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Voters in Oregon will have the chance to approve an ambitious criminal justice reform agenda this year. The Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, or Measure 110, would reclassify low-level possession of illegal substances from a misdemeanor to a violation, prompting either a $100 dollar fine or a health assessment.

Drug trafficking would still be considered a felony, while substantial possession would be reduced to a misdemeanor. The measure would also expand rehabilitation services and open 24-hour Addiction Recovery Centers. 

According to a report released by the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, the proposed reclassifications could lead to 1,800 fewer Oregonians being convicted of felony possession of a controlled substance each year, a drop of about 95 percent from the current conviction rate. 

The report notes that Measure 110 would particularly benefit racial minorities, as racial disparities in both arrests and convictions would “fall substantially.” For instance, arrests of blacks, who are disproportionately affected by the drug war, would fall 93.7 percent. It would fall 82.9 percent for Asians, 86.5 for Hispanics, 94.2 for Native Americans, and 91.1 for whites.

The report adds that “inequities [may] exist in police stops, jail bookings, bail, pretrial detention, or other areas” but there is not “sufficient or appropriate data to examine those stages.”

Measure 110’s addiction programs would cost $57 million annually, to be funded entirely through excess taxes collected on cannabis sales, which are expected to net $182.4 million from 2021 to 2023. Anthony Johnson, one of the chief petitioners of the Yes for 110 Campaign, predicts that as tax revenues increase and the state realizes the savings incurred by decriminalization, even more funds can be reallocated to treatment and rehabilitation.

The campaign has primarily been organized online, leaning on supporters to get the word out. “There’s no playbook for how to campaign in a pandemic,” Johnson says. Nonetheless, he thinks it has “a really good chance of winning” this fall. “Our communications with voters all across the state shows that voters understand that the status quo is not working. We’re clearly not going to arrest our way out of addiction.”

The measure has been endorsed by many prominent individuals and organizations, ranging from the Oregon branch of the American Civil Liberties Union to several county district attorneys.

Oregon has long been at the cutting edge of drug reform efforts. The state legalized recreational cannabis in a 2014 ballot measure, and a 2017 law slashed some penalties for possession of small quantities of cocaine, LSD, and other illegal substances. Oregon voters will also have a chance this November to approve medicinal use of psilocybin at licensed treatment centers.

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Postmaster General Louis DeJoy attempted on Friday to depoliticize recent policy changes that have slowed mail service and to calm worries that the post office will be unable to process an expected surge in absentee ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In testimony to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, DeJoy promised that mailed ballots would be given priority in advance of November’s general election. But he also stressed the dire financial straits facing the U.S. Postal Service—circumstances that have been worsened by the pandemic and that will necessitate changes if the post office is to remain functional.

“As we head into the election season, I want to assure this committee and the American public that the Postal Service is fully capable and committed to delivering the nation’s election mail securely and on-time,” DeJoy told the committee. He voiced support for voting by mail—saying that he intends to vote by mail himself—and promised that “the Postal Service will deliver every ballot.”

The post office has found itself at the center of controversy after reports of delivery delays and disconnected mail-sorting machines. Democrats have accused DeJoy, who became postmaster general in June after a successful career as head of a private-sector logistics firm, of implementing those changes in order to interfere with the election. Most states have expanded the availability in mail-in voting this year in response to the coronavirus pandemic and in hopes of preventing crowding at polling places.

Both sides have been blowing the issue out of proportion. President Donald Trump has alleged that the more widespread use of mail-in voting is ripe for fraud, but there is no evidence to support that claim; Trump himself has voted by mail as recently as March of this year. Democrats, meanwhile, believe DeJoy is engaged in a nefarious plot to disenfranchise Americans, even though the expected uptick in mail volume around the election would fall well within the post office’s usual capabilities.

It’s good to see that DeJoy is trying to lower the temperature surrounding this debate. He told the committee on Friday that more “dramatic changes” to mail service will be postponed until after the election.

That makes sense. But make no mistake about it: Dramatic changes are necessary. The post office, DeJoy said, is facing the prospect of a $9 billion shortfall this year alone—a huge total for an agency that is supposed to be self-sustaining.

If members of Congress are surprised to learn that the post office needs serious reforms, they haven’t been paying attention. The Government Accountability Office warned in May that the post office’s business model is “not financially sustainable” after it lost $78 billion since 2007.

Pension costs are driving those losses. At the end of 2019, the postal pension fund had $50 billion in unfunded liabilities—that’s the long-term gap between what the fund expects to pay out to current and future beneficiaries and the amount of revenue the fund is expected to collect from workers’ paychecks and investment earnings. The fund that covers health care expenses for retired postal workers is facing a $69 billion unfunded liability.

But the post office can’t do anything about those pension costs without congressional approval, DeJoy reminded the committee on Friday. Indeed, the post office has been asking Congress for years to approve changes to help stanch the bleeding, including reducing delivery days, closing locations that have few customers, and repealing collective bargaining. If members of Congress aren’t going to support wholesale changes to how the Portal Service does business, they shouldn’t be surprised when DeJoy tries to save money in the few ways available to him.

The good news is that the post office’s longterm troubles are mostly disconnected from partisan electoral politics, and that the Portal Service should be capable of handling mail-in ballots in November. The bad news is that, once the election is over, not many people are likely to keep caring care about the very real problems that do exist within America’s mail system.

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Tucson handyman Kevin McBride was hard at work one Friday last May when his girlfriend offered to get him a cold drink from a convenience store. She took his Jeep, his sole means of transportation and the basis of his livelihood. Then the cops took his Jeep, and local prosecutors are now demanding a $1,900 ransom before he can get it back.

This sort of shakedown would be clearly felonious if ordinary criminals attempted it. But as McBride discovered, it is legal under Arizona’s civil asset forfeiture law. The cops said McBride’s girlfriend had used his Jeep to sell a small amount of marijuana to an undercover officer for $25. Although the charges against her were dropped, the Jeep is still being held as a party to that alleged offense, and McBride has to pay for the privilege of getting his property back.

“They’re extorting money from me,” McBride says, “and I didn’t do anything. I don’t know how they can do that. You know, we don’t live in a free country anymore, because that’s not freedom.”

Ordinarily, someone in McBride’s position would be inclined to give in, since challenging the forfeiture would cost thousands of dollars in legal fees, and there would be no guarantee of winning. But the Goldwater Institute is representing McBride pro bono, arguing that Arizona’s system of legalized theft violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.

When he began to wonder what was keeping his girlfriend, McBride hitched a ride to the convenience store, where he was dismayed to find police loading his Jeep onto a flatbed truck. When he asked the cops what was going on, he was handed a phone number to call for an explanation. He tried the number for three weeks before someone answered, which is when he found out that his Jeep had been seized because of the alleged marijuana sale.

Under civil forfeiture law, neither the fact that McBride was not accused of a crime nor the fact that the charges against his girlfriend were dropped made any difference. Officially, the Jeep itself is accused of participating in criminal activity. If McBride could scrape together the money for a lawyer to challenge the forfeiture, the government would have to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that the Jeep was involved in a penny-ante marijuana sale.

That is actually an improvement on the standard that applied before Arizona amended its forfeiture law in 2017, when “a preponderance of the evidence” (any probability greater than 50 percent) was enough. But the current standard is still a much lighter burden than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the rule that applies in criminal cases. And unlike criminal defendants, innocent owners like McBride have no right to court-appointed counsel, which makes it much easier to pressure them into “mitigation” agreements like the one proposed by the Pima County Attorney’s Office.

“An outright return of the vehicle is inappropriate in this case,” Deputy County Attorney Kevin Krejci asserted in an August 11 letter to McBride. Instead, “the state offers the following mitigation of forfeiture,” Krejci wrote, saying the Jeep “would be released from forfeiture for $1,900.00.” But “if we cannot agree on this mitigation, then the state will proceed with a Declaration of Forfeiture.” Since Arizona assigns 100 percent of forfeiture proceeds to the law enforcement agencies responsible for the seizure, this proposal is tantamount to demanding a bribe for the return of stolen property.

Arizona, like the federal government, allows owners of seized property to argue that they should get it back because they were unaware that it was being used for illegal purposes. But then the burden is on them to show they “did not know and could not reasonably have known” about that illegal use. In other words, property owners like McBride are presumed guilty unless they can prove otherwise. So much for due process.

The Goldwater Institute also argues that the forfeiture of McBride’s Jeep violates the Excessive Fines Clause, which the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled applies to civil forfeiture cases. McBride says his Jeep is worth about $15,000, or 600 times the value of the marijuana that his girlfriend was accused of selling.

“If the forfeiture of a $15,000 Jeep over $25 worth of marijuana is not excessive,” says Goldwater Institute senior attorney Matt Miller, “then it is difficult to imagine what would be.” The government presumably will argue that the $15,000 loss is perfectly reasonable given Arizona’s draconian penalties for selling small amounts of marijuana, which include up to two years in jail and a maximum fine of $150,000 for amounts less than two pounds.

“In Arizona, as in most states, someone does not need to be convicted of a crime before their property can be forfeited,” Miller notes. “Even though forfeiture was meant to be used to target the property of major criminals—like drug kingpins—it is predominantly used against the little guy, even when he has done nothing wrong.”

In this case, the little guy is taking a stand against the government’s extortion. “Kevin has joined with the Goldwater Institute to inform the government that if they proceed with the forfeiture and take him to court, he will countersue not only get his Jeep back, but also to have Arizona’s civil forfeiture scheme declared unconstitutional,” Miller says. “If he is successful, it will be a victory for all Arizonans.”

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