addiction

A new committee will meet next week for the first time as lawmakers start to look for solutions to Oregon’s drug addiction crisis.

Prosecutors and Republicans say a 2021 court opinion has made it too hard to convict dealers. Top Democrats are listening.

Oregon officials want to change the system to motivate people suffering from addiction to get help.

Three years after Oregon voters elected to decriminalize drugs, a new study has concluded that the first-in-the-nation law has not led to increased drug use or drug overdoses.

A coalition of powerful business and political leaders are moving ahead with plans to “fix” Measure 110, the voter-approved drug decriminalization effort.

Oregon voters in 2020 passed Measure 110, a first-in-the-nation law decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of controlled substances such as heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine and fentanyl. Three years later, public drug use has wearied even the most tolerant of Oregonians. Now, the Oregon law faces significant overhaul or repeal, a prospect likely to slow movements in other states to treat addiction as a public health issue.

Oregon Recovers, a Portland-based nonprofit, urged state leaders to change – but not eliminate – Measure 110, which decriminalized low-level drug possession.

California’s experimental new program targets methamphetamine addiction by rewarding patients with gift cards for negative drug tests.

Up until 2020, police and the courts were the ones most often on hand when someone hit their rock bottom. But when Oregon voters decriminalized drugs through Measure 110, the criminal justice system lost a lot of its power to coerce people into treatment. Suddenly, and for more than two agonizing years, there's often been nobody waiting at rock bottom.

The largest survey of homeless Californians in decades aims to dispel myths about what drives that state’s most pressing crisis. It found that addiction and mental health conditions rarely cause homelessness.

When the city’s medical examiner announced in February that four people who had recently died of overdoses had the animal sedative xylazine in their systems, public health workers across the state sprang into action.

On an average day in California, about 18 people die due to overdoses from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. That works out to nearly four people every five hours.