Are Anabolic Steroids Legal in Oregon Now?
By Rick Collins, Esq.
Q: I saw your social media posts about the change in Oregon law. Are steroids legal now?
A: Everybody is buzzing about the big change in Oregon law.On Election Day 2020, Oregon voters passed (by 58%) ballot Measure 110, the Drug Decriminalization and Addiction Treatment Initiative, dramatically changing the state’s controlled substance law and making Oregon the first U.S. state to decriminalize the “non-commercial possession” of all drugs.1 When the law takes effect in February 2021, possessing small amounts of drugs like heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine or oxycodone is simply no longer a crime under Oregon law.
Details you should know: drug manufacturing and trafficking, including possessing with the intent to sell, are still crimes in Oregon. Also, federal law still applies (although the feds rarely target personal use possessors). Note that the change does not “legalize” drugs – it only “decriminalizes” their possession. So, instead of getting arrested for a crime, someone caught with a small quantity of drugs in Oregon faces a Class E violation and a choice: either pay a $100 fine or have a completed health assessment by an addiction recovery center.
Proponents are celebrating this “historic, paradigm-shifting” victory, while traditional drug warriors are decrying a disaster. The truth is probably in between. Criminalizing drug addiction was always a bad idea. Prohibition policies don’t work and the trillion dollars we spent on the drug war was largely wasted. It fostered mass incarceration, particularly of people of color, without reducing addiction rates. Certainly, it’s better to help people suffering from addiction to recover and be productive than to punish them in jail. However, the effectiveness of the new law will be based on the extent and availability of treatment options. That’s where problems are surfacing: Oregon Governor Kate Brown has suggested delaying the financial aspects of Measure 110 until July 2022 because of insufficient resources to create the necessary infrastructure of addiction recovery centers. Decriminalization would move forward, but people addicted to drugs might not get the help they need.2 Let’s hope that changes.
Meanwhile, what nobody in the mainstream media has talked about is the fact that because Measure 100 addressed the entirety of the state’s controlled substances law, anabolic steroids are included. Subject to the same details noted above, possessing steroids is no longer a crime in Oregon. The chances of getting arrested for personal use steroids in Oregon will be pretty much non-existent.
Now, the progressives who pushed Measure 110 were focused on decriminalizing a population of “traditional” drug addicts. I’m certain that nobody who lobbied for the law or who voted for it gave a single thought to anabolic steroids. I’ll bet if they had realized that jacked-up gearheads with doorway-wide lats would be subject to getting the same break as strung-out narcotics addicts, they might have considered carving steroids right out of the law! But now, well, here we are.
Which brings us to a sweet irony. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, when Congress and state legislatures classified anabolic steroids as controlled substances to stop athletes from cheating in competitive sports, they dragged male hormones into the War on Drugs and saddled recreational (i.e., non-competing “cosmetic”) steroid users with all the baggage of narcotics crimes – arrests, prosecutions, imprisonment, and debilitating criminal convictions – without putting much thought into it. Now (with equally little thought), in the progressive State of Oregon, steroid users will get the benefit of being dragged with narcotics addicts straight out of the criminal justice system.
Will Oregon become the West Coast Mecca for hardcore gearheads? Unlikely, given that many bodybuilders tend to skew to the political right and Oregon is far from that. But if the decriminalization experiment that Oregon has undertaken is successful regarding the traditional drugs of abuse at which it is targeted, other states (e.g., California or Washington?) may follow suit, leading to a wider set of geographic choices where steroid users could live without fear of arrest. I’ll revisit this subject for an update in a future column. For now, follow me on Instagram @RickCollinsEsq for news of interest to the fitness community!
Rick Collins, Esq., CSCS [https://rickcollins.com/] is the lawyer who members of the bodybuilding community and dietary supplement industry turn to when they need legal help or representation. [© Rick Collins, 2022. All rights reserved. For informational purposes only, not to be construed as legal or medical advice.]
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References:
1. https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Measure_110,_Drug_Decriminalization_and_Addiction_Treatment_Initiative_(2020)
2. https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/02/kate-brown-budget-delay-addiction-treatment-funding/
