After listening to speaker after speaker discuss Oregon’s substance abuse crisis, Rep. Kevin Mannix had a logical question:

“Should we have a drug-prevention czar who is able to have some authority and input as to every agency out there – state and local – and his mission is to help them coordinate what they’re doing?” 

“An emphatic yes – 100%,” responded Annaliese Dolph, director of the Oregon Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission. “We need somebody who can herd all the cats. Figure out where the gaps are. Figure out where it needs to go. And get it ramped up quickly.” 

That is the challenge confronting the Legislature’s Measure 110 committee and Gov. Tina Kotek’s administration as Oregon struggles with behavioral health. 

One after another, panelists told the committee – officially called the Joint Interim Committee on Addiction and Community Safety Response – that state and local agencies and service providers too often don’t work well together … and may not even know what the others are doing.

“Unequivocally, we need to un-silo,” Dr. Andy Mendenhall, president/CEO of Central City Concern in Portland, said at last week’s two-and-a-half-hour meeting.

This is not a new dilemma. Neither is it unique to substance abuse prevention and treatment. 

Ed Blackburn, the former executive director of Central City Concern, told the Oregon Housing Conference in 2019 that institutional silos were the overwhelming barrier to ending Portland’s chronic homelessness. Rather than remain stuck in their institutional egos and bureaucratic norms, the various agencies and providers needed to fully collaborate.

 “What this requires is bringing together systems that are not currently working very well together,” said Blackburn, later an adviser for Kotek’s gubernatorial campaign.

Also back in 2019, Gov. Kate Brown established a Behavioral Health Advisory Council, recognizing that Oregon had a failed system of mental health treatment. In 2006, Gov. Ted Kulongoski created the Ending Homelessness Advisory Council, which developed a 10-year plan to end homelessness. He acted a year after Multnomah County adopted Oregon’s first such local 10-year plan.

Oregon has had a surplus of special committees, councils and commissions – and a dearth of effective, collaborative, ego-less action. (Not to mention the Portland-area infighting, which last year caused Kotek to intervene. 

Meanwhile, governors, legislators and state executives have alternately centralized and decentralized agencies as they added, subtracted and altered programs. 1971’s Department of Human Resources became 2001’s Department of Human Services. Along the way, adult corrections, juvenile corrections and housing were taken away and made into separate departments. Housing was combined with community services in 1991.

The Oregon Health Authority was carved out of DHS in 2009. Senate President Peter Courtney later mulled whether mental health was so important that it should be taken from OHA and made an independent agency. Instead, Medicaid and Behavioral Health, which since 2016 have been combined as the OHA’s Health Systems Division, now are being made into separate divisions within the department.

Government is not alone in what could be perceived as “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.” Businesses, including newspapers where I worked, often have fallen under a similar spell when a new top executive arrives. 

Thus, the question posed by Rep. Mannix, a Salem Republican, which he prefaced with, “With all of the acronym organizations involved … .”

He was asking about a drug-prevention czar “as a short-term solution while we work out how we work these programs together.”

Oregon’s history, however, suggests we never fully work that out.

Which is why we have great plans, not great successes.