Ambiguous title. The pastor didn’t ask for money from the freezing people. He took them in for free. The city then criminally charged him for violating zoning rules:
Chris Avell, pastor of Dad’s Place in Bryan, Ohio, was arraigned in court last Thursday because he kept his church open 24/7 to provide warmth to the unhoused.
Ohio law prohibits residential use in first-floor buildings in a business district. Since the church is zoned as a Central Business, the building is restricted from allowing people to eat or sleep on the property.
If these people get angry at someone performing a good deed because that makes then look bad, they’re going to hell.
If even the least absolutist christian sect, the church of England, teaches that as they did to me during my childhood, then those fuckers aren’t even close to being Christian. They’re just wearing a crucifix.
I wonder if there’s a first amendment defense to be made here. The pastor was following his religious tenets by sheltering the poor in the church in their time of need.
So by this logic church patrons would have to leave the premises to eat a snack, participate in a church meal, or even eat one of those wafers they sometimes hand out.
Yup. Serve the body of Christ? Straight to jail. Your sermon is so boring someone dozes off, believe it or not, jail.
Of course, this doesn’t really happen, through the magic of selective enforcement the only people getting the boot are those preventing the homeless from freezing to death, ruining the plans of the local administration.
The doctrine of transfiguration is not the same thing as communion. When protestants take communion they are not under the belief they are eating the literal body of Christ. Instead it’s purely symbolic. Catholicism holds that your salvation literally hinges on eating that piece of bread and wine every week since they believe it is literally Christ’s body once it’s blessed. It’s like the literalist opposite of gnostic views
Buddy you’re trying to nitpick something that no one cares about that still has the same result. At the end of the day the people will still be eating the cracker in a business zoned church.
Whatever beliefs or arbitrary labels are held behind the gesture do not matter at all to what is being talked about
Yep, and what boundaries constitutes a church, synagogue, mosque or place of worship these days, and why is one religion tax free, yet a philosophical movement is not? To whom is respon$ible for making these institutions exempt of taxation? I for one would be a proud supporter of a church that actually upholds the tenants of biblical teachings, and also follows in the footsteps of those morals, but it’s all just a sad sad part of modern day capitalism. This Pastor is a hero and should be heralded as such.
Not that I particularly care if churches are or are not taxed but arguing that religion is philosophy just is empirically wrong. Philosophy is rarely passed generation to generation but religion is almost always is. No one would call an 8 year old a Hegellian but they would grasp the idea that the 8 year old is Muslim and should be given hallel food. A Marxist solider who dies in combat isn’t going to get a Marxist funeral. A Platoist is not going to request a Platoist leader to provide them comfort in their final moments. No one is bringing their family to weekly Russellian services where they sing about the glory of set theory. No desperate person has begged their local Utilitarian thinker to pray away the Utility Monster.
You’re right. The only difference between philosophy and religion is the cult aspect. So why are we rewarding the culty versions that indoctrinate children into being unable to think for themselves rather than actual philosophical movements? Its backwards as fuck. Religon is much of why humanity is so stupid. It requires faith. Faith and critical thinking cannot coexist when the faith involves meaning of life stuff.
Technically you are correct, but this is far from the first instance of this kind, probably already even in 2024. I knew immediately what it meant b/c of that context… sigh, unfortunately:-(.
Still, thank you very much for clarifying - Lemmy is shared world-wide, and not everyone may have picked up on that, especially non-native speakers. You are preventing misunderstandings hence promoting Truth, exactly as that pastor would have wanted:-).
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, but it seems to me the problem here isn’t the zoning laws, but draconian enforcement during an emergency.
Usually in times of hardship, anyone with half a brain knows not to strictly enforce laws like this that were clearly not intended to stop churches, businesses, or private individuals from helping people.
It’s like charging someone for violating zoning by taking in neighbours whose homes were destroyed. In normal times, there are laws against turning yourself into a boarding house without a permit, but nobody reasonable would enforce that after a tornado.
The regulation/law could have been written better. That’s why I called it overreach. They could have written an emergency clause or wrote an emergency regulation/law that specified overruling certain laws.
That’s what I meant by overreach. I’m generally pro regulations when it comes to safety which is what the sleeping and eating one I assume was written about.
Seems like a shooting range next to a school could be a deterrent.
Hmmm, which school to shoot up? This one next to a bunch of folks with weapons and ammo within arms reach practicing marksmanship or any of these other ones without that?
You mean like here in maryville, tn, where the new Smith and Wesson factory and test range shares a property line with Middlesettlements Elementary School?
Nothing quite like kids hearing gunshots outside at school.
And it wasn’t just “allowed” by zoning laws. The city basically did backflips to get the plant to move here. They even convinced the city of Alcoa to cede the land to the city of Maryville without telling Alcoa why they wanted it.
Bunch of shady shit all around, but the whole county basically sucks Smith and Wesson’s dick now. They even had a big festival on the day the plant opened to celebrate it.
he building is restricted from allowing people to eat or sleep on the property.
Okay… so any business in the ‘business district’ is restricted from allowing people to eat or sleep on their property.
If I was a lawyer, I’d record people eating in their business district buildings and present that to the court right next to the law that says they’re not allowed to do it.
I would fight tooth and nail to ensure whatever judicial overreach is screwing over poor people also screws over rich ones.
No eating in the business district means no break rooms. And if Christian churches are in the business district, I’d imagine this means no communion wafers either.
How many of those businesses work people so hard/overnight so they are sleeping in their offices? Its Ohio so probably not many but its probably still happened.
If you are simply buying fruit juices at the store you are getting zero to virtually zero fiber. So you are getting a bunch of calories but without feeling any sense of fullness that you would get if you instead just ate the fruit.
Fruit is healthy but you are much better off just eating the fruit and drinking water. If you really want to drink the fruit juice you should just blend the fruit so that you are also getting all the pulp. The fiber is excellent for you and will help prevent you from turning all that juice into “empty” calories.
If you like banana smoothies, peanut butter is another great way to round it out a bit more. And yknow, make it taste all the better because peanut butter fucks.
Freeze the banana and then blend the frozen banana with peanut butter and a little almond/oat/other plant milk and it’s like a milkshake without the dairy. Amazingly good!
Growing up we'd blend just frozen bananas and a little bit of peanut butter together. Keep it going long enough and you'll get real close to ice cream consistency with just those two things. Add a little drizzle of chocolate syrup and you've got a reasonably not unhealthy treat that's damn good.
It’s obvious to anyone who has thought about it, yes. Unfortunately there’s a larger than you expect percentage of people out there who just think “fruit healthy” and that’s where the thought ends
It doesn’t help that government recommendations have been based on either terrible research or straight up from lobbying groups for so many decades.
The old food pyramid was insane. Nuts, beans, and red meat all being lumped in the protein category, while all fats and sweets were considered the same. Sugar was just considered a carbohydrate, whether it came from fruits or from soda (high fructose corn syrup). The categories were displayed and expressed as hard lines and there was no nuance at all. Not to mention bread, cereal, rice, pasta all being the largest category… and an entire category for just milk-based items.
For many people the government recommendation is just taken at face value, often just because that is what they’re taught in school.
Yep, the dairy lobby is still pissed about it, it’s been five years now and they still say that Health Canada is biased against them… After working with them to create the guide for decades? 🤔
I’m not arguing that, this is recommending a glass with every meal and giving it its own special food group requirements. The “93% are not getting enough dairy” figure is pretty absurd since in 2021 (the last time data was collected), Americans ate on average 667 pounds of dairy per year. That’s 1.8 pounds per day. It’s a weird measurement, since a pint of milk weighs about a pound, and a pound of cheese is 16 servings of cheese, but either way… I think we’re getting enough dairy.
I think it was kellogs or one of the other old school cereal brands that came up with the food pyramid just so they could sell cheap corn based shit. Greed from the very beginning.
One of my friends was staying with me for a few days. She bought 2 half gallons of apple juice (buy one, get one) and she was saying how much she loved it, how healthy it was, and she switched over from soda a while ago. I commented that it’s not really healthy per se because it still contains nearly as much sugar as soda, she didn’t disagree but still said that drinking apple juice just seems healthier since it’s from a fruit.
my dad, who is quite overweight, would order the sweet potato french fries at Culver’s, after I told him to eat healthier. My mom even supported him - “those are SWEET POTATO fries! that’s healthy!”. I told them that’s not how it works, and it just made them angry.
I think children are generally taught “eat your fruits and vegetables”. It should not be permitted to target children with fruit-branded junk food and mis-marketing
what does “healthy” even mean in this context exactly? like if i eat 3 apples tomorrow will i tangibly actually feel different? what about every day for a week? month? what exactly are people getting out of this other than the placebo effect from the word ‘healthy’
“Healthy” most of the time means it has a range of nutrients that help your body function, and prevents a lot of bad stuff, if you eat them consistently.
These bad things include dementia, certain eye diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, pancreatic diseases, hip fractures, cancer, weight gain and diabetes.
Remember when conservatives blamed “windmills” for this? All while conservatives in charge of Texas raked in millions of dollars in campaign donations from ERCOT members. Conservatives will gleefully watch your family die for fun or profit.
A conservative is incapable of empathy or remorse. Be very careful in your dealings with them. They do not value the lives of others the way normal people do.
They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until we are dead.
As an aside, I used to live in a remote fishing area and we had tons of American visitors. I remember one woman told me she knew Obama was the devil because she felt “the evil” emanating from him.
So the attorney general can open an investigation on this asshat profiteering off of hand sanitizer but when it comes to companies price gouging in the wake of the pandemic we get this limp dick response? Sure I’m glad he said something but we need more
Apparently a state of emergency needs to have been declared for them to actually do anything about price gouging directly.
I read about it when Southwest airlines went completely down for a week last year over the holidays and I was stranded somewhere. Other airlines had astronomical prices and car rentals were over $500 for one day. It was disgusting. But apparently there was nothing to be done.
They need to change the rules surrounding it because they’re not working. But any amount of government intervention in the economy gets conservatives screaming about “communism,” or socialism, or whatever scapegoat they’re using that day that they don’t know the actual definition of. And yet, if there’s no government intervention in the economy it’s “Biden’s not doing enough/Biden is personally raising gas prices every week” etc.
Of course there wasn’t a single peep from them when Trump was fucking shit up, other than those “this is Biden’s America” memes when Biden hadn’t even taken office yet and the photos were a year old. Nothing will get done about it as long as conservatives have any say in congress. But they’ll always be the one’s complaining and pointing the finger at “the libruls” while profiting.
I’m tired of being part of the murder of the guilty on a systemic level. No crime is heinous enough for me to say “Yeah, government, go ahead and murder us”.
I don’t disagree. There are some sick people in this world that create chaos and torture people for the remaining time here. I don’t believe they deserve life.
However being framed for that is the problem. And I think it’s a very hard teeter totter to walk without problems or mistakes.
This guy wasn’t an innocent. The testimony that they were trying to challenge was about him being a future risk to the public. He wasn’t trying to say that there was evidence he didn’t do it.
Hey, hi. Not what I’m talking about, thanks. People who are innocent of crimes are killed by capital punishment and I’m really tired of being involved in that against my will.
Why is decent rail service, like basic medical care, a contentious issue in the U.S.? Even this article casts shade by saying ‘Bear is located about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Biden’s home of Wilmington.’ As if having access to public transportation is some kind of left wing elite privelege that no one else can utilize.
America is about twice the size of all of Europe. Railroads were controlled by monopoly rich people. Once America became more industrialized, planes became a better cargo transit option. That and the interstate system made trucks an even better economical option. Railroads were not an option as they were expensive and land intensive(which also meant more money for acquiring land)
For medical care, the US government actually spends a bunch on healthcare on par with most other countries. Just that a majority of the monet will go to a bloated medical company into a billionair’s pocket before any of it applies to an individual.
So, extreme capitalism ruined both. Yet we have politicians and people who think we should push further towards a capitalistic way of running things…
California is as densely populated as Spain, which has an excellent high speed rail network, the northeastern US has densities comparable with Central Europe and the rest of the East coast is well within the ranges seen in western Europe.
the u.s. spends up to twice as much on health care, and doesn't cover 'as much' or 'as many', as those other nations that have nationalized or 'socialized' health care programs.
Railroads have always been business owned. So acquiring land is expensive for them. Highways and interstates are government owned. So they just forced owners to accept the appraised value.
For medical care, the US government actually spends a bunch on healthcare on par with most other countries
I think he’s technically correct, by virtue of lying by omission. US government spends money on devices like Medicare and Veterans Services that are much less expensive (although I’m sure still obscene) vs US spends a lot more than anyone else by virtue of privately funded services with Multiple levels of profit-making for most of us. As always the only real answer is that it’s more complicated than anyone expects
– as an employed citizen with a family, my employer and I pay a stupendous amount for my healthcare and everything I spend includes multiple levels of profit taking
– as a retired Veteran, my ex father-in-law pays nothing for medical care. He uses services paid by US Government, with fewer layers and no profit taking. As the largest user of services such as drugs, they can negotiate better rates. Granted, service can be poor but that’s directly related to insufficient funding
I’m going with “size doesn’t matter” here; it’s all politics. On the one hand we have a political requirement that all these long distance routes be kept running, even if they’ll never be viable, never be funded adequately. But on the other hand most of the population is in urban/suburban areas that could be effectively served by good rail service. We don’t have the political will power to create good rail service where it’s most effective, most needed, but we do waste money on bad rail service where it will never be effective
Railroads were not an option as they were expensive and land intensive
I’m not buying this, since the tracks and right of way used to exist. Yes it’s really expensive to acquire now, and that’s going to happen since centers of population change but you can’t use this as an historical reason, because historically we had a lot more train service.
Yeah I’d love to take a train from Ohio to California if it didn’t take longer than the greyhound for more money than a plane ticket. At our size low speed long distance passenger rail is unwanted. But I think a lot of people would be comfortable with a 1-2 hour ride from Cleveland to Chicago and another hour or two to St. Louis, and so on until they’re in California by the end of the day or so. And it should be subsidized to allow it to compete with the heavily subsidized highway and air systems.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d also love to take long distance train rides and believe it more than worthwhile to build them all up to modern high speed lines. Some services are worth more than immediate profit/loss.
However the reality is long distance lines will never have high ridership, never be profitable, so it is disingenuous to require those lines while claiming rail never makes a profit.
We need to make a decision and stick with it:
— is good train service a societal good that benefits us all over the long term, in which case the long distance lines deserve better funding, along with the entire system ?
— Or do we focus on profit/loss, in which case we need to close the long distance lines, the connectivity to to less populated towns, small cities, counties, entire states, the integration to bring our country together, in favor of greatly increased inter-city rail where it is most needed, most effective and can be profitable by serving half the population in the highest population areas?
I believe it’s a public good and we deserve it regardless of profit. Just like mail. Though I think prioritizing high population areas is worthwhile in part due to the fact that it will help fund the unprofitable bits.
But the current air travel system cannot be sustained long term. Whether by willful decarbonization or by lack of oil in the ground airplanes will have to move towards alternative fuel sources. On one hand there’s hydrogen but I’m a huge supporter of using rail as a more efficient and affordable solution if we build the infrastructure in.
Maybe North America but Europe is larger than the US and especially the contiguous US. There are also a shit ton of different countries in Europe which all have different laws and standards which are not easy to work with. They seemed to be able to do just fine. Although they did not cater near as much to auto manufacturers and rip up rail line we did in the US.
As for medical care, the US spends significantly more per person (19% of GDP vs 10-11% for most others) and you are correct that the main reason for that is bloated medical companies.
One part of the problem is that Congress has a rural bias, so there are a lot of rural Congresspersons who don’t see the benefit of better rail service so they won’t vote for it.
Why is decent rail service treated as something only the north east can have? Like, I’m glad they’re getting more, but it can be frustrating how there’s a fair amount in one area and basically none west of the Appalachian mountains.
Thats not what socialism is. Socialism is basically collective ownership of all of the means of production. Its a term used by a variety of egalitarian (classless) political theories.
IIRC the teacher expressed concerns about the student having a gun, and the school administration said something like, “he has tiny pockets! a gun can’t fit in tiny pockets” and she got shot like less than an hour later. I used quotations but it’s not an exact quote.
The administrator downplayed the report from the teacher and the possibility of a gun, saying — and I quote — ‘Well, he has little pockets,’ ”
Shortly after 1 p.m., another teacher told an administrator that a different student who was “crying and fearful” said the boy showed him the gun during recess and threatened to shoot him if he told anyone. Again, no action was taken, she said.
When another employee who had heard the boy might have a gun asked an administrator to search the boy, he was turned down, Toscano said. “He was told to wait the situation out because the school day was almost over,” she said.
Can we just get whoever these chucklefucks are and ask them why they were so unconcerned with the fact that three different people came to them talking about a 6 year old they’re in charge of being seen with a gun?? Isn’t the normal response to ONE person telling you about a child being seen with a gun on school grounds to actually investigate whatever is going on?
How do you have an entire fucking family show up for a baby shower and not one god damn person says a thing? How do these people show up at a hospital with a pregnant 12 year old thinking this was going to have a happy ending?
That’s some George Costanza shit right there. “Was I not supposed to impregnate 12 year olds? Because I had no idea. I mean if someone had told me that was frowned on around here, I never would’ve done it.”
Not even divorced yet and she’s already getting fingerbanged in public with her affair partner. That’s some fine Republican family values there, making her grandchild conceived outside of teenaged marriage proud.
“Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, Lauren Boebert got fingered in a public theatre, or that she was dry jerking her bf in public while her divorce is still warm, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that AOC was protesting abortion rights outside the supreme court, well then everyone loses their minds!”
Is anyone really surprised cannabis use surged? Like with legalization you would think it would have that cause and effect.
Im glad psychedelic use surged. Makes you see reality differently and can be amazing for mental health issues which needs to be utilized. Fuck the war on drugs
Alcohol can go away though but it’s hard when there is quite literally no future to be seen
If I recall the research, increases are pretty slight from legalization.
COVID and the largest disruption to social and economic conditions in human history is the alpha and omega for pretty much anything that significantly changed in the last three years.
I’d be curious on this research. I could be completely wrong but I feel like with legalization and having the conveniency of dispensaries it would mean more frequent use and even new use. Do you know if this research was for why they used and not if they would of used it wasn’t legal and didn’t have dispensaries?
I’m finding conflicting research now that I’m looking again. In Colorado for example use definitely went up after legalization but not by a significant amount more than it was already going up, year over year. Youth usage went down.
From my understanding, at least in Canada, we’ve an increase in older people using and a decrease in younger people trying.
Essentially older people who may have used back in the day generally gave it up when they had kids and lost their plug. Now that it’s legal and available they are going back to it since its easier to get now then having to know some guy and go through that whole rigmarole. As for the younger crowd, dealers aren’t as common since most people just buy it from the store, or grow their own and they have other avenues to form addictions, like social media.
Maybe for new people that didn’t use it because it was illegal.
Before it was legal I would buy as much as I could because I hated meeting dealers. Now that I can go to a shop I don’t really mind going a few days without.
I tend to smoke more when I have a lot vs just having an eighth from the dispo that I’ll just stretch because I know I can just go get more any time with ease.
Also ime with new users where I live. People love the 5mg gummies. That’s not what we used to do with edibles before legalization. I don’t think a lot of new users are getting baked like snoop, unless maybe they are a part of party culture.
Also it seems younger people consider always-stoned-stoners junkies. It’s not a cool look anymore it’s just pretty pathetic and sad.
Ditto. The first 3 paragraphs. Ditto. I smoke less because I can pick up whenever. I ran out 2 weeks ago and will pick up next time I’m in the city and in the area. I could go to the city now but I’m too lazy.
I mean I agree the war on drugs and the way it’s policed is not the right call. But after looking at what’s happening in Oregon. Not sure I’m totally for just straight up legalize all the things. OD rates are up, and apparently it’s quite common for folks to be nodding off all over the place. It’s not the psechedelics like marijuana and lsd, it’s the synthetic opioids and harder drugs like heroin doing real damage.
Does anyone have a way to read the article without an account?
Oregon was setup to fail with it. The US is setup to fail right now. We can’t even agree that addiction is a mental health issue and should be addressed with therapy vs jail. Fentanyl will never be solved, let’s be real. Feds help bring it in.
Now if you set up clinics for people to do drugs safely AND gave them access to clean drugs it’s a completely different story.
It’s also not like that is unique to Oregon. Go to Seattle and you’ll see tons of people nodding and OD rates are higher everywhere
It’s below, broken into 3 parts because apparently Lemmy has a comment limit, but TLDR the bureaucracy of providing services that help drug users has been slower to implement than the law that made drugs legal was. Mostly due to republicans constantly trying to attack any bills or laws that would help addicts, though it should be noted that now even a decent chunk of democrats want to undo the law since people aren’t getting help they were promised by the government.
POLITICS
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN OREGON DECRIMINALIZED HARD DRUGS
A bold reform effort hasn’t gone as planned.
JULY 19, 2023
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on July 20, 2023
Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.
Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.
For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Oregon’s Measure 110 was viewed as an opportunity to prove that activists’ most groundbreaking idea—sharply reducing the role of law enforcement in the government’s response to drugs—could work. The measure also earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue for building a statewide treatment network that advocates promised would do what police and prosecutors couldn’t: help drug users stop or reduce their drug use and become healthy, engaged members of their communities. The day after the measure passed, Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the nation’s most prominent drug-policy reform organizations, issued a statement calling the vote a “historic, paradigm-shifting win” and predicting that Oregon would become “a model and starting point for states across the country to decriminalize drug use.”
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession. This year’s legislative session, which ended in late June, saw at least a dozen Measure 110–related proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike, ranging from technical fixes to full restoration of criminal penalties for drug possession. Two significant changes—tighter restrictions on fentanyl and more state oversight of how Measure 110 funding is distributed—passed with bipartisan support.
Few people consider Measure 110 “a success out of the gate,” Tony Morse, the policy and advocacy director for Oregon Recovers, told me. The organization, which promotes policy solutions to the state’s addiction crisis, initially opposed Measure 110; now it supports funding the policy, though it also wants more state money for in-patient treatment and detox services. As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
Many advocates say the new policy simply needs more time to prove itself, even if they also acknowledge that parts of the ballot measure had flaws; advocates worked closely with lawmakers on the oversight bill that passed last month. “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Measure 110 went into effect at a time of dramatic change in U.S. drug policy. Departing from precedent, the Biden administration has endorsed and increased federal funding for a public-health strategy called harm reduction; rather than pushing for abstinence, harm reduction emphasizes keeping drug users safe—for instance, through the distribution of clean syringes and overdose-reversal medications. The term harm reduction appeared five times in the ballot text of Measure 110, which forbids funding recipients from “mandating abstinence.”
Matt Sutton, the director of external relations for the Drug Policy Alliance, which helped write Measure 110 and spent more than $5 million to pass it, told me that reform advocates viewed the measure as the start of a nationwide decriminalization push. The effort started in Oregon because the state had been an early adopter of marijuana legalization and is considered a drug-policy-reform leader. Success would mean showing the rest of the country that “people did think we should invest in a public-health approach instead of criminalization,” Sutton said.
To achieve this goal, Measure 110 enacted two major changes to Oregon’s drug laws. First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline. (Selling, trafficking, and possessing large amounts of drugs remain criminal offenses in Oregon.) Second, the law set aside a portion of state cannabis tax revenue every two years to fund a statewide network of harm-reduction and other services. A grant-making panel was created to oversee the funding process. At least six members of the panel were required to be directly involved in providing services to drug users; at least two had to be active or former drug users themselves; and three were to be “members of communities that have been disproportionately impacted” by drug criminalization, according to the ballot measure.
Backers of Measure 110 said the law was modeled on drug policies in Portugal, where personal drug possession was decriminalized two decades ago. But Oregon’s enforcement-and-treatment-referral system differs from Portugal’s. Users caught with drugs in Portugal are referred to a civil commission that evaluates their drug use and recommends treatment if needed, with civil sanctions for noncompliance. Portugal’s state-run health system also funds a nationwide network of treatment services, many of which focus on sobriety. Sutton said drafters of Measure 110 wanted to avoid anything that might resemble a criminal tribunal or coercing drug users into treatment. “People respond best when they’re ready to access those services in a voluntary way,” he said.
Almost immediately after taking effect, Measure 110 encountered problems. A state audit published this year found that the new law was “vague” about how state officials should oversee the awarding of money to new treatment programs, and set “unrealistic timelines” for evaluating and funding treatment proposals. As a result, the funding process was left largely to the grant-making panel, most of whose members “lacked experience in designing, evaluating and administrating a governmental-grant-application process,” according to the audit. Last year, supporters of Measure 110 accused state health officials, preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, of giving the panel insufficient direction and resources to handle a flood of grant applications. The state health authority acknowledged missteps in the grant-making process.
The audit described a chaotic process, with more than a dozen canceled meetings, potential conflicts of interest in the selection of funding recipients, and lines of applicant evaluations left blank. Full distribution of the first biennial payout of cannabis tax revenue—$302 million for harm reduction, housing, and other services—did not occur until late 2022, almost two years after Measure 110 passed. Figures released by the state last month show that, in the second half of 2022, recipients of Measure 110 funding provided some form of service to roughly 50,000 “clients,” though the Oregon Health Authority has said that a single individual could be counted multiple times in that total. (A study released last year by public-health researchers in Oregon found that, as of 2020, more than 650,000 Oregonians required, but were not receiving, treatment for a substance-use disorder.)
Meanwhile, the new law’s enforcement provisions have proved ineffectual. Of 5,299 drug-possession cases filed in Oregon circuit courts since Measure 110 went into effect, 3,381 resulted in a recipient failing to pay the fine or appear in court and facing no further penalties, according to the Oregon Judicial Department; about 1,300 tickets were dismissed or are pending. The state audit found that, during its first 15 months in operation, the treatment-referral hotline received just 119 calls, at a cost to the state of $7,000 per call. A survey of law-enforcement officers conducted by researchers at Portland State University found that, as of July 2022, officers were issuing an average of just 300 drug-possession tickets a month statewide, compared with 600 drug-possession arrests a month before Measure 110 took effect and close to 1,200 monthly arrests prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
“Focusing on these tickets even though they’ll be ineffective—it’s not a great use of your resources,” Sheriff Nate Sickler of Jackson County, in the rural southern part of the state, told me of his department’s approach.
Advocates have celebrated a plunge in arrests. “For reducing arrests of people of color, it’s been an overwhelming success,” says Mike Marshall, the director of Oregon Recovers. But critics say that sidelining law enforcement has made it harder to persuade some drug users to stop using. Sickler cited the example of drug-court programs, which multiple studies have shown to be highly effective, including in Jackson County. Use of such programs in the county has declined in the absence of criminal prosecution, Sickler said: “Without accountability or the ability to drive a better choice, these individuals are left to their own demise.”
The consequences of Measure 110’s shortcomings have fallen most heavily on Oregon’s drug users. In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In neighboring Idaho and California, where drug possession remains subject to prosecution, the rate of increase was significantly lower than Oregon’s. (The spike in Washington State was similar to Oregon’s, but that comparison is more complicated because Washington’s drug policy has fluctuated since 2021.) Other states once notorious for drug deaths, including West Virginia, Indiana, and Arkansas, are now experiencing declines in overdose rates.
In downtown Portland this spring, police cleared out what The Oregonian called an “open-air drug market” in a former retail center. Prominent businesses in the area, including the outdoor-gear retailer REI, have announced closures in recent months, in part citing a rise in shoplifting and violence. Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding. In April, the center abruptly closed following employee complaints that clients were covering walls with graffiti and overdosing on-site. A subsequent investigation by the nonprofit found that a security contractor had been using cocaine on the job. The center reopened two weeks later with beefed-up security measures.
Portland’s Democratic mayor, Ted Wheeler, went so far as to attempt an end run around Measure 110 in his city. Last month, Wheeler unveiled a proposal to criminalize public drug consumption in Portland, similar to existing bans on open-air drinking, saying in a statement that Measure 110 “is not working as it was intended to.” He added, “Portland’s substance-abuse problems have exploded to deadly and disastrous proportions.” Wheeler withdrew the proposal days later after learning that an older state law prohibits local jurisdictions from banning public drug use.
Despite shifting public opinion on Measure 110, many Oregon leaders are not ready to give up on the policy. Earlier this month, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed legislation that strengthens state oversight of Measure 110 and requires an audit, due no later than December 2025, of about two dozen aspects of the measure’s performance, including whether it is reducing overdoses. Other bills passed by the legislature’s Democratic majority strengthened criminal penalties for possession of large quantities of fentanyl and mandated that school drug-prevention programs instruct students about the risks of synthetic opioids. Republican proposals to repeal Measure 110 outright or claw back tens of millions of dollars in harm-reduction funding were not enacted.
The fallout from Measure 110 has received some critical coverage from media outlets on the right. “It is predictable,” a scholar from the Hudson Institute told Fox News. “It is a tragedy and a self-inflicted wound.” (Meanwhile, in Portugal, the model for Oregon, some residents are raising questions about their own nation’s decriminalization policy.) But so far Oregon’s experience doesn’t appear to have stopped efforts to bring decriminalization to other parts of the United States. “We’ll see more ballot initiatives,” Sutton, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said, adding that advocates are currently working with city leaders to decriminalize drugs in Washington, D.C.
Supporters of Measure 110 are now seeking to draw attention to what they say are the policy’s overlooked positive effects. This summer, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a Measure 110 advocacy organization, is leading an effort to spotlight expanded treatment services and boost community awareness of the treatment-referral hotline. Advocates are also coordinating with law-enforcement agencies to ensure that officers know about local resources for drug users. “People are hiring for their programs; outreach programs are expanding, offering more services,” Devon Downeysmith, the communications director for the group, told me.
An array of services around the state have been expanded through the policy: housing for pregnant women awaiting drug treatment; culturally specific programs for Black, Latino, and Indigenous drug users; and even distribution of bicycle helmets to people unable to drive to treatment meetings. “People often forget how much time it takes to spend a bunch of money and build services,” said Wheelock, the homeless-services worker, whose organization received more than $2 million in funding from Measure 110.
Still, even some recipients of Measure 110 funding wonder whether one of the law’s pillars—the citation system that was supposed to help route drug users into treatment—needs to be rethought. “Perhaps some consequences might be a helpful thing,” says Julia Pinsky, a co-founder of Max’s Mission, a harm-reduction nonprofit in southern Oregon. Max’s Mission has received $1.5 million from Measure 110, enabling the organization to hire new staff, open new offices, and serve more people. Pinsky told me she is proud of her organization’s work and remains committed to the idea that “you shouldn’t have to go to prison to be treated for substance use.” She said that she doesn’t want drug use to “become a felony,” but that some people aren’t capable of stopping drug use on their own. “They need additional help.”
Brandi Fogle, a regional manager for Max’s Mission, says her own story illustrates the complex trade-offs involved in reforming drug policy. Three and a half years ago, she was a homeless drug user, addicted to heroin and drifting around Jackson and Josephine Counties. Although she tried to stop numerous times, including one six-month period during which she was prescribed the drug-replacement medication methadone, she told me that a 2020 arrest for drug possession was what finally turned her life around. She asked to be enrolled in a 19-month drug-court program that included residential treatment, mandatory 12-step meetings, and a community-service project, and ultimately was hired by Pinsky.
Since Measure 110 went into effect, Fogle said, she has gotten pushback from members of the community for the work Max’s Mission does. She said that both the old system of criminal justice and the new system of harm reduction can benefit drug users, but that her hope now is to make the latter approach more successful. “Everyone is different,” Fogle said. “Drug court worked for me because I chose it, and I wouldn’t have needed drug court in the first place if I had received the kind of services Max’s Mission provides. I want to offer people that chance.”
This article originally suggested that REI’s store in Portland had closed; it is scheduled to close early next year.
Jim Hinch is a senior editor at Guideposts magazine.
Im glad psychedelic use surged. Makes you see reality differently and can be amazing for mental health issues which needs to be utilized. Fuck the war on drugs
I would still be on SSRIs if it wasn’t for my magic mushies, and they’ve done better than SSRIs ever did.
I recommend starting with actual trips before getting into micro dosing. Start with a low to moderate dose and wait at least two weeks before trips. Good luck, enjoy the journey!
I want to use mushrooms again but I went on SSRIs. They changed my life for the better and without them I probably wouldn’t have tried an SSRI. Mushrooms seem better. I only did low doses but went through about an oz of shrooms over the time I used them.
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