DO NO HARM

Oregon tried a more humane way to address addiction. Then came the backlash.

- E. TAMMY KIM

In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.

One September evening in Medford, a white cargo van belonging to a nonprofit called Stabbin Wagon parked near the Greenway, between an auto-repair shop and a Wendy’s. For unhoused people across Oregon, cargo vans have become a symbol of help. Some contain primary-care clinics and food pantries. Others, like Stabbin Wagon’s, distribute a more controversial kind of aid: safe supplies for drug users.

Stabbin Wagon’s director, Melissa Jones, pulsed with nervous energy, and wore flip-flops and a T-shirt that read “Nothing ends homelessness like housing.” With her was Samantha Strong, a young activist with a green buzz cut and piercings. The two women—Stabbin Wagon’s only employees—opened the van’s doors to reveal plastic bins and hanging compartments of inventory, neatly arranged and all free. There were boxes of naloxone, needles of various gauges, cookers, pipes, fentanyl test strips, soap, and hand sanitizer.