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The Jan. 22 edition of The New Yorker (the one that will arrive on New Seasons shelves next week) features a visit to Southern Oregon to examine one of the flashpoints in the state’s battle over Measure 110.
That mobile site of controversy is Stabbin Wagon, a cargo van that distributes clean needles and other drug-use supplies to people addicted to opioids in Medford. Founder Melissa Jones, who has repeatedly clashed with the town’s cops, receives money for her harm-reduction service from Measure 110, Oregon’s drug-decriminalization initiative.
Stabbin Wagon received plenty of local media attention last year (this Lund Report story was well handled) after the Oregon Health Authority granted Jones $1.5 million to open a respite center. As the van’s cheeky name suggests, Jones is something of a provocateur in Medford, a police abolitionist who scorns the idea that the only way to treat drug addiction is pressuring people to get clean.
More broadly, harm reduction remains a controversial model despite studies showing it works in reducing overdose deaths as fentanyl swamps the nation. That’s led to a disconnect between public health advocates and the general public. Last year, Multnomah County halted a plan to distribute tinfoil and other fentanyl smoking supplies on the streets of Portland, after WW revealed that the program was greenlighted in secrecy.
That’s the context in which The New Yorker arrives in Medford. The resulting story only partly succeeds as an evaluation of Measure 110; there’s little ink spent on how slow and feeble the initiative’s recovery-program funding has been. But it’s worth reading as a portrait of polarization, in which the people who advocate for the unhoused and addicted are no longer on speaking terms with those who don’t believe drug use should overrun the public square.
“The local providers were run by professionals who collaborated with city hall and used terms like ‘pathways to desirable solutions,’” reporter E. Tammy Kim writes. “Jones dismissed them as the ‘nonprofit industrial complex’ and questioned their methods, including mandatory urine tests, which she considered inaccurate and degrading. ‘Twelve-step, abstinence-based programs didn’t work for me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t find stability that way or healthiness and happiness.’”
“As a matter of style,” the reporter adds, “Stabbin Wagon seemed more of a piece with Portland.”
Read the full story here.