The group propping up Oregon's hard drug decriminalization law plans to pay for legislators to travel to Portugal next week to learn about drug decrim there. It's a bad idea.
Measure 110 is literally a cancer that is killing Oregonians, abided and abetted by the sham organization funded by the Drug Policy Alliance, who lied broadly to Oregon voters in 2020. Representative Lily Morgan is a good person, but I don’t think legislators should accept European junkets from political organizations like the “Health Recovery” sham. It will be interesting to see which elected officials obey the law on fully reporting any costs for junkets.
Thanks to Jeff Eager for writing this and PORTLAND DISSENT for widening the reach of this excellent column, particularly for naming names.
The “Recovery Alliance” is in a wild panic after polling shows north of 60% of voters would repeal M 110. But the Democratic legislative leadership is in such thrall to those enabling addiction that they won’t even simply refer it back to voters to reconsider this horrible experiment.
The HJRA has sent communications indicating they are very afraid of their scheme getting re-examined, so now they are spending north of $50,000 to essentially bribe a number of public employees (who don’t have to report junkets). Morgan Godvin, a hand-picked member of the “no cops or even anyone related to cops” BS 110 commission, did a couple years in federal prison when the heroin she was dealing (and using herself) killed a friend/customer. The mainstream press never mentions her background.
Then there is Andy Ko, head of the “Partnership for Safety and Justice,” who says his group is paying. Since they are effectively an Oregon Subsidiary of Soros anti-law enforcement groups, it’s one hand feeding the other. Monta Knutson is one of the Chief Petitioners for M110, the two police officers are properly being funded by their respective police organizations. Two Demo bigwigs, Floyd Prozanski and Bob Nosse are being coy, but taking the baksheesh! Sen. Kate Leiber, who wants to be an even worse AG than the current one, claims to be paying her own way.
Readers will likely not recognize many of the alphabet soup of “advocacy groups” that have a vested interest in continuing this Oregon-brewed catastrophe.
We would hope for the liberals favorite phrase...”transparency,” but just as I was a pretty lone advocate three years ago publicly denouncing M 110, I predict we will get very little transparency about what really happens or the actual lowdown on a radically different system Portugal is trying (unique in the world!) By traveling almost 5000 miles away for an very elaborate junket funded by the people who made bootleg fentanyl so widely unenforceable, taxpayers will get nothing!
Most of us, even those of us who didn't vote for 110, didn't realize the state was committing Seppuku by ballot measure while we were, understandably, distracted by Oregon's, uh, unsteady response to Covid. Josh did.
I LOVE the title of this piece. It is so perfect. LOL... Great piece! Measure 110 is beyond saving and will die a natural death. I think many Portlanders and other Oregonians have learned that this experiment with Pathological Altruism FAILED and yeah, law and order is a real thing and a necessary part of any working society.
The Drug Policy Alliance's Oregon front group, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, is taking a big risk with its Portuguese junket. The only way that Portugal's drug decriminalization program overlaps with Oregon's is, well, the decriminalization of formerly illicit substances.
Every other element of the Portuguese model is antithetical to the so-called harm reduction philosophy that passes for drug policy in Oregon today. In the perverse world harm reduction, "Government strategies which aim to produce a population of healthy, enterprising and productive citizens, clearly require scrutiny and active forms of resistance because they subjectify individuals and limit the possibility of different forms of existence." * So wrote Australian scholar Helen Keane in her defense of harm reduction long ago in 2002, when the germ of M.110 was just a pipe dream.
The passage illustrates the hypocrisy of harm reduction's "no judgment" ethos. It allows people to pursue, judgement free, "other forms of existence" such as a life of public enslavement to meth or fentanyl. Harm reductionists' judgment and moral opprobrium is reserved for government policies that "subjectify" individuals by fostering the development of "a population of healthy, enterprising and productive citizens."
Horrors! Has government no respect for users' autonomy? What is the legal requirement that M110 drug treatment conform to value-free harm reduction principles if not precisely the sort of "active [form] of resistance" that Kean encouraged whenever government allows morals to inform drug policy? It's not outlandish to suppose that the badass county bureaucrats behind the boofing scandal saw themselves as part of resistance movement.
Since the aim of Portugal's drug policy is to sustain "a population of healthy, enterprising and productive citizens," and since coercion is built into every step of Portugal's response to an individual's ongoing drug use, how will the Health Justice Recovery Alliance prevent Oregon's junketeers from seeing the glaring contradictions in the system they're being asked to defend back home?
This isn't an abstract question. Let's hope that the junket produces enough of a record that skeptics in Oregon will be able to answer it and capitalize on any sleight-of-hand on the part of the HJRA.
Don't get your hopes up that Oregon's delegation will return home as M.110's greatest critics. Jessica Vega Peterson is perfectly capable of coming back from Portugal without having been challenged except perhaps by an encounter with Portuguese salted cod.
In closing, it follows as night follows day that defenders of M110 will invoke the specter of renewed incarceration for simple possession to persuade Oregonians to leave the laws and regulations that implement M110 intact. As former Clatsop County D.A. Joshua Marquis points out in his comment on another piece in Portland Dissent, nobody has gone to jail in Oregon for simple possession since the early 1970s. Those seeking to amend or repeal the M.110 scheme must never allow incarceration scaremongering to go unchallenged.
*Keane. Helen. "Critiques of harm reduction, morality and the promise of human rights". International Journal of Drug Policy 14 (2003) 231–232
School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra
This makes me sick; wastiing tax dollars to go on a junket. Even if it isn't tax dollars it is a waste of time. These people should be kicked out of office as it seems they have nothing better to do. I agree with Joshua that Measure 110 is a cancer killing Oregonians. They need to spend their time solving homelessness and other necessary issues.
Great column. It seems to me that the parade’s gone by with regard to the exploration of Portugals decriminalization strategy. We already embraced The strategy, we acted, it failed. Is the purpose of the trip to see if we missed something?”
And I'm not surprised one bit that Jessica is going. Why would SHE miss the opportunity for a free VaCay, yo?! Let's face it, and we all know this is true, they're not doing this JUST so they can find out what works, they're going this so they can GO TO PORTUGAL and see the sights. Disgusting how selfish and opportunistic these grifters really are, living it up, on taxpayers dollars. Vomit!
mind altering drugs have no color, but note that fentanyl comes from china. not sure where the psilocybin on the Alaska airline contretemps came from, but Oregon seems to be leading in that field also. what can one do when your state government is pushing mind destroying chemicals? ask why?
Six years ago, an Oregon contingent comprised of legislators and bureaucrats (including Mike Schmidt, then executive director of the Criminal Justice Commission) traveled to Norway to see if they could find the secret to that country’s success in running prisons.
The group returned and put on the usual dog-and-pony show for a legislative committee. Colette Peters, then head of Oregon’s Department of Corrections, was still entranced by the Norwegians. She spoke in awe of how the prisons looked like college campuses.
“The amount of nature contained within the prison walls was amazing,” Peters said. “Every cell had a huge window that looked out on a monastic yard.”
Peters could hardly bring herself to use the words “prisoner” or “inmate.” Instead she called those who were incarcerated “criminal justice-involved individuals.” In Norway, each justice-involved individual was assigned a personal contact officer. There was a one-to-one ratio between staff and individuals.
But Schmidt had to acknowledge a big difference. Norway had a prison population of 400. Oregon had 14,600. Perhaps he was looking ahead to reducing Oregon’s prison population by simply not prosecuting.
The sheen from the Norway was dulled several months later when then-President Donald Trump also extolled Norway. Why, he asked, should the United States take in immigrants from “shit-hole countries” like Africa and Haiti rather than from places like Norway? The media, of course, were quick to link Trump’s admiration for Norway with racism.
Some countries (and states) are more shit-hole than others. Oregon is not Norway, and it’s not Portugal. Perhaps the Oregon group should be visiting Haiti to see what happens when law and order disappears.
I hope Rep. Lily Morgan (R-Grants Pass), Sgt. Aaron Schmautz, President, Portland Police Association, and Detective Scotty Nowning, President, Salem Police Employees Union make their voices heard on this trip.
Measure 110 is literally a cancer that is killing Oregonians, abided and abetted by the sham organization funded by the Drug Policy Alliance, who lied broadly to Oregon voters in 2020. Representative Lily Morgan is a good person, but I don’t think legislators should accept European junkets from political organizations like the “Health Recovery” sham. It will be interesting to see which elected officials obey the law on fully reporting any costs for junkets.
Thanks to Jeff Eager for writing this and PORTLAND DISSENT for widening the reach of this excellent column, particularly for naming names.
The “Recovery Alliance” is in a wild panic after polling shows north of 60% of voters would repeal M 110. But the Democratic legislative leadership is in such thrall to those enabling addiction that they won’t even simply refer it back to voters to reconsider this horrible experiment.
The HJRA has sent communications indicating they are very afraid of their scheme getting re-examined, so now they are spending north of $50,000 to essentially bribe a number of public employees (who don’t have to report junkets). Morgan Godvin, a hand-picked member of the “no cops or even anyone related to cops” BS 110 commission, did a couple years in federal prison when the heroin she was dealing (and using herself) killed a friend/customer. The mainstream press never mentions her background.
Then there is Andy Ko, head of the “Partnership for Safety and Justice,” who says his group is paying. Since they are effectively an Oregon Subsidiary of Soros anti-law enforcement groups, it’s one hand feeding the other. Monta Knutson is one of the Chief Petitioners for M110, the two police officers are properly being funded by their respective police organizations. Two Demo bigwigs, Floyd Prozanski and Bob Nosse are being coy, but taking the baksheesh! Sen. Kate Leiber, who wants to be an even worse AG than the current one, claims to be paying her own way.
Readers will likely not recognize many of the alphabet soup of “advocacy groups” that have a vested interest in continuing this Oregon-brewed catastrophe.
We would hope for the liberals favorite phrase...”transparency,” but just as I was a pretty lone advocate three years ago publicly denouncing M 110, I predict we will get very little transparency about what really happens or the actual lowdown on a radically different system Portugal is trying (unique in the world!) By traveling almost 5000 miles away for an very elaborate junket funded by the people who made bootleg fentanyl so widely unenforceable, taxpayers will get nothing!
Most of us, even those of us who didn't vote for 110, didn't realize the state was committing Seppuku by ballot measure while we were, understandably, distracted by Oregon's, uh, unsteady response to Covid. Josh did.
I LOVE the title of this piece. It is so perfect. LOL... Great piece! Measure 110 is beyond saving and will die a natural death. I think many Portlanders and other Oregonians have learned that this experiment with Pathological Altruism FAILED and yeah, law and order is a real thing and a necessary part of any working society.
“Pathological Altruism”. Nailed it!
The Drug Policy Alliance's Oregon front group, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, is taking a big risk with its Portuguese junket. The only way that Portugal's drug decriminalization program overlaps with Oregon's is, well, the decriminalization of formerly illicit substances.
Every other element of the Portuguese model is antithetical to the so-called harm reduction philosophy that passes for drug policy in Oregon today. In the perverse world harm reduction, "Government strategies which aim to produce a population of healthy, enterprising and productive citizens, clearly require scrutiny and active forms of resistance because they subjectify individuals and limit the possibility of different forms of existence." * So wrote Australian scholar Helen Keane in her defense of harm reduction long ago in 2002, when the germ of M.110 was just a pipe dream.
The passage illustrates the hypocrisy of harm reduction's "no judgment" ethos. It allows people to pursue, judgement free, "other forms of existence" such as a life of public enslavement to meth or fentanyl. Harm reductionists' judgment and moral opprobrium is reserved for government policies that "subjectify" individuals by fostering the development of "a population of healthy, enterprising and productive citizens."
Horrors! Has government no respect for users' autonomy? What is the legal requirement that M110 drug treatment conform to value-free harm reduction principles if not precisely the sort of "active [form] of resistance" that Kean encouraged whenever government allows morals to inform drug policy? It's not outlandish to suppose that the badass county bureaucrats behind the boofing scandal saw themselves as part of resistance movement.
Since the aim of Portugal's drug policy is to sustain "a population of healthy, enterprising and productive citizens," and since coercion is built into every step of Portugal's response to an individual's ongoing drug use, how will the Health Justice Recovery Alliance prevent Oregon's junketeers from seeing the glaring contradictions in the system they're being asked to defend back home?
This isn't an abstract question. Let's hope that the junket produces enough of a record that skeptics in Oregon will be able to answer it and capitalize on any sleight-of-hand on the part of the HJRA.
Don't get your hopes up that Oregon's delegation will return home as M.110's greatest critics. Jessica Vega Peterson is perfectly capable of coming back from Portugal without having been challenged except perhaps by an encounter with Portuguese salted cod.
In closing, it follows as night follows day that defenders of M110 will invoke the specter of renewed incarceration for simple possession to persuade Oregonians to leave the laws and regulations that implement M110 intact. As former Clatsop County D.A. Joshua Marquis points out in his comment on another piece in Portland Dissent, nobody has gone to jail in Oregon for simple possession since the early 1970s. Those seeking to amend or repeal the M.110 scheme must never allow incarceration scaremongering to go unchallenged.
*Keane. Helen. "Critiques of harm reduction, morality and the promise of human rights". International Journal of Drug Policy 14 (2003) 231–232
School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra
Awesome comment, Ollie. Thanks!!!
Great piece, Jeff - keep up the good work!
While I am vitriolically opposed to JVP (Deborah Kafoury's alter-ego), the article did say Jessica was paying for her trip herself.
That said, the taxpayers would be better served if Vega Pederson just stayed home and invested the time listening to ALL of her constituents.
I dunno, her constituents would probably chip in to relocate her permanently to Portugal, or anywhere.
The ones I'm asking her to listen to surely would.
Based on the press’s increasingly skeptical coverage of her, I suspect a whole lot of MultCo Dems have soured as well.
I have, and most of my friends who are paying attention have too.
This makes me sick; wastiing tax dollars to go on a junket. Even if it isn't tax dollars it is a waste of time. These people should be kicked out of office as it seems they have nothing better to do. I agree with Joshua that Measure 110 is a cancer killing Oregonians. They need to spend their time solving homelessness and other necessary issues.
With the time it takes for a round trip, they could easily stay home and read about it or have a Zoom meeting
Great column. It seems to me that the parade’s gone by with regard to the exploration of Portugals decriminalization strategy. We already embraced The strategy, we acted, it failed. Is the purpose of the trip to see if we missed something?”
And I'm not surprised one bit that Jessica is going. Why would SHE miss the opportunity for a free VaCay, yo?! Let's face it, and we all know this is true, they're not doing this JUST so they can find out what works, they're going this so they can GO TO PORTUGAL and see the sights. Disgusting how selfish and opportunistic these grifters really are, living it up, on taxpayers dollars. Vomit!
mind altering drugs have no color, but note that fentanyl comes from china. not sure where the psilocybin on the Alaska airline contretemps came from, but Oregon seems to be leading in that field also. what can one do when your state government is pushing mind destroying chemicals? ask why?
Excellent breakdown on the Portugal trip.
Six years ago, an Oregon contingent comprised of legislators and bureaucrats (including Mike Schmidt, then executive director of the Criminal Justice Commission) traveled to Norway to see if they could find the secret to that country’s success in running prisons.
The group returned and put on the usual dog-and-pony show for a legislative committee. Colette Peters, then head of Oregon’s Department of Corrections, was still entranced by the Norwegians. She spoke in awe of how the prisons looked like college campuses.
“The amount of nature contained within the prison walls was amazing,” Peters said. “Every cell had a huge window that looked out on a monastic yard.”
Peters could hardly bring herself to use the words “prisoner” or “inmate.” Instead she called those who were incarcerated “criminal justice-involved individuals.” In Norway, each justice-involved individual was assigned a personal contact officer. There was a one-to-one ratio between staff and individuals.
But Schmidt had to acknowledge a big difference. Norway had a prison population of 400. Oregon had 14,600. Perhaps he was looking ahead to reducing Oregon’s prison population by simply not prosecuting.
The sheen from the Norway was dulled several months later when then-President Donald Trump also extolled Norway. Why, he asked, should the United States take in immigrants from “shit-hole countries” like Africa and Haiti rather than from places like Norway? The media, of course, were quick to link Trump’s admiration for Norway with racism.
Some countries (and states) are more shit-hole than others. Oregon is not Norway, and it’s not Portugal. Perhaps the Oregon group should be visiting Haiti to see what happens when law and order disappears.
Is anyone familiar with this group pushing for a ballot measure to fix 110? Are they gathering signatures? https://fixballotmeasure110.com/
I hope Rep. Lily Morgan (R-Grants Pass), Sgt. Aaron Schmautz, President, Portland Police Association, and Detective Scotty Nowning, President, Salem Police Employees Union make their voices heard on this trip.