The war on drugs is over. Drugs won.

Ballot Measure 110, which legalized possession of fairly hefty quantities of hard street drugs in Oregon, with enhanced treatment options coming maybe, someday, was a terrible idea to begin with. But it's been an even worse failure than it needed to be. The new law's administration, if you can call it that, by the bureaucrats in Salem has been disgraceful in its incompetence.

People are dying in their tents and in the alleys while the Oregon Health Authority tries to figure out which end is up. OPB has a pretty solid, and depressing, assessment of the situation here.

After nearly six months of delays, funds are closer to reaching addiction services providers in Oregon. The council overseeing Measure 110′s rollout finished approving grant applications on Thursday and grantees should have their money by the end of the summer.

The milestone comes one day after the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office, which is conducting an audit, sent a letter to Oregon Health Authority calling out “areas of risk” in the way the program has been administered so far....

• The Oversight and Accountability Council did not receive information about individual grantee performance and did not receive public comments from meetings, despite asking the health authority for these items.
• Measure 110 does not provide clarity around the roles and of the health authority and the council, therefore the Legislature should provide that clarity.
• The Oregon Health Authority “has not always provided adequate support” to the council and has experienced staffing issues. That has contributed to delays in funding. Therefore auditors recommend that sufficient and dedicated staff support the council and that the authority provide timely and clear responses to the council’s questions.
• The council “developed an inefficient grant evaluation process, due in part to a lack of support and guidance.” Again, more support from the health authority is recommended.
• “Insufficient grant management and monitoring pose a risk that providers will not use funding in alignment with the equity and treatment support goals” of Measure 110. Auditors recommend the health authority “develop robust grant management and monitoring processes, including ensuring sufficient data is collected to enable those processes,” and that it give the oversight council sufficient support “while developing and voting on rules for data collection and reporting.”
• Ongoing ethics and conflict of interest training was also recommended for the council.

And so supposedly there'll be some money around by the end of the summer. Great. That will be 18 months after hard drugs became essentially legal in this state. And drug deaths started going through the roof.

The chaos at the OHA is all a direct consequence of Governor Killer Kate's philosophy that managers are fungible, and a guy who ran building permits is qualified to run a giant health care system. A lot of folks have died as a result of that misguided view.

Isn't it time that Patrick Allen took the obscene PERS pension and "retired," and we got a real health care professional in that office? If I were governor (ha), he would have been gone more than a year ago. Even She, Tina suggests she's going to can him. He must have quite a pee tape on somebody.