Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray is embracing a proposal on the Ohio ballot that would downgrade all drug possession crimes to misdemeanors and prohibit jail time for all but the most frequent offenders. | Angelo Merendino/AP Photo Health Care Don’t lock them up: Opioid policy shakes up Ohio governor’s race The ballot issue will test how far leftward voters will go in the 'drug dealer's playground.'

PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — Two years after Ohio swooned over Donald Trump’s law-and-order presidential campaign, the state is weighing a decidedly un-Trumplike solution to its spiraling opioid epidemic: Stop locking up drug users, and instead use the money to treat them.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray is embracing a proposal on the ballot that would downgrade all drug possession crimes to misdemeanors and prohibit jail time for all but the most frequent offenders, a move that has put him out of step with key state officials and even some in his own party — and sets up a test of how far leftward Ohio’s frustrated voters will go to escape a deepening drug crisis.


“You listen to the television commercials and it’s all about fentanyl — how we’ll become some sort of drug dealer’s playground in Ohio if we have any change to the status quo,” Cordray told a Democratic gathering in this once-booming industrial town anchoring a county where the overdose death rate is twice the national average. “Newsflash: We are the drug dealer’s playground in Ohio right now.”

Cordray, who’s running even with Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine in a state that went for Trump in 2016 after twice backing Barack Obama, has made the opioid crisis — and health care more broadly — a fixture of his campaign. The 59-year-old consistently bashes the state GOP for being slow to react to the explosion of super-potent fentanyl throughout Ohio, and has pledged to bring new ideas and energy to the fight.

But the ballot initiative, better known as Issue 1, has prompted concerns from some on the opioid epidemic’s front lines that it may be a bit too novel. While five other states spanning the political spectrum have enacted similar enforcement overhauls of late, none would be as potentially disruptive as Ohio’s.

The wide-ranging proposal would amend the state’s Constitution if it passes by majority vote. Beyond no longer classifying drug possession offenses as felonies, it would also open up new avenues for offenders to get out of prison earlier, or get their prior felony drug arrests reclassified to misdemeanors.

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Those changes would keep an estimated 10,000 people out of jail per year, the plan’s supporters estimate. The money the state saves — pegged at $100 million in the early years — would be redirected to anti-addiction and support programs.

Early polling shows substantial public support for the initiative, with one October survey finding 48 percent favor the overhaul, versus 30.5 percent who oppose it. It’s a lead that advocates chalk up to the desperation that’s gripped voters across a state where heroin and fentanyl are killing more than 13 people a day — and a growing aversion to jailing drug users as the addiction crisis hits communities closer to home.

“We’re looking at all these things: The prison population, the prison budget and the opioid deaths, which continue to march upward horrifically,” said Stephen JohnsonGrove, deputy director of policy at the Ohio Justice and Policy Center and one of the campaign’s leaders. “It gets very personal when you hear the stories of a mom in Akron whose son is in prison and other son or daughter is dead or addicted to opioids, and then you go to [rural] Columbiana County and hear the exact same story.”

Yet opponents across the state’s political, judicial and health care arenas warn the proposal is an oversimplified response to what is perhaps Ohio’s most complex emergency. Issue 1 would immediately and permanently alter the Ohio constitution, forcing the state government to implement the proposal as it’s written. No massaging the language, no loopholes or carve-outs, no technical fixes to adapt to the situation on the ground.

“The permanency of the constitutional amendment really doesn’t gives us the flexibility that might be needed,” said Lori Criss, CEO of the Ohio Council, the association representing the state’s behavioral health nonprofits.

Such an instant structural shift would throw Ohio’s existing drug enforcement and behavioral health systems into chaos, Issue 1’s critics argue, opening the state up to unintended legal and practical consequences. That includes upending Ohio’s sprawling and successful drug court system — a chief innovation that’s emerged from the opioid crisis — by removing the threat of prison that the state uses to persuade offenders to enter treatment instead.

“It’s going to upset the whole apple cart,” Donald Capper, a Democrat and judicial candidate in Ohio’s Lawrence County, told POLITICO after pressing Cordray on the initiative during a local party dinner. “I believe jail is a tool, and Issue 1 takes away the tool.”

That’s left Cordray largely on an island in his enthusiasm for Issue 1. He is one of just two statewide Democratic candidates openly backing the drug law overhaul — a position that’s opened up him up to a barrage of GOP attacks down the stretch run of the campaign.

The Republican Party has seized on the initiative as evidence Cordray — who previously ran the Obama administration’s CFPB — is too liberal for Ohio, and derided it as an out-of-state gambit to juice turnout. Issue 1’s campaign is funded largely by two California philanthropies — one run by Mark Zuckerberg, the other by his Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — and an organization run by liberal billionaire and activist George Soros. None, however, played a role in crafting the proposal.

Polling shows the initiative is appealing in particular to younger voters, minorities and those who list health care as their top issue heading into November — a coalition that Cordray will likely need to carry to win the governorship.

“Cordray and other Democrats support this ill-conceived drug dealer amnesty policy because they want more votes,” Republican National Committee co-Chair Bob Paduchik wrote in an op-ed last week.

DeWine himself has blasted Cordray over Issue 1 so often it’s become a central part of his campaign, often relying on a claim that the new rules would let a drug dealer carry as much as 19 grams of fentanyl — enough to kill roughly 10,000 people — without the worry of jail time.

“The people who wrote this thing just didn’t know what they’re doing, and it’s so wrong, it’s stupid and to me it illustrates a lack of judgment,” he told POLITICO during a recent campaign swing through Troy, Ohio. “I just think it’s crazy.”

A longtime Ohio politician who unseated Cordray as attorney general in 2010, DeWine has fashioned himself the experienced top cop who knows what works best for the state. He won headlines last year for suing five drug companies over the opioid crisis, and has based his own plan for fighting the epidemic on bolstering existing programs and expanding anti-drug education.

“We know what we’re doing,” DeWine said. “We don’t have to go reinvent the wheel.”

Cordray fiercely disputes the “10,000 people” assertion, emphasizing that Issue 1 wouldn’t touch penalties for drug trafficking. He’s said that anybody carrying that much fentanyl is clearly a trafficker who he’d make sure is prosecuted for it.

In an interview, Cordray contended the focus on Issue 1’s shortcomings is more an effort to mask what he calls a failure of the GOP-led legislature to curb an opioid problem that’s metastasized in recent years to a full-blown drug addiction crisis. Overdose deaths in Ohio hit 4,854 last year, the second-highest figure in a nation wracked by rising rates of drug use and an influx of deadly fentanyl.

“People say, oh, it shouldn’t be a state constitutional amendment. I agree. It should be the Legislature, but they’re not doing anything,” he said, adding that he also supports a slate of other legislative proposals for tackling the epidemic in addition to his own five-point plan. “I’m not confident that they will.”

That’s a pessimism that’s shared throughout other parts of the state, even after Trump rolled out a plan to “stop” the opioid epidemic and Congress passed a massive package last month easing access to treatment to much bipartisan fanfare.

A two-year, state-backed effort to rewrite Ohio’s drug laws remains on the shelf. Outgoing Gov. John Kasich’s emphasis on growing the state’s so-called rainy day fund has pressured localities required to pay into it, and anti-addiction support remains scarce in the most drug-troubled communities.

“If this isn’t a rainy day issue for us, what’s the definition of rainy day?” Dale Cahall, the mayor of Georgetown, Ohio, asked one recent morning.

A lifelong resident of the village along Ohio’s southern border, Cahall skews further left than most of his constituents, two-thirds of whom went for Trump in 2016. He remains skeptical of Issue 1, saying he worries about its blanket ban on jail time for certain offenders and isn’t sold on the idea it’d get more people through treatment successfully.

But the damage done by the drug epidemic has no regard for partisan lines in the state, he said. And there’s a similarly broad feeling that the traditional ways of fighting the drug crisis aren’t working anymore.

Surrounding Brown County ranks among the state’s worst for overdose death rates. Georgetown itself has no nearby emergency department after losing its only local hospital — and 300 jobs — to financial difficulties, and it’s struggling now to pay its five part-time emergency responders. The county jail has grown so full at times that it’s turned offenders away.

“I was just talking to my police chief. About 95 percent of all the calls they receive — whether it’s a breaking and entering, or even a speeding ticket — there’s drugs involved,” Cahall said. “We’ve been fighting the war on drugs big time, and we’re not winning.”

Against that backdrop, Issue 1’s proponents say their chief goal is to inject fresh urgency into the state opioid effort by convincing people to try something brand new — and perhaps hit on a better model for the rest of the nation.

Because the proposal would mandate fundamental changes to the core of Ohio’s strategy for combating incarceration and addiction, they argue it would box the state government into taking ownership of a sweeping experiment it might otherwise view as too much of a political gamble to try.

“It’s a risk, but lives are being lost,” said former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat and Issue 1 supporter. “Our criminal justice system is — excuse me, I don’t usually use this word — but f----- up.”

And though the groups behind Issue 1 initially cringed when Cordray endorsed a proposal they’d hoped would remain nonpartisan, JohnsonGrove said the initiative’s fortunes are now effectively tied to his campaign — and the bet that two years after Ohio led the nation’s charge into Trump’s law-and-order era, it’s ready to take another big leap of faith in the other direction.

“If DeWine wins, we’re not going to win. If Cordray wins, we have a shot,” he said. “And even if we don’t, but we get really close, I think we’ll have sent a really solid warning shot that there’s a big appetite in the state for this.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version misstated how the ballot measure would reduce sentences.