hearing. We know that we have to make sure that we keep drug dealers off the streets. We also know that we need to increase treatment. It is very important that we continue to treat, increase treatment. So our plan does that and if you want me to go through the parts of the plan, I’m happy to do that.

Miller: Well, let me ask you questions instead about the parts of the plan that I have questions about, and then we can see where that goes. But I do want to start with increasing treatment. It’s not the headline grabbing piece when you announced this proposal. The headline is Democrats actually want to recriminalize drugs. We’ll get to that in a second.

Rob Wagner, you can take this. What are your proposals to increase access to treatment?

Wagner: Well, let me just take a quick half step back, Dave, because you asked this at the outset. When we come into the legislative session in the even-numbered year, it’s a sprint. So we have 35 days to be able to process legislation. And what the legislature is trying to do is address all the crises facing the state with the limited time that we have and the available resources. So you’re going to hear comprehensive proposals as it relates to housing, from shelter to get people into stable housing, to keep them there with rental support. And working with the governor, a broad proposal around housing production. So I just wanted to make sure that people knew that we’re not just limited to addressing the addiction crisis.

I might turn it back over to Senator Lieber to talk about the specifics of how we’re continuing to make investments on building out our mental and behavioral health treatment program.

Miller: Senator Lieber, what about increasing access to medication assisted treatment? What is your plan?

Lieber: We heard very clearly from an addiction specialist, that until we have medications for opioid treatment, those who are addicted are going to continue to find illegal opioids. So we know what works in this area and that’s medication treatment. One of the things we wanted to do, and we worked with a variety of medication specialists, is to make sure that we can increase access to that medication. That is removing some of the barriers of preauthorizations. That is making sure that insurance companies will cover the exact doses that our addiction specialists tell us they need. And that is also making targeted investments into the continuum of care that we will make, to continue to flesh out the treatment system.

That is gonna also include work, making sure we can build up our workforce because one of the things that is a barrier to us opening up additional beds in this space is that we can’t get the workforce to come and work it. So we’re gonna have some comprehensive plans around how to do something in the short-term and in the long-term to really continue to build up this workforce.

Miller: You want to allow a treatment facility or a sobering center to be able to hold an incapacitated person for three days, up from two days. What’s the thinking behind that?

Lieber: One of the things that was being told to us is that fentanyl is different. Fentanyl is different and we know that it stays in the system a lot longer. And there was a push to perhaps have that go from 48 to 72. I will say that this continues to just be a proposal. And the reason we wanted to get this proposal out was so that we will have some robust public discussion about whether or not that is a needed change. But the reason we put it in there is we are recognizing that fentanyl fundamentally acts differently within our systems. And we need to make sure that we are putting in all the tools we can to address this problem. So that was one sort of very specific way we were trying to do that.

Miller: So let’s turn to the recriminalization piece of this. You would recriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs, turning that into a Class C misdemeanor, which carries a penalty of up to 30 days in jail and/or a fine of over $1,200. Can you walk us through what would happen, the various possibilities, if police found someone on the street, say, smoking fentanyl or with a small foil packet in their hand?

Lieber: Sure. Fundamentally, what we heard from law enforcement across the state is that they needed a tool. And by decriminalizing small amounts of drugs, they felt they were being asked to sort of step into these situations without a tool. So we were very conscious of that and we wanted to make sure that we could give that tool back to the police in order to figure out how to confiscate drugs and address the open use that was happening on our streets.

So by decriminalizing possession at a [Class] C misdemeanor, it allows a police officer to develop reasonable suspicion based on whether someone calls in and says, “I just witnessed someone smoking drugs.” Or based on their own observations, develop reasonable suspicion to stop and search someone to figure out what level of drug they might have on them. If it is a drug at a [Class[ C misdemeanor level, which is the lowest amount, less than a gram, five [or] four pills or less of fentanyl, then they would be required to offer a sort of a street-level diversion program right then and there. The person would be offered that and they could either take that or [say] that they rejected it. The police then could utilize the criminal justice system…

Miller: When you say “take that,” does that mean take the piece of paper the way they might take a citation now, or would they be forced to call somebody? I mean, this gets to the heart of a lot of reporting, including by Conrad Wilson at OPB this week, about a lot of complaints that the current citation system isn’t working. So how would the street level-diversion work?

Lieber: I remember I talked to you about going to Portugal and one of the things that they had in Portugal was this ability to have touches with people on the streets and every time that touch happens, it is of value. So this thinking is, we are going to allow some flexibility within this deflection network for jurisdictions to have some flexibility on how they do this. But the idea is there will be some sort of ability to have immediate needs met of this person, and then a follow up conversation with a case manager or peer services worker to make sure that they can help this person on the street get access to the services that we are setting up. And that was the missing piece, I think, that was happening - that there was no way to force that connection between what was happening for the police and what was happening in the behavioral health system.

Miller: This seems, to me, to be the key philosophical question and what separates your position now from what we’ve heard from a number of progressive groups or treatment providers. For example, there was a quote from Andy Ko, the executive director of the Partnership for Safety and Justice.

He said in a statement: “Treating the tens of thousands of Oregonians suffering from addiction as criminals is pointless, irresponsible and profoundly wasteful. Regressive policies of the past half century, too often elevated punishment as if it were health care. We need an honest response to the healthcare crisis we face.”

But you did just use the word “forcing” people. So do you see the heart of the problem in Oregon right now as a lack of treatment options of all kinds, not enough inpatient detox, not enough outpatient support, not enough peer support, not enough medication, assisted treatment? Or do you see it as not enough ability to coerce people into treatment?

Lieber: Well, first of all, I said “force a connection” - I want to make sure that that is corrected. We know that police were asking for a tool, the ability to stop somebody and make sure that they can confiscate the drugs and stop open air drug use. That was something that was really important.

We can’t go back to the war on drugs. The war on drugs was a terrible time in our history. We are not advocating what the war on drugs was, which was locking people up for long periods of time based on their addiction. But what we do know is that there needs to be some accountability that is put into the system. There needs to be both carrots and sticks. And I think that when you think about this push and pull of the system, that we lost a little bit of that. And I think quite frankly, that’s what the voters thought that they were doing. So by linking the two systems, the criminal justice system and the behavioral health system and sort of forcing a connection, that there is value in that connection.

And we know that we need to continue to build the behavior health space. Andy and I, we talk a lot and he’s absolutely correct. We have got to continue to do that, but we were fundamentally underfunded prior to this when we decriminalized. And one of the things I recognized by going to Portugal was that they spent years building up their behavioral health system before they took the step to decriminalize. And that was not something that we had done in Oregon.

Miller: Speaking of money, I haven’t seen a fiscal analysis of this yet. I don’t know that it exists. I’m not sure that even the bill is ready enough for there to be a meaningful analysis. But what’s your ballpark sense for what this would cost? Because you’re talking about a lot of extra touches in a sense, whether it is workforce development or all kinds of things that the Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission is going to be doing - much more treatment availability, more of a role for county-level courts and law enforcement. When you add all this up in your mind, how many zeros are there?

Wagner: Well, I think it’s important to know that the revenue forecast is coming out six days from now. And so that’s going to be the final opportunity for the legislature to understand how much money we have. I do want to underscore that the legislature, following the passage of this measure, has been making hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in our workforce, in our behavioral and mental health treatment programs. There is a conversation happening right now about what that level is. It will be significant.

I also just want to say something, Dave. I listened to the Conrad Wilson piece and I found it really profound, the fact that he was having those conversations around citations and just how people weren’t really making that connection around their public health and really getting into treatment.

Miller: And I recommend people to listen to it. You can find on our website. Just the basic of it, since you referenced it and I’ve heard it, but probably a lot of people still haven’t, is that he saw a police officer cite somebody who was using meth right on the street. This is not the first time that this has happened for this man, and then the man shuffled off. And based on the numbers, I think something like fewer than 1% of people who have gotten these citations ever call the number. So that’s the basis, but it’s a very dramatic, single person story. So please go on.

Wagner: Senator Lieber has spent time as a prosecutor with Multnomah County. But for me, this has been a heck of an education, I think, for a lot of people. I actually asked to be able to go on a ride along with frontline police officers out of East Precinct in Portland, and we were going along a pathway under a bridge near I-205. And they very kindly asked a couple people who clearly were having some difficulty, “Hey, I’ve got a ride along here. Would you guys mind talking to them?” And they actually brought out their foil and their fentanyl packets and showed me, using a glow light, the difference between carfentanil and this.

It was just being able to talk to people as human beings about what their needs were. And after we had that conversation, law enforcement said, we don’t have the tools that we need to be able to connect people to treatment. We want to be part of a solution here. So in response to those sorts of concerns, I think this is why the proposal, that Senator Lieber and the Addiction and Community Safety Committee [are] rolling out, is so responsive both to the needs of communities. It’s a compassionate response and it connects law enforcement to be able to play a role in connecting people to treatment. And as you said, this will require significant additional investment. I think you’re going to see, as soon as the revenue forecast happens, there’s going to be numbers that are attached to the different program options.

Miller: Senator, we’re almost out of time but before we say goodbye, I just want to turn briefly to the huge news out of the State Supreme Court this morning. They ruled unanimously that 10 conservative lawmakers - nine Republicans and an Independent - cannot run for re-election either this November (a handful of them) or the rest of them in 2026. Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, who was one of the lawmakers who cannot run in November, said yesterday, in advance of the ruling, that even if it went against members of his caucus, it was still a win because quote, “they literally have no reason to show up.” So in order for them to show up, they’re going to want to see that they’re going to be able to make a difference. There’s not a lot of subtext there. It’s basically, as I hear it, give us what we want or we’ll walk out again. There’s no incentive for us to even be there otherwise.

What does that mean, both for this proposal that we’ve been talking about, and for everything that you want to do in this short session?

Wagner: Well, first addressing the Supreme Court ruling, I just got notification of it, so I haven’t had an opportunity to read the full response. But I do think it’s important to recognize that the public and legislators now know how [Measure] 113 is going to be applied. And I believe that’s really good for our state and for our legislative process. So it is time for us now to move forward together.

Lieber: And I would just encourage your listeners, especially when you’re talking about this drug crisis, to really look at the places where we agree in these proposals. I know you’re going to have the other proposal. But we agree we need to build up treatment everywhere. We agree we need to protect our children with prevention. We agree we need to treat drug dealers more harshly and make sure that we can prosecute them. And I think we agree we need to give police officers tools to confiscate. I think there are more points of agreement than there are disagreement in these particular proposals, both in housing and in the drug crisis. And I would encourage your voters to take a hard look on where we agree and not simply spend all of our time on where we disagree.

Miller: Kate Lieber and Rob Wagner, thanks very much.

Wagner: Thank you.

Lieber: Thanks, Dave.

Miller: Kate Lieber and Rob Wagner are Democrats in the State Senate. Kate Lieber is the Senate majority leader, Rob Wagner, the Senate president.

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