Moving beyond addiction: In eastern Oregon, drug use often lurks in the shadows

Trailers and mobile homes are parked in a dirt lot near Ontario on Oct. 23, 2024. Due to illicit drug activity, this encampment in Malheur County is called “fentanyl flats.” (Photo by Ben Botkin/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

Rundown trailers streaked with graffiti that sit along a windy gravel road just outside Ontario in eastern Oregon are part of an encampment that’s rife with guns and drugs and people on edge.

“Fentanyl flats,” as the site is called, with its stacks of belongings piled high against a backdrop of sagebrush stretching into the horizon, is considered a danger zone. When Malheur County deputies show up, they arrive in pairs. A nonprofit worker once took a client to the encampment to gather her belongings from a trailer. Armed men confronted them, one of them smoking methamphetamine. 

“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to die,’” said Chrissy LaChapelle, executive director of the Oasis House, a nonprofit that helps impoverished people in Ontario. 

She no longer goes there alone. 

Oregon’s drug addiction epidemic, much of it fueled by fentanyl, has spilled far from the state’s urban population centers in recent years. In rural corners of Oregon, fentanyl use and addiction thrives, and often in the shadows, with people camping in forests or other isolated spots. That makes them difficult to reach, and even those in towns are often reluctant to seek help, feeling they should tough it out, despite their suffering.

Oregon Health Authority data shows that before 2020, when voters approved Measure 110 and decriminalized low-level drug possession, overdose deaths were relatively rare in eastern Oregon. But in 2023, with more than 1,820 drug deaths statewide, most eastern Oregon counties had overdoses, with 13 deaths in Umatilla County alone. 

In Malheur County, five people died and 24 visited hospital emergency departments for an opioid overdose in 2023. State data shows that on a per capita basis, more people are treated in Malheur County emergency rooms for an overdose than either in Clackamas and Washington counties and only Multnomah County’s rate is higher.

Deflection programs emerge

With the drug crisis worsening, the Legislature in 2024 approved House Bill 4002, which recriminalized drug possession starting last September and allowed Oregon counties to start deflection programs. They are modeled after a similar program that started in Seattle and spread throughout the rest of Washington state. Oregon is the second state to adopt this approach on a wide scale to steer people into treatment to avoid a misdemeanor drug charge.  

The deflection programs rely in part on law enforcement identifying candidates who are caught with a small amount of drugs, don’t have any warrants or court cases and are willing to participate. After arrest, suspects can opt for deflection services and if they complete them, they will not be charged.

In Oregon, counties run the programs, and so far, 28 of Oregon’s 36 counties, including Malheur, have created programs. In the other eight — Wallowa, Lake, Jefferson, Wheeler, Sherman, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties — suspects have to face charges and only later can they enter a diversion program through the court system and get their records erased.

It’s too soon to judge the success of county deflection programs but it’s already clear that resources are a challenge, especially in a place like Malheur County. It’s Oregon’s second largest county in size, bigger than the state of Maryland, but it only has 18 sheriff’s deputies. They’re responsible for investigating crime, patrolling highways and waterways and assisting other agencies, from the federal Bureau of Land Management to the Ontario Police Department.

And though they police a relatively small population, the county attracts a steady influx of people from bordering Idaho, with Interstate 84 connecting Ontario, the county seat, to Boise. Recreational marijuana is illegal in Idaho, so many people drive to Ontario to buy cannabis products. 

“We’re right in the center of a main traffic highway where a lot of people stop,” said Andrea Recla, deflection coordinator for Malheur County. “We have a lot of people that will come into Ontario for a multitude of reasons.”

Since drug possession again became illegal in Oregon, Malheur County deputies and other police agencies have arrested nearly 30 people for misdemeanor drug possession. Just four people have started and continued to participate in the county’s deflection program, officials said. 

Each county can design its program as it likes, with the Legislature giving rural counties a minimum of $150,000 each to launch and run their programs. 

Malheur County’s program is run by Lifeways, the county’s community mental health provider. The grant allowed Lifeways to hire a trained professional in recovery from drug addiction — what’s known as a peer — to respond to referrals from law enforcement. Peers have been shown to have the biggest impact in helping to shepherd addicts toward recovery because they’ve been through the struggle and are now sober.

Ideally, soon after a police officer arrests a potential deflection candidate, they’re turned over to the peer. The program requires a person who enters deflection to get an assessment within 72 hours at Lifeways’ clinic in Ontario to determine what type of treatment and care they need. The peer tries to build a rapport with the person, helping them to connect to Lifeways’ medical services, including opioid treatment medication, and to get behavioral health and addiction counseling.

The grant also includes money for hot meals, clothing and transportation. 

With just one peer navigator, Lifeways can only respond to deflection referrals on weekdays. If police send Lifeways a referral during a weekend to its 24-hour dispatch center, the peer tries to contact the person on the following Monday.

“I know some of the other counties have the ability to send a navigator out on scene regardless, every time of day,” said Recla, also the Lifeways clinical director of intensive outpatient services. “We are not at a place where we’re able to do that right now.”

And even if the organization had enough people to respond to deflection calls 24 hours a day, that would not be practical if the arrest was made in an area too far away, for example in Jordan Valley south of Ontario, which is 90 minutes away by car. Recla said deputies are stretched too thin to spend a chunk of their day waiting with a suspect for the peer to arrive.

“Even if we just dispatch someone immediately, that’s an hour and a half that they’re stuck sitting there waiting on the side of the road with somebody for us to show up,” Recla said. “It’s just not convenient. It’s not a good use of resources.”

Drugs are pervasive

 Treatment providers see the impact of addiction every day.

The nonprofit Oasis House, which started in June, serves meals daily at a church in Ontario to unhoused people and others who are low-income. 

It also offers services like free clothes, bicycle repairs and animal care. 

Some of the clients have drugs.

In one instance, LaChapelle, the nonprofit’s executive director, said a man visiting them pulled out a bag of methamphetamine. When she admonished him, he pulled out a bag of fentanyl. 

She warned him not to bring drugs in again or he would have to leave. In another instance, a volunteer found a bag of fentanyl and a pipe that somebody left. They disposed of it. 

She has also visited fentanyl flats, helping clients gather their belongings. 

“These two guys roll up, and one of them is smoking meth,” she said. “And they both have guns.”

Not everyone at fentanyl flats is on drugs, however.

Jewel Hance is among those who eat at Oasis House. She’s 35 and once lived in a house in Ontario but lost it. She moved into her recreational vehicle and ended up at fentanyl flats. 

Sometimes people ask her about drugs but she’s stayed clean for seven years and hopes to eventually move to a stable home with a housing voucher.

LaChapelle knows other people who’ve gotten off drugs and off the streets, including families she has helped them. She rented out one of her duplexes to three families off the streets.

Now, they have jobs, pay their rent on time and keep the duplex clean. 

She said that resources can help people find stable housing and get off drugs but she also said they need compassion. That means helping people in the throes of addiction.

“We’re here for them,” LaChapelle said. “You know, I don’t care if they come in here, high and strung out. You’re not doing it in here, but I don’t care if you come in here.”

Fall of timber industry, influx of drugs

To the north of Malheur County lies Baker County, which also has a drug problem and lacks resources. 

Baker City, the county seat, is home to about two-thirds of the county’s population of nearly 17,000 with others scattered in tiny towns like Huntington, 44 miles away. It only has 500 residents, but has not escaped the addiction crisis. The town’s center is littered with discarded needles that didn’t make it into a metal collection bin for drug paraphernalia. 

Many homes are abandoned, and cannabis stores are shuttered, while deer roam through. The area once thrived with timber revenue but as lumber mills started shutting down in the 1980s, the economy tanked and methamphetamines took hold.

Shane Alderson, 45, grew up in Baker City. His father was a Forest Service mechanic with a stable job. But he had friends whose fathers depended on the mills and lost their jobs.

Alderson remembers an influx of “sketchy” people in the area in the 1990s, and an influx of drugs. In 1994 in a Baker City Park, he watched as a girl smoking a marijuana joint laced with methamphetamine had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment.

In his role as a county commissioner, Alderson helped start the county’s deflection program, which depends in part on Baker County Sheriff’s Deputy Gabe Maldonado. Among his duties, Maldonado coordinates the program by tracking cases in a log from arrest to referral to treatment. 

The program works much the same as in Malheur County, with deflection candidates referred to New Directions Northwest, the county’s community mental health provider. The provider also uses a peer to contact people interested in deflection but, like Malheur County, that person can’t always reach people right away due to potentially long distances to travel and the inability of deputies to detain and wait with people for long periods. 

Once an arrest is logged, the peer tries to reach the person within 24 hours, said Bob Forsyth, a grant and peer worker supervisor for New Directions Northwest. Sometimes they have a number and call. Other times they knock on doors. And sometimes they have to search the area if the person is homeless. 

Only two people in Baker County have started treatment through the deflection program.

Alderson attributes the slow start to the newness of the program and the difficulty reaching people who are spread out over a vast territory. 

“If you’re in Portland and you have 35 people who are addicted in a block, they’re easy to scoop up,” Alderson said. “I may have 35 addicted people that would take 80 miles — 40 one way and 40 back — to reach.”

Support for programs

Though eastern Oregon’s deflection programs are just getting started, and it’s still too soon to analyze their impact, they have the support of behavioral health professionals and law enforcement. 

But as the program unrolls, officials are trying to keep realistic expectations. 

“We’re starting small because we want to be effective at what we do,” said  former Ontario Police Chief Mike Iwai, who retired in late October and helped start the county’s deflection program. “We’re looking more for outcomes.”

The 31-officer department is responsible for law enforcement in a city of about 12,000 people, which gets thousands of visitors from Idaho. 

Iwai said Measure 110, when it passed, led to open drug use in Ontario and attracted people from Idaho, where medical and recreational marijuana is illegal.

“When they come over here, they think ‘If I get caught, there will be a slap on the wrist, as opposed to if I get caught in Idaho,’” he said.

Iwai, also a former Oregon State Police trooper, said state leaders have no idea of the extent of the drug problem in communities like Ontario.

“I think the west side of the state doesn’t realize what kind of problem we have here,” he said. “By our numbers, we don’t compete with Portland. But having said that, it’s here. It’s in our schools. We’ve had several overdoses.”

Malheur County District Attorney David Goldthorpe said that by creating a misdemeanor for low-level drug possession, the new law gives police a tool with teeth that they didn’t have when possession was decriminalized.

“I don’t want anyone to ever think that the purpose of this was to put more people in jail,” he said. “By nature, more people will be arrested and questioned, because obviously their drug use now is illegal again. But the goal isn’t to fill the jail.”

Travis Johnson, the Malheur County sheriff, agrees. 

“You hear a lot that people will tell you that, well, you can’t force someone into sobriety, into treatment to make change,” Johnson said. “But allowing them free drug use with no consequences clearly doesn’t work. It turns out no war on drugs works less than a war on drugs.”

He said the state’s decision to give counties the authority to tailor their programs to their population is a plus. But he said residents have not yet adjusted to the shift from decriminalization to the new misdemeanor charge. Under Measure 110, the punishment was a $100 citation, which could be waived if people agreed to an assessment. But police across Oregon said the citation system was unenforceable. 

The new law created a misdemeanor penalty, which means that people who don’t enter deflection and are convicted can face up to six months in jail, though there are still opportunities for recovery programs through diversion. 

Johnson said residents also need to be educated about the deflection program and that it will take time to have an impact. 

“If we get in too big of a hurry and expect too much too soon, we’re going to be disappointed,” he said.

Reporter Ben Botkin produced this story as a 2024 USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism National Fellow and Engagement Grantee. 

Previous coverage in Moving beyond addiction series:
Part 1: Portland-area advocates, police see signs of improvement

Part 2: Clatsop County’s program shows some signs of success