A powerful message about the addiction crisis in Oregon from Lake Oswego Mayor Joe Buck’s weekly email message.
Summer Reflection
Our State’s addiction crisis and its impact on our loved ones and neighbors can feel outside of our local city control. But is it entirely? Oregonians are justified to be leery about the decriminalization of Federally illicit substances. While these efforts have rightly kept those suffering from addiction out of the criminal justice system, they have failed to produce pathways to recovery accessible to the vast number of Oregonians stricken with substance abuse disorder and other accompanying mental health maladies.
While this disease is now more front and center on sidewalks and in the national media, the health crisis has existed in the families of Oswegans for generations. While street drugs, Measure 110, and the omnipresence of highly potent weed are just targets of our ire, alcohol continues to kill vastly more Oregonians per year, carries an immense social and economic cost, and fosters generational trauma. The need for candid conversations, education, and treatment has never been greater.
Locally we can continue working together to educate students and to ensure our residents have access to treatment, including new methods like psilocybin therapy. While small cities like LO do not control funds needed to establish treatment beds, we can be responsible partners by ensuring drug and alcohol treatment is given siting considerations reflective of centers of health care and healing. Substance abuse is a disease like any other, and those afflicted need the compassionate, informed support of neighbors to enable daylight to come to the dark, shameful corners of often covert suffering. Together we can cease the stigmatized narrative of fear and disgrace and redirect the anger we all rightly feel for the addiction crisis to wholeheartedly support our family members, neighbors, co-workers, and friends who suffer. By providing a safe, supportive community for those who suffer to reclaim their lives, we can, in fact, make a difference locally.
- Mayor Joe