Published September 18, 2024
Whenever I visit the small Oregon town where I grew up, I am always interested to see what has changed. A couple of years ago, I noticed a cluster of tents next to City Hall, just across from the library and post office. It was jarring. Poverty is common in rural Oregon, but this variety of homelessness was new—an urban blight had now spread throughout the state.
The consensus was that drugs were at the root of the expanding problem. Oregon legalized marijuana in 2015, and in 2020, voters overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs. The result was the tents, inhabited by those who would not or could not keep clean enough for a shelter, let alone a job and an apartment.
While dealing drugs remained nominally illegal, legalizing possession of smaller amounts made it much harder to investigate and prosecute. Add the resulting drug culture to Oregon’s general soft-on-crime approach and you get danger, disorder, and filth. None of this helped anyone, including the users—instead of jail, they were left to decline and die in tents.
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Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His first book, Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All, was published by Ignatius Press in Spring 2025. As a cultural commentator, Dr. Blake has published hundreds of articles at outlets including Public Discourse, World Opinions, The Federalist, Catholic World Report, and the University Bookman.
