Dan Rayfield & Oregon's lost year

The attorney general candidate stuck with the zealots and the donors like his life depended on it, when Oregonians’ lives depended on him breaking ranks.

Former Speaker of the Oregon House and current candidate for Attorney General Dan Rayfield. (Photo courtesy Oregonlive)

Oregon’s Measure 110’s deadly, devastating decriminalization of hard drugs was in effect for exactly 43 months. The law’s deathspan would have been cut by 28% - one full year - if the Oregonians in charge of the legislature had recriminalized hard drugs in 2023 instead of waiting a year to allow a small cadre of ideological zealots and, crucially, campaign donors to put lipstick on a public policy pig.

Dan Rayfield was the Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives during this lost year, one of perhaps three people with the power to move decisively to stop the damage of Measure 110. He did not. He stuck with the zealots and campaign donors until citizens had organized and funded an effort to repeal of the measure, forcing his hand.

In the upside-down world of Oregon politics, which rewards fealty to the extremists and the donors and the party and is willfully oblivious to its effect on the governed, Rayfield’s timidity was politically rational. He was following the well-worn path to, eventually, the governorship, that had been followed by Kate Brown and Tina Kotek. Rayfield now seeks to parlay his loyalty to the cause into a stint as the state’s Attorney General, its top law enforcement officer. Just one re-election away from the governorship. If voters keep playing the game, that is.

When the legislature convened for its 2023 session on January 17, it was obvious to all but the ideologically or monetarily dependent that decriminalization, far from delivering on its supporters’ promise that it would lead to “no more overdoses,” was an unprecedented social disaster. Overdose deaths had, in fact, skyrocketed under decriminalization.

No less an astute observer than yours truly wrote in February 2022, a full year prior to the 2023 session, that decriminalization was failing my state, and needed to end. The overdoses were rising, the implementation of Measure 110 was a mess, and only eight (8) people caught by police possessing hard drugs had availed themselves of the vaunted Measure 110 hotline to begin the process of connecting with treatment.

Things kept getting worse. When the 2023 session got underway, Rayfield and his colleagues had the opportunity, I would argue the duty, to pause or repeal hard drug decriminalization. And they knew it, too. That’s why they passed what they called the “Hope and Recovery bill” to “strengthen and improve Measure 110.” When it was well past time to gut and discard Measure 110, the legislature instead sought to “strengthen” it.

In a press release heralding passage of the bill, Speaker Rayfield said, “The Hope and Recovery bill will ensure Measure 110 programs continue to reduce hospitalizations and overdoses and improve timely access to care.” Except Measure 110 did not, ever, reduce hospitalizations and overdoses.

Why the disconnect? In 2022, Rayfield had received a $4,500 campaign contribution from the Drug Policy Alliance, the New York-based, George Soros-founded pro-drug outfit that had financed the 2020 Measure 110 campaign and was organizing the defense of its global pro-drug policy centerpiece. Rayfield wasn’t alone - the Drug Policy Alliance had given $50,000 that same year to soon-to-be Governor Tina Kotek, who, like Rayfield, was in a position to recriminalize.

Rayfield stuck with the Drug Policy Alliance and its small but exceedingly well-funded (by Measure 110) group of allies. It was only in 2024, after Oregonians had become palpably incensed with the legislature’s inaction and a well-funded and destined-to-succeed effort to repeal decriminalization at the ballot box, that Rayfield finally gave his Democratic subordinates in the House permission to vote for a bill that just barely recriminalized hard drugs in Oregon. Remarkably, Rayfield now takes credit for this late, timid action.

In the lost year between the 2023 and 2024 sessions, the Drug Policy Alliance and its allies took legislators on a junket to Portugal to see that country’s decriminalization up close and personal, concocted a laughably compromised study claiming no correlation between decriminalization and Oregon’s raging overdose death rate, and generally waited for the out-of-state advocacy money and the many millions of Measure 110-authorized spending to work their political magic and save the policy of decriminalization from an embarrassing defeat.

And in that lost year, many more Oregonians of all ages, including children, died from drug overdoses and in drug-spawned homeless camps. Oregonians would have died from drug overdoses if drugs were criminalized, too, but if you believe there’s no connection between decriminalization and overdose deaths, well, bless your heart.

During Oregon’s lost year, Rayfield stuck with the zealots and the donors like his life depended on it, when Oregonians’ lives depended on him breaking ranks. That is why he is his party’s nominee for Attorney General, a position in which loyalty to party despite its legal and ethical excesses is essential to the enterprise.