Fresh Air - Oregon's Drug Decriminalization Experiment

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

In 2020, Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved to decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs, and mandate more spending on drug treatment and social services. But 3.5 years of frustration, with overdose deaths and open air drug use, has turned public opinion around, and lawmakers have restored criminal penalties. We'll speak with New Yorker contributing writer E. Tammy Kim, who traveled through the state speaking with activists, treatment providers, police, lawmakers and drug users about the experience, and the ongoing debate over how to respond to America's drug crisis.Also, Kevin Whitehead remembers classical and pop singer Sarah Vaughan on the 100th anniversary of her birth.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 2020, voters in Oregon overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs, including fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. The initiative was accompanied by new investments in addiction treatment and support services. The move was hailed by national drug reform advocates who've long condemned the so-called war on drugs as a self-defeating policy that filled prisons, disproportionately harmed the poor and communities

of color, and failed to deter drug use. But three and a half years later, public opinion has turned against the groundbreaking approach, and the state legislature has acted to restore criminal penalties for hard drugs. The state experienced rising overdose deaths and high rates of drug use, and open-air drug use in streets, parks, and camping areas unnerved many residents. Our guest, journalist E. Tammy Kim, wrote about the Oregon experience in The New Yorker, speaking with activists, treatment providers, police, lawmakers, and drug users, among others. Kim is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, covering labor in the workplace, arts and culture, poverty in politics, and the Koreas.

She previously worked as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a staff writer for Al Jazeera America. Kim is an attorney who worked in New York for low-wage workers and families facing medical debt before entering journalism. Her January story in The New Yorker is titled A Drug Decriminalization Fight Erupts in Oregon. Well, Itami Kim, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. So let's set the stage for this story.

November 2020, Oregon embarks on this dramatic decriminalization of hard drugs in small amounts. This was approved in a statewide voter referendum, so it wasn't just legislature. The voters had their say. You wrote that this was inspired by a sense of desperation. Meaning what? This came at a time, obviously, during the pandemic, but also right after the reckoning over the summer with Black Lives Matter's protests being the largest in our nation's history. People were thinking about drug use and the addiction crisis, the opioid crisis, in a new and different way. I think in Oregon, the way that played out was people were seeing rising rates of overdose deaths, fentanyl was coming into the market. And the previous program, which was really a sort of law enforcement-based program, as

it has historically been in this country, wasn't working. And I think in combination with this sort of sense of the Black Lives Matter movement saying, let's reevaluate our relationship to law enforcement more generally, people were wanting to try something new. The form that that took was Measure 110, which was a ballot initiative that was developed both by national harm reduction and sort of criminal justice advocates, but also local activists and organizations who were interested in a new approach to the war on drugs. Right. Now, this didn't legalize hard drugs per se, right? What exactly did it provide? It didn't. It decriminalized, which essentially meant that it took away the sort of usual policing power around use, so public use of drugs, and possession of small amounts of illicit drugs.

In Oregon, meth has always been sort of the most popular illicit drug on the street. But of course, like the rest of the country, opioids have come in very strong over the past decade or so. And then kind of in distinction to the Midwest and the Northeast, where fentanyl already a decade ago was sort of overtaking oxycodone and heroin. We saw this happening sort of right before the pandemic in Oregon. And so what Measure 110 did on the policing side was to say to the police, we're not going to arrest people anymore for possession. You're going to give them an option where they can pay a fine or they can call a hotline and

sort of submit to an encounter to get counseling around treatment. Right. So you'd get a ticket and then you'd either pay $100 fine or make this call and get sort of an on-the-phone evaluation. So not a heavy burden. That's correct. Right. But there was more to this than the enforcement change, right? There was also supposed to be additional funding for what? Exactly. So Measure 110 sort of taking a sort of bird's eye view of it has two big prongs.

So one is this change in law enforcement, so the decriminalization prong. And the other prong was a massive infusion of money from recreational marijuana tax dollars primarily to fund a treatment and harm reduction infrastructure across the state. A curious thing about Oregon is I think nationally we really think of it as a very progressive place with really advanced social services, a welfare state that's quite developed. And yet Oregon has ranked towards the bottom by some rankings 49th in the country in terms of access to behavioral and mental health services. So it was sort of starting from a place of being very behind in the ability of people who wanted to get out of addiction to seek that treatment. And this was going to cure that was the plan.

Right. Anybody who knows folks who've suffered with this knows that it's not easy to find treatment when you need it. And sometimes you need it right away. Absolutely. When someone's ready, you want to be able to find treatment when you need it, and sometimes you need it right away. Absolutely. When someone's ready, you want to be able to respond. And you need it multiple times usually also. Right, right, right. Now, in addition to traditional outpatient and inpatient treatment, there was this new notion of what is called harm reduction. It's a different kind of activity to deal with this issue.

You want to just explain what it means? Yeah. So what we wanted, what I was doing in this story was sort of looking at what does it mean to get treatment and on the treatment prong of Measure 110, what was the kind of evolution in the thinking and the science around what the money would fund. And as you just said, you know, I think there's this TV version of sort of what it looks like to get out of alcohol or drug use. And it's kind of a Betty Ford clinic, right, where you check into a residential center and you're kind of separated from your family and friends. You do a 90-day, you know, session, let's say, and then you kind of get out and go on your way. That's

representing actually quite a limited part of the treatment infrastructure. And what we actually have and has developed over the past few decades is this kind of continuum of care, which looks at people who aren't yet ready to give up drug and alcohol use. They need instead a safe place to perhaps do those drugs. They need supplies so that they don't get sick. You know, I think the key example for this is the free needles or needle exchange programs, which came about really in the AIDS crisis to combat the transmission of AIDS, HIV, and hep C. And, you know, so, but in addition to that, now people are using different kinds of drugs, consuming drugs in different ways. And so harm reduction might be, for example, giving out

cookers or pipes that are safe and have been sanitized for people. So this is all to say, like on the side of people who aren't yet ready to go into a recovery or treatment program, you want to reduce the harm to themselves and to others, and then also infuse services that are more along the kind of traditional path of treatment. Right. And it's a less judgmental way to deal with people who have this issue. And it also connects them to treatment if they're ready, right? The idea is that you're talking to somebody and you're somebody who knows how to get you somewhere if you really want to get into a rehab or something. You know, a lot of people know that Portland is a place where politics are progressive and there's a lot of tolerance for unhoused people and people dealing with addiction. Things changed there. But the law was statewide.

And you looked at a community called Medford in southwest Oregon. You want to just talk about what some of the developments were that were troubling to some folks, and we'll get into some of the reasons for them. So what was the experience? What arose there that created issues for citizens of Medford and Jackson County? I think on the policing side, the police had always played a very important role in the treatment infrastructure, if we can call it that. So before Measure 110, police would make arrests for misdemeanors and felonies related to drugs, obviously, and some of those were for possession, simple possession by users. The way the police saw themselves was they would make those arrests, they would bring people to the county jail, and at the jail as a kind of interface point for social services and

at the courthouse, they saw themselves as funneling people into treatment. You know, I think on the other side, obviously, the critics of that would say, well, you were creating harm just by arresting people and putting them in jail, and the jail and the court system was never really a good place for people to get treatment. There's an old adage in recovery and addiction, which is, you know, you can't get better until you're ready, and that, you know, you really need to do this voluntarily. And so there's always been in that kind of dynamic. Another thing that was going on in Southern Oregon was a steep rise in homelessness. Obviously, we've seen this across the country through the hardship of the pandemic, the mental health strains, all know, sort of this strange system, fentanyl coming in, which is incredibly addictive and incredibly cheap and incredibly deadly. And then this,

you know, rise of homelessness and a backlash against homelessness. And so I think the way that Southern Oregon was then experiencing this huge policy change under Measure 110 was, hey, Measure 110 happened when all of these bad things were happening. Therefore, it seems like Measure 110 might have caused these bad things. Right. Measure 110 being the referendum which provided for the decriminalization of hard drugs. You mentioned that there was increasing encampments of unhoused people at a greenway there in the area. And police now, under the new rules, could not apprehend people for using drugs. And so people could do it openly. What did local citizens see that they found so

troubling here? That's correct. I think there was a kind of twinning in people's minds of homelessness and the sort of physical messiness of homelessness and the sort of physical, you know, messiness of homelessness and drug use. And under the decriminalization of drugs in Oregon, people were then essentially not able to be arrested for using drugs in public. You know, it wasn't just that they couldn't possess drugs, but that they couldn't, it wasn't just that they were able to possess drugs in public and not be arrested. It was that they could essentially use drugs in public and not be arrested. And so that did lead to more encounters by sort of, you know, your average people, your average families who were experiencing public places with drugs and drug use. You know, we know that drug use occurs in every socioeconomic stratum. And if you have a home, if you have a place to use drugs, you're not as vulnerable,

obviously, to law enforcement. But if you're using drugs in public, you know, you can be policed, but you can also have really uncomfortable interactions with people who don really amped up on uppers like meth would then have a really strong feeling about, hey, I don't think decriminalization is working and this is actually making me and my community feel less safe. One point I believe you wrote that the government of Medford, I guess the city council, enacted a tough anti-camping ordinance, right? What happened there? So yeah, the Medford city council and the Jackson County Commissioners in this area, they wanted to crack down on what they called basically unauthorized camping. And what this

was was a sort of combination of people who were gathering in public because they had lost housing or people who had already been homeless but were gathering in new areas because of displacement from wildfires. There was a number of reasons why people were sort of moving around, but that their homelessness was becoming more visible to people. And so at the same time that the police felt that they couldn't really interact with people in terms of their drug use, they were interacting with people much more in terms of their homelessness and basically prohibiting them from sleeping outside, from gathering in large groups. And this did, in a couple of instances, lead to observed harms. Activists in the area attribute the death of a

man who was sleeping outside to this kind of policing. Who froze to death, right? Who froze to death, yeah. Who froze to death, yeah. He was found in the morning. There were complaints about crime. Any way to evaluate that? Was there more crime with the growth of these encampments and, you know, the open-air drug use?

One of the reasons it was hard to evaluate the asserted rise in crime rates was because before the decriminalization of drugs, a lot of drug arrests weren't simply drug arrests per se. They were drug arrests that were made in connection with other sorts of crimes like theft or other sorts of small, petty of usually economic crimes. And I think one of the things that people were saying after the passage of Measure 110 was that there were kind of more people on the street who felt comfortable doing drugs and who also felt comfortable committing acts of petty theft and violence. It was difficult for me to sort of disaggregate, at least in the data that I was looking at, about whether that was true or whether that was a perception or whether the police were being sort of more vigilant about documenting those crimes as opposed to drug crimes now that they weren't working on those cases anymore.

You know, you just used the phrase petty theft and violence. I mean, some might wonder what is petty violence. I guess I would group some of this under perceptions of disorder. So a thing that I heard repeatedly, like in Medford and Portland, Ben, Eugene, Salem, these different cities across the state was there's all these people on meth who are kind of running around naked or they are waving knives around. So this sort of thing where it wasn't necessarily that people were being assaulted, but they felt threatened by really disturbing things they were seeing on the streets. And I don't mean to say that that isn't disturbing.

I think that there was a lot of harm caused by what people saw with this increased use in public. You know, one of the things I liked about your story was its exploration of a debate among various folks who, in good faith, want to help drug users get clean and want to help deal with this problem in a constructive way. There are different beliefs about what works and what doesn't. Maybe we should just start with an organization called Stab and Wagon. It's director Melissa Jones who sounded like she was a pretty compelling figure. Tell us what the organization and she were up to.

Melissa Jones and Stab and Wagon are on – if we have a sort of gradient of services, are on kind of the more radical and political edge of harm reduction. And it's a group that basically owes all of its funding to Measure 110, to this experiment in Oregon. So for me, it was interesting to look at because it was part of the promise of Measure 110, which was that we're going to try new things. And Melissa Jones and Stabenwagen were trying new things in this community. Most of what people saw of Stabin Wagon's work was the distribution of safe use supplies and safe sex supplies and in-person outreach, delivery of meals through a white cargo van that Melissa and her staff kind of drive around town and park near where people are unhoused. And so, you know, I think for people who benefited from these services, it was a real godsend, and they felt very seen and heard by these people who weren't there to judge their drug use. But for more conservative people in town, they saw this as a representation of a very misguided social program, which is, hey, you're enabling drug use. Why are these state dollars that we voted for to fund treatment going to essentially helping people stay in their use?

Now, there's another point of view that you're right about. Some who are more traditional treatment providers who think that addicts need some pressure to enter treatment. I mean, that pressure can come from obviously circumstances in their own lives, from loved ones and relatives, but also the threat of jail where there are alternatives to going to jail, particularly treatment alternatives, can be effective. Give us a sense of how that debate played out here. Another provider that I talk about in my story is Summer Walcott, who is the director of OnTrack, which is a sort of large social services agency in

Southern Oregon. And Summer is not at all an opponent of harm reduction. There is harm reduction sort of built into the treatment and recovery services that her organization provides. However, in some ways, her approach is quite traditional. I mean, the end goal for her interaction with their clients is recovery, to come out of addiction, to come out of drug use. They also partner with the local police in outreach to homeless people and to people who are using on the streets. So for example, on-track employees who themselves are usually recovered people who are using drugs will go out with Medford police officers and approach people who are using and say, hey,

do you want to get into treatment? What are your needs? You know, do you need housing, this sort of thing. And, you know, again, the supply of social services is very limited, but they would sort of make that offer and try to do counseling. And so, but there was, you know, there was this contrast between what OnTrack was doing and what groups like Stabenwagen were doing. And I think from the OnTrack perspective, they have seen thousands of clients go through treatment and recovery. They believe it can be done, and they just felt that they needed more resources to do that. And they, too, were sort of confused about, well, where is the Measure 110 money going, and is it overprivileging the distribution, for example,

of safe use supplies when really we should be having more sober homes, more recovery housing, more inpatient treatment and outpatient treatment? We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We're speaking with E. Tammy Kim. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her January story is titled, A Drug Decriminalization Fight Erupts in Oregon. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. Hi there, it's Tanya Mosley, here to share more about my new series of Fresh Air Plus bonus episodes. I love when he casts his mom in movies. It feels so authentic. I know. You know, she was also in the film Goodfellas, which I also love.

I need to get that screenplay, by the way. I don't have that one. For the next few weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, I'll be talking about all of my favorite movies with my colleague Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you want to hear what movies I love and which screenplays I actually own and use as creative direction, sign up for Fresh Air Plus at plus.npr.org. It seems that although this measure, which decriminalized hard drugs and provided for investments in treatment, it took quite a while for that funding to get going for reasons that are actually pretty understandable, I guess, right? Right. That is perhaps the poison pill of this experiment in Oregon, which is that

decriminalization went into effect right away, and the amped up treatment infrastructure took about a year and a half to get going, essentially. So it took more than a year for the promised funding to begin rolling out to organizations across Oregon. Part of that was this sort of bureaucratic issue that the organization responsible for doling out that money was also responsible for dealing with COVID. It was the Oregon Health Authority. And they were incredibly overwhelmed. It was very difficult to hire also for drug and alcohol counselors. So many things that we kind of know about because of the pandemic economy were undermining the ability of this agency to implement this program. I think another thing that is sort of telling just kind of thinking about this as a public policy experiment is

this is a program that came to be because of voters in our most sort of direct democratic process of a ballot initiative. However, what that meant also was that there wasn't necessarily institutional buy-in or a kind of institutional advocate for the program. So, you know, many government officials, including at the Oregon Health Authority, would sort of explain this to me as, hey, we didn't, you know, want this. We didn't ask for this. It was foisted upon us by the voters. And now we're kind of rushing to implement this. And it's not fast.

It goes slow. That's so interesting. So, yeah, like if it's the governor's pet project, then it gears it up. In this case, she gears it up. But if it's the voters telling you to do it, then it takes a while for government programs to get up because there are all of these rules that are established to prevent self-dealing and cronyism and waste. And you've got to give everybody their chance to have their say. And there's competitive bidding. And it all takes a while under the best of circumstances. And with COVID, it was going to be slow. You write that the money distributed through this measure was both a lot and not very much. What did you mean?

About $300 million over a period of time was allocated from the marijuana taxes towards treatment and recovery. Sounds like a huge amount of money, but obviously that needs to be distributed statewide. There were also allocations to tribes. So, you know, just kind of jurisdictionally, like everybody gets a piece, but it's very spread out. Then on top of that, if you're thinking about inpatient or outpatient treatment, these are very expensive programs. And Medicaid will often cover parts of that, but the sort of health parts of that. In addition, you also need to figure out where people are going to live and what they're going to eat while they're going

through these programs. And so if you're thinking about kind of a holistic response and kind of taking a person who is trying to get out of addiction from, you know, zero to 10, this is very costly. And so I think, you know, there were huge expectations placed on this experiment. And yet it was an experiment that kind of wasn't funded to address all of those hopes and dreams. hearing in the legislature, which essentially became a debate over the merits of the decriminalization measure. What complaints did lawmakers hear about it? And then let's talk about what was offered in its defense. First of all, those who favored reversing this move, what did they tell them? Most of the people who were speaking to lawmakers against Measure 110 talked about public use and about perceived increases in dangerous drugs. Certainly business owners also were talking about, you know, people sleeping in front of

their properties and getting rowdy in front of those properties, harassing, you know, patrons of their businesses. And so what was interesting is I think especially listening to the people testify from Portland was that part of that is also just the fact that Portland's downtown has been vacated since the pandemic. You know, there are no office workers there anymore. And so it has this sort of vacant quality. And that is going to be, you know, those empty spaces then have been filled by people without homes. And so, again, we're just seeing kind of like this lab experiment be infiltrated by all of these different factors that weren't sort of anticipated at the time. And those who wanted to defend the decriminalization initiative, what did they say in its defense? The defenders had generally two arguments. One is that the treatment and recovery and harm reduction

infrastructure is expanding and working and that they were seeing it every day. And there are countless examples of people in new detox facilities, recovery homes, in new treatment programs, in new family counseling programs, where they had great stories of their clients. And then I think the second prong is the racial justice element. Oregon is a fairly white state. However, the disproportionality statistics around drug enforcement, arrests, incarceration, to some extent, those are, you know, very skewed against Black, Latino, Native people in particular. And there was a call, like, from a man named Larry Turner, who I quote, who has been doing racial justice work in Portland for

a very long time in the African American community, saying, why have we given the drug war decades to do its thing? And now, two, three years into this great experiment, we're going to already cut the cord. You know, we need more time to see this out. It is working for our community. And if we reverse it, we're going to go back to the kinds of racial disproportionality that we saw before. So legislative leaders said, you know, we have to have some change and a package of legislation was passed. Let's talk about what it does. I mean, what does it do in terms of, you know, rules for possession of these hard drugs? The bills, there are two bills that were just passed by the Oregon legislature, and one of them essentially recriminalizes. And so we're going back to the pre-measure 110 status quo, where it is a misdemeanor to possess small amounts of illicit

drugs. This sets a jail term of about six months, but there is a kind of opt-in program that counties can decide on that's called like deflection or diversion, where if somebody says, I'm going to go into treatment and kind of follows through with a treatment and recovery regimen, then the misdemeanor can be wiped out and they don't do jail time. And so that is the kind of, you know, harm reduction promise built into it. However, again, that part of this law is not mandatory. And so it's kind of customizable county by county. The other bill in this package drives $211 million additional dollars, which is quite a lot to, again, to beef up the treatment infrastructure. This recriminalization doesn't do away with the treatment

and recovery part of Measure 110 exactly. And so the funding that was going to providers will stay in place and the $211 million newly allocated will support that. And so, you know, of course, always like the devil in the details, we have to see how this is going to be implemented. I think advocates of the 2020 experiment are devastated and feel like this is just going back to the traditional drug war. But lawmakers have been taking pains to say, no, this is not exactly the same. We're just trying to do this in a more efficient way that, you know, lets law enforcement in again to help people on their way to treatment. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with E. Tammy

Kim. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her January story is titled A Drug Decriminalization Fight Erupts in Oregon. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is Fresh Air. You know, the Drug Policy Alliance, which is a national organization, which heavily supported the decriminalization initiative in 2020 and has criticized this, has advocated changes in a lot of different states. And I think the idea was that success in Oregon would inspire more change in other states across the country. What do you think the impact will be in other states now that we're considering changes? This is a huge setback for the harm reduction and sort of drug reform movements. Yes, Oregon was supposed to sort of pave the way for similar changes in other places.

You know, the movement was eyeing California and Maine and Vermont. I think most of those efforts now are going to have a very hard time getting off the ground because of the negative press coverage and this sort of general perception that what was tried in Oregon did not work. The Oregon model also is often referred to as kind of being based on the Portugal model, you know, Portugal being a country where there has been a long history of pretty positive experiment with decriminalization and infusion of services. And so, you know, I think now that people think, well, decriminalizing just, you know, sort of isn't going to work anywhere, we probably won't see as many proposals in other states. You know, police officers have been frustrated for many years with arresting people for minor drug offenses and spending a lot of time going to court and then nothing really seems to change.

You talked to some police officers and prosecutors. What sense did you get of how they feel about criminal penalties for possession? The police officers I spoke to were not enthusiastic about policing for a minor possession. You know, they obviously want to be engaged with more significant crimes and that is the kind of demand from the community that, you know, obviously they're responding to calls for major robberies and physical assaults, etc. However, they felt offended that they no longer had much of a role to play after decriminalization went into effect. Because, again, I think they have in many cases seen instances where they are as opposed to other methods occurring

in all kinds of communities. I'm in Philadelphia where there's a big battle here over one neighborhood that has a lot of open-air drug markets. And one of the things that struck me as I've observed the debate is that sometimes I would see harm reduction advocates make a very persuasive case that what they're doing, which is providing clean needles and safe injection, is going to keep users alive. It's going to help them get more of them into treatment. But it's definitely going to reduce harm to the users.

But they don't really address the community that feels besieged whose kids have to, you know, walk through needles on the sidewalk and step over people, you know, shooting up and these kinds of things. And sometimes community advocates, you know, talk about what they're seeing, but they don't really address what, you know, what will be good for these folks who are afflicted with addiction. I don't know what the question here is, but it just – it seems a really difficult debate. Yeah, I think you've honed in on such a key, kind of the emotional key to this whole question. And for my reporting, I went to Vancouver, British Columbia, which having drug users who are involved in policymaking, decriminalizing drugs. They did that in 2022.

But that doesn't mean that the streets are, you know, sunny and everybody has a good middle class job and there's no problems. I mean, there's going to be a collision on the street because people are poor, because people are living in desperate circumstances, because people have mental health issues, all sorts of things. And when you throw drugs into that mix, it's a very difficult encounter. I think your question highlights the need for strong institutional leadership, whether that comes from provincial or state, county, or national leaders to say, yes, we need to respect the human rights of drug users and harm reduction is science and policy. And so are these sorts of treatment mechanisms. At the same time, we need to figure out how to respect people's desired quality of life on the streets where they live and

walk. And, you know, I think a lot of this actually boils down to the question of homelessness policy and housing policy, because, again, it's this question of where are people who use drugs supposed to use drugs, because they are going to continue to use drugs. Well, Itami Kim, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. Really appreciate your time. Itami Kim is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her January story is titled A Drug Decriminalization Fight Erupts in Oregon.

Coming up, Kevin Whitehead remembers jazz and classical and pop singer Sarah Vaughan on the 100th anniversary of her birth. This is Fresh Air. Jazz and pop and classical singer Sarah Vaughan was born 100 years ago today in Newark, New Jersey. As a girl, she sang in church in Newark before breaking into show business at New York's Apollo Theater after winning on Amateur Night there. She apprenticed in the Earl Hines and Billy Eckstein big bands, and then she was off and running. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead picks up the story. Sarah Vaughan, 1954.

She'd come up in the 1940s alongside a new jazz style she instantly took to, bebop, with its defiant wrong notes and offbeat phrasing. She shared bandstands with bop mastermind Dizzy Gillespie, who was always ready to explain his concepts. Vaughn, who had big ears and played good piano, could follow the logic. The boppers played fast but also loved slow ballads, which were Sarah Vaughan's real forte, from early hits like Tenderly to her late period closer Send in the Clowns. With Dizzy in 1945, she recorded her first version of Loverman. This is the bridge. I've heard it said that the thrill of romance could be like a heavenly dream. I go to bed with a prayer that you make love to me, strange as it seems.

At 21, Sarah Vaughan was still developing her gorgeous vocal timbre and exquisite control of her pitch, dynamics, and vibrato. Her manner was rough when she started out, but within a few years she acquired an air of sophistication and absolute confidence in her ability to swoop and plunge at will. She put that bebop knowledge to use. This is from her 1954 Lover Man, nine years later. Can be like a heavenly dream I go to bed With a prayer

That you'll make love to me Strange as it seems By the 1950s, Sarah Vaughan was making jazz records with big and small bands and songs for the pop market with strings or maybe goofy electric guitar. A couple of tunes she hated became hits she'd reluctantly take requests for. One night, very, very late in a Chicago club, at the end of a live recording session, she did her best to ruin take after take of a tune she plainly didn't want to do, Bob Hope's theme, Thanks for the Memory. She sabotaged the ending with pointed humor. We did have fun and no harm done.

So thanks for the most craziest, upset and downside-est recording date I ever had in my life. Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-dee. Da-da-da-da-da-da. I'm so glad that it's over. Her label released that mess anyway. In the 1960s, Sarah Vaughan continued to record both jazz and pop. One good thing about singing contemporary pop,

folks already know how those songs go. That could make even her minor variations on a familiar tune stand out. Tall and tan and young and handsome The boy from Ipanema goes a-walkin' And when he passes, each one he passes goes Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah When he walks, he's like a soundball That swings so cool and sways so gentle That when he passes, each one he passes goes Sarah Vaughn in 1964. She'd engaged more seriously with Brazilian music on sessions recorded in Rio

de Janeiro in the late 70s. But first came some lean times. Venerable jazz stars like her recorded less often in the 1970s, and Vaughn sometimes found herself without a contract. But her reputation continued to grow. Earlier in her career, she'd drawn comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald. Now she got compared to operatic diva Leontine Price, one of Vaughn's heroes. She began adding symphonic concerts to her schedule. In later years, Vaughn's jazz variations might grow even more extravagant. Here she is in 1979. They just don't understand Living for you

Is easy living It's easy to live When you're in love And I'm too in love There's nothing in life but you Sarah Vaughan's extraordinarily supple voice held out into the 1980s, though she never pampered it. She didn't warm up before a show,

though she might have a cigarette or a drink or even a meal before going on. Singers aren't supposed to do that. Sarah Vaughan made her final album in 1987, a Brazilian tinge date very much of its time in contrast to her ageless voice. She died of cancer in 1990 at 66. Musicologist Gunther Schuller once called Sarah Vaughan the greatest vocal artist of the 20th century. Well, art shouldn't be a competition. Enough to say she was one of the very best singers in any genre for four decades. tomorrow Tell me when will I hear from my people Tell me when will I hear from my friends

Bleeding fine deep down in my heart No one ever can treat us apart Holding on to a teardrop of sun In the mouth of the night Kevin Whitehead is the author of the books Play the Way You Feel, The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, Why Jazz, and New Dutch Swing. Before we wrap up the show, Terry is with us, and she has something to say. Thanks, Dave. Yeah, I'm sorry to say that Kevin has decided to step down from his role as Fresh Air's jazz critic.

Believe me, we tried and failed to get him to change his mind. He's been our jazz critic since September 1987. I don't know why he'd think that's time enough. In the world of jazz criticism, Kevin stands out for his deep knowledge of jazz history and his excitement about new performers, including from the jazz avant-garde. Personally, I'm grateful for the music he's introduced me to and for his insights. I'm also a fan of his writing. He has an ability to describe what's happening musically that opens up your ears without ever resorting to cliche and without repeating himself. I'm grateful he's agreed to return to do pieces marking special occasions,

like Sarah Vaughan's Centennial. Thank you, Kevin. Come back soon. Back to you, Dave. Thanks, Terry. I couldn't agree more about Kevin's writing. Happy trails, Kevin. We will miss you. On tomorrow's show, journalist Nancy Nichols talks about American women and cars, which she says have become our most gendered technology. Women weren't considered qualified to drive cars, but glamorous women were used to advertise them. Cars were mostly designed for male bodies, she writes, in ways that put women drivers at risk.

Her book is Women Behind the Wheel. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies. This message comes from Grammarly. Back and forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at grammarly.com slash enterprise.