“Once they get out of jail, they often keep using, their probation gets revoked and they return to jail,” said Colin Murphy, another public defender. “It’s the same cycle I saw before we decriminalized. If this approach to getting rid of drugs in our community actually worked, it should have worked by now, because we’ve been doing this since the 1970s.”

The strategy diverts police away from serious investigations, he said: “We’re told law enforcement has very scarce resources. But in these possession cases, I see five cops standing around investigating one unhoused person because she had a baggie in her pocket.”

I’ll try to keep this brief, as all of this is in my wheelhouse; being homeless with my family in Medford is ironically how I got back into journalism after phoning in a tip to the Mail Tribune about a SWAT standoff at a motel just down the road from the photos in the article while evacuating.

That paper no longer exists, so I’m glad someone is covering Medford.

This sort of crackdown is on brand for MPD. It’s an incredibly conservative city where people fully believe that the biggest threat to them is … the homeless keeping to themselves, because the only cause of homelessness is drug use. Can’t possibly be the housing crisis or shit job market.

Addiction services are just this side of useless. I went through OnTrack about 20 years ago, and it was a joke; one of those programs where all they provide is group sessions where we’re all taught to will ourselves out of addiction without any further resources. I still vividly remember that depressing wood-paneled room.

This is a crackdown on people the system has already failed. But we can’t address systemic change when just rounding up the “undesirables” puts the problem out of sight, and no one in power wants to address the causes.

I spent eight months looking for work after (knowing I would be upon being hired) I was laid off. I did not want to move to Texas, where my job was centralized to. But the job market was such that the small market for people with significant journalism experience was oversaturated, and after having done marketing for Harry & David, I was not going that route again.

People act like homelessness and drug addiction are personal choices and failures. They aren’t.