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2024-02-03 -Great Cultural Revolution

Crisis in the Northwest: Fentanyl 'killing the mentally ill for a dollar a pill' in state with loose drug laws

A Good News/Bad News story
[FoxNews] Oregon voters, lawmakers call for reinstitution of criminal penalties three years after passing nation's first decriminalization law.

Experimenting with human lives.

Oregon has turned into a battlefield in the war over drug policy since the state became the first to decriminalize drug possession. Nearly 60% of voters approved Measure 110 but, three years later, numerous polls suggest they regret that move. And no other states have followed Oregon's lead, despite assurances from researchers and decriminalization advocates that the law is not responsible for increased addiction, overdoses and crime.

State lawmakers are poised to re-criminalize drug possession in a special legislative session that begins Monday, though Democrats and Republicans have drafted competing bills. And Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek declared a 90-day state of emergency this week in downtown Portland, where the fentanyl crisis has been most pronounced.

"Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond," Kotek, a Democrat, said in a release. "We are all in this together."

Fentanyl strikes fear among even longtime drug users.

"This is creating zombies," Lori, a homeless woman in Portland, told Fox News last summer. "This sh-- should be illegal because they're killing the mentally ill for a dollar a pill, because I guarantee ya, all these people have some kind of mental illness."

Michael Dusek, who uses marijuana and meth, agreed.

"They’re incoherent most of the time, they’re babbling about something to themselves quite loudly, like they can’t hear themselves," said Dusek, who has been homeless off and on since 1992. "They’re like living dead."

Overdose deaths in the state surged from 800 in 2020 to 1,394 in 2022, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The overwhelming majority of fatal overdoses are now attributed to fentanyl, according to Oregon health data.

"It seems like we got all of Oregon coming, just to pick up fentanyl now," Dusek said of Portland.

Decriminalization advocates point out that fatal overdoses surged across the country beginning in early 2020, not just in Oregon. Many analysts attribute the spike to isolation and despair during the coronavirus pandemic.

Nikki said she has revived 32 people in the past year, collecting as many doses of naloxone as she can from clinics, shelters and even places where citizens have "just nailed a box to a tree or to a wall and keep it stocked with Narcan."

Most fentanyl users Fox News spoke to were difficult — if not impossible — to understand. One woman chattered breathlessly while absently sorting syringes inside her tent, one hand protected by a blue latex glove. A 27-year-old man muttered that he was originally from Idaho, then lived on the Yakama Indian Reservation before a family member dropped him off in Portland so he could "live homeless and do drugs."

"Most of them are mentally ill, and the families don't wanna take care of them," Lori said. "Or they're sick and old and their families don't take care of 'em."

THE RISE OF FENTANYL
Methamphetamine was historically Oregon’s drug of choice. But around 2018, law enforcement started to see a trickle of fentanyl, and then a surge, outpacing cocaine, heroin and meth. The small blue pills looked like Oxycodone and were filling the void left after states cracked down on opioid prescriptions.

And they were cheap to produce.

"It doesn't take a whole lot of fentanyl to meet the supply side for particular users to give them the effects that they want," said Chris Gibson, executive director of the Oregon-Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA).

The number of pills law enforcement seized soared from about 100,000 in 2019, to more than 3 million in 2022, according to HIDTA's annual report. And while preliminary data from 2023 shows the increase in pill seizures slowing, powder seizures more than tripled last year. Police who participate in the HIDTA reported finding more than 180 kg (nearly 400 lbs) of fentanyl powder, Gibson said.

"When you start thinking about the fact that it's estimated that two milligrams of fentanyl is a lethal dose to a new user, we start seeing the dangers of that," Gibson said.

The ingredients to make fentanyl are typically shipped from China to Mexico, Gibson said, then the finished product makes its way up the I-5 corridor from border to border, fanning out along the way.

"Oregon can't control the southern border, but we have Honduran cartel members all in our urban areas pushing deadly fentanyl," Clackamas County Commissioner Ben West said. "We can't control that. But that costs Oregonians lives, and it causes a lot of criminality and despair."

But Oregon can control its drug policies, West said, and "elections have consequences."