One year after its start, Lincoln County’s drug deflection program begins to see success one person at a time

By GARRET JAROS/Lincoln Chronicle

NEWPORT – Jeromey Baker is standing in front of Starbucks with his skateboard in hand and the afternoon sun highlighting his mop of red hair when a man who looks like a thousand miles of rough road stops to talk.

The man tells Baker – who is wearing a blue hoodie with the word Sober written across the front – that he is an inspiration.

No one would have said that to Baker a year ago.

“I was waiting out front of Starbucks while my girlfriend was in the bathroom,” Baker said. “And for some reason I thought she was using all the drugs without me …”

“But I was walking in circles out in front of the door waiting for her and one of the people who work at Reconnections was sitting in her car waiting and she watched me walk face first into the brick wall. And I don’t even know how I did it. I knocked myself clean out and woke up on the ground.”

The woman tried to help Baker into recovery. But he wasn’t having it. Not then anyway. That would take another six months and a probation violation for drug possession that landed him back in jail.

And that is when the drugs, the overdoses, the stealing from stores and the homelessness finally caught up with him. He was exhausted. He asked for help.

Deflection’s start

Baker, 32, graduated in mid-November from Oregon’s behavioral health deflection program, which offers people with substance use disorders a path to treatment instead of criminal charges for low-level drug possession.

Twenty-eight of Oregon’s 36 counties opted to participate in the program which launched in September 2024 as an attempt to address the revolving door of illegal drug use, crime, homelessness and overcrowded jails.

Oregon lawmakers voted in the spring of 2024 to re-criminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs and allocated millions of dollars toward rehabilitation as an alternative to jail. The legislation encouraged counties to create “deflection” programs to allow people to avoid jail and court and have their arrest expunged if they successfully complete a rehabilitation program. The legislation itself, House Bill 4002, was in response to the failures of voter-approved Measure 110, which decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs.

Lincoln County signed on and was allocated $341,256 out of the $20.7 million in statewide grants to launch its program. That involved hiring a coordinator, forming a workgroup of law enforcement and judicial officials and partnering with a network of treatment providers.

Those providers include Reconnections Counseling, Phoenix Wellness, Power House Detox, Lincoln County Health and Human Services, Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.

Lincoln County’s program had a delayed start, but once Shannon Heisler was hired to coordinate from within the district attorney’s office the pieces fell into place and the local deflection program launched last November.

One year

Deflection has had mixed results statewide. Officials from more populous counties like Multnomah are bemoaning the lack of participatory effort and pivoting to prosecute people who do not “meaningfully engage” in treatment.

There were 2,674 “deflection events” across the state during the programs first year, according to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission. Of those, 2,230 people qualified for deflection and 1,665 chose to participate. More than half – 889 — were unsuccessful in fulfilling the requirements, 393 were successful and another 383 are still working through the program.

Entering the six-month program is voluntary and only available to people who face minor drug possession charges or co-occurring criminal charges – usually disorderly conduct, offensive littering or shoplifting. They cannot have any Measure 11 crimes, which are violent felonies or any open felony cases.

Lincoln County District Attorney Jenna Wallace describes the county’s deflection program as providing an alternative to traditional prosecution by connecting people to behavioral health services, substance use treatment, housing help, and case management – before criminal charges are filed. The program, she said, is “designed to interrupt cycles of arrest and incarceration by addressing the root causes of criminalized behavior.”

Deflection was offered to 66 people in Lincoln County as of mid-December. Fifty-six accepted, 10 declined, 26 were unsuccessful, seven graduated and 21 are still in the program.

Graduating from deflection is no easy task and involves different levels of treatment depending on a person’s needs. Some may go into rehabilitation centers for months while others may receive outpatient services. Participants must also pass urinalysis tests three times a week over the course of a month.

They have six months to pass that requirement or face going to jail for the initial charge that brought them to deflection. But if they complete all the requirements that charge is expunged from the record.

Finding participants for the program is a team effort with referrals coming from law enforcement, community partners and the district attorney’s office where Heisler and chief deputy district attorney Michael Thornicroft review the jail roster and arrest reports each morning looking for candidates.

Heisler and Thornicroft are happy with participation numbers so far, despite the dropout and incompletion rate which they say is on par with statewide numbers. They are also happy in the knowledge the program is gaining traction while they continue to learn and improve upon what works.

“So, say out of the seven who graduated,” Thornicroft said. “Let’s say that it only sticks with two. Okay. But still that’s great. That’s two that I’m not going to see in drug court. And the transformation of some of these people is amazing — to see their booking photo and then see them six months later.”

Heisler, who shops at discount stores and seeks out deals to help provide participants with everything from clothes to bus passes to housing and phones to help them stabilize and secure jobs, gives credit to the deflection team.

“I think we’re a great team,” she said. “All of our providers and everyone that’s been in the meetings from the beginning. We have the presiding judge on our board, parole and probation and the sheriff. And then our providers are incredible.

“They are peer providers which means they’re in recovery, they get it. And so the fact that we are using a team of law enforcement but also people who have been there and done that – it’s the best.”

The program is the only one in the state with a phone number to take calls 24/7 from people seeking to get into the program.

Lincoln County’s deflection program used 80 percent of the money it was given to launch the program and returned the other 20 percent. The Legislature has allocated $40 million for the program’s second biennium in 2025-2027 of which Lincoln County will receive $1.34 million.

An estimated two percent of the population of Lincoln County would benefit from deflection, Heisler said, which makes her excited about the new community pathway through treatment provider referrals the program has implemented. Thornicroft said he would like to even more treatment options.

“I think we need more treatment centers in Oregon,” he said. “That’s coming from a prosecutor. But I get folks who are on probation and for serious crimes and there is nothing I would like better than to be able to send them away for treatment but there’s waiting lists. I just think we as a society would be better for it if we had more treatment.”

A fresh start

Deflection was not Baker’s first go-round with treatment and rehabilitation.

He graduated from the county’s drug court in December 2019 and then celebrated the achievement by getting high.

“The day I got off probation I ended up using heroin as a celebratory thing,” he said. “I have no idea why. I think I had a reservation for it, a want to use in the back of my head. So when I graduated drug court I just went right back into using.”

While in drug court he was able to buy a truck and land his dream job on a fishing boat. As he slipped back into using, he set rules for himself like not using drugs while he was on the boat for the crews’ safety. He managed to finish the season on good terms, but sensing a slide he decided not to return.

“At first, I thought I could handle it,” Baker said of the drug use. “The thought that I was losing control never really clicked in my head. I knew I was starting to get out of hand. I was breaking rules that I set for myself. One rule was if I can’t pay for it with cash than I don’t do it. And another one was I would only use on the weekends. And that was another rule I broke almost instantly.”

All the demons came flooding back – methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl – which he overdosed on 11 times. And then there was the residual trauma and resentment that led him to lean on drugs — including the disruptive early life with a stepfather who was a drug addict and whose dead body he would later have to help his mother move and the desire to fit in while feeling like an outcast.

He lost his truck after nodding off at the wheel, sideswiping another truck, running over a stop sign and crashing through someone’s garage door. “I don’t know how but it terrified me.”

He soon found himself homeless, living in a tent by the beach with his girlfriend, stealing food and other supplies from stores to survive and swap for drugs.

“I don’t know how I could even afford it,” Baker said. “I was stealing so much stuff from the stores. It got to a point where it was overwhelming.”

Eventually everything caught up to him again – the drugs, living on the streets, shoplifting, walking into the brick wall. He wishes he had accepted help from the woman that day but now understands he could not have gotten sober at that time because drugs were how he coped with life’s challenges and hardships.

The final straw came during a check-in with his probation officer.

“I had drugs in my pockets and my PO could tell I was high,” Baker said. “He asked me to empty my pockets and told me to sit down. And I told him I needed help and needed to go to treatment.”

The offramp was the deflection program.

“I was tired of living like that, tired of putting his life on the line every time I used,” Baker said. “But I also just needed help. I didn’t know what to do. I just had no idea what to do for myself. I just needed a push.”

Heisler gave him that help, which he said he is “super grateful” for.

“She’s super respectful to me,” he said. “She doesn’t look down on me like I feel some people do. She helps me with my rent. She helps me with my phone bill. And she told me that if I ever needed anything, like anything at all, hygiene stuff, bedding, clothing, anything, that as long as I’m doing good and still in recovery, then she would help.”

Baker now has 196 days of sobriety under his belt. He will continue to stay in a sober living house, receive outpatient treatment and attend support groups while he works “to just get comfortable in my skin again and make sure that I’m actually using my support group the right way before I go back out there.”

To critics who might say deflection is a waste of taxpayer money, Baker said without the program and the resources it provides there is no way he could have been successful. And for those who might be battling with the same issues that have plagued him since his teen years he advises asking for help.

“Go to an alcohol and drug treatment place and ask for help,” he said. “Go take an assessment because you never know if you might need inpatient treatment or not. And if you don’t need that you can always go to like an AA group or an NA group. The people there are always super helpful, super inviting and they’re super caring.”

• Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at [email protected]