America's 'capital of woke' decriminalised drugs and became a hellscape of open-air fentanyl markets which even addicts admit was a mistake... leading to a humiliating U-turn for liberals, reveals TOM LEONARD

After three years in which its streets became a hellscape of open drug use, rocketing fatal overdoses and rampant crime, Oregon has learnt a painful lesson. And hopefully so has everyone else who believes that the best way to deal with the menace of deadly drugs such as fentanyl and heroin is to decriminalise them.

Oregon governor Tina Kotek this week reversed large parts of a controversial 2021 law known as Measure 110 and restored criminal penalties for possession of hard drugs and court-ordered treatment for offenders. From September 1, drug possession in the West Coast state will be punishable by up to six months in prison.

The U-turn brings an ignominious end to America's most radical experiment in Left-wing drug policy — a supposedly humane and enlightened policy of de-fanging the oppressive criminal justice system, allowing drug abusers to indulge their addiction in peace.

Suffice to say, it has been nothing short of a complete disaster. The real puzzle for many Oregonians — particularly inhabitants of its drug-battered city of Portland — is why it took their leaders so long to accept defeat.

Portland is a bastion of progressive values in the Democrat state where voters decided, by a comfortable majority, in November 2020 to become the first U.S. state to decriminalise the possession of personal amounts of all hard drugs. These include the likes of heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl. (It remained a criminal offence to sell the substances, although police would complain that decriminalisation made it much harder to distinguish dealer from buyer).

As anyone who visited Portland, as I did last October, will know, the situation was both desperate and farcical. So much so that even the hopeless addicts I spoke to — men and women who were cooking up fentanyl on city-centre pavements as commuters and children passed by — admitted that they couldn't understand what had ever possessed their politicians to think decriminalisation might work.

'The truth is that addiction rates and overdose rates skyrocketed,' said Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, a Measure 110 enthusiast who is now attempting to save face by insisting that it would have worked if proper treatment services had been put in place.

Such an attitude, say experts, flies in the face of an essential truth about drug addiction that the decriminalisers fail to appreciate — that very few addicts will try to break their habit if they aren't pressured to do so. Getting high feels good (at least in the short term) while drug withdrawal is fiercely difficult — so of course they need an incentive, which is often the threat of punishment.

Instead, supporters of ideas like Measure 110 — including those in the UK, where the Scottish government is pushing to decriminalise all drugs for personal use in order to tackle Europe's worst overdose rates — argue that criminalising possession unfairly stigmatises addicts.

Measure 110 was hailed as a compassionate solution to America's addiction nightmare.

It all proved hopelessly naive. Accidental fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — a drug that is tearing through America — increased by 500 per cent in four years in the Portland area. No other state saw anything like the same upsurge.

In the week I visited, eight young people died on a single night in a local park. Police said the victims had snorted cocaine which they were unaware was laced with fentanyl.

As drug users flooded into a state where they could do largely what they liked unmolested, and where charities plied them with free drug paraphernalia such as clean needles and smoking pipes to make taking the narcotics 'safer', open-air drug markets flourished and crime soared as addicts did whatever it took to feed their addiction.

Street addict after street addict confided to me that there was next to no chance of them seeking to get off drugs now that the one big obstacle to using them — being locked up in prison and forced to enrol in a treatment programme — had been removed.

Under Measure 110, instead of arresting hard-drug users and pushing them through a court system that often makes them get treatment, police hand addicts a ticket imposing a $100 fine that is cancelled if they phone a treatment referral hotline and agree to participate in a health assessment. The system proved useless — more than 95 per cent of tickets went ignored. Of 4,000 drug-use citations issued during the first two years of Measure 110, only 40 people phoned the hotline asking about treatment. As a result, it was calculated that each call cost taxpayers $7,000.

Even the New York Times, a habitual cheerleader for relaxing anti-drug laws, conceded that Portland had been turned into a 'drug-user's "paradise" ' since Measure 110 came into effect in February 2021.

Out on the streets on a weekday morning, it was painfully easy to find addicts who agreed.

I encountered Donna Pinaula and her husband 'Utah' at one of Portland's busiest street intersections, pushing around a shopping trolley stuffed with drugs and drug-taking handouts. Only two hours earlier, the pair had been booked by police for taking fentanyl openly. They grinned at my foolishness when I asked if they intended to seek treatment or pay the fine — they never did either, they said — and proceeded to prepare another fentanyl hit for themselves in full view of passers-by.

The couple showed off their drugs to me: blue pills or 'blues' for her, which are a mix of fentanyl and some other ingredients they couldn't remember, and a white 'rock' of pure fentanyl for him.

The pieces of silver foil they heat the drugs on and the glass pipes they smoke it with had both been provided, free of charge, by a local charity committed to the principle of 'harm reduction' — a controversial strategy that seeks to prevent accidental overdoses and infectious disease transmission. Critics say that it simply fuels drug-taking — which, in the case of Oregon, appears to be true.

Donna and Utah made no effort to hide their drug abuse. They said police rarely bother to hand out tickets to open drug-users and only intervened that morning because they were smoking fentanyl next to a road crossing that children were using to get to school.

As local police officers later confirmed to me, their hands were tied by Measure 110 — they could only confiscate drugs they actually saw and couldn't search users.

As for the starry-eyed claims of Measure 110's backers that, free from the threat of arrest and imprisonment, addicts would all rush off to seek help — if only they'd spoken to Utah first.

'It has made it worse,' said the 33-year-old ex-forklift truck driver, when asked about drug abuse in Portland since Measure 110.

'Don't get me wrong, it makes it better for me as I don't have to worry, but getting the police off our backs and giving us free pipes and foil to do our drugs is not going to get us off the streets.'

Down the street, another addict named Eric 'Irish' James agreed. Did he and his fellow fentanyl addicts really want to get off the drug? 'No,' he said bluntly.

Measure 110 rose from the ashes of the ferocious anti-police protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd by officers in 2020.

The attempt to take police out of the equation when it came to drug addiction backfired spectacularly badly as crime — particularly violent crime — soared as the dealers moved in.

Parts of Portland's once attractive and vibrant downtown area became a tent-covered no-go zone where addicts who were clearly deeply mentally troubled would walk around screaming their heads off — and locals wouldn't bat an eye.

Police chiefs complained that Measure 110 severely hampered their ability to keep order on the streets. Shootings rose from 413 in 2019 to 1,309 in 2022, leading to shops closing and residents leaving. The city was especially ill-equipped to cope, as it had already suffered a steep decline in police numbers when many officers responded to the wave of 'defund the police' hostility — which, in right-on Portland, involved nightly violent clashes with 'anti-fascist' militants that went on for months — and left the department. Recruits have hardly been rushing to replace them.

Instead, businesses have had to pay armed private security guards to patrol after dark, but they have next to no training and virtually no power to enforce the law. They can certainly do little about the drug dealers who circulate unmolested, carrying their supplies in backpacks.

The drug crisis also crippled the other emergency services. Fire crews were having to spend much of their time dealing with overdose cases, and there was a shortage of ambulances available to respond to non-drug-related medical emergencies.

For all the Left-wing complaints about heavy-handed policing, the officers I met couldn't have been less aggressive towards the addicts as they rode around on bicycles and gently checked that the drug users were still alive and in reasonable condition.

'People round here want addicts to go to rehab but they didn't think they'd be smoking fentanyl in front of pre-schoolers,' said officer Eli Arnold. He said he and his colleagues now spend much of their time reviving the same addicts after overdoses again and again.

Portlanders pride themselves on their liberal instincts but locals had clearly had enough of Measure 110 long ago.

Businessman Andy Munson described it as a 'disaster', telling me: 'People had the best of intentions but this law has fallen flat on its face. And two years of protesting and tearing the cops apart hasn't helped.'

Synthetic opioids are so powerful that it was 'absurd' to think addicts would volunteer to get off them, he said.

Alice Heller, a recovering addict and clothing designer, said the proponents of Measure 110 had twisted what it means to be a liberal. 'It's not liberal to help people take drugs,' she said. 'They don't know what to do so they feed the monster — it's inexcusable.'

Liberal-minded Oregonians have long boasted of the fact that theirs was the first U.S. state to decriminalise cannabis back in 1973. Being first to do the same with fentanyl and heroin is unlikely to be remembered with anything like pride.