And you thought it was gonna stop at pot. And you are gonna love the reason why. M-O-N-E-Y! It’s cheaper to join em’ than fight em’. Just too darned expensive to police. Yeah. Sounds to me like Oregon has been smoking the stuff.
AMTVMedia: On Saturdays, anyone can walk through the back door of a street-side community center in North Portland and pick up a snack, toothbrush or even a meth pipe.
Bagels and sandwiches sit on a side table, tourniquets and condoms on others. The spread caters to drug users, courtesy of a local branch of the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, a Seattle-based nonprofit.
The meth pipes are a recent inclusion for the Portland group, perhaps its most unusual. They’re being made available as a less risky option for methamphetamine users who might otherwise inject the drug, officials say, and because their patrons asked for them.
“Nobody knows what’s good for drug users better than drug users, and I think that’s a standpoint that’s neglected and really not given the credence and the value that it should,” volunteer Sam Junge said one Saturday last March at the nonprofit’s rented space in the St. Johns neighborhood.
He said he expects meth pipe programs will soon go the way of their syringe counterparts and become “standard practice in harm-reduction communities.”
But for now, Portland’s is one of only two in the U.S. with any real visibility.
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A sign taped to the door of a modest office sums up the Portland People’s Outreach Project’s ideology: “You are loved and valued, no matter what. Stay strong, stay safe!”
The nonprofit started delivering supplies to drug users in February 2015. It’s now operational three days a week, working Saturdays from Anarres Infoshop & Community Space in St. Johns, and Sundays at isolated homeless camps and downtown areas where drug users congregate. Volunteers also distribute supplies via bicycle on Fridays.
It’s founded on the principle that drug users deserve love and respect. The “bosses,” as one volunteer calls them, are offered supplies without fear of being force-fed treatment options or required to return syringes in exchange for more.
Its meth pipe program is designed to offer an alternative to injecting methamphetamine and, more importantly, sharing needles. Doing so can spread HIV, hepatitis C and other communicable diseases.
“If an injector uses a pipe for one week, that’s one week where we’ve reduced [more] risky behavior,” said Shilo Murphy, executive director of the peer-run nonprofit, which also oversees programs in the Washington cities of Bremerton, Ellensburg, Everett, Olympia and Seattle, as well as north and east King County.
The Portland program replicates the nonprofit’s efforts in Seattle, where it has been giving away meth pipes for more than a year and has recorded a decline in the number of people it’s served who inject the street drug, Murphy said. The nonprofit also distributes crack pipes in Seattle, he said.
It takes its lead from the needle exchange programs that started targeting heroin users in the 1980s. The U.S. surgeon general lent credence to their effectiveness,saying in 2011 that needle exchange programs reduced the risk of HIV and curbed drug abuse.
But critics contend meth pipe distribution programs are untested, waste resources and discourage users from quitting drugs, according to a 2015 Reuters report about the Seattle program.
Then there’s the legality of it: Meth pipe giveaways appear to be illegal, Sgt. Greg Stewart, a Portland police spokesman, said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive. However, he said any law enforcement action against the nonprofit would be “dependent on calls for service” and that he wasn’t aware of any such calls.
Sgt. Pete Simpson, another Portland police spokesman, said he doesn’t think simply having a clean meth pipe is a crime. If police find a pipe that has drug residue in it, though, its owner will generally face an attempted possession of meth charge, Simpson said in an email.
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Methamphetamine is a highly addictive stimulant that releases a flood of neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain and enters the user’s bloodstream and brain quickly when smoked or injected, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
That causes a quick, enjoyable rush that lasts a few minutes, the institute says. The drug takes longer to kick in when taken orally or snorted, producing the euphoria but not the rush.
Meth is attached to more Oregon arrests and deaths than any drug, data show. It’s also the greatest drug threat in the 12 Oregon and Idaho counties — and Warm Springs Indian Reservation — included in the Oregon High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
The trafficking area program, in a report for this year, attributed 140 Oregon deaths to methamphetamine use in 2014 — the highest toll since 2000 and 17 more than in 2013.
Portland People’s Outreach ProjectThe Portland People’s Outreach Project is a local branch of the Seattle-based People’s Harm Reduction Alliance.
It offers services at Anarres Infoshop & Community Space,7101 N. Lombard St., from 2-5 p.m. on Saturdays.The organization’s annual budget is $42,339, including donations, said Shilo Murphy, executive director of the Seattle-based nonprofit. He said that figure doesn’t include administrative costs.It has spent $3,500 on 7,000 meth pipes, Murphy said.The organization is planning a community benefit and concert in Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood in June. It’s also acceptingvolunteers and donations.Such deaths are rarely the product of an overdose, the report notes, but are typically caused by traumatic incidents that occur while the user is under the influence or from heart attacks, seizures or strokes.
By comparison there were 111 heroin-related deaths in Oregon in both 2013 and 2014, the report says, and most were caused by overdoses.
Oregon authorities arrest more people on meth delivery, manufacturing and possession offenses than those of any other drug, according to the report. The average number of such arrests doubled from 2009 to 2015, researchers noted.
About 4.7 percent of the U.S. population has tried meth, according to a 2012 survey cited by the institute. Users experience “a pleasurable sense of well-being or euphoria,” the institute says, but abuse can lead to memory loss, aggressive behavior, psychosis, malnutrition and other problems.
The drug’s economic burden — including costs associated with addiction, drug treatment and premature death — in the United States is harder to gauge. ARAND Corp. study using 2005 data, puts it between $16.2 billion and $48.3 billion.
Most meth users choose to smoke the drug rather than inject it, data show. According to 2011 meth treatment admission data compiled by the Community Epidemiology Work Group, nearly two-thirds of meth users smoke it. About 22.5 percent said they injected it, while the rest either inhaled it or used other means.
Murphy said the nonprofit had heard from meth users who turned to needles because their pipes were broken. Some users, he said, were smoking out of makeshift devices such as lightbulbs — “things that can give them more damage than the drugs themselves.
The program is a welcome resource for people like Bob Darting.
The 64-year-old picked up a meth pipe from the St. Johns space in March. He said he smokes meth about once a month and wanted to have his own pipe to cut down on the spread of germs. He still hasn’t used the pipe, he said in late April.
“If someone comes to you and they say, ‘Hey, you want to smoke something with me?’ and you look at them and they don’t look real well, would you smoke it with them?” he said. “Hell no.”
Having his own pipe allows him to say: “How about you smoke out of your pipe, and I’ll smoke out of mine?”
The nonprofit doled out 440 meth pipes in Portland from January through the end of March, according to the most recent data available.
It also handed out more than 260,000 syringes from February 2015 through the end of March, data show, and distributed more than 910 kits of naloxone— which can reverse the effects of opioid overdoses.
The nonprofit had more than 3,600 consultations in that time, some of which were with repeat clients.
Thirty-five people stopped by the St. Johns space one Saturday in March. It was a quick visit for some: They came in, grabbed their supplies and left. Others lingered, picked over the rack of clothes and goods, or considered the food offerings.
One man came in with three locked containers of syringes. A woman said she wanted to volunteer. Another woman re-upped her naloxone supply, she said, because she’d used what she had from the week before to treat a friend’s overdose.
Volunteers gave away 28 meth pipes.
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Nonprofit officials and others say they’re not aware of visible pipe programs in the U.S. outside of those in Portland and Seattle.
The idea is worth a shot, said Benjamin Hansen, a University of Oregon associate professor of economics who studies risky behavior.
“My initial reaction is, ‘If it’s cheap, why not try something?’” he said.
Dr. Matthew Golden, director of the HIV/STD Control Program for Seattle and King County’s public health agency, and a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, said he’s open to considering such programs as part of a harm-reduction cocktail, but has not seen data supporting their effectiveness.
Such programs raise the usual questions, such as whether money would be better spent financing intensive treatment for small groups of drug users. In the worst-case scenario, Murphy said, the nonprofit serves a new group of drug users. But if it works, the group helps stem the spread of HIV and hepatitis C and empowers drug users to live better, more positive lives.
Daniel Raymond, policy director for the Harm Reduction Coalition, said he thinks the Portland and Seattle programs will prompt more interest in such projects. Harm-reduction programs for people who smoke drugs, he said, generally haven’t taken off like those for people who inject them.
“Some of this is because of the stronger (and) more direct link to HIV risk and other potential harms of injecting relative to smoking — a greater sense of urgency,” he said in an email. “But if we see good results from Portland (and) Seattle, those models for meth smoking could spread.”