Oregon’s 2020 Drug Policy Didn’t Treat ‘root Causes’ Of Use, Attorney General Says

Oregon’s short-lived attempt to decriminalize drug possession in 2020 failed due to an inadequate rollout, Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said.

In 2020, Oregon adopted Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of a small amount of hard drugs. Instead of arresting drug users, police officers would issue citations and redirect the user to a state-funded support hotline. But after a surge in fatal overdoses, state lawmakers overturned much of the measure in 2024, restoring criminal penalties.

Speaking to POLITICO’s Dasha Burns for “The Conversation” podcast, Rayfield, a Democrat, said the 2020 policy intended to reframe drug use as a public health crisis, rather than a criminal one.

“The idea was to treat some of the root causes of these issues,” said Rayfield. “But the way that it rolled out, you didn’t get the support services that were really needed to realize the hypothesis.”

Rayfield pointed to the emergence of various public crises at the time — a housing shortage, the COVID-19 pandemic and the fentanyl boom — that doomed the measure.

In practice, most people did not use the state hotline. Although officers handed out 7,000 citations during the three-year span of Measure 110, the hotline averaged only 10 callers per month.

“We created a new classification of crime that was really focused on keeping people out of the ... criminal justice system and nudging them to treatment,” said Rayfield.

“However,” he continued, “we also know that some people just aren’t going to do that.”

The full interview with Rayfield is available on this week's episode of “The Conversation.”