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Last month, Gov. Tina Kotek said she would accept the recommendations of a task force put in place over the summer to study how best to help Portland recover from its host of problems. The solutions recommended by the task force were really just common sense. The city would need to hire more police and put an end to open air drug use. In short, Portland would undo some of the things it had done to itself in 2020. That’s when the city voted to defund police and the state voted for Measure 110 which legalized hard drugs, including fentanyl.
Having accepted the plan to correct these failures last month, this week Gov. Kotek and Mayor Wheeler jointly announced a 90-day drug emergency in the city.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler each made an emergency declaration to address the public health and public safety crisis in Portland’s Central City, citing overdoses, deaths and fear driven by fentanyl use, according to a Tuesday press release.
“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” Kotek said in the release.
Oregon voters passed Measure 110 in 2020, which decriminalized some use of hard-drugs, including fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid. The measure has received criticism, as opioid overdose deaths steadily climbed since.
Opioid overdose deaths in the state increased from 280 in 2019 to 956 in 2022, according to the state’s data.
Again, the story here is that progressive voters in the state are utopian dreamers with no common sense. Legalizing drugs has made the use of drugs far more common and, not surprisingly, a lot more people are dying as a result.
