“Fuck no, I wouldn’t vote for it again,” says a previous proponent of Measure 110, the 2020 law that decriminalized drugs and which the Oregon legislature reeled back this week. How did we get here?
When I moved to Portland in 2004, the junkies in downtown’s Pearl District, romanticized in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, had been replaced by farm-to-table restaurants and a flagship REI store. Portland was on the up, a media darling poised to become the next great American city.
Then came the record scratch that was 2020.
