The U.S. is mired in a years-long nightmare of record drug use and overdose deaths – killing well over 100,000 people a year and costing taxpayers in terms of crime, law enforcement, homelessness and prison. Just a couple of years ago, the state of Oregon tried to address its own crisis with a controversial law called Measure 110. It decriminalized the use of hard drugs – including LSD, heroin and fentanyl. 

What could go wrong? 

After a disastrous three years, the Democrat-controlled legislature not only rescinded the law, but voters also booted a "soft on crime" prosecutor in Portland: Mike Schmidt.

Schmidt, the once-popular District Attorney in Multnomah County – where Portland’s the county seat – was among dozens of prosecutors across the U.S. accused of being "soft on crime” and originally elected with money from liberal billionaire George Soros.

After Portland’s liberal voters gave Schmidt the boot, the conservative-leaning Nathan Vasquez became the new DA in town. He promised to go back to treating crimes like crimes. I recently spoke with him during his first week on the job.

Vasquez told me that Portland, like many cities, has experienced a “dramatic spike” in crime in the past couple of years. 

"When we're talking about our homicide rates, we went from averaging about 20 to 30 homicides in the city of Portland to over a hundred. So we saw some really dramatic increases,” Vasquez says.

The number of annual homicides peaked at 101 in 2022, then dropped to 71 last year, according to the Oregonian newspaper. 

Full Measure asked how the law permitting hard-drug use impacted the dynamic.

"We saw people coming from outside of our state to be here for that purpose," Vasquez responded. "And we saw, just sadly, skyrocketing rates of overdose deaths. We saw public use just explode in our city.” 

Overdose deaths in Oregon shot up from 696 in 2020 to more than 1,800 in 2023 with the lenient hard drug law in effect.

Residents are hoping for a turnaround now that the law has been rescinded and there’s a new prosecutor at the helm in Oregon’s biggest city.

Vasquez said in a recent interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting that his first priority is serving the victims of crime and making sure that there is a focus on public safety from his office.

"Number two will be addressing the substance use and abuse crisis that’s out there and taking all efforts we can at the District Attorney’s office to be involved in that," he said. "And the third big one is gun violence. We have seen, in this community, far too much gun violence, too many homicides."

For more on this story, watch "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” Sunday. Attkisson's most recent book is "Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."