Jefferson Journal | May/June 2023

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6 Meet Oregon’s First Psilocybin Terapy Facilitators

By Juliet Grable

Although many aspiring facilitators are already practicing in a health-related field—there are many therapists and psychologists; nurses and doctors—any Oregonian over 21 who has completed high school may apply. JPR talked with four Oregonians who are currently enrolled or just completed their programs to learn more about what is motivating people from all walks of life to assist others seeking psilocybin therapy.

9 Oregon Doesn’t Have Enough Treatment Or Housing For People With Mental Illness

By Amelia Templeton

Oregon’s system for people with profound mental illness is broken. We examine two major problems and two promising strategies.

Crystal Rogers

Raymond Scully

Shanna Simmons

Lars Svendsgaard

Traci Svendsgaard

Robin Terranova

JEFFERSON JOURNAL (ISSN 1079-2015), May/June 2023, volume 47 number 3. Published bi-monthly (six times a year) by JPR Foundation, Inc., 1250 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Periodical postage paid at Ashland, OR and additional mailing offices.

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Time . Money. Compassion .

[

THANK YOU FOR 50 YEARS OF GIVING ]

We all give in different ways. Whether you give of your time, skills, pocketbook or otherwise, we thank you for your generosity. As your community foundation, we count on generous people like you to help us improve the lives of all Oregonians. So in this, our 50th year, OCF is celebrating YOU. Thank you. Visit oregoncf.org/50 to see the positive impact we’ve made together, find new ways to give and get inspired.

Quitting Twitter

Exactly what caused Twitter to reclassify NPR as “state-affiliated media” in April remains a mystery. There was no hot button story or controversial topic NPR took on that provoked the issue with the social media platform. And Twitter didn’t reach out to NPR to seek information, begin a discussion, or lay out a process to review the label used to describe NPR on the platform. It just did it.

When challenged on the decision by NPR, none other than Twitter CEO Elon Musk became the social media platform’s spokesperson. Seemingly thinking out loud, Musk asked questions about NPR’s structure and how it received funding, almost as if he was hearing about the issue and considering it for the first time. Shortly after, Twitter changed its label of NPR to “government-funded media” despite the fact that NPR receives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

NPR responded by announcing that it would no longer post new content on its 52 Twitter feeds. According to NPR, that made it the first major news organization to quit Twitter, which has become an important platform for many journalists and news outlets. Explaining the decision, NPR CEO John Lansing said, “NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”

In an era when social media plays such an outsized role in amplifying the information citizens receive, platforms like Twitter have assumed greater responsibility helping users discern real independent journalism from propaganda and disinformation. It’s a difficult task fraught with shades of gray that I’m sure keeps thousands of lawyers busy. Central to this effort among most social media outlets is developing and implementing a plan that is rational, based on facts, and transparent to both news organizations and the public.

Lately, Twitter has become the exception. Its approach to taking on this serious responsibility seems to be arbitrary, shallow and dependent on the whims of its new mercurial CEO. When the New York Times recently decided not to pay a new user fee required by Twitter to maintain its verification checkmark confirming its authenticity, Musk reacted by calling its content “propaganda” and “the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea.” That response built on Twitter’s previous potty-mouth statement to journalists everywhere when it began auto-replying to all emails sent to its press office with a poop emoji.

Although Twitter has not changed JPR’s account designation at this time, we are following NPR’s lead and suspending our use of the platform to distribute any new content. We believe Twitter’s poorly considered, inaccurate labeling of NPR is aimed at the entire public radio system and that it’s designed to undermine our collective work and credibility. JPR is a proud member of the NPR Network and we stand by its values and journalistic standards.

Each day, JPR joins NPR in striving to create a more informed public. We do that by pursuing truth, accuracy and fairness in everything we do. Your direct support is the engine that drives this work and ensures that we can independently and creatively pursue our public service mission. Thank you for the trust you place in us as a source you rely on to learn about our community and our world — we try to earn it every day.

editor’s note: See related story, page 37

Executive Director.

Twitter’s approach to taking on this serious responsibility seems to be arbitrary, shallow and dependent on the whims of its new mercurial CEO.

Paul Westhelle is JPR’s

In November 2020, Oregon voters passed Measure 109, which allows psilocybin, a psychedelic compound derived from certain types of mushrooms, to be administered to adults in special licensed service centers. Psilocybin-assisted therapy, as it’s called, must take place under the supervision of “facilitators” who have undergone at least 120 hours of instruction in approved programs. The state’s first cohort of trained psilocybin-assisted therapy facilitators are completing their programs this spring, and the first service centers are expected to be licensed later this year.

Psilocybin-assisted therapy offers great promise as a tool for helping people cope with a range of mental health conditions including substance abuse, PTSD, or a terminal diagnosis. Psilocybin can also simply help people feel better and more engaged in their lives, advocates say. They point to a growing body of research that supports the safety and efficacy of the therapy, and to the Oregon Health Authority’s strict protocols for facilitators, training centers, and the substance itself.

There are challenges and concerns. Psilocybin is still a federally classified Schedule 1 substance, and many Oregonians are nervous about the consequences of Measure 109. Last November, 27 counties and over 100 municipalities voted to opt out of allowing psilocybin-assisted therapy. Even where they are allowed, the fees and requirements for service centers—annual fees, liability insurance, security cameras, storage—are steep, and many are concerned that the cost of sessions, not to mention lingering stigma, will prevent those who might benefit the most from the therapy from accessing it.

Although many aspiring facilitators are already practicing in a health-related field—there are many therapists and psychologists; nurses and doctors—any Oregonian over 21 who has completed high school may apply. JPR talked with four Oregonians who are currently enrolled or just completed their programs to learn more about what is motivating people from all walks of life to assist others seeking psilocybin therapy.

Meet Oregon’s First Psilocybin Therapy Facilitators

Chelsea Phegley | Talent

Chelsea Phegley, 39, is a critical care rapid response nurse at Rogue Regional Hospital in Medford. She lives in Talent, Oregon. She experimented with psychedelics as a teenager and learned about the country’s early research on psychedelic therapy, primarily with LSD, while studying anthropology. The shut-down of that research felt like a missed opportunity, she recalls, but she really didn’t think about it again until COVID hit.

The straight trauma of working through that experience and the witnessing of the suffering of my co-workers and the patients and the docs and myself and just everybody was this slow drain of complete self-annihilation. I was like, gosh, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go from here. And my boyfriend got me a book, one of Michael Pollan’s books, for Christmas. I was on a travel assignment and I read that book, and bam, I was like, we’re doing this, this is happening again, and I am going to be a part of this.

Phegley started Googling schools and learned about the InnerTrek program, which was founded by Tom Eckert, who helped write the original Proposition 109. She applied and was accepted to the program within a few weeks, and even received a grant from the Asante Foundation to attend. Phegley graduated on March 10—one of the very first cohort of facilitators in the state.

When I got into nursing, I thought that I was getting into a healing profession. And I think that anybody who spent a significant amount of time in critical care, intensive care sort of realizes that that’s not that world—it’s not a healing space.

Chelsea Phegley is a critical care nurse at Rogue Regional Hospital in Medford. She’s training to become a psilocybin facilitator through the InnerTrek program. She hopes to work with health care workers, first responders and those in law enforcement.

by Juliet Grable

And so being able to go to school for this program, and to really learn about healing and what it takes to heal, and then be able to look forward to using those tools in a way to be able to do what I always thought I was going to do before. Now it’s the barriers to actually being able to practice.

Legal facilitated psilocybin experiences won’t be possible in Oregon until licensed service centers are up and running, so for her practicum, Phegley traveled to Mexico and worked with a Mazatec woman and her assistant. She and a colleague from her program also facilitated experiences for each other. During one of these, Phegley, who has suffered from insomnia all of her life, experienced what she describes as a “deeply sedated” state. Basically, it would put me in this state of such extreme security, and showed me how to get there. And so, after that— and this is where integration so important; I could have walked away from that experience and been like, Wow, what a beautiful gift. I got this couple hours of the deepest, most satiating rest I’ve ever experienced in my life—but with integration, I was like, Okay, I’m gonna keep calling that feeling up. I’m gonna keep doing that. And so in continuing that work, I’ve basically been able to eliminate my insomnia. And I’ve slept every single night since that experience, which to me is a miracle. It’s incredible.

Phegley believes that psilocybin-assisted therapy is a much-needed tool that can help address the mental health crisis that is overwhelming support systems not just in Oregon, but all over the country.

We have this gaping hole in human care that boils down to this mental health crisis that we’re in that’s overwhelming our hospital, that’s overwhelming our law enforcement, that bleeds into addiction. There’s 100% correlation between childhood trauma and addiction. People are hurting so bad. And for a lot of people, what psilocybin gives them is a recognition and a sense of connectedness, a sense of support, a sense of recognizing a community.

Phegley would like to work with other health care workers and first responders and those in law enforcement—one-on-one at first, and then, in small pods of up to six people. People in

these professions experience a particular type of stress and isolation, she says, which has been compounded by Covid. Phegley believes psilocybin therapy can help people help each other.

Psilocybin is just a piece of that. The rest of it is building a community that they can then use to support each other and create something that’s longer lasting, too. The integration piece is arguably the most important part; what you do after the experience is so vital to what you take away from it in the long term.

Dr. Jarrod Franklin | Portland

Dr. Jarrod Franklin, 34, moved to Portland from Chicago to pursue graduate studies nine years ago. He is a naturopathic physician, holistic nutritionist, and Ayurvedic practitioner. He’s currently enrolled in Synaptic Institute’s Entheogenic Medicine Training Program, where he also teaches. Franklin says he was drawn to psilocybin-assisted therapy because of its potential to bridge the gap between mental and physical health.

What really drove me to be a facilitator comes down to a few key sort of points: Wanting to help the underserved, primarily people of color that have been impacted by generational trauma; also wanting to shed light on the mental health disparities that we experience in this country, and especially what has been sort of ruminating over the past couple of years with the COVID pandemic, and really championing that mental health goes along side by side as part of a holistic medicine approach, which is primarily my expertise and my career focus.

Dr. Jarrod Franklin is a naturopathic physician, holistic nutritionist, and Ayurvedic practitioner in Portland. Franklin is teaching the social equity component of the Synaptic Institute’s Medicine Training Program.

The Oregon Health Authority clearly lays out the sections that are required in a facilitator training program. Synaptic’s curriculum covers everything from neuroscience and the science of psilocybin to practical considerations such as selecting music for a session and how to handle challenging experiences. Franklin is teaching the social equity component.

It addresses everything from historical trauma, to systemic oppression, to what is it to [make] responsible referrals and building networks and the importance of that, as well as understanding where we’re coming from in the history in the United States, such as the history of the war on drugs. So, it’s really addressing the social components of being able to deliver this medicine in an effective manner and examining the history of the pitfalls as well the benefits over time of utilizing psilocybin in a therapeutic fashion.

As outlined in OHA’s new guidelines, facilitators can’t diagnose or treat physical or mental health conditions while providing psilocybin services to clients. This means Franklin cannot incorporate psilocybin-assisted therapy into his medical practice, but he can offer it as a separate service.

I plan to do that by concentrating on the communities and groups that I think I would like to work with, primarily people of color, at-risk women, and veterans, and again, anyone that is seeking a better way to go about approaching their mental health. Again, there is a mental health crisis in this country, including access to affordable mental health care, as well as finding mental health care that is culturally aware and informed.

One of Franklin’s chief concerns is broadening the scope and access of psilocybin-assisted therapy. Part of that will require changing perceptions about what this medicine is about, and who it is for.

Right now, I think people hear psilocybin, and don’t necessarily hear the therapy part. And their mind goes to other programs in the state that utilize other substances. But I believe as time goes on, people will be more informed; people will get the information correct and really understand what this program does and does not provide for people.

Mandy Miller | Portland

Mandy Miller, 54, initially moved to Oregon from California to be closer to family. Last November, she enrolled in the facilitator program offered by Fluence. Although the Oregon Health Authority only requires participants to be 21 and hold a high school degree to enroll in a facilitator program, Fluence requires students to have an advanced degree or to be a credentialed or licensed in a health-related field. Miller has a private practice as a marriage and family therapist and is licensed in both California and Oregon. She plans to stay in Portland once she has completed the program.

Part of the reason that I wanted to stay and settle in Portland is that the connections that I’ve made with the people in my program, some of the mentors and trainers, I think that this is a really exciting place to be to have this pioneer type of ther-

apy, but also that it’s widely accepted here. So there’s several counties in Oregon that did not adopt the Measure 109. So it’s not like I could be anywhere in the state and look to practice. Portland is where I feel supported socially.

Miller takes a somatic, or body-centered approach to therapy and has been interested in non-ordinary states of consciousness for many years. She has seen how psilocybin can help a person reconnect to themselves and others.

Somatically, if we’re feeling really disconnected from ourselves and our bodies, and we’re really uncomfortable with ourselves, then we’re going to do everything we can to not be in our bodies, if that makes sense. I think that leads to a lot of dis-ease.

I know of a person who was struggling with dependence on alcohol, and tobacco, and didn’t want to use those substances any longer, and started to take small doses of psilocybin. And he was able to stop drinking, and increase his connection to himself and other people in the community where he was getting the support, and also stopped smoking tobacco. And basically, when his relationship to those things that he was dependent on changed, a whole new world opened up for him, and he was able to have more sustaining and lasting relationships with people.

Facilitators aren’t guides, says Miller. Though she and her clients will have conversations before the session to prepare and afterwards to help make meaning of the experience, she will take a hands-off approach during the actual psilocybin sessions.

What my role is, in my way of thinking, is to be a person who reminds the person who’s in this non-ordinary state of consciousness that they’re safe, that there’s someone there with them, you know, after four to five milligrams of mushrooms. But in that dose, people normally aren’t able to talk; there’s not a lot of interaction. So it’s not like I’m inviting them or directing them to go anywhere, or think about anything in particular, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’m witnessing; I’m sitting with; I’m meditating, you know, in more of a meditative space, of just really observing and holding the space really.

Psilocybin-assisted therapy is different from traditional psychotherapy, and Miller cannot provide psychotherapy while in a psilocybin session with a client. She feels her personal and professional experience has prepared her well for her new role as facilitator.

I’ve written all over my house on little notes, like, “do less,” and “get out of the way.” And there’s a non-directive approach in this kind of therapy. At this stage in my life I have had a lot of experience, and so supporting people, suggesting ways of feeling better and getting better is kind

Continued on page 40

Mandy Miller is enrolled in the Fluence facilitator program in Portland. She is a private practice marriage and family therapist licensed in Oregon and California.

Oregon Doesn’t Have Enough Treatment Or Housing For People With Mental Illness

by AMELIA TEMPLETON

Oregon’s system for people with profound mental illness is broken. We examine two major problems and two promising strategies.

PROBLEM ONE: Some people with the most serious mental illnesses cycle between Oregon’s public psychiatric hospital, county jails and homelessness.

People with serious mental illnesses often receive treatment for a time and then drop out or discontinue it.

Here’s what too frequently happens next: Without treatment, some mentally ill people deteriorate and end up homeless. An arrest – easy to come by when living on the streets – can land them in county jail. Unable to stand trial due to psychosis, they’re sent to the Oregon State Hospital on a court order to be treated.

While they’re at the Oregon State Hospital, they get medication, therapy and a safe environment. Most people staying in the Salem psychiatric hospital are also isolated from friends and family. It’s an hour drive for visitors from Portland and much further for people from the east side of the Cascade Mountains or the southern part of the state. Patients are also often cut off from any therapists or health care providers they had been seeing before because of a rule in the federal Medicaid statute. And in any case, the majority of patients can only stay until they’re well enough to understand the charges against them and stand trial.

Though some have to leave before they have hit even that relatively low bar for wellness. As of September 2022, people accused of felonies can be held for treatment for a maximum of one year. For misdemeanors, the maximum stay is 90 days.

Some people are eventually able to stand trial. Others are found to be never able to understand the charges against them. Prosecutors pursue “guilty but for insanity” verdicts in the most serious cases. Less serious charges are dropped, and a person is discharged to a hospital, to the street or to the oversight of a county mental health department. Often, they end up homeless. Then the cycle repeats.

“We’ve become very dependent on the criminal punishment system as our de facto mental health system,” said Jesse Merrithew, a civil rights attorney who is part of a high-profile lawsuit over delays admitting patients to the state hospital. “It doesn’t make sense clinically. Doesn’t make sense morally.”

PROMISING STRATEGY: A statewide program to assess and assist people ages 12 to 25 who are in their first year of experiencing psychosis could result in early and more successful treatment for people with the most serious mental illnesses.

One statewide program aims to intervene far upstream of the revolving door cycle by helping people maintain their sense of identity, family and agency through the initial onset of a mental illness.

The Early Assessment and Support Alliance focuses on people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder with psychosis.

For many who have these disorders, symptoms begin in their late teens or twenties. Without early intervention, young people first developing a mental illness that involves psychosis will often spend one to two years after their symptoms start before getting any treatment. That delay can upset the course of their lives, disrupting their chance of finishing school, finding a job and maintaining family ties.

“These conditions can lead to the dissolution of a family pretty rapidly,” said Tamara Sale, who runs the Early Assessment and Support Alliance Center for Excellence at the OHSUPSU School of Public Health. ”It can lead to them being kicked out in the street because their families [are] trying to draw boundaries.”

When people do finally receive treatment, it’s sometimes in the form of involuntary civil commitment, which is difficult to obtain, controversial and increasingly rare. But people have a better shot at recovering if they get early treatment and support, experts say. That’s because most people who experience psychosis due to a mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder have initial symptoms that are milder, Sale said.

“There’s a window where we can identify and interact with the person before it’s gotten to that really acute level,” Sale said.

In the early stage, people start to experience changes in their sensory perceptions and new ideas that don’t make sense to other people. They are also more likely to consider suicide during the early onset phase.

“They are met with a lot of misunderstanding,” Sale said.

Crucially, during this early period, people are often relatively motivated to figure out what’s happening to them and receive treatment.

But for many people, navigating the rules of the health care system and insurance feels impossible. It requires people to show up on time to appointments and be organized at a time when they are losing those abilities.

“If you think about a program for people in wheelchairs being placed on the second story of the building with no elevator and no ramp and no outreach,” Sale said. “That’s kind of how the mental health system has been set up.”

Sale says it’s easy for a person experiencing the first onset of a mental illness to be mislabeled as lazy or pressured to perform.

“Other people don’t understand how hard they’re working,” Sale said.

This is where the Early Assessment and Support Alliance, EASA for short, comes in. The program is set up to accommodate the needs of people who have experienced psychosis, and to show them that the mental health system can be a friend, not the enemy.

Similarly to the Intercept program for children experiencing mental illness, EASA program staff come to people’s homes and work with their families to figure out how to connect with a person and engage them in treatment.

Program staff will spend time getting to know the person, and will communicate with them in whatever way feels safe. For someone experiencing paranoia, that might mean speaking on either side of a closed door, or exchanging handwritten notes. In the short term, the goal is to get each participant to the point where they can put their thoughts together well enough to participate in decisions about their course of treatment.

Another distinguishing feature of the program is its approach to antipsychotic medication. Taking medication isn’t a requirement of the program, and when meds are used, clinicians focus on getting the dosing right for each participant.

“If we identify people a little earlier, it’s easier to focus on a start low, go slow approach.”

Some people, Sale said, do need medication and may need help working through the grief associated with that decision. While many antipsychotic drugs are effective for most people, they are controversial because they can be sedating and cause heart problems, among other issues.

The program uses strategies to help people who want to minimize the dose that they’re on. A person might opt for a dose that’s just enough to stop scary hallucinations, but that doesn’t completely eliminate the voices in a person’s head, if those voices are friendly.

The program teaches skills that can reduce the symptoms of psychosis, like getting adequate sleep and regulating stress. And it helps people understand the often-predictable pattern of their illness.

“If they can understand what their personal pattern is, they can often prevent it from progressing,” Sale said.

People typically stay enrolled in EASA for about two years. Sale says the program is still figuring out which metrics to use to measure success, but some numbers suggest it has a stabilizing effect. The likelihood of a person being hospitalized drops while they are in the EASA program. About 60% of participants are in school or are working when they start EASA, and roughly the same percentage are still enrolled or employed at the end.

Sale says genuine recovery from psychosis is possible, and EASA graduates have gone on to careers in college admissions, law and medicine.

“I think our society really needs them,” she said, “and it’s a huge loss for them not to be able to participate.”

Sale says the metric that matters the most to her is that graduates are able to live full lives.

PROBLEM TWO: Tere are nowhere near enough group homes, residential care facilities or supportive housing options for people living with mental illness or addiction.

In 1995, Oregon closed the Dammasch State Hospital after Disability Rights Oregon publicized the deaths of five patients and the inhumane living conditions there. For years, Oregonians with mental illnesses had lived at the psychiatric institution heavily sedated and in the dark. Eager to find a better way to treat people with mental illnesses, advocates urged the state to replace the Wilsonville hospital with smaller-scale housing and community treatment programs across the state so that people could remain integrated in their communities while receiving the care they needed.

Flash forward 28 years: That promised community treatment system still barely exists.

Instead, legislators spent $311 million remodeling the state psychiatric hospital in Salem in 2013 and $83 million building a new satellite campus in Junction City in 2015. Those expansions were made over the objections of many people working in mental health care.

“We were so frustrated with all this focus over in the valley

For many people, navigating the rules of the health care system and insurance feels impossible. It requires people to show up on time to appointments and be organized at a time when they are losing those abilities.

on the state hospital remodel,” Dr. Robin Henderson, the chief executive for behavioral health for the Providence health system in Oregon, said of that effort. “What we want is the rest of the system.”

As housing costs rose during the last 20 years, it became harder for people struggling with mental illness to afford housing, especially for those on a disability income. That made the need for subsidized or free housing more urgent. But it also made finding affordable housing for people with serious mental illnesses even harder.

And then the pandemic struck. That too exacerbated the housing problem. COVID-19 outbreaks and staffing shortages led a number of adult foster care homes and skilled nursing homes to close or cut back the number of patients they worked with.

For example, in one of the state’s earliest COVID-19 outbreaks, more than 30 people died at a Southeast Portland nursing home, Health Care at Foster Creek. Facing lawsuits and the loss of its state license, the 115 bed facility closed in May 2020 Health Care at Foster Creek had been one of the places Oregon’s Department of Human Services had placed seniors with serious mental illness, using funding from Multnomah county’s community mental health program.

“Many of the places that we sent people in 2019 aren’t here anymore,” Henderson said.

Residential care facilities can choose who they admit, and can turn people away for having the wrong health insurance, for being “too acute,” or for particular behavioral issues.

The current situation is akin to a buyers’ market, where “the people who have the housing options can be pickier,” Henderson said. That means some patients are frequently rejected and struggle even more to find a stable place in the community.

PROMISING STRATEGY: More small facilities statewide would allow more people to live stably in their communities.

Emily Cooper, with Disability Rights Oregon, says the state’s north star should be providing in- home support and hands-on outpatient treatment so that people with mental illness can live as independently as possible.

“We need more services in the community, period, the end,” Cooper said.

Henderson said the state also needs more “step-down” residential facilities that can treat people with serious mental illnesses after an acute illness and hospitalization, and provide them with a safe environment for long enough to allow them to get stable.

“Ninety-seven percent of people who enter into some type of facility like that, should be able to go back out and reintegrate into the community,” she said.

There’s a distinct advantage to scaling down any new residential care facilities for psychiatric patients. A federal rule that dates back to the 1960s means the state could only use federal Medicaid match dollars for inpatient psychiatric patients in facilities of 16 people or fewer, though the state health authority recently received a waiver from Medicaid that allows for some exceptions for facilities that treat substance use disorders.

At a hearing in December, lawmakers asked then director of the Oregon Health Authority, Patrick Allen, what would alleviate the admissions crisis at the Oregon State Hospital. Allen’s answer was that the state needed to invest more in community services.

“More of everything,” is how Allen described what was needed.

In the last session, the legislature made a down payment on solving the housing and residential care problem.

It allocated $130 million for the acquisition, renovation and start-up expenses of supportive housing and licensed residential treatment facilities, and for “community-based residential settings for individuals with a serious and persistent mental illness requiring a higher level of care.”

Another $100 million in one-time funding went to help county mental health programs pay for short-term housing support, including funding for shelter beds and rental assistance.

The Oregon Health Authority completed its review of proposals this month, and has awarded grants for 16 residential treatment homes adding 122 beds and nine supportive housing projects adding 160 new units.

The health authority wasn’t able to share a list of the projects that have been funded.

The health authority spokesperson said they prioritized rural areas where the need for housing is the greatest. The projects “will help relieve the bottleneck of individuals waiting to be released from the Oregon State Hospital,” said health authority spokesperson Timothy Heider.

The legislature’s one-time investment may help stand-up new residential facilities, but it won’t cover their annual operating budgets, or ensure they can keep their doors open. The recent changes to the state’s Medicaid program that increase reimbursement rates for behavioral health and allow some larger facilities to bill Medicaid for substance use disorder treatment may help sustain these places in the long run.

This examination of the role of substance abuse in Oregon’s failing mental health system was written and reported by Amelia Templeton, edited by Lillian Mongeau Hughes, produced for the web by Meagan Cuthill, with photo editing by Kristyna Wentz-Graff. This series exploring both the biggest problems facing Oregon and potential solutions is sponsored by the Oregon Community Foundation.

Amelia Templeton is OPB's health reporter, covering COVID-19, health inequality and Oregon's unique approach to health care.

Despite Oregon’s High Opioid Abuse Rates, State Lawmakers Struggle To Improve Critical Drug Monitoring Tool

Since it was implemented 14 years ago, Oregon’s prescription drug monitoring program has lagged behind other states in terms of the type of data captured, who has access to it and how it’s being used.

In 2009, as prescription opioid addiction rates soared, Oregon adopted a critical oversight tool meant to help address the crisis: prescription drug monitoring. The database of prescriptions could identify patients who were doctor-shopping and notify prescribers. Or it could alert oversight authorities to questionable prescribing practices by clinicians.

But Oregon was one of the last states to adopt the tool. And since it was implemented 14 years ago, Oregon’s prescription drug monitoring program has lagged behind other states in terms of the type of data captured, who has access to it and how it is being used.

Now, despite Oregon having among the highest rates of prescription opioid addiction, state lawmakers remain slow to make improvements that Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan says could make a meaningful difference in the battle against opioid addiction.

In 2018, a report by the Secretary of State’s Audits Division highlighted a dozen critical points for improvement of the program, including requiring prescribers to register and use it and creating periodic report cards on prescriber activity. The changes required action from both the Oregon Health Authority, which manages the program and the Legislature.

Over the next four years, Oregon fully implemented only four of those recommendations, prompting urgent calls from Fagan for more action.

“I will just say, that’s not good enough,” she said last June. “It is not. Legislative changes are needed to implement most of the outstanding recommendations.”

While fentanyl and synthetic opioids have increasingly driven overdose deaths, some state lawmakers hope to improve the prescription drug monitoring program. In the current legislative session, three bills seek to expand the Oregon Health Authority’s oversight and increase the rigor of the program.

But other recommendations are still going unaddressed, including those that raise concerns from legislators and advocates around patient privacy.

While legislators hesitate, however, the auditors who championed the improvements five years ago say the stakes are only getting higher.

“Frankly, Oregon has fallen behind,” said Ian Green, audit manager for the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office. “It’s really time to act to strengthen our toolkit for fighting the opioid epidemic.”

A public health, not a law enforcement tool

In the fight against the opioid crisis, the prescription drug monitoring program is useful in a few ways. When considering a prescription for a patient, a prescriber can check the system to see if that patient has recently received a separate opioid prescription or other medications that can be

dangerous in combination with opioids. Pharmacists can also check before filling a prescription.

Limited individuals and groups have access to the data to help hold providers accountable for prescribing and dispensing drugs responsibly. They include medical directors, who oversee medical practices at hospitals and clinics, and the Prescribing Practice Review Subcommittee, housed within the state Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Advisory Committee, which is composed of doctors, dentists, nurses and a couple of members of the public.

If they spot questionable prescribing patterns, they can target the prescriber or pharmacy for outreach and education.

Some states embraced prescription drug monitoring programs as a law enforcement tool: According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration originally funded the development and operation of most of them.

However, Oregon created its monitoring program with the prime focus on public health.

“The Legislature established the (prescription drug monitoring program) as a means for improving provider collaboration and patient outcomes, but the program is not a law enforcement, regulatory or insurance tool,” an Oregon Health Authority spokesperson said in a written statement.

In 2018, when then-Gov. Kate Brown declared the opioid crisis a public emergency, the Secretary of State’s Office conducted an audit of the system to determine whether it could be more effectively leveraged to tackle the crisis.

At the time, Oregon reported the highest prescription opioid abuse in the country, according to the National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Oregon teens reported the sixth-highest substance abuse in the country, the audit reported, and Oregon’s seniors led the nation in hospitalizations for opioid-related issues such as overdose, abuse and dependence.

Auditors spoke with stakeholders of all kinds across the state, including program staff, prescribers, members of licensing boards and staff from the Oregon Pain Commission.

They found significant shortcomings. For example, 33% of required prescribers weren’t actually registered with the program, and many of them weren’t checking the system regularly. Some of the dozen recommendations auditors made in that first report were within the Oregon Health Authority’s power to implement, but many others were dependent on legislative changes.

The drug monitoring program’s staff acted on a few of the recommendations, increasing efforts to enroll prescribers and creating quarterly prescriber report cards and reports to medical directors, which allowed for more transparency around prescriber practices.

But in the four years that followed, many more of the recommendations — about eight of them — were only partially implemented or not implemented at all.

Continued on page 17

JPR News Focus: Health & Medicine

Continued from page 15

Legislators and auditors say the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the legislative inaction, as distribution of personal protective equipment and vaccines and dealing with crippling hospital staffing shortages catapulted to the forefront of public health priorities.

But the pandemic amplified the drug crisis, too. Deaths from all opioid-related overdoses, including prescription, synthetic opioids and heroin, substantially increased from fewer than 400 in 2019 to more than 600 in 2021, annual data from the OHA showed.

While prescription opioid-related overdoses and deaths make up fewer than 200 of those deaths annually, OHA data showed that they nevertheless increased in 2021 after steadily declining for several years. On a national level, Oregon became less of an outlier in its rates of prescription opioid abuse among people 12 and up, The rates of several states surpassed the Beaver State in 2021, according to National Survey on Drug Use and Health data.

A few months after the blistering 2022 follow-up report to Oregon’s 2018 audit, Green and Kip Memmott, audits director for the Secretary of State’s Office, presented an update to the Joint Committee on Legislative Audits in December.

Their presentation elicited strong reactions from the legislators in that committee. Several expressed an eagerness to move forward with the remaining recommended improvements.

“I really hope we would … collectively come up with kind of an omnibus bill that addresses these issues,” said Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, at that time. “To me, this looks like common sense.”

Smith and Rep. Nancy Nathanson, the Eugene Democrat who cochaired the committee, did not respond to two emailed requests for interviews on what follow-up efforts the committee members made after hearing the presentation from Green and Memmott.

Some action, ongoing hesitancies

Rep. Bobby Levy, a Republican from Echo, introduced a bill in January that would address one of the most pressing recommendations from the audit about the prescription drug monitoring program.

House Bill 2642 would require all prescribers to check their patient’s prescription history before prescribing any drugs tracked in the program. The intention is to increase vigilance against doctor shopping and potentially dangerous prescription combinations.

At the time the first audit made that recommendation, Oregon was one of only nine states that did not have such a requirement enshrined in law.

Levy cited broad concerns about addiction in Oregon as reasons for filing her bill: rising numbers of fentanyl overdose and her concerns about the implementation of Measure 110, which decriminalizes possession of small amounts of drugs including heroin and meth.

“I could go on and on,” she said in an email. “We are not doing enough. We need to look everywhere a drug addict can get their choice of fix. This is just one of the ways.”

Another measure, House Bill 3258 filed by Rep. Tawna Sanchez, D-East and Northeast Portland, would require the program to begin tracking federal Schedule V drugs. Drugs in the classification contain limited amounts of certain narcotics, such as codeine.

Both Levy’s and Sanchez’s bills have been referred to the House Committee on Behavioral Health and Health Care. Only Levy’s bill has been scheduled for a public hearing, on March 27.

A bill from Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, has stirred up more reaction, however. That measure, Senate Bill 559, would require veterinarians to register with the monitoring program, another recommendation from the audit. That has sparked opposition from veterinarians around patient privacy and other concerns.

The Oregon Veterinary Medical Association asked the Legislature to take “a deeper look to determine the prevalence of veterinary drug shoppers and to clarify the degree to which veterinary prescriptions impact the human opioid epidemic.”

Similar concerns about the privacy of patient data have made Oregon’s legislators balk at pursuing recommendations to allow regulatory bodies and law enforcement more access to drug monitoring data.

Currently, Oregon law requires a warrant for law enforcement to access prescription drug monitoring data, and health licensing boards only get access if they have an open investigation into a medical provider. By contrast, a majority of states allow for proactive reports to be made to health licensing boards, which can lead to additional training and intervention outside of any discipline, Green said. And 21 states allow for reports on suspicious prescribing to law enforcement, according to the Secretary of State Audits Division.

The Oregon audit asserted that allowing law enforcement more open access to the data can save agencies time and money during investigations.

Green said concerns about patient privacy are “certainly legitimate.” But the Legislature could, for example, ensure that proactive reports could focus solely on prescribers and not patients.

“The worst of the worst of the pill mills,” Green said.

But others still harbor doubts. Kelly Simon, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the potential for law enforcement abuse of increased access to prescription drug monitoring data is too high a price to pay. It is an issue the ACLU has successfully litigated before, in an instance when the Drug Enforcement Agency sought access to information from the database without a probable cause warrant.

“Warning flags go up for me when I hear about proactive sharing of private health information with law enforcement,” Simon said. “Oregonians consistently say drug use is a public health issue for us, not a criminal issue … I think Oregon’s statutory protections that require law enforcement to get a warrant is exactly the right standard.”

Amid all of the urgent needs presented by the pandemic, Sen. Deb Patterson, chair of the Senate Health Care Committee, said changes to the prescription drug monitoring program have “not been a topic of conversation that I’ve been privy to … I’m still on the learning curve.

“The OHA does cooperate with all law enforcement requests with a court order and board requests related to investigations,” the Salem Democrat said. “To date, the Legislature maintains (the prescription drug monitoring program’s) primary purpose is to support safe prescribing decisions.”

Kaylee Tornay is an investigative reporter for InvestigateWest (invw.org), an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest.

For over two decades, The Folk Show has featured an eclectic blend of all things folk and some things not-so-folk. Singer/ songwriters, Americana, bluegrass, Celtic, traditional, old-time, and some surprises are featured each week.

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What has to get left out? At JPR, we have to ask these questions every day.

All News Is Local

One of the challenges of producing daily journalism is trying to decide what to cover. In the flotsam and jetsam of daily information, how do you decide what is important? As reporters, what do we have an obligation to cover for our audience and when can we advance a bigger conversation? What has to get left out? At JPR, we have to ask these questions every day.

In recent months JPR reporters have brought you stories that feed into the national dialogue. They range from stories about the people who will be Oregon’s first guides in the state’s new psychedelic therapy program, to local coverage of Shasta County’s efforts to ditch Dominion Voting Systems which is now part of the $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, to a nearly overlooked local example of train derailments like others making national headlines.

Meet the facilitators

For the past two months, JPR writer Juliet Grable has been at work on a series of short profiles about the therapists, nurses and alternative medicine practitioners who will be among the first to graduate from Oregon’s psilocybin therapy program. We wanted to know, who are the people who will be using psychedelic mushrooms in a therapeutic setting, and what is their motivation to work in this new arena of health care? How can talking to them demystify this emerging field for the rest of us?

She spoke with a range of practitioners, including a critical care nurse from Talent who hopes to bring this treatment to first responders, a naturopathic physician from Portland focused on ensuring equity in psilocybin access for people of color, and a therapist who participated in an early FDA psilocybin study and who hopes to open a service center in Grants Pass. We hope these interviews will shine a spotlight on this unique subculture.

Shasta County and the $1.6 billion lawsuit

In January, Shasta County earned the inauspicious title of being the first county in California to break their contract with Dominion Voting Systems over unfounded national claims of fraud during the 2020 election. This is just one story of political dysfunction playing out recently in Shasta County that JPR reporter Roman Battaglia has chronicled. It’s worth noting that the far-right majority on the county’s board of supervisors who are pushing for this change did not protest the election results that swept them into office using the same voting system.

Roman’s local reporting sometimes results in watching tenhour long public meetings to find out the results of a decision or driving to Redding to stake out the local elections office. Shasta County was being referenced in the $1.6 billion defama-

tion case by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Fox quickly settled that lawsuit in mid-April, but Shasta County dumping Dominion was being referenced as evidence of how Fox’s false claims during the 2020 election caused real-world damage to the voting system company. Story by story, Roman has documented incremental local changes that often get followed later by national media outlets.

Adding to the record on train derailments

This winter JPR reporter Jane Vaughan reported about a place just northwest of Dunsmuir, California called the Cantara Loop. The name came up because a listener emailed us that a Union Pacific freight train had jumped off the tracks in the mountainous region south of the Oregon-California border. It was not the first time. What initially seemed like an unusual story about an industrial accident soon appeared to be just one local example of train derailments that were happening around the country, including the toxic chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. National reporting from ProPublica has noted that a trend known as “precision scheduled railroading” has led to companies using longer and longer trains. When weight is not distributed properly throughout cars, derailments can occur. We don’t know if that was a contributing factor of the incident at the Cantara Loop or if it happened because of the tight curve in the tracks for which the area is known.

Jane’s story drew on public records like an audit of Union Pacific Railroad by the Federal Railroad Administration and FRA’s records about UP’s above average number of accidents in California. Being in rural far-Northern California, no other outlets had covered the derailment at the Cantara Loop and Union Pacific had not even notified the Siskiyou County Office of Emergency Services that the accident had occurred. While it’s always hard to measure the impact of a story, Jane’s reporting documented what could have otherwise been overlooked and added a local data point about this national trend.

We hope that local reporting by Juliet, Roman and Jane adds value for our audience by establishing a set of facts in Shasta County, adding a data point that might otherwise get missed with the Cantara Loop, or by humanizing and exploring a world that’s unfamiliar to most with psilocybin therapy.

We welcome your suggestions about other stories we should be covering and other important questions that should be asked.

Erik Neumann is JPR’s News Director.

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Meet the places and faces behind Oregon’s ‘chardonnay moment’

MACGREGOR CAMPBELL

How Chardonnay Reflects Oregon’s Changing Wine Scene

As the sun rises over a steep south-facing slope on the eastern side of the Eola-Amity Hills, workers arrive in dusty cars, minivans and SUVs. As though responding to an invisible signal, they mobilize, five-gallon buckets and shears in hand, delicately snipping and grabbing clusters of small translucent green grapes.

It’s a familiar setting across the Willamette Valley’s premiere vineyards: elevation high enough to cool off each night, slopes angled to catch each photon of the daytime sun, and row upon row of gnarled vines growing grapes that were first developed in the Burgundy region of France.

A journey across space and time

Chardonnay and pinot noir have grown together for centuries in the Burgundy region of France. Early Oregon winemakers planted both, drawing inspiration from Oregon’s similar latitude and climate.

As winemakers learned the intricacies of Oregon’s terroir and what would do well in the market, pinot noir emerged to define the style of the region. Oregon chardonnays, by contrast, were trickier.

Californians had been growing chardonnay grapes since the 1880s, but when Oregon’s early winemakers brought them north in the 1960s, they found a colder and wetter climate. Vines that did well in California often struggled to fully ripen in Oregon.

That led many early Oregon chardonnays to be very bright and acidic, sometimes overly so, at least for the expectations of the time.

“[S]ometimes if you’ll try some early chardonnays from Oregon, they’ll probably still be alive because there was so much acid that nobody can drink them right off the bat,” says Wynne Peterson-Nedry, winemaker for a number of labels, including her family’s Ribbon Ridge winery.

Starting in the 1980s, Oregon winemakers started to explore chardonnay clones brought from regions of France that were more similar to Oregon. These “Dijon” clones had smaller berries and ripened faster. That made them easier for winemakers to work with in Oregon’s climate.

As these new clones started to rise in popularity, vineyard owners also started planting more chardonnay on better land. And more winemakers started to see an opportunity.

Many associate chardonnay with bold, buttery and oaky flavors and textures associated with California, but there’s more to it than that, says Ball, the sommelier.

“Chardonnay is kind of known as this blank canvas. So it’s really kind of something that a winemaker can take and turn into, quite frankly, just about anything,” says Ryan McKay, winemaker and co-owner of Cramoisi Vineyard in Dundee.

For Ball, an Oregon chardonnay strikes a balance of floral notes and delicate acid that pairs perfectly with many of Oregon’s signature foods: crab, cod, oysters and herbed chicken, perhaps in a cream sauce. “You want to have food and wine and going back and forth, cutting through the thing that you’re eating,” she says. “[I]t does well with all types of dishes.”

The king and queen

Through hard work and time, Oregon’s chardonnay has emerged as a new royalty among the state’s wines.

“[Y]ou automatically think of chardonnay as being the queen to the king of pinot noir,” says Peterson-Nedry. “I think people are being very pleasantly surprised by how great Oregon chardonnay can be.”

And for the workers who steward grape vines through growth, maintenance and harvest, as well as the vineyard owners and winemakers, that means that even as chardonnay dons its crown, the quest for perfection is not over.

“We’re trying to make some of the best wines in the world,” says Evan Martin, proprietor of Martin Woods Winery in McMinnville, who sources some of his grapes from Koosah.

And so back at Koosah’s Eola-Amity Hills vineyard, where the chardonnay vines grow in rows upon high elevation

Workers harvest chardonnay grapes at Koosah Vineyard on Oct. 17, 2022. As warm weather stretched into fall, chardonnay berries had time to ripen before harvest. Screen capture.

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JPR News Focus: Food & Wine

Continued from page 21

south-facing slopes, Martin spent weeks tasting the berries, testing their sugar levels, and waiting for the perfect fall moment, this day when stewards take to the fields for harvest. “Eighty percent of the wine is determined by the decision of when to pick and what you get on that particular day. What is in that berry on that particular day?” he says.

As the late September heat picks up, the vineyard stewards who have spent about an hour picking grapes, hauling heavy buckets up and down the steep slopes, and decanting into tractor-pulled bins, fill the last of the large bins destined for Martin’s winery. This first pick is over.

They make their way back to their vehicles and are soon on their way to the next of three picks they have scheduled for the day.

The grapes travel by flatbed truck up a steep gravel road to Martin’s home and winery in McMinnville, where he immediately presses them and stores the juice in large white plastic vats, where it starts to ferment.

Martin will eventually transfer some of the juice to barrels made of Oregon oak, where it will evolve and transform under his careful eye.

Oregon still produces about 10 times as much pinot noir as chardonnay but just as winemakers transform each season’s grapes into new libations, so they are transforming Oregon’s reputation.

More space is opening up for a huge range of varietals and styles, says Ball. “Oregon is a really big state. It’s a really big place with a lot of pockets that are still to be discovered.”

STEPHANI GORDON / OPB

MacGregor Campbell is an awardwinning visual journalist and editorial product creator specializing in animation, story editing and design processes.

Chevonne Ball, left, a sommelier and consultant, chats with winemaker Wynne Peterson-Nedry at Carlton Winemaker's studio, Nov. 28, 2022. Screen capture.

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News & Information Service

Too Much Information

In 1981, the English rock band The Police released their fourth studio album Ghost in the Machine, which contained several hit singles, including “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Spirits In The Material World”. That album also contained the less-known poppy Reggaesque song “Too Much Information”, which features Sting repeatedly belting out the song’s main lyrics with guitar riffs and horns pulsing to the backbeat of Stewart Copeland’s mechanical drumming:

Too much information running through my brain

Too much information driving me insane

The song is an odd melodic mixture of disruptive sounds accompanied by those repetitive trance-inducing lyrics that alternate between that opening salvo and the song’s only other verses:

I’ve seen the whole world six times over Sea of Japan to the Cliffs of Dover

Over my dead body Over me Over you

“Too Much Information” didn’t become a hit and today has only had 3 million plays on Spotify as compared to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” at 279 million. But some 40 years later, those lyrics strike me as being prophetic for the plight of us humans in the Information Age. We bombarded daily with information: news, emails, texts, pictures, videos, social media posts. The amount of information we are pummeled with is six times more than during the 1980s.

I’m old enough to remember a time when modern life was not like this. The evening news was on at 5:00 p.m. and lasted for an hour. If someone wanted to send you a written message, they wrote a letter and mailed it to you. If you wanted to read something, you read a newspaper that was delivered once a day or a book that was printed and stored in a place called a library. Movies were watched at movie theaters or were on VHS tapes (and later DVDs) that you had to go rent from a video rental store. If you wanted to listen to The Police, you or a friend had to have the record, or 8-track, or cassette tape. There was no cyberspace or social media, just real socializing in meatspace. No Facebook or Twitter. If you had something to say to someone, you said it directly to their face.

I recall this era not to be nostalgic, but to point out that before the Information Age, the rate at which information was being created and disseminated was much slower than it is today. The pre-Internet world was not necessarily a better world but it was one in which too much information wasn’t running through our brains and driving us insane. Perhaps Sting was the canary in the coalmine of the up and coming Information Age.

According to a study done by the University of California San Diego, the average American daily consumes 34 gigabytes (GB) of information. That study was done back in 2009. That amount is most certainly more today and likely approaching the theoretical daily limit of 74GB. Today, we spend, on average, 12 hours of our day consuming digital information.

As a species, we are reaching information saturation. At the same time, the deluge of data being created is exponential. Ninety percent of all the information that has ever existed in recorded history was created in just the past 2 years. Currently, we’re cranking out data at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. That’s 1 billion gigabytes.

Today’s smartphones have an average storage capacity of 100GB, which means we’re generating enough data to fill up the storage of 10 million smartphones every day. If that sounds impossible and you’re envisioning the planet quickly becoming encased in smartphones, don’t worry. Most of that data is stored on millions of high-capacity hard drives whirring away in large data centers located all over the

Continued on page 39

There was no cyberspace or social media, just real socializing in meatspace.

On The South Oregon Coast, The Port Of Coos Bay Aims To Become A Major Shipping Hub

The Coos Bay-North Bend area has roughly 32,000 residents and hundreds of acres zoned for industrial development. Through a public-private partnership between the port and NorthPoint Development, advocates of the port expansion aim to develop a $1.8 billion intermodal facility, capable of moving freight using multiple modes of transportation.

“Our primary role is to facilitate and encourage economic development here in the region and for the state,” said Margaret Barber, director of external affairs and business development for the Port of Coos Bay. Barber said one asset the port controls is the Coos Bay rail line, which it’s hoping to upgrade if it can obtain $700 million from the U.S. Transportation Department’s Mega Grant program. While the Port of Coos Bay was not chosen as a Mega Grant recipient last year, Barber said advocates of a port expansion already have lined up $35 million from the state of Oregon, a BUILD grant, and a Port Infrastructure and Development program.

“We’ve got nine tunnels along our rail lines. So we’ll be making those taller essentially, or dropping it down one way or the other, so that it can accommodate double-stack traffic, because that’s primarily how containers are moved now,” Barber said. “So we’re looking at—when this is fully up and running—moving about 1.2 million containers through the Port of Coos Bay every year.”

The Coos Bay Rail Line runs 134 miles and links the port with the national rail network in Eugene.

Barber said that moving product by rail is more eco-friendly than by semi-truck, and, she said, results in 75% less greenhouse gas emissions. An improved rail system could be used for more than international goods shipped from overseas, she added.

“The idea would be that we can capture a lot of export traffic as well,” she said. “Whether it’s agricultural products from the Midwest, or Oregon even, and move stuff back that way.”

Upgraded rail and port facilities could help Coos Bay and North Bend rebound from several recent setbacks. In 2019, the Coos Bay Georgia Pacific Mill shut down, and last year the Shutter Creek Correctional Institution in North Bend closed. The combined loss of those 220 jobs has created more urgency for the plans to upgrade the port, and that’s sparked attention from some politicians.

“I would love to talk more about the Port of Coos Bay,” Val Hoyle, the Democratic representative for Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, said on a recent edition of KLCC’s “Oregon Rainmakers” podcast.

Holye, a member of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the Port of Coos Bay is her top transportation priority, and she’s looking to have its channel dredged to a depth of 45 feet and a width of 450 feet to enable full-size container ships.

“With that, we will be able to reduce the supply chain congestion on the west by 10 to 12%,” said Hoyle. “And it will create both directly—and with ancillary services—about 9,000 jobs between Coos, Douglas, and Lane County.”

Among those also hoping for an improved facility is Lori Steele, executive director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association. Steele told KLCC that this push is good news for processors and suppliers, at a time when the seafood industry is still recuperating from the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of its Ukraine market.

“The Port of Coos Bay is really our largest international port and terminal,” said Steele. “And they are not only making efforts to make expansions and grow as an international shipping terminal, but they’re also making significant investments in the future of their fishing and seafood industry down there.”

There are undercurrents of dissent, however. The Biden administration and some environmentalists are eying the southern Oregon Coast for wind turbine developments. That’s caused concern for fishermen and other environmentalists.

Hoyle is hoping all these competing interests can be worked out.

“We feed the world out of the south coast,” she said. “And we want to make sure we allow people to fish, we allow whale migration to be not affected, and that we also move to a green energy source right there in the California current where there’s a lot of fish and there’s a lot of wind.”

Proponents of a port expansion say that if the rail line, navigation channel, and container terminal all come together, the Pacific Coast Intermodal Port will generate 3,500 construction jobs over a five-year period, and will lead to 12 trains a day running between the Coos Bay area and Eugene.

Brian Bull joined the KLCC News Team in June 2016. He is a 20-year reporter who has worked at NPR, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Wisconsin Public Radio, and ideastream in Cleveland. His reporting has netted dozens of accolades, including three Edward R. Murrow Awards and the Ohio Associated Press' Best Reporter Award in 2012.

JANE VAUGHAN

According to the press release, the fundraising campaign must raise $1.5 million by June for the 2023 season to continue.

OSF Announces $2.5 Million Campaign To Save Its Season And The Theater’s Future

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published April 11 on www.ijpr.org.

Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced a $2.5 million emergency fundraising campaign to “Save Our Season, Save OSF” on April 12 in the midst of a financial crisis. OSF will also suspend its planning for the 2024 season.

The grassroots campaign, called “The Show Must Go On,” aims to raise $2.5 million in order to prevent layoffs and complete the 2023 season, which is set to begin on April 18. According to a press release sent out Tuesday, there is “a gap in OSF’s funding between May and July of this year.”

“We know it is a heavy lift, and a big ask of our supporters, but we have seen what we can do when we all come together in times of need,” the campaign’s webpage reads. “Whatever you can afford to give, we need you to give now.”

OSF’s Board of Directors has also relieved Artistic Director Nataki Garrett of her role as executive director, which she took over in January after the departure of David Schmitz. The board will take over administrative duties itself.

The festival will also cancel this year’s production of “It’s Christmas, Carol!”

According to the press release, the fundraising campaign must raise $1.5 million by June for the 2023 season to continue. Next steps will be determined in May.

OSF Development Director Kamilah Long said she previously worked for OSF and was re-hired in March for this fundraising campaign. The goal, she said, is to secure the 2023 season first before turning to the 2024 season.

“We need to get the funds to make sure it [the 2023 season] can happen because we can’t have the same thing happen again,” she said. “We cannot be in this position again.”

The press release states that the Mellon Foundation has given $2 million. Other donations include $5 million in individual pledges, and $170,000 pledged by the OSF Board of Directors, including a $50,000 gift from the board chair.

Long said OSF will be turning to donors and to the commu-

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Allen Elizabethan Theatre, featuring a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

JPR News Focus: Theatre

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nity for support and reminding them of the significance of OSF for the region.

“It’s no way we can allow this legacy, one that’s about to be a 90-year legacy, not stay alive. So I think everybody has a little bit of skin in the game. If they forgot that they had some skin in the game, I’m back to be here to remind people why we should exist,” she said.

Despite the dire financial situation, she is optimistic about the future of the organization: “OSF will be here for its 90th birthday that’s coming up in 2025. I do know that.”

OSF was hit hard during the COVID-19 pandemic and never fully recovered. The 89-year-old theater is the primary cultural attraction in Southern Oregon, and in March 2020, as the reality of the pandemic became apparent, the company shuttered its productions and laid off 400 staff, about 80% of its total workforce.

Then in January, the theater company announced another slew of staffing changes, including the departure of their executive director and director of development, in what they called a “restructuring strategy aimed at aligning its business model with its vision and realities of the post-pandemic market.” OSF also laid off 19 staff members, stopped hiring for 20 open positions and announced the launch of an $80 million fundraising campaign to help fund long-term operations.

OSF had tried to offset its deficits from the pandemic’s impact, including reducing its number of shows each season, shortening its calendar for performances and diversifying the shows it offers.

The theater company is one of a group of cultural companies in Oregon that is asking the state legislature for $70 million in funding during the 2023 legislative session. OSF is specifically asking for over $5 million in grants through House Bill 2459. The Shakespeare company received over $5 million in Paycheck Protection Program loan money during the pandemic, nearly all of which was forgiven. In November, it received a $10 million grant from The Hitz Foundation, and in December, the OSF Board decided to release $4.25 million from its endowment to help support operating expenses.

According to tax filings obtained by ProPublica, total revenue for the OSF Association plummeted from approximately $45 million in fiscal year 2019 to approximately $25 million in fiscal year 2020.

Jane Vaughan is a reporter and producer for JPR.

‘A Living Remedy’ Tells A Story Of An Oregon Family, Class And A Daughter’s Grief

When Nicole Chung was growing up in a heavily white town in Southern Oregon, she dreamed of escape.

She “felt like an anomaly” as a Korean American adoptee, an experience she explores in her 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know. In that memoir, Chung breaks down the simplistic origin story her white adoptive parents told her about how she came to be theirs, while tracing her search for her birth family.

Chung eventually staked out a new life for herself far from her adoptive parents, both in physical distance and social class. Her new memoir A Living Remedy grapples with the guilt and grief that accompany that distance, and the pain of not being able to help her parents when they needed her most. In the process, Chung crafts a deeply personal reckoning with our country’s entrenched inequalities and an elegy for her parents.

As a child, Chung had considered her family middle-class, but work was often unsteady. When Chung was in high school, her mother had a mastectomy to treat breast cancer and a hysterectomy to treat endometriosis — costly medical crises that brushed up against periods of unemployment for her parents, who often didn’t have health insurance. During this time, Chung realized her family’s financial situation was in fact precarious. “I had sensed that we no longer lived paycheck to paycheck, as my mother had once told me, but emergency to emergency,” she writes, distilling the insecurity her parents faced. “What had seemed like stability proved to be a flimsy, shallow facsimile of it, a version known to so many American families, dependent on absolutely everything going right.”

Attending college on financial aid was Chung’s first opportunity to build a more stable economic foundation, but her ascension up the class ladder was not seamless. She and her husband experienced times when money was tight as they were building their careers and family on the East Coast. Still, as she takes pains to acknowledge, she was better off than her parents ever would be: “Our ‘broke’ bore no resemblance to my parents’ ‘broke,’ because ours was finite and because we always had other options: we could have quit our graduate programs, avoided having children, tried to pursue more lucrative careers.”

Not taking those other options led to self-reproach. For years, Chung couldn’t afford to help her parents financially;

worse, she could “barely afford to visit them.” Her situation is not uncommon, as she points out in one of the book’s sharpest passages: “In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.”

Chung was already struggling with this guilt when her father was belatedly diagnosed with late-stage kidney failure, his condition compounded by the diabetes he couldn’t afford to adequately treat for decades. He died a few years later, at 67 — nine months before the publication of All You Can Ever Know, which would change Chung’s finances in a way that might have allowed her to help him.

When Chung sold the proposal for A Living Remedy in 2019, she had intended to focus on her father’s illness and death, and how it embodies America’s uneven burden of healthcare inequality. For about half the book, which proceeds linearly from her upbringing in Oregon to the present, this is indeed the shape the memoir takes — and where it is at its strongest. That her father wasn’t approved for Medicaid or Social Security Disability Insurance until he was “gravely ill” speaks to the system’s dysfunction. “It is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him,” Chung writes, nailing how her father’s “common American death” evidences how easy it is to slip through the gaping holes in our safety net.

But as Chung was writing A Living Remedy, a new emergency would complicate her project. Within a year of her father’s death, Chung’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. Amid her grief for her father, she struggled with how best she could help her mother — like many, she was pulled between the needs of the family she had started across the country and the one she had been raised within. And then the pandemic shut down the country, and Chung could not be there as her mother took her last breath in May 2020.

Chung could have decided to leave her mother’s cancer and death out of A Living Remedy. But in bringing the reader along as she grieves and travels back and forth to her mother’s house,

“How do you learn to cherish yourself, your life, when grief has made it unrecognizable?” – Nicole Chung

NPR Books

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her finances now allowing more visits, Chung provides a rare record of the difficulty of supporting a parent through end-oflife care. “This first. Then you can fall apart,” Chung tells herself as she struggles to talk with her mother about treating a brain metastasis, capturing the devastation of needing to make decisions no one wants to have to make. A similar pain suffuses the chapters about calculating the risk to her mother, her family, and herself if she were to fly out to be with her mother after the pandemic hits.

The last several chapters of A Living Remedy feel loose as Chung wades through grief for both her parents. At times I wished she would return to some of the argumentation that grounded the chapters about her father’s experience, especially when she mentions subjects like overwork without bereavement leave.

But these chapters also contain striking reflections on living with absence. “How do you learn to cherish yourself, your life, when grief has made it unrecognizable?” Chung writes. “I am starting to feel that we do so not by trying to fill a void that can never be filled but by living as best as we can in this strange,

yawning terrain our loved ones have left behind, exploring its jagged boundaries and learning to see it as something new.” It’s a line that recalls the book’s title, borrowed from a phrase in a Marie Howe poem called “For Three Days”: “...because even grief provides a living remedy.” This book does not fill the void left behind by Chung’s parents and others lost to our broken systems, but it provides a powerful remembrance and a path forward.

©2023 Kristen Martin for National Public Radio, Inc. NPR news report “A Living Remedy› tells a story of family, class and a daughter’s grief” by Kristen Martin was originally published on NPR.org on April 3, 2023, and is used with the permission of NPR. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

Kristen Martin is working on a book on American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent.

FOCUS PERFORMING ARTS

TOM VITALE

Champion Is Not Your Grandmother’s Metropolitan Opera

In a hangar-like wood-paneled room at the Metropolitan Opera House, more than 60 artists—actors, dancers, musicians, directors and stagehands —are arriving for a rehearsal for Terence Blanchard’s Champion. Last season, Blanchard made history when his Fire Shut Up in My Bones was the first opera by a Black composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera.

“Walking around this building, it’s still like a dream,” says Blanchard. “And then, this time it seems like things have ratcheted up to another level. Because the singers are amazing, and the production, as you see, is just awesome. And that’s just half of the people.”

Along with its huge cast, the production includes a fullsized boxing ring on the Met stage. Champion tells the story of Emile Griffith, a closeted gay boxer—in an era when gay people were outcasts—who rises from obscurity to become world champion and, in one of the great tragedies in sports history, kills his homophobic archrival in the ring.

Blanchard says his best friend, former Heavyweight Champion Michael Bentt, told him Griffith’s story.

“And I think what got me about the story was the fact that when I won my first Grammy, you know, I celebrated with my wife by turning and getting a hug. Giving her a hug and giving her a kiss, brought her up on stage. And to think that this guy became Welterweight Champion and couldn’t celebrate that with somebody openly—somebody that he loved—seemed awkward and silly to me.”

The lead role of Emile Griffith is played by Bass-Baritone Ryan Speedo Green.

“I came from a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. And I’m singing at the grandest opera house arguably in the world. Anything is possible. And now I told myself that I want to break opera goers’ preconceptions of what Opera can be.”

At lunch in the Met cafe between two three-hour rehearsals, the 37-year-old singer said Champion will defy operagoers’ expectations, “Because this is the most action-packed opera I’ve ever seen onstage.”

At the end of Act One, the opera reenacts a pivotal moment in Emile Griffith’s career. At the weigh-in for a 1962 championship bout at Madison Square Garden, Griffith’s Cuban opponent, Benny Paret, taunted him with an anti-gay slur. Hours later in the ring, an enraged Griffith caught Paret on the ropes and unleashed a torrent of blows. Paret slumped to the canvas in a coma that he never came out of.

Speedo Green trained for the role for more than a year. The 6-foot-four bass baritone says he lost 100 pounds—from 340 down to 240—so he would look like a professional boxer. And

he worked with a trainer and a professional boxer to learn how to move and think like a boxer.

“I’d never thrown a punch in my life. So I had to learn all the defensive moves, all the slipping and weaving, even realizing that boxing is the most physical version of Chess that exists in sports.” Green says now he knows what it felt like to box that round. “But now we make it bigger, we make it broader. We make it more theater, Raging Bull.’’

Along with scenes of boxing, Champion is energized by dynamic dancing. Blanchard’s jazz-inflected score—with its shifting rhythms and time signatures—presented a challenge to choreographer Camille Brown.

“Terence’s music is so beautiful and challenging in the best ways because it always keeps you on the edge of your seat,” says Brown. “As a choreographer, I have to be right there. He’s ten steps ahead. I have to catch up to him. It’s really been a treat, and it’s definitely been hard work in the best ways.”

The story of Champion is told in flashbacks. As an older Emile Griffith—suffering from dementia—looks back at his career, he is filled with regret for the death he caused in the ring. Terence Blanchard says his opera is ultimately about redemption and forgiveness.

“What he said in his autobiography really blew me away. He said, ‘I killed a man and the world forgave me, but yet I loved a man and the world wants to kill me.’ And to me, everything I’ve written for this opera is centered around that moment. Because we have to get past all of this. It’s time for us to grow up as a society.”

©2023 National Public Radio, Inc. NPR news report “Champion is not your Grandmother's Metropolitan Opera” by Tom Vitale was originally published on NPR.org on April 8, 2023, and is used with the permission of NPR. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

Along with its huge cast, the production includes a full-sized boxing ring on the Met stage.

Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green portrays Emile Griffith as a young boxer in Terence Blanchard’s Champion.

KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

JANE VAUGHAN

MENTAL HEALTH

The rural Northern California community has its sights set on a new emergency mental health care facility to fill chronic gaps in resources.

In Humboldt County, Gaps In Mental Health Care Make Treatment Difficult

Over the past 25 years, Arcata resident Lea Nagy has grown familiar with mental illness. Her youngest son is bipolar, and she has four grandchildren with serious mental illnesses.

“I’ve had lots of personal experiences,” she said. “Which, you know, you never want to be drafted into the mental health arena.”

As the president of the Humboldt County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and a county family liaison, she spent a busy recent day coordinating resources for families and attending meetings. By 4 p.m., she was just sitting down to eat lunch.

Nagy laughs easily and is quick to share the number for her cell phone, which is always on and goes off frequently, with families looking for help.

“People need what they need, you know, whether they need a place to listen or, you know, ideas about self-care. I just think it’s important that they get a chance to not feel alone and so isolated,” she said.

This support is important in Humboldt County, where mental health services are severely lacking. Like many places, the county is dealing with the effects of the COVID pandemic and the opioid epidemic. But Humboldt is a rural county in far Northern California, removed from resources and funding. Its remote location exacerbates the challenges the region faces.

Now, the county’s Department of Health and Human Services and other partners are working on a possible solution: a proposed emergency mental health care facility in Arcata that would provide beds for patients to sober up, a crisis stabilization center and a substance use disorder residential treatment program, among other resources.

‘There’s still hope’

Nagy has degrees in child development and special education, and she spent 20 years teaching special education. But she stressed that “I’m not a therapist. I’m just a family member.”

“I got drafted into this stuff, and all I have here is life experience. That’s all I have,” she said, as she prepared to lead a weekly NAMI support group meeting in Eureka.

Twelve people gathered around a large wooden table in a conference room, with two others on Zoom. Most were the parents of children with mental illness. They took turns updating each other on how their kids were doing; some were doing well while others struggled.

Many parents discussed whether their children were taking their medications.

above: President of NAMI Humboldt Lea Nagy, second from right, offers advice to Michelle Norton, right, during a support group meeting. From l–r, Bambi Ward-Roller and co-facilitator Liz Houghton listen. left: Luke Brownfield is Humboldt County’s chief public defender and has been trying to institute a mental health court in the county.

“I have a difficult time not asking him to go on his meds. He’s in a trench, and he won’t get out. He does not want to be on meds,” said Carol Green, talking about her son. Others struggled with knowing how best to help a child who needed support.

“I don’t know how to get him help. I don’t know,” Liz Houghton, one of the co-facilitators of the group, said of her son. “Or we wait for crisis.”

“You got us! You got our group! We’ll help you through the hard parts,” Nagy said to one couple, who was navigating a transition with their son.

Michelle Norton’s son had been talking about suicide and taking a lot of the anaesthetic ketamine.

“Right now, my thing is accepting that he’s probably gonna die. I really really am having a hard time with that,” she said emotionally.

Another attendee, Gretchen Curtice, jumped in: “But I mean… There’s still hope.”

Maintaining hope is especially important in this group. One of their principles of support, passed around and recited aloud at the end of every meeting, is “we will never give up hope!”

But finding resources to help those who are struggling can be a real challenge.

JANE VAUGHAN / JPR

JANE VAUGHAN / JPR

JPR News Focus: Mental Health

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Lack of infrastructure

In Humboldt County, “there’s not the infrastructure here to meet the needs,” according to Luke Brownfield, the county’s chief public defender.

Brownfield was born and raised in the county, so he’s familiar with its beautiful natural surroundings, its uniquely “awesome” people and its “different way of thinking.”

Mental illness is common among his department’s clients.

“I would say our percentage would be at least 75 percent of our repeat offenders suffer from mental health histories,” he said.

Brownfield has often put clients through mental health diversion, wherein if someone can relate the crime they committed to a diagnosed mental illness, they can get treatment rather than jail time and eventually get the case dismissed. But he said there aren’t enough providers to fill that need.

This is also a problem for hospitals. In this rural county, there’s only one inpatient psychiatric hospital and a critical shortage of hospital beds.

Dr. James Goldberg, the medical director of two emergency departments in the county, said patients in need of psychiatric care take up crucial space in hospital beds.

“Just earlier this week, out of our 22 beds that we have here, we were actually holding 12 behavioral health patients,” he said.

Patients in crisis are frequently brought to a medical hospital, but they often don’t need medical care. The staff there don’t have the comprehensive training to help these patients, and they have sometimes been assaulted, Goldberg said.

“Unfortunately, like other communities, Humboldt County’s been impacted by drug use and particularly with methamphetamine, which is really wreaking havoc,” said Paul Bugnacki, deputy director at the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services Behavioral Health Branch. “And there’s an increase in need for psychiatric services and not a lot of beds available throughout the state.”

‘Trying to do the right thing’

To help address this problem, work continues on the proposed emergency mental health care facility. In February, project leaders applied for over $12 million in grant money from the state’s Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program, which is dedicated to behavioral health, and they’ll hear back on whether they received funding this spring. But even if they’re successful, the facility won’t be complete for at least two more years.

Brownfield is not a fan of the proposed facility because he sees it as another version of incarceration. Instead, he has been trying to start a mental health court in the county, which would provide individualized mental health treatment plans, and he’ll test a version of that program this summer.

In a community this close-knit, the work is a personal mission for him.

“Being public defender, I often have pretty much all my old classmates coming through the courthouse, some of them be-

ing defendants, some of them being jurors, some of them being victims. You know everybody,” he said.

Despite the difficulties of the situation, Brownfield said client success stories happen frequently, and they make him appreciate his work even more. He’s glad to have recently seen more focus on mental health treatment in the community.

“Everybody’s trying to do the right thing. We’re all trying to figure it out,” he said. “I’m hopeful about the progress mostly because at least now it’s an issue that people are talking about and discussing.”

According to Darian Harris, chief executive of the two Providence hospitals in Humboldt County, attitudes are starting to change.

“There is a greater appreciation for the need to invest in mental and behavioral health,” he said, especially regarding health equity in “rural and remote communities like ours.”

Remaining optimistic

In Eureka, Nagy’s support group ended, and people hung out and chatted for a while. The remnants of their conversation littered the table: water bottles, notebooks, a box of the opioid overdose reversal medicine Narcan.

Mental illness is tough to talk about and deal with, and Nagy has done both for decades. So she’s had to find ways to take care of herself.

“The best thing I ever did, I put in a hot tub in my backyard under a redwood tree. And every night I do a nice hot tub with spa music, you know, and I light candles. I have a little altar set up with Christ and Buddha and anything else I can find that seems, you know, uplifting,” she said.

What keeps her going, she said, is her desire to reduce stigma around mental illness and the hope that even if you can’t help your own kid, maybe you can help somebody else’s.

Jane Vaughan is a reporter and producer for JPR.

JANE VAUGHAN / JPR

Attendees gather in Eureka, CA at a weekly NAMI support group meeting for those whose loved ones have mental illnesses.

MEDIA

DAVID FOLKENFLIK

NPR Quits Twitter After Being Falsely Labeled As ‘State-Affiliated Media’

NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.

The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.

Twitter then revised its label on NPR’s account to “government-funded media.” The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

By going silent on Twitter, NPR’s chief executive says the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.”

“The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said in an interview. “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”

In a BBC interview posted online Wednesday, Musk suggested he may further change the label to “publicly funded.” His words did not sway NPR’s decision makers. Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform.

“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he says. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

NPR’s Allyn emailed Musk on Wednesday morning asking for “your reaction” to the news organization quitting Twitter.

Initially, Musk didn’t respond, but a couple of hours later Musk tweeted out Allyn’s email followed with a tweet saying “Defund @NPR.” His followers quickly piled on.

NPR is instituting a “two-week grace period” so the staff who run the Twitter accounts can revise their social-media

By going silent on Twitter, NPR’s chief executive says the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.”

NPR Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on NPR.org on April 12, 2023.

NPR News Focus: Media

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strategies. Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter.

In an email to staff explaining the decision, Lansing wrote, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.”

For years, many journalists considered Twitter critical to monitoring news developments, to connect with people at major events and with authoritative sources, and to share their coverage. Musk’s often hastily announced policy changes have undermined that. Lansing says that degradation in the culture of Twitter — already often awash in abusive content — contributed to NPR’s decision to pull back.

Musk proves conciliatory and erratic in BBC interview

PBS, which also receives money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the BBC, which is funded by a uniform license fee charged to British television viewers, are among those whose Twitter accounts were given the same designation.

In the new interview with the BBC’s James Clayton, Musk almost appeared to be seeking a compromise with the journalist. He said Twitter would adjust its labels for the British public broadcaster to “publicly funded.”

“We’re trying to be accurate,” Musk said. “I actually do have a lot of respect for the BBC.” He said the interview offered him a chance to “get some feedback on what we should be doing different.”

When questioned by Clayton, Musk replied that the “publicly funded” label would apply to NPR as well. The change was not made before NPR’s decision on Wednesday morning, however.

The BBC exchange showed Musk as alternately conciliatory and erratic. He also said that he’s sleeping on a couch at work, that he followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter only because a judge forced him to, and that he should stop tweeting after 3 a.m.

“The point is the independence,” NPR leader says

Lansing says Musk is focusing attention on the wrong element of the equation.

“The whole point isn’t whether or not we’re government funded,” Lansing says. “Even if we were government funded, which we’re not, the point is the independence, because all journalism has revenue of some sort.”

NPR’s board is appointed without any government influence. And the network has at times tangled with both Democratic and Republican administrations. For example, NPR joined with other media organizations to press the Obama administration for

access to closed hearings involving detainees held by U.S. authorities at Guantanamo Bay. And “All Things Considered” host Mary Louise Kelly stood her ground in questioning then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over then-President Donald Trump’s actions in Ukraine despite being berated by Pompeo.

Most of NPR’s funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

It isn’t clear that a withdrawal from Twitter will materially affect NPR’s ability to reach an online audience. NPR’s primary Twitter account has 8.8 million followers — more than a million more than follow the network on Facebook. Yet Facebook is a much bigger platform, and NPR’s Facebook posts often are far more likely to spur engagement or click-throughs to NPR’s own website. NPR Music has almost 10 times more followers on YouTube than it does on Twitter, and the video platform serves as one of the primary conduits for its popular Tiny Desk Series.

Musk uses Twitter to question the legitimacy of media outlets

NPR’s decision follows a week of public acrimony, as Musk has used his platform to cast doubt on the legitimacy of major news organizations.

The billionaire, who bought Twitter in October, previously announced he would remove check marks from the accounts of legacy news organizations unless the outlets paid for them. The coveted marks once meant Twitter had verified the authenticity of an account belonging to a news organization, government or public figure. Now, they can be bought through a monthly subscription.

Musk also singled out The New York Times earlier this month, removing its check mark and calling its reporting “propaganda.” Twitter’s communications shop now simply responds to reporters’ emails with poop emojis.

At least three public radio stations preceded NPR to the exits at Twitter: Member stations KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., WESA in Pittsburgh and WEKU, which serves central and eastern Kentucky. (After NPR said that it was leaving Twitter on Wednesday, Boston-based WBUR announced that it, too, would stop posting on the platform “in solidarity with NPR,” according to a statement from its CEO, Margaret Low.)

Fears that Twitter label could endanger journalists

Journalism and freedom-of-speech groups have condemned Twitter’s labels, including PEN, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“NPR receives public funding, but is not state-controlled, meaning Twitter’s listing could pose risks for journalists reporting from areas where suggestions of government affiliation

have negative connotations,” CPJ’s Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in a statement urging Twitter to revisit its decision.

Twitter’s own guidelines previously said, “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.”

That language has now been removed. In addition to NPR and the BBC, Twitter recently labeled the U.S. broadcaster Voice of America as government-funded media. Voice of America is part of the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media. But its editorial independence from government officials — at times hard won — is enshrined by law.

“The label ‘government funded’ is potentially misleading and could be construed as also ‘government-controlled’ – which VOA is most certainly not,” VOA spokesperson Bridget Serchak said in a statement to NPR.

Serchak says VOA will continue to raise the distinction in talks with Twitter as the label “causes unwarranted and unjustified concern about the accuracy and objectivity of [its] news coverage.”

At Elon Musk’s Twitter, unpredictability is the norm

Like so many policy decisions at the social network of late, Musk applied the label to NPR’s Twitter account abruptly. It’s still not clear why he became so animated about the issue.

In his exchanges with NPR reporter Allyn, Musk said he was relying on a Wikipedia page dedicated to “publicly funded broadcasters” to determine which accounts should receive the label.

When pressed for how he justifies the disclaimer considering NPR receives meager funding from the government and has complete editorial independence, Musk veered into conspiratorial territory.

Inside the Box

Continued from page 27

planet; one of the largest being the Google data center in Oklahoma estimated to be 980,000 square feet or 22.5 acres.

I don’t know what happens when we reach total information saturation but I suspect we’re probably not going to find out. We’ll likely continue to offload data processing to artificial intelligence (AI). We’ve already been doing that for some time now and this process will continue to accelerate as AI systems become more prevalent and increasingly sophisticated and capable.

In a future arriving perhaps as quickly as next year or next week or maybe even tomorrow, you will no longer read books. An AI system will summarize the most important points for you and answer any further questions you might have. In fact, the AI system will have written that book, which will no longer be a “book” in the traditional sense of how we think of books but a custom-written, just-in-time, curated knowledge artifact.

But that’s just the beginning of the seismic shift that will radically transform humanity as we leave the Information Age

“If you really think that the government has no influence on the entity they’re funding then you’ve been marinating in the Kool-Aid for too long,” Musk wrote to Allyn.

Musk’s push to label the network even ran afoul of the site’s own rules. A former Twitter executive who was involved in crafting the guidelines told NPR that the deciding factor in whether to issue the designation was whether an outlet had editorial freedom. The labels, the former executive said, were intended to give users context that a tweet they are seeing may be propaganda.

The messy deliberations on display in Musk’s email exchanges over labeling NPR’s account are in line with his impulsive leadership style. His changes to the platform often are announced by tweet, with sudden reversals not uncommon, or promised changes never coming to fruition. Because Musk relishes troll-like behavior, there is always a possibility that his pronouncements turn out to be jokes. He has announced that the effective date for the change in the check mark verification system is April 20. The date is an inside joke among people who smoke or consume marijuana.

disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp, Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James and Business Editor Lisa Lambert. NPR’s Bobby Allyn, Mary Yang and Dara Kerr contributed to this story. Under NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

©2023 National Public Radio, Inc. NPR news “NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’’ by David Folkenflik was originally published on NPR.org on April 12, 2023, and is used with the permission of NPR. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

behind and dive headlong into the Age of AI, an era in which every human profession will initially become augmented by AI then eventually replaced by it. Whatever humans currently do as a profession will be done better by an AI computer system or an AI robot. No profession is immune—doctor, lawyer, teacher, artist, writer, pilot, actuary, software engineer, carpenter, plumber, electrician—all of them will be done better by an AI.

It’s difficult for me to imagine this and I don’t want to believe it. But it’s already happened and will continue to accelerate and expand into more and more professions until it is over me, over you, over everybody

Scott Dewing is a technologist, teacher, and writer. He lives in the State of Jefferson.

Meet Oregon’s First Psilocybin Therapy Facilitators

Continued from page 8

of in my toolbox. But in this particular kind of therapy, it’s really about being right here right now, and exploring and discovering and staying curious about what arises for the participant or the client. And just me getting out of the way so that they can emerge and they can see themselves more than me being a mirror or giving them reflection.

Steve Elfrink | Grants Pass

Steve Elfrink, 60, founded OmTerra and co-founded the Psychedelic Somatic Institute; he is enrolled in Synaptic’s Entheogenic Medicine Training Program. Elfrink has a long relationship with psychedelics, starting with recreational use as a teenager. He has struggled with anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide, and claims a profound experience with LSD in his late 20s saved his life.

I had the full-on experience of unity consciousness: I saw myself in the mirror, and I saw myself as the most beautiful person in the world. But then I saw the faces of humanity unfold in front of me. Every face that ever existed just folded out in this infinite Rolodex of images, of faces. But all of us were part of this; we are all one—it was that classic, “we’re all one.” I also had the experience of laying on the floor and love streaming in and streaming out reciprocal love with the universe. For a lot of folks that sounds kind of wacky or crazy, but that’s one of the most beautiful things about this work in these medicines; it takes us to a place that resides in all of us.

After that experience, Elfrink started meeting other “alternative” practitioners. He began exploring psychedelics more intentionally for himself and facilitating experiences for others who were suffering. In 2015, he took part in a psilocybin study hosted by the FDA. Today, he works as a psychedelic somatic therapist, primarily with clients suffering with complex PTSD, early childhood trauma, and pre-verbal trauma. He describes his work as focusing on helping the body process and release trauma.

For me, what’s so important is to take someone into symptom resolution, versus symptom management, where we’re constantly just trying to cover up these feelings. There’s a joke about a client of a psychiatrist or therapist saying, “I think you need to up my meds; I’m having feelings.” We’re trying to just suppress everything. And with these medicines, it allows people to go deeper into these feeling states; they can go deeper into an understanding of their life, or what has gotten them to where they are.

Elfrink is planning to open a service center in Grants Pass. His protocol will include three preparation sessions before the actual psilocybin experience and three integration sessions afterwards. In addition to facilitating the kinds of experiences that are possible with higher dosages of psilocybin, he is interested in exploring how lower doses might aid his body-centered trauma work.

What’s really important is preparation. And part of that is really just building relationship with the facilitator. So creating a rapport, creating trust. Anyone I work with, I’m sharing some about myself. And just to give them the sense, or build the confidence in me, as far as I’ve been to these places; I’ve been in some of these difficult places, and whatever shows up, I can get you through.

All eyes are on Oregon as the first groups of facilitators earn their certifications and the first service centers open later this year. Elfrink wants the roll-out be as successful as possible; this includes setting realistic expectations for people who choose to take part in psilocybin-assisted therapy.

Is it a magic pill? No, I it’s not a magic pill. And also, there’s variability in humans. The kind of wild card here is the level of complex trauma. That’s where I always go to because that’s me. And so, what happened in that early childhood? Is everyone going to have one dose and, have unity consciousness? No, probably not. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes it takes a little bit of work. Sometimes there’s the level of complexity within someone or maybe that first dose wasn’t high enough for them. So there’s going to be variables. I do have my own concern around that. Because for me, it’s all about expectations. And right now, there’s a very high expectation fed by the media, and this perpetuation of a single dose and Bob’s depression was gone forever. And that’s not always the case.

Elfrink has some advice for anyone who is considering pursuing psilocybin-assisted therapy for themselves.

I think I said this earlier about setting expectations that this can be profound work, this can be life changing work. Again, I wouldn’t be here without this work. And there’s also, it’s not a one-shot deal sometimes. Sometimes it’s going to take personal work. And sometimes there’s deeper work you have to do. It’s not going to be necessarily one and done.

Before clients can access psilocybin therapy, the state must issue licenses to the manufacturers that cultivate psilocybin and the laboratories that test it, as well as to facilitators and service centers.

Juliet Grable is a writer based in Southern Oregon and a regular contributor to JPR News.

Steve Elfrink is training to be a psilocybin facilitator through Synaptic’s Entheogenic Medicine Training Program. He plans to open a service center in Grants Pass.

Ashland Wildlife Lab Combines Forensic Science And A Horse Trailer To Confront Illegal Logging

On a recent day, Ed Espinoza stood inside a 30-foot-long trailer next to a whirring machine about the size of a commercial photocopier. The device is known as a DART time-offlight mass spectrometer.

“This is the Ferrari of mass spectrometers,” Espinoza said. “It gives us very accurate data.”

The trailer – a horse trailer-turned mobile lab – was parked outside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland. Staff here help the Fish and Wildlife Service solve crimes by doing DNA analysis on illegally sold plants and animals.

Espinoza said the mobile lab was a new attempt by forensic scientists like him to help get scientific instruments to the places where they’re most needed.

The Ashland lab is well known for its collection of taxidermied animals. A tall warehouse on site is filled with everything from scaly pangolins to tiger pelts. Over the years, Espinoza has seen trends in the illegal animal trade, including elephant ivory, bear bile used in traditional Chinese medicine and beluga sturgeon caviar from Russia. The latest trend, he said, has been timber from places like Southeast Asia, Africa and Amazonia.

Identifying The ‘Chemical Fingerprints’ Of Trees

Nearby, in one of the lab’s libraries, drawers are filled with samples of ebony and purple heart. Espinoza held up a small slab of bulnesia from Argentina, one of the world’s hardest woods.

“These samples specifically came from a very large container leaving Madagascar,” he said, showing off the contents of a long metal drawer filled with slices of rosewood.

Forensic specialists use collections like the Ashland lab’s as DNA comparisons against samples of potential illegal timber.

In the past, there’s been a gap in this sort of reference material, according to Marigold Norman, director of research at World Forest ID, an organization creating a geolocated database of wood commodities.

“It’s very difficult to say this timber came from this specific place unless you can compare it to something that actually came from there,” Norman said.

Cady Lancaster co-founded the Wood Identification and Screening Center at the Ashland lab, where she previously worked as a wildlife forensic scientist. She said forensic science helps enforce current laws by identifying illegal logging operations.

“We know it’s making it into the U.S. But unless you can prove it, you can’t catch the bad guys,” Lancaster said.

Illegal logging contributes to deforestation and biodiversity loss. It funds organized crime, according to Espinoza. And cheaper illegal logging undercuts prices for sustainably managed timber, Lancaster said.

She helped develop a method of analyzing what she described as the “chemical fingerprints” for the more than 60,000 species of trees in the world. Using a mass spectrometer allows scientists to weigh the molecules of an unknown material, which can then be matched to the lab’s database.

“We just hold a wood sliver with tweezers and let a 660-degree Fahrenheit helium ion stream blaze over the wood,” Lancaster said. “That’s going to burn the wood away, release all of the molecules into the air so they can get sucked in to the mass spec. It happens nearly instantaneously.”

Laws such as the Lacey Act and an international agreement known as CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wildlife Fauna and Flora) are meant to prevent protected tree species from being sold in the U.S. But customs authorities at ports of entry can’t easily tell if something is illegal or not without the right testing tools.

A Small Town Government Lab’s Logistical Problem

So, the chemists at the Ashland lab faced a logistical problem. They had the testing technology in the form of the mass spectrometer, but Ashland, Oregon is nowhere near a major port where containers of timber are shipped into the U.S. Should suspected illegal timber be transported to the small

Ashland is the unexpected home of the country’s only full-service forensic laboratory devoted to tracking illegally transported animals and plants.

Forensic scientist Ed Espinoza stands outside a modified horse trailerturned forensic lab at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland.

Down To Earth

Continued from previous page

Southern Oregon town? Or could they get the tool to port officials on the coast?

That’s where Espinoza’s new horse trailer came in.

Standing inside the modified trailer, he explained the key is its especially smooth ride to keep from breaking the mass spectrometer in transit. Additionally, they installed air suspension and hydraulic jacks in the bed of the truck that tows it to further absorb vibration.

“We want to make sure that it arrives in a way that it can work. We don’t want to destroy it from point A to point B,” he said.

The mobile lab also contains a digital microscope so forensic scientists can study the anatomy of wood samples as well as import permits to see if they’ve been forged. The equipment and modification cost about $600,000, Espinoza said.

Both Norman and Lancaster agreed that being able to deploy the trailer from Ashland to ports of entry will be helpful for customs agents.

“Having a scientist on hand who knows the statistics, who knows what part of the wood to ID and can bring it right back to the trailer, get you an answer in 10 minutes of ‘Oh, know we need more of this lot. Let’s keep looking into that.’ Of course, that’s going to be really powerful,” Lancaster said.

The trailer is expected to be deployed from the Ashland lab to a U.S. port of entry later this spring.

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JPR's Erik Neumann is JPR’s News Director.

Espinoza stands in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory where wood samples have been collected from around the world as references to test for potential illegally transported timber.

CHELSEA ROSE

Written In Stone

Cemeteries have long been recognized as a place where the dead can talk with the living. Headstones can communicate religion, wealth, real or perceived social standing, participation in fraternal organizations, and more. Archaeologist Jim Deetz famously organized common motifs in 17th and 18th century headstones in Massachuse recent trend of literally taking a signature recipe to the grave.

Grant, whose adventures you can follow on Instagram via @ ghostlyarchive, first discovered gravestone recipes on accident while doing a class project. Just a few years later she has gathered nearly two dozen recipes from across the US and inadvertently started a heartwarming national conversation that explores the relationship between food, death, and memory. While data is not complete, and most of the research has been crowd sourced to date, it seems that the practice of inscribing recipes on headstones is a relatively new one. The earliest one Grant has come across dates to the 1990s and the most recent at the time of our conversation was from 2019. Most recipes are sweet, and most have limited—and in some cases incomplete—directions, and they seem to have been done in isolation of each other. When Grant reached out to the families, many have expressed surprise that other headstone recipes exist.

Food, along with cooking implements and infrastructure, is something that we regularly encounter in the archaeological record. We measure past mealtimes in terms of number or weight of chicken bones or seeds, empty cans and broken jars, but we don’t often have access to the more intimate aspects of cooking or experiencing the favorite dishes of the past. Sweet things like cookies, cakes, and other treats are even more invisible in the archaeological record, as their ingredients are unlikely to survive. I recently attended a session on Culinary Archaeology at a conference and was moved by the way that Harvard PhD candidate Veronica Peterson framed the preparing and sharing of meals as “caring” for others. By acknowledging the care that so often accompanies the preparation and consumption of food, we can start to see why it is one of the foundational aspects of every culture around the world. Food comforts us, reminds us of our childhoods, our parents, our grandparents, so I guess it is only natural that it would be a favored way to connect with our lost loved ones.

I was so fascinated by the practice of setting recipes in stone as a memorial to the one that made them best, that I tried my hand at one of the recipes Grant showcased on social media. While I would consider myself a decent cook, I am a terrible baker. I shied away from the more complicated cakes and cookies and picked “Kay’s Fudge” recipe as it had just a few ingredi-

ents and seemed simple (and my grandma Nanny used to make fudge at holidays). Had I been a baker or at all versed in sweets, I would have known that making fudge from scratch is not for novices (I should have been paying more attention to Nanny in the kitchen). It turned out as terrible as a poorly formed lump of chocolate, milk, and sugar can be, but I’d like to think that Kay would have appreciated my efforts (even if I mortified my own grandmother). Regardless of the results, the project left me thinking about Kay and her family and reminded me of my own. Not just my beloved Nanny, but also about all of the times my cousin would sneak pieces of fudge out of its hiding place in the crisper drawer before it was time to serve it.

I have heard rumor that Oregon has its very own gravestone recipe, but have yet to have it confirmed. Grant’s work has reminded me that there are so many ways to engage with, and learn from, the world around us. I know I, and most likely many of you, will be keeping a sharper eye out next time I visit a cemetery. The increased attention to this relatively unknown practice will likely lead to a spike in the memorialization of favorite recipes, but I hope it will also help us to think about and share with those we care for, the things we make best.

I have heard rumor that Oregon has its very own gravestone recipe, but have yet to have it confirmed.

Chelsea Rose is an archaeologist with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) and co-host of Underground History, a monthly segment that airs during the Jefferson Exchange on JPR’s News & Information Service.

above: Rosemary Grant in front of the spritz cookie recipe that started her quest to document and try recipes inscribed on headstones across the United States.

left: Chelsea Rose with the fudge she made following Kay’s headstone recipe.

RECORDINGS

Paul Simon Wrestles With Faith On His New Concept Album Seven Psalms

In 201, Paul Simon was on World Cafe to talk about his new release So Beautiful or So What. I hadn’t really paid close attention to his career for a while, but the new music was solid and you could tell from the interview that Simon was as fully energized and passionate about it as at any point in his career. Though an elder statesman of rock and roll even 12 years ago, the album showcased the sharp lyrics, inventive rhythms and complex arrangements he’d been known for for decades. It occurred to me as I listened, that from the Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies to Greenwich Village folk to bringing music from around the world to America on his albums Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon had been making globally relevant music my entire life.

In 2016, he did it again with Stranger to Stranger. The track Wristband begins as a humorous tale of getting locked out of his own concert because he went outside and didn’t have a wristband to get back through security. By the end, the line “if you don’t have a wristband, my man, you don’t get through the door” is a political statement about privilege and elitism, signaling solidarity with marginalized and less fortunate groups.

In 2018, Simon announced that he was retiring from touring. He also released an album of re-imagined lesser known tunes from his extensive catalog – In the Blue Light. It was recorded with the help of Bryce Dessner of the band The National, the chamber orchestra yMusic, and featured Bill Frisell and Wynton Marsalis. There was some speculation at the time that he may have also decided to retire from making new music.

Whether or not he planned to retire, his inner artist wasn’t going to allow it. This month he is slated to release Seven Psalms. In a trailer for the new record and accompanying documentary – In Restless Dreams – he explains that he had a dream in January of 2019 that he was working on an album called Seven Psalms. He wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but he kept getting ideas and would wake up pre-dawn to write them down. Those notes eventually turned into the new record.

For a brief tumultuous time in the ’80s, Paul Simon was married to the late Carrie Fisher. She talks about it in her one-woman show Wishful Drinking, concluding that even if you’re not represented in a positive light, you should never pass up an opportunity to have Paul Simon write a song about you “he’s so good at it.” Fast forward to the present and Seven Psalms is about his relationship with the universe. “This whole piece is really an argument I’m having with myself about belief, or not.” Also suggesting “the limitation of your belief always tends to be tied to your conception of your mortality.” With a body of work featuring psychological deep dives, self-reflection and biting

social commentary, his observations on creation itself have the potential to be illuminating and thought provoking.

He’s joined this time by the British vocal group VOCES8 and Edie Brickell (his wife) makes a guest appearance. All of the music is performed on acoustic instruments. It’s produced by Paul Simon and Kyle Crushman whose work includes albums with Edie Brickell, Ben Harper, Salim Nourallah, and Natalie Maines. Though it’s broken into seven distinct tracks, or “movements” the 33-minute album is meant to be listened to in its entirety.

Seven Psalms is scheduled for release on May 19 on CD, vinyl and on streaming platforms. Because it’s a concept album, we’re going to act a little like our friends across the hall in Classics & News, and present the entire piece on Open Air a few times before we start playing the individual cuts. Check our Facebook and Instagram pages and listen to Open Air for more details.

“This whole piece is really an argument I’m having with myself about belief, or not.” – Paul Simon

Dave Jackson is JPR’s Music Director and host of Open Air.

DAVE JACKSON

MILK STREET

CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL

Lemon and Shrimp Risotto with Fresh Basil

This is our version of the rich, intensely flavored risotto di limone that Giovanna Aceto taught us to make in Amalfi, Italy. In an unusual twist, the risotto is finished with an egg yolk and a couple tablespoons of cream, giving the rice a lush, velvety taste and texture. To create a flavorful broth for simmering the risotto, we steep the shrimp shells and strips of lemon zest in water, and for citrus notes that register at every level, we stir in bright, puckery lemon juice and floral, fragrant grated zest just before serving. If you purchase shrimp that are already shelled, bottled clam juice is a fine substitute. Bring two 8-ounce bottles clam juice, 3 cups water, ½ teaspoon salt and the zest strips to a simmer in the saucepan and cook, covered, for 10 minutes to infuse, then strain as directed.

TIP: Don’t uncover the pot for at least 5 minutes after adding the shrimp. Lifting the lid releases some of the residual heat that’s needed to cook the shrimp.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

45 MINUTES

Ingredients

2 lemons

2 teaspoons plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided, plus more to serve 12 ounces extra-large (21/25 per pound) shrimp, peeled (shells reserved), deveined and patted dry kosher salt

1 small yellow onion, finely chopped

1 cup carnaroli or arborio rice

½ cup dry white wine

1 large egg yolk

2 tablespoons heavy cream

½ cup loosely packed fresh basil, roughly chopped

Directions

Using a vegetable peeler (preferably a Y-style peeler), remove the zest from 1 of the lemons in long, wide strips; try to remove only the colored portion of the peel, not the bitter white pith just underneath. Using a rasp-style grater, grate the zest from the remaining lemon; set aside separately. Halve the lemons and squeeze ¼ cup juice; set the juice aside.

In a medium saucepan over medium, heat 2 teaspoons oil until shimmering. Add the shrimp shells and cook, stirring constantly, until pink, 1 to 2 minutes. Add 5 cups water, the zest strips and ½ teaspoon salt, then bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce to low and cook for 10 minutes. Pour the broth through a strainer set over a medium bowl; rinse out the pan. Press on the solids to extract as much liquid as possible, then discard. Return the broth to the pan, cover and set over low to keep warm.

In a large Dutch oven over medium-high, heat 1 tablespoon of oil until shimmering. Add the onion and ¼ teaspoon salt, then cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, 6 to 7 minutes. Add the rice and cook, stirring, until the grains are translucent at the edges, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the wine and cook, stirring occasionally, until the pan is almost dry, about 3 minutes. Add 3 cups of the hot broth and cook, stirringoften and briskly, until a spoon drawn through the mixture leaves a trail, 10 to 12 minutes.

Add the remaining broth and cook, stirring, until the rice is tender, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the shrimp. Cover and let stand until the shrimp are opaque throughout, 5 to 7 minutes.

Stir in the remaining 1 tablespoon oil, the lemon juice, egg yolk, cream, basil, and the grated zest. The risotto should be loose but not soupy; if needed, stir in water 1 tablespoon at a time to achieve the proper consistency. Taste and season with salt. Serve drizzled with additional oil.

POETRY

JANE SLAMA

My Father’s Watch

No longer able to be worn, one lug broken beyond repair, it now sits on a table by the bathtub timing my long evening soaks— a magazine in hand just above the water line.

He would have been amused to see his watch so placed. A strict father during my childhood, he later shed his tough bark to reveal a deep crimson heartwood.

His kept his watch in a leather case on his dresser, along with his wallet and keys, always in the same place, never one to swerve from a course once set or lose what he most needed.

When I found it, after his kidneys stopped, the battery had exhausted itself, the thin black hands paused mid hour, like an unfinished sentence or thought, like the last goodbye I always expected to say, but couldn’t.

Now they sweep across the large round face speaking in their sign language about the many ways we mark time, its starts and pauses, its relentless pace, and the constant pulse of memory it animates.

Floating

November evening. I glide like a skiff over the balmy surface of a pool. Above me on air currents two crows drift, their black wings open like hands—dutiful. How many times have I known this? My dream and waking moments splice gently, neatly together in this warm water. It seems I’ve been floating across a vast great sea, arms spread in tandem with dark wings above. Years like mysterious undercurrents have pulled me up and down the shores of love, which slowly the sea claims with assurance.

Jane Slama lives just beyond the city boundary of Grants Pass, Oregon. She has been a college instructor in literature and writing, teaching in California and Oregon. Most recently she taught at Rogue Community College. In 2020 she published In This Country: A Chronicle of the Cuyama Valley, a historical look at the little-known California valley she lived in before returning to Southern Oregon.

Writers may submit original poetry for publication in Jefferson Journal

Email 3–6 poems, a brief bio, and your mailing address in one attachment to jeffmopoetry@gmail. com , or send 3–6 poems, a brief bio, and a selfaddressed, stamped envelope to:

Amy Miller, Poetry Editor Jefferson Journal

1250 Siskiyou Blvd

Please allow eight Ashland, OR 97520 weeks for reply.

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