Transforming Justice | Harm reduction practices and implementation take time and Oregonians are walking in the right direction
I have a T-shirt that I like to wear grocery shopping. Even though it is one of my favorite shirts, I usually don’t put it on unless I expect to be in a place where people can give it a quick glance and still have time to ask me what it means.
As T-shirts go, it is subtle: solid black with four words in small white lettering. So small, in fact, that people who are close enough to read it — like grocery check-out cashiers — usually squint before their eyebrows go up when they realize what it says. Then, as if the words are in a forgotten language, they almost always ask, “What does that say?”
So, I confirm what they already know: “It says, ‘I love drug users.’” That usually gets a laugh and another squint to confirm that I’m telling the truth.
I explain that it’s a “harm reduction” statement and ask them if they have heard of harm reduction services for drug users. Usually, they keep smiling and shake their heads, so I ask if they have heard of sterile syringe programs to prevent the transmission of HIV and hepatitis or overdose prevention programs to prevent death.
In the years since I bought my “I love drug users” T-shirt at a drug policy conference, virtually everyone now responds with an approving nod, which always fills my heart with joy. That is progress.
But it is also an important reminder of unfinished business. It has now been more than 50 years since Richard Nixon declared his “war on drugs” and set in motion one of the most disastrous eras of criminal justice and health care policy that our country and the world have known.
The great irony is that Nixon’s original proposal, shorn of the war rhetoric and political motivation, began as a reasonably health-focused response to a national health crisis. Yes, even Tricky Dick understood harm reduction.
With tragic results, what began in the early 1970s as harm reduction rapidly mutated with police departments, prosecutor offices and state prison systems claiming the lion’s share of resources in a “forever war” that Americans became conditioned to accept as normal.
There are many reasons for this, most of them about politics, money, racism and economic disparity. But regardless of the interests at play, what followed was always the same: conflation of America’s health care and criminal justice systems to form a mutant public policy that achieved neither. The outcome was also the same for people and communities that had already been historically over-criminalized in America, especially for communities of color: infliction of greater harm, rather than harm reduction, as the “normal” response to drug use.
That now may be changing. As we have seen throughout the recent election, Oregon has become the frontline of a struggle to focus public policy on reducing the harm experienced by individuals suffering from addiction. And Oregonians are increasingly aware that the damage caused by criminalization does not stop there. It also has a devastating emotional and economic impact on their families and communities. And yet, Oregon has for many years ranked last among our nation’s states in allocating its public resources to address addiction and drug overdose while ranking near the top in terms of addiction and overdose rates.
Clearly, that is not what Oregonians want. Passing Measure 110 just two years ago by a remarkably wide margin and in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Oregon voters began the process of reversing the perverse, deeply counterproductive and costly heaping of additional suffering on drug users.
Oregon voters instead chose to fund programs that directly address the needs of people suffering from addiction by reallocating funds from cannabis taxes that they had approved six years earlier. Finally, we are beginning to develop the health-centered response that we have always needed and that people suffering from addiction and their families have always deserved. We must give it time to work.
As of October this year, Behavioral Health Resource Networks now exist in all of Oregon’s 36 counties to provide free coordinated treatment and harm reduction services — due solely to Measure 110 and its implementation. Many police departments, prosecutor offices, county governments and ambitious politicians see themselves as the losers in terms of funding and power with the passage of Measure 110. Some of them are already trumpeting proposals to roll back its decriminalization of addiction and reclaim the cannabis tax funding that Oregon voters chose to designate for programs that help people suffering from addiction survive.
I have sometimes wondered if I would get the same raised eyebrows wearing a T-shirt that says, “I hate drug users.” Too many of us are still conditioned to accept the decades of harm caused by involving the criminal justice system in the lives of drug users and are too willing to let the harm continue. But not all of us. I am hopeful that this time will be different.
Andy Ko is executive director at Partnership for Safety and Justice, a statewide nonprofit advocating for equity, accountability and healing in the public safety and criminal justice systems. He has led on homelessness prevention and efforts to reform drug policy and criminal justice for over three decades.
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