Gavin Kelly prepares fentanyl inside a friend’s car in Portland, Oregon.
This is what the fentanyl crisis looks like in a state rethinking its historic drug policy
Photographs by Jordan Gale
Story by Kyle Almond, CNN
Published March 2, 2024
Gavin Kelly prepares fentanyl inside a friend’s car in Portland, Oregon.
Three years ago, photographer Jordan Gale moved to Portland, Oregon, sight unseen and was shocked by some of the public drug use he witnessed as he walked downtown.
And then there was the smell.
“I think you could talk to many people in Portland and they can describe to you what burning fentanyl smells like, because we’ve all walked past it and we’ve all gotten that whiff as we wait for the bus or the MAX train,” Gale said.
The fentanyl crisis has only gotten worse in downtown Portland, prompting elected officials to declare a 90-day state of emergency there.
“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said in January.
Opioid overdose deaths in Oregon increased from 280 in 2019 to 956 in 2022, according to state data. Much of that can be attributed to the rise of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid.
Fentanyl is a nationwide problem, but perhaps it’s nowhere more visible than in Oregon, which in 2020 became the first state in the nation to decriminalize the possession and personal use of all drugs. Voters in the state approved Measure 110, which made it so that people caught with small amounts of illicit drugs are no longer be punished with jail time; instead, they are subject to a ticket and a maximum fine of $100 — a fine that can be waived by participating in a health assessment.
The policy was designed to encourage more people to enter drug treatment programs, as it would also take a portion of Oregon’s cannabis tax revenue and put it into addiction services.
But the rise in overdose numbers, and the visible drug use in downtown Portland, Oregon’s largest city, has led to new legislation that would reintroduce criminal penalties.
House Bill 4002, which has bipartisan support in the Democratic-led Legislature and was overwhelmingly passed by the House and Senate this week, would make drug possession a special unclassified misdemeanor where a defendant would first face probation and then jail time for probation violations. It also would allow for people to be released from jail if they take part in a treatment program. It now heads to Kotek’s desk for her consideration.
“We know that we have to take action,” Kate Lieber, the state’s Senate majority leader and co-chair of the Joint Committee on Addiction and Community Safety Response, said earlier this week. “We’ve got five Oregonians overdosing and dying every day. We have a goal to get people into treatment and recovery and not jail, and we agree that the current system the way it is set up is not working. We need to give providers and law enforcement the tools that they need to keep people safe and save lives.”
Gale arrived in Portland just a couple of months after Measure 110 passed, and he was intrigued by the initiative.
“I saw that it was this historic experiment that will influence, I think, how America deals with drug use in the future,” he said. “If there was a full repeal to this law, I think that would send a big sweeping signal to other states — especially, Republican-controlled states — that decriminalization doesn’t work, that we should double down on something like the War on Drugs, which may be misleading or too soon to tell.”
Gale also felt a personal connection.
“I come from a pretty low-income, single-parent household that had issues with addiction,” he said. “It’s a topic that’s close to home. Moving out here, I’d never seen (stuff) like this, people using fentanyl or meth out in the open. Back home, that was something people kept real secret and no one really knew. You did that in secrecy.”
To learn more about the topic, Gale grabbed his camera and went out on the streets, photographing people who are living it every day. He spent time with drug users, police officers and outreach professionals.
“I’d be out like 10 to 12 hours a day with with some of the people that I’d meet, just kind of cutting it up and walking with them and spending that day engaging in their daily routines,” he said.
Anyone can take a photo from afar, Gale said, but he is passionate about getting up close and interacting with his subjects.
“I think by putting that face and that story and that intimacy to an issue like this, it becomes a lot more real,” he said. “It becomes a human experience and a humanized problem that you can no longer ignore.”
Two of Gale’s most heartbreaking subjects are Gavin Kelly, and his mother, Amanda, who ended up getting into fentanyl together, Gale said. His photos show them living on the streets of Portland, which has been struggling with a housing crisis that worsened during the pandemic.
With regards to Measure 110, Gale said Gavin told him it has made it “way easier” to get fentanyl or methamphetamine. The fentanyl has been getting cheaper, too.
“I remember when I first started photographing blues (pressed fentanyl pills), a blue was like $10 a pill,” Gale said. “And eventually over the course of 2021 into 2022, I would be with people who would find them for less than $2 a pill.”
Gale said he heard that Amanda had recently gotten into a women’s shelter and that Gavin had graduated from an inpatient program and put into a sober living house. But Gavin relapsed, Gale said, and is back on the street, panhandling.
Another devastating photo shows Portland police officer David Baer administering Narcan, an over-the-counter opioid antidote, to a man believed to have overdosed near an abandoned building.
Baer helped the man regain consciousness before getting him medical attention from an emergency medical technician.
“There’s nothing I can do, other than keep people from dying on the sidewalk,” Baer told Gale.
Baer and other officers who hand out citations for drug possession must also give out a card that lists a phone number where people can seek addiction treatment services and get their fine dismissed. But in the first year of Measure 110, just 1% of people who received citations called the hotline, state auditors found.
Portland is getting all the attention because it’s the state’s urban hub, but even rural counties are dealing with this crisis in some capacity, Gale said.
“If fentanyl was what it is now, prior to that bill going up for a vote, I don’t think it would have passed,” he said. “I think people would have seen the issue at hand and then been like, that’s too much of a risk to take.”
Not everyone is in favor of rolling back decriminalization. Opponents of House Bill 4002 have said Measure 110 was implemented poorly and not given the proper time or resources to work. Some say there still aren’t enough drug treatment services.
“Before we punish people for not engaging in treatment, we must ensure it’s available. And it is not,” Multnomah County public defender Grant Hartley said to the committee this week.
There have also been concerns raised about whether Oregon’s criminal justice system can handle an increased caseload, and whether the new bill would disproportionally affect people of color.
Gale isn’t sure what the answer is, but he is hoping for the best.
“I think of this as an evolving experiment,” he said. “We’re all in uncharted waters here, and these laws are going to have to continuously change and be amended and repealed as we move forward.
“Anyone who was expecting the issue to be solved a year into Measure 110, that’s just silly. Maybe this needed to happen. Hopefully some of the changes will get people into a better situation.”
