New study finds Oregon’s Measure 110 not linked to overdose deaths

A new study from Portland State University completes a three-year project looking at the impacts of several drug policy shifts — including Measure 110 — which decriminalized drug possession in Oregon. Among other things, this final study concluded that decriminalization had little to do with rising crime and overdose deaths. Instead, the study found that the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread emergence of fentanyl were the primary drivers behind a surge in drug-related deaths. Brian Renauer, a professor in the Criminology & Criminal Justice Department at PSU, joins us to explain.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Researchers from Portland State University just released the last installment of their three-year project looking at the impacts of several drug policy shifts – including Measure 110 – which decriminalized drug possession in Oregon. Among other things, the final study concluded that decriminalization had little to do with rising crime and overdose deaths. Instead, researchers found that the pandemic and the widespread emergence of fentanyl were the primary drivers behind a surge in drug-related deaths. That goes against the prevailing wisdom that led lawmakers to recriminalize drugs last year.

Brian Renauer is a professor in the Criminology & Criminal Justice Department at PSU, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.

Brian Renauer: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Miller: So as I noted, this was the third installment of a three-year study. Can you remind us first what you learned that first year?

Renauer: Yeah, so for our first year, we wanted to talk to law enforcement and understand what they were seeing on the street, how they were implementing the new violation policy under decriminalization Measure 110. So we had focus groups with law enforcement throughout the state of Oregon. And we found that overwhelmingly they had very negative perceptions about the impact that Measure 110 was having on their profession and on communities. In particular, they felt that it was reducing their proactivity that would reduce overall arrests, stops, searches, and that it would impact what we refer to as drug nexus crimes. So utilizing possession of controlled substances as a gateway to get into people’s pockets, people’s cars and trunks, to find evidence for higher level types of crimes, like weapons.

Miller: And if they didn’t have that as a kind of tool, then they would have less of a way to to stop other kinds of crime?

Renauer: Yeah, because now it was a violation and there was sort of this gray area. Do I have probable cause to be making these stops, to be moving forward with these types of searches? Is it worth it when it’s only going to be a violation potentially? So the perception is that police uniformly would stop doing that. That’s going to increase crime.

So yeah, those were the sort of key indicators, and they felt that overall, it would be increasing crime and overdose deaths. They also felt that they had an important role to play in addressing drug addiction, that it is that police contact can connect them with treatment services. Particularly they touted drug courts, and there is strong evidence that drug courts can assist in reducing addiction.

Miller: OK, so that was year one. What about year two?

Renauer: So year two, we wanted to examine those perceptions. What is the accuracy of these perceptions that law enforcement had, at a bigger aggregate trend level for the state? And ultimately, we found that there’s some inaccuracies in what they’re saying. And it’s not that their anecdotal stories weren’t real, they are occurring, but when you blow it up to that sort of bigger statewide level and look at the trends over a very long period of time … What’s unique about our study is that we examined what was occurring in Oregon from 2008 all the way up to 2024.

Miller: As opposed to looking from 2021 to 2023 or something?

Renauer: Exactly.

Miller: The immediate years of Measure 110?

Renauer: Yes, or only one or two years prior. We went way back in time and what we found is that, for example, arrests were already decreasing for possession of controlled substances prior to the pandemic. That’s well before Measure 110. Well, what’s causing that? Why aren’t we thinking or talking about that? And ultimately, arrests stabilized after the pandemic. They did decrease, but ultimately, they stabilized and stabilized through Measure 110.

So the notion that police are no longer out there doing their jobs around drug enforcement is just not accurate. We also found that there wasn’t this strong connection between PCS arrests historically and contemporaneously, and arrests for other types of crime like weapons, drug manufacturing, property crimes.

Miller: Again, PCS – possession of a controlled substance.

Renauer: Correct.

Miller: There’s been so much talk on our show alone, but just all over Oregon, about Measure 110 that I think a lot of us may have forgotten about earlier drug liberalization moves in Oregon that people like you have not forgotten about. So remind us what the state did in the mid-2010s in terms of drug liberalization policies.

Renauer: Yeah, so we examined two particular, I would call them progressive changes to our laws, that went through the legislative system, passed through the legislature. The first was Justice Reinvestment in 2013 and 2014, which did change some of the marijuana laws at that time. And also encouraged and provided resources to address individuals who perhaps had long criminal histories but also coupled with addiction, and rather than sending them to prison, were going to get them into community-based treatment programs and probation.

Then we had, in 2017, defelonization. So prior to 2017, possession of illicit substances – heroin, cocaine, etc. – around less than two ounces was a felony. And that’s still the case in about 21 states today, [it] used to be a larger number. And in 2017, that became a misdemeanor, so we wanted to examine that unique change, which is still pretty rare among states. Then obviously, 2021, we have decriminalization.

Miller: So could somebody who is skeptical of these progressive policies say, OK, it’s not Measure 110, the full decriminalization that’s to blame here – and we can talk more about what you’ve learned about what else happened in the last five years – but it is the totality of these progressive measures that either looked at marijuana alone or all drugs, and lowered the penalties or the level, the crime classification for possession of drugs. I mean, is that a viable point that somebody could make?

Renauer: I would say no, in the sense that those prior initiatives did not have significant impacts on property and violent crime for the state of Oregon. So that being the case … And they did not have significant impacts on, for example, police proactivity, the number of defendants that the criminal justices is taking into it around drugs, etc. So the system learned to adapt to these changes, and crime, public safety and health did not dramatically change.

They were also noncontroversial. Most of the public doesn’t even know that these changes were made and they were bipartisan, supported by the law enforcement community. Measure 110 decriminalization, a very different story in that it came through a public ballot initiative and therefore, from the political standpoint, a very different framework.

Miller: And very different where it ended up, where it was bipartisan, but what was bipartisan about it was that both Democrats and Republicans, after public polling came out against it, said, let’s change it. Let’s essentially overturn what voters had done. I’m curious about what you felt was important to look into for this final year. What were the big questions that you and your fellow researchers still have that you wanted to answer for this final installment?

Renauer: The ones that the media and the politicians certainly wanted to know immediately, [is] what is the impact on this of decriminalization, on public safety and then on health in terms of overdose deaths? And one of the important things about that is you need time to do that analysis appropriately, that exploring just one year after passage of a particular policy is not gonna give us an accurate understanding of its impacts. So that’s what our final report focused on: public safety and health.

Miller: And how is it that you’re able to say that it’s not Measure 110 that led to the huge spike, say, in overdose deaths, but it was the widespread availability of fentanyl, and it was just the shock to our collective systems of COVID?

Renauer: Yeah, so when you look at the impact of COVID-19 and drug overdose deaths, that’s where we see the most significant uptick in overdose deaths, almost occurring exactly with the shutdown period from COVID-19. And that trend has continued upwards through Measure 110. Other states, similarly, COVID-19 having a very strong impact on increased overdose deaths. But the biggest one that a lot of commentators don’t speak about and that I think is absolutely critical is the emergence of fentanyl on the drug market, saturating the drug market here in Oregon, exactly corresponds with the implementation of Measure 110.

Miller: Fentanyl, as opposed to less potent opiates or opioids like heroin or prescription drugs?

Renauer: Correct. And there’s some research out there that looks at the spread of fentanyl. The public may not know that fentanyl started out in the east and slowly spread, beginning 2014, to the west. The west states being the last states where we use, refer to the word, it saturated the drug market. And there’s some researchers that have examined it through, when the percentage of drugs seized in arrests, 50% or more are being fentanyl, you could say that fentanyl saturated that market. When that occurs, there’s almost a direct positive correlation to increase overdose deaths. That has occurred in every other state. We just happened to have it occur late and it occurred simultaneously with Measure 110.

Miller: Your findings do seem to contradict a study that got a lot of attention two years ago. It was by a Canadian economist named Noah Spencer, who you write about in your study. He wrote this: “When Oregon decriminalized small amounts of drugs, it caused 182 additional unintentional drug overdose deaths to occur in 2021. This represents a 23% increase over the number of unintentional drug overdose deaths predicted if Oregon had not decriminalized drugs.” What do you think about his study?

Renauer: I don’t know the exact particulars of his study, but I questioned whether he examined the impact of COVID-19. And that’s where we see, again, that massive significant shift in increased overdose deaths for Oregon. Layer on top of that fentanyl and that when fentanyl saturates that market, that’s what happens. Overdose deaths dramatically increase. It just happened to coincide with Measure 110 here. You look at the graphs for any other state for when their overdose deaths occurred around fentanyl. They didn’t have Measure 110. Why aren’t we questioning what happened in those states? So I think the analysis of that study is incomplete.

Miller: What was going through your mind then when drug recriminalization was being debated last year in the Oregon Legislature?

Renauer: The feeling that it was too early, the feeling that, let’s have this policy play out some more. It is true and our study did find that there was a significant uptick in property crime rates, but that peaked in 2022, and it’s been declining since that time frame. So it was easy for people to say, oh, it was increasing because of Measure 110 – but why was it all of a sudden decreasing? Was Measure 110 helping to do that?

So I think it was the notion of let’s have some patience around allowing this policy to have its full impact. And you have to keep in mind that certainly Measure 110 had its challenges, problems and failures, particularly around implementation that within three months of the voters approving it, we decriminalized, where the key component of this policy is fully funding treatment resources and networks.

Miller: Right. The basic idea here was this shouldn’t be a criminal justice issue. This is a public safety issue, a public health issue. So let’s treat it like that. You’re saying it was only the first half of that equation, that sentence, that we really paid attention to at the beginning?

Renauer: That’s right. You have to remember, this is the criminal justice system, and this policy required hundreds of millions of dollars to be shifted from the marijuana recreational surplus into this new treatment network, and that’s going to take time. And that money really didn’t start trickling in and new programs and personnel being hired until a year after decriminalization. So again, if we really wanted to understand this, we needed more time, we needed this new system to be up and running.

Miller: I’m curious what lessons you’ve taken from this in terms of public opinion and public policy. You’re a researcher here and when I said, what was going through your mind when lawmakers are debating this, you basically said it’s too early. We need more time. In other words, let’s see what the data says. But the public had made up their mind already.

The public polling, which is, besides actual elections, the best metric we have for assessing public opinion … Voters had so squarely turned against Measure 110 and politicians, who were put in their jobs by those voters, they responded immediately. What’s that like for you as a researcher who is creating and relying on data? I mean, what does this say to you about the best way to make public policies?

Renauer: Well, the best way to make public policies is definitely bipartisan, with significant buy-in among multiple partners. And it’s clear that Measure 110 purposely, if you read through the ballot measure itself, doesn’t really mention the role for law enforcement. It doesn’t mention the role for courts or drug courts. So you’re leaving out this very powerful institution that’s been involved in drugs and that’s not gonna build a good partnership or good faith. And who is the media gonna go talk to about what’s the impact of Measure 110? They’re gonna talk to cops, they’re gonna talk to the courts. They had, because they were left out, a very negative perception of it. So I think you need to work with these stakeholders and create this buy-in.

The criminal justice system needs to include the courts and the police because they’re the ones that [are] gonna come into contact with people with substance use disorders and they have a role in that. We need to help define what that role is and what is the best way to get assistance to those people. The other thing we learned is that the size of that population in Oregon that is suffering from substance use disorder is dramatically larger than I ever imagined. OHSU study puts it around 327,000 Oregonians. So the criminal justice system itself is never going to crack that nut. They’re gonna need help. And the Social Service network and health networks, they’re gonna need help too. They’re going to need to learn to work together.

Miller: If last year wasn’t enough time for us to really say how Measure 110 was playing out, if you wanted more time, can you say anything now about how the replacement, how deflection is working, that is based on data and evidence?

Renauer: Well, the academic answer, it’s too soon. But I haven’t been involved in any of the studies of deflection, how they’re turning out. Our advice to them though, and my concern about it is, we’re gonna need numbers. As I just said, the number of people suffering from substance use disorder is pretty significant. And if your county wants to do deflection, but you’re afraid of only putting a few people in this, you’re not going to have an impact.

Miller: And if tiny numbers of people are actually ending up there, which is what I’ve seen so far …

Renauer: Correct, it’s going to have no impact. And if you’re not fully funding … Again, we have to step back and define what is success for Oregon in terms of addressing drugs and substance use disorder. And if success is getting more people into treatment, increasing those treatment resources, the beds available, we need to be monitoring that, we need to be watching that. We need to be understanding it better with measures. And those measures are going to have to be shared between systems – the criminal justice system and the health systems – which again, sometimes butt heads and are not used to working together. But this is an issue that requires it.

Miller: Brian Renauer, thanks very much.

Renauer: I appreciate it.

Miller: Brian Renauer is a professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at Portland State University.

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