![]() In San Francisco, they’re known as “commuter drug dealers” due to the fact that they tend to stay in the cheaper East Bay and take the BART downtown. While Mexican cartels do the manufacturing, the dirty work of selling and moving the drugs falls on young men, often immigrants fleeing poverty in countries like Honduras, with little if any connection to the cartels that supply their product. There’s a hierarchy to the international drug trade. Many have told police they’re from Honduras. Portland police believe they are dispatched from suburban safe houses, distributing fentanyl produced with Chinese chemicals in superlabs operated by Mexican drug cartels and shipped up the Interstate 5 corridor. They arrived downtown over the winter, on standup scooters wearing matching backpacks. The shift of Portland’s drug market toward the downtown core coincided with the arrival of a new group of dealers. And when the center was boarded up earlier this year following WW’s reporting on the state of its surrounding sidewalks, the fentanyl market moved west, to Southwest 6th Avenue. Then to Washington Center, a vacant office complex at the busy corner of Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street. First, the drug trade moved to the parking lot outside Dante’s. Thus began a game of whack-a-mole, migrating southward. The notorious wooden benches along Northwest 5th Avenue disappeared. Spurred by complaints, Mayor Ted Wheeler and the neighborhood association agreed in March 2022 to a crackdown, marked by an increased police presence and subtle streetscape shifts. ![]() Drug deals were a daily nuisance, recorded in reports from occasional police stings that describe the nearby bus mall and its surrounding environs as “crack alley,” a parking lot called the “boneyard,” and the “benzo benches.” (Blake Benard)Īs recently as last year, Portland’s drug market was centered in Old Town. ![]() OPEN FOR BUSINESS: The historic Three Kings Building on the corner of Southwest 6th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street. This is the story of the corner that leaches this poison into the city-and, on one weekday evening, the consequences. The latest escalation is fentanyl, which is commonly found in counterfeit pills, called “blues,” that mimic the appearance of the prescription opioid they replaced. But it was just the first stage of an opioid crisis. In 2009, there were 94 overdose deaths in Multnomah County. Once people became addicted, they turned to a cheaper alternative, heroin. Ryan Lufkin, who prosecuted drug crimes for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office a decade ago, says the roots of Portland’s fentanyl problem go back more than 10 years to when pharmaceutical companies flooded the county with powerful prescription opioids like Ox圜ontin. The people who use it choose between risking their lives with each injection, or smoking it, which often means brutal withdrawal symptoms within hours, making daily life a constant battle to stay “well.” Unlike with heroin, every hit can be a potential overdose. What’s now being sold on this corner is a drug so powerful and unpredictable that observers can watch its victims collapse within feet of obtaining it. What’s different about the fentanyl market is the potency of its product. The sale and use of opioids in downtown Portland is a perennial story, featured on the cover of WW since the 1970s, when the Rose City became a heroin hot spot. Oregon has the highest rate of drug use disorder in the country, and the fastest-growing fatal overdose rate among teenagers. Last year, the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office recorded more than 350 overdose deaths involving opioids, nearly triple the number only three years earlier, an increase driven by fentanyl. Overdoses have surged in Portland over the past few years.
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