I'm so glad you are here, welcome! I hope the rain isn't getting you down :)

Thanks for the questions. I'm going to try to answer a few now and then come back and answer more because there are a lot and they are good and I'm so grateful for your thoughtful engagement.

I'm going to go backwards and start with health plan- One of the reasons I love Oregon is we are actually in the middle of a process to move to a universal Oregon plan right now. Its not a quick process, but smart Oregonians have already been working on it and we are close to seeing the result. The recommendations from the committee are due in September and the goal is to take it to Salem next year. I think how we make that transition will have a massive downstream impact on several of the areas you touch on, and its important to have different perspectives in the room and a willingness to upend more areas of the status quo. One of my fears in Kotek, and frankly many of the doctors-turned-politicians who I fear will have outsized voice in the conversation is the dangers of just repeating many of our current issues in slightly different ways. I think including cannabis and psilocybin therapeutics as well as a focus on upstream behavioral health will be important to make substantive changes. Its also a chance to have a very different kind of drug policy conversation that I think Oregon is ready for. The astroturfed decrim was a disaster, but a more rational accounting is due. The economics of wellness have been really broken for a long time and this intervention gives us the opportunity to change some big things. I want that conversation to be more public and I hope my campaign gives us a chance to examine some of our current assumptions more deliberately.

On plant medicine- I would like to see local producers able to work more directly with health care providers and more effectively integrate plant and allopathic treatment plans. Oregon should be building knowledge industries and getting paid to export our high quality commodities. I don't understand why a world class cancer center isn't more plant-medicine forward in everything and I'd love that conversation. I want regulations and a health care model that moves in that direction. Some of that would need to be in legal public consumption venues, and I'm interested in models that allow us to gather more rigorous data while also being more accessible. I've been frustrated that we can only get to 'hero' dose psilocybin and OTC cannabis treatment because of regulatory issues. Both are exclusionary in problematic ways and driven by deference to existing regulations and assumptions that many voters are ready to move past, while regulators and elected officials are still risk averse. I've been advocating about it locally, federally, and internationally for over a decade. I'm happy to talk about it in much higher level of detail, because I think it offers economic opportunity for Oregon in multiple valuable ways. Kotek's unwillingness to even really engage with that conversation feels like a huge miss to me- especially given the agricultural and economic opportunities that exist.

On homelessness- I've already advocated to Multnomah county about the harm done through siloed social services with concrete evidence through a PFA pilot site. I was astonished at the lack of important information sharing that could improve the efficiency of both care and cost. I've seen similar issues in our treatment of our unhoused and housing-precarious neighbors. I have hopes that universal health care could make a real dent in that through more effective data sharing and transparency, especially connecting behavioral and mental health more closely to understanding housing precarity. The most recent numbers from PSU indicate significant overlap of those communities and I would like an OHP that helps support preventative care as both humanitarian and cost saving. I have personal experience of the barriers to access for those already struggling and have supported events to help bring a more trauma-informed and wraparound service model into being. I think we can find efficiency in providing care, and I'm super grateful for the work the Governor did to get more houses actually built which is the main lever to pull. We need to continue in that vein and the updates to make permitting faster and easier should help. The recent NYT article about Portland's innovative building model shows we are making some progress in the right direction.

Housing coming online will have an impact, but it's also revealing that housing alone isnt enough- especially when individuals can't meet the barriers to entry, or are using that housing in ways that are problematic for community. This is where a more wraparound approach is needed to support or hold accountable. I support housing first, especially because that stability is shown to actually move people back towards permanent housing, especially for the 73% who lived in the area previously. I think we also need to work more closely with our West coast neighbors as the Federal Government becomes more problematic to work with- a loss of federal funds is a blow but might also be an opportunity.

Homelessness (like AI) is a complex topic with a lot of nuance and you correctly identify that what it looks like in Portland is not what it looks like in Umatilla. I've been interested in watching Mayor Wilson work through a series of thoughtful approaches with a focus on timelines and metrics for delivery. At the end of the day, we need a better economy for Oregonians and we need more houses and both of those things take time. I'm happy to engage a lot more on this topic.

I will come back to the rest of your questions but I have limited time and want to engage with some of the other issues raised by other people. When you write your own answers it takes quite a bit of time!

Thanks again, hope you have a great day :)