My friend was a popular, promising artist – how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous? | Drugs

The summer I met Evan B Harris, Portland was in the midst of a heatwave. People sat hot and listless on their porches, and took trips out to Crater Lake. In the backyard of my rental house, the grass grew dry and yellowed.

One evening, a friend invited me to an art opening across town. Inside, Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie was playing an acoustic set, but most of us were out in the yard, drinking beer in the lowering sun. I remember Evan, heavily tattooed and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He asked how I was enjoying the exchange rate – in those days two dollars to the pound – and I joked I’d bought so much vintage clothing I was thinking I would have to buy a house to keep it all in.

Portland, a midsize city in north-west Oregon, was affordable back then. Not just for visiting Britons, but for artists, musicians and writers.

When I began to spend time there, in the mid-2000s, the city was not without corporate influence – it was home to the HQ of Nike, Adidas and Intel. But its character seemed more marked by its dive bars and thrift stores, its art galleries, coffee shops and cooperative groceries. There was a rich LGBTQ community, a Rock’n’Roll Camp for Girls and a feminist bookstore. There were craft breweries, artisanal goods and farm-to-table restaurants. It was all of the things that would be affectionately skewered some years later by the TV series Portlandia, and was perhaps best summed up by a line from the show: “Portland is a place where young people go to retire.”

Evan was an artist. Not long before we met, he had completed a mural in the stairwell of the city’s newly opened Ace hotel – the second in what would later become an international hipster chain. His work was beautiful: old-fashioned and intricate folk art, filled with sea creatures, jays and foxes, with moths and mermaids, sailors and sweethearts.

I saw Evan quite a few times that summer, and on subsequent trips to Portland. It was not romantic – I simply liked Evan the way I liked Portland itself; in a way that felt easy and creative and joyous. One time we drove out to Astoria, through the Clatsop forest. I remember the logging museum where we stopped for coffee, and the family of deer that crowded the road. It was a beautiful drive, but a solemn one: Evan’s younger brother had experienced some serious mental health issues and he was awaiting news of a diagnosis.

Until then, I had known little of Evan’s past, but as we drove, he told me about his upbringing: how his mother was a schizophrenic and a heroin addict who often paid for her drug habit with sex. They were homeless, moving constantly. Often she would head off for days at a time, leaving Evan with friends or relatives, or sometimes on his own, without food. When he was 11, she took her own life and he went to live with his father and his new family; a situation little better than the one he had left. That anyone should not only overcome such a terrible start but reach adulthood unscathed struck me as an achievement. That he should be such a warm and generous person, seemingly so beloved in his city, was remarkable.

For the next decade, life took me off in other directions. It had been a long time since I’d been to Portland and I knew the city had changed. In part, it had become a victim of its own success: its reputation as a cultural hotspot with a high standard of living meant that between 2000 and 2014, its population grew by 90,000. House prices rose exponentially. Homelessness figures followed suit. In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd prompted more than 100 days of protest in Portland: clashes ensued, federal agents were deployed, and the city began a reckoning with its past.

Still, I thought of my time there fondly. Sometimes I would look up at my bookshelves and see the painting Evan had once given me – a bird in a waistcoat – and I would seek him out on Instagram. He was always busy: there were gallery shows and artwork for breweries, bands and feature films. I saw he had married, settled in a new art studio and seemed content.

I noticed when he stopped posting in the spring of 2021 and was curious, but not particularly worried. He’d told me once he’d be happy living quietly, making art by the sea, so when he disappeared from view I imagined that was where he was, and felt happy for him.

Then in June this year, Evan returned to social media, posting a picture of himself with a friend. He looked different now. He was wearing garish makeup, several kinds of animal print and many rings and necklaces. “I can’t thank Jordan, Kristin and Evie enough for welcoming me into their hearts and home,” the caption began. “If it wasn’t for them I would either be back to being homeless on the streets of Portland or dead from a fentanyl overdose.”

The post made no sense. I could not fathom how the person I had known – so bright and talented and popular – had ended up in this situation. So I got back in touch with Evan, and we had long conversations that would eventually branch out into equally long conversations with others who know him. His story is by turns horrifying and hopeful.

To understand what happened to my friend is also, I think, to understand what happened to Portland, and to many cities across the US and beyond; a story of opiate addiction, mental health crisis and a homelessness epidemic; a lesson in how we care for our most vulnerable.

It is strange, after so many years, to see Evan through a screen. He is sitting in Jordan and Kristin’s house in Pennsylvania, next to one of their dogs. There is a slowness and fragility to him that feels new; as if he is finding his footing as he walks me through the events that led him here.

It was a few years ago that Evan’s father began to suffer with mental health issues. By the time the pandemic arrived, he was in full crisis, using drugs and worried enough about Covid that he had locked himself inside his house. For a week, Evan stayed with him, and they shuttled back and forth to hospital as his father experienced mounting phobias and suicidal thoughts, but refused treatment. At the end of that week, his father took his own life.

Over the years, Evan had experienced periods of depression and anxiety, but he had never fully addressed them, or the loss of his mother, or considered the impact of his early life. “I just buried these problems, this grief that I had,” he says.

But the loss of his father unmoored him. “I had already lost my mom to suicide, and to lose another parent the same way, it was just too much,” he says. “I just didn’t know how to process it.” He began isolating himself from friends and family. Previously an occasional weed smoker, he now started consuming large quantities of pot. He brought his father’s extensive antiques collection to the house he shared with his wife and sat among it with his thoughts. “I was surrounded by his stuff, and this grief and sadness,” he says. “I was overwhelmed, and my mind just broke.”

When he first began to hear voices, Evan was unsettled. It was different from an internal dialogue. Instead the voice appeared to be standing outside of him, talking over his shoulder and whispering in his ear. “In my brain it was my dad’s ghost talking to me,” he says. “I thought his soul was trying to enter my body.”

More voices came, then hallucinations. He saw faces everywhere. In trees. In the pattern of a carpet. He took these to be ghosts, too. When he also began hearing strange sounds, he believed it was because he was being programmed by passing cars. Meanwhile, the thoughts of what happened to his father played constantly in his head. “And it just absolutely spiralled from there.”

It was hard to explain to anyone what was going on inside his mind. He grew paranoid, and believed his wife and her family were trying to trick him. He pushed away his brother and his friends, and started to alter both his appearance and his personality. “I was so afraid of looking like my dad, or being like him, that I started just destroying my persona,” he explains. He gave away the antiques and abandoned painting. Those who knew him were scared of the person he had become. No longer able to live with his wife, Evan moved into his car.

When the car was written off in an accident, the only place he could think to go was Lone Fir Cemetery, a 30-acre plot of 25,000 graves in the south-east of the city. “I figured everyone else would be too scared to live in there,” he says. “So I climbed over the fence and I lived in a bush in the graveyard for a year.”

It was around this time Evan began painting his face white. “I couldn’t look at my face because it reminded me of my dad,” he says. “I couldn’t even look in a mirror any more.” His mind fractured further. “I thought I was possessed by ghosts, so one day I’d be a man, one day a woman, one day a kid, speaking in different accents. I mean, I was just so far gone. I was terrifying to people.”

He had no money. His ID and mobile phone were stolen. The pandemic was at its height and people walked around wearing masks. He recognised no one. Meanwhile, Portland was recovering from the recent riots. “So the city was destroyed,” Evan recalls. An influx of homeless people also brought change: “There were homeless camps on every corner, fentanyl and crystal meth had flooded the streets. It looked like someone had dropped a bomb in Portland.” The scene was so apocalyptic, Evan believed the world had ended.

He ate out of trash cans and slept in his clothes. “And when my clothes would get too wet and ruined, I’d just take whatever I could from the boxes of free clothes people would leave out. But it was hard to sleep because it was so cold, and in Portland it rains all the time.”

One of the few items Evan had in his possession was a guitar, and it was through playing music that he met Michael, who lived in a homeless camp close to the cemetery. Michael was a meth addict, and the camp he lived in was cobbled together “like a Mad Max fort” from furniture left out on the street. Evan joined the camp and found a kind of camaraderie with its residents. “For the most part we were all hallucinating because we all had some form of schizophrenia,” he says. “So I would spend all day saying, ‘Do you see that thing right there?’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah I see that.’ We kind of created this world within a world.”

A record number of people are now homeless in the US. The 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report found that on a single night in January, 653,104 people were without a home – up more than 12% on the previous year. Over the course of that same year, nearly a million people experienced homelessness for the first time, the majority forced to live rough for want of affordable housing.

In Portland, an estimated 6,300 people are now homeless. As is the case nationally, many of the city’s homeless experience mental health issues – 63%, according to a 2021 study by the Oregonian newspaper. There is a lack of facilities, a lack of qualified workers, a lack of money to help those who need it.

It is not that people didn’t try to help Evan. His wife, his brother, his friends all did what they could. A mutual friend tells me of meeting for coffee one day and finding Evan “out there. His personality had totally changed. He had painted his face and was drinking large amounts of THC” – tinctures infused with cannabis. “He was fucked up. I said, ‘Let’s go and get you some help.’”

The friend took him to an in-patient clinic, but was told Evan needed out-patient care. Knowing he had nowhere to go, he paid for a hotel room and helped him set up a GoFundMe page, but Evan grew paranoid and accused the friend of taking advantage of him.

At a later date, the same friend went to find him in the cemetery. “I told him, ‘This isn’t you, Evan.’ He said, ‘That Evan’s dead.’” He grew angry and abusive. “He started shouting, ‘You’re a paedophile!’ and got really violent.” It was deeply distressing. “For months after that I would see him around the corners of the city, and I didn’t know what to do.”

For several years before his psychotic break, Evan had designed labels for Coppertail, a brewery in Tampa, Florida, and it was through this work that he had met a Pennsylvania film-maker named Jordan. The pair had become fast friends, and when Jordan noticed that Evan was no longer replying to his messages, he contacted his wife, and was bewildered by the story she told him: the mental health crisis, the makeup, the move to the cemetery. There was little he could do from the other side of the country, so in May 2021 he took a trip to Oregon to try to find Evan.

On his first evening in Portland he paced the perimeter of the cemetery, calling Evan’s name. The following evening, he was sitting on the kerb, eating a slice of pizza, when he looked down the street and saw Evan looking through some bushes. “And that was the start of something really, really difficult and heartbreaking for a long time,” Jordan says. “I didn’t consider the emotional toll of this. I maybe had the bravado of, ‘I’m going to fix this right now!’ I was like, ‘How complicated could this be?’”

It was scary to see his friend in such bad shape. “He had makeup smeared on his face, he was super dirty, he was so thin already, so thin.” Over the days that followed, Jordan got Evan food, a shower, a bed. They walked and talked. Jordan filmed Evan, documenting his strange transformation. “He was bouncing between these three personalities and telling these wild, deep stories that he was making up essentially on the spot,” Jordan recalls. “It was like a Tolkien novel. It was like his incredible imagination, his gift, got turned on him.”

At some point Jordan asked a question: “Would you want this to stop? What if we could get you off the street, get you into a house with a bed? What if we can get you comfortable?”

He drove them to a mental health facility and left Evan in the car park while he went inside to explain the situation to the staff. “I need everyone to treat this with kid gloves,” he told them. “If we are calm and cool and Fonzie about this, we may actually help this person. If not, he’s going to walk right out that door.”

They were three-quarters of the way through the paperwork when Evan got spooked and left. Jordan and four members of staff followed him into the parking lot, but there was nothing they could do. The facility staff explained that there were only three phrases that could get Evan admitted. “It’s ‘I want help’, ‘I’m going to hurt myself’ or ‘I’m going to hurt somebody else’,” Jordan says. “I was like, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? I leave here in four hours.’”

He bought Evan camping supplies, a torch and a mobile phone. He wrote his telephone number on “700 things” in the hope of keeping in touch, then flew back to Pennsylvania. The phone was stolen within 48 hours.

It was July when Jordan returned, and this time he had brought a cheque for $5,000 to admit Evan to a private facility out of town. He knew his friend needed not only shelter, but antipsychotic medication, a diagnosis and treatment plan. “If the public health system’s not going to do it, I will pay,” he decided. This time, Evan was amenable, but the day before he was to be admitted, the facility called. “They said, ‘Sorry, it sounds too severe, we don’t have the beds, we’re not going to take him.’” It was very upsetting, Jordan says. “And I did not have a back-up plan.”

Once again, he bought Evan a mobile phone, camping equipment and food. But this time there was a sense of futility. He knew the phone would soon be gone, and the sleeping bag ruined. “He hugged me, and I just cried all my way to the airport because I thought, that’s it, the next thing I’m going to hear is this person’s dead. What is the other outcome? Look at this place, it’s a war zone.”

Substance abuse affects somewhere between 58% and 88% of those living on the streets in the US. Over the past decade, an increasing number of those users have begun taking fentanyl, a pharmaceutical drug prescribed to treat severe pain, which is also manufactured and sold illegally by criminal gangs.

Fentanyl is up to 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine. It is both ludicrously addictive and hideously dangerous. In 2010, fewer than 40,000 people died from drug overdoses in the US, and less than 10% of those deaths were related to fentanyl, but by 2015, this had begun to shift. Last year, there were about 107,000 fatal overdoses, the majority linked to fentanyl. The drug is now the leading killer of people under the age of 50 in the US.

The country is in the grip of what is described as the “fourth wave” of the fentanyl crisis. In this wave, there is a growing trend for mixing fentanyl with other stimulant drugs such as methamphetamine or cocaine. As fentanyl is so cheap to manufacture, dealers also use it to cut other drugs, including heroin and MDMA.

Last year, fatal fentanyl overdoses rose by over 50% in Portland. At least a quarter of those fatalities were homeless people, most of them white and male.

Evan had been living on the streets for a year when somebody offered him drugs. “Other than smoking pot, I never used anything before being on the streets – especially with my mom’s use of drugs, I really steered clear,” he says. “But you can’t sleep, it’s freezing outside, and someone’s like, ‘Here, smoke this, you’ll feel better, you’ll have energy, you can get up and move.’ So I tried crystal meth for the first time and it did, it gave me energy to move around, but it also made everything that was going on inside my head way worse.”

The real problem came when Evan inherited his share of his father’s estate – $170,000. He used some of the money to rent an apartment. “But I had extreme schizophrenia and I just filled it with trash because I was so out of my mind,” he says. “I was seeing faces dripping down the walls, I couldn’t even be in there.” He returned to live on the streets and began giving the money away, buying homeless friends clothes, tents and drugs. “In my mind, that money was cursed, because it was all my dad talked about,” he says. “I thought if I gave it away, it would be better karma.”

One day, in the throes of a particularly severe mental health episode, someone he knew offered him new drugs. “He didn’t call it fentanyl, I didn’t know what it was, but he said, ‘If you smoke this, those voices and all that stuff in your head will go away.’ And I was just like, OK, I’ll do anything. And it made the voices go away, because it just takes away everything.”

I ask Evan to describe what freebasing fentanyl feels like. “You feel euphoria, just complete relaxation,” he says. “It takes away all thoughts, you’re just in the moment, present, relaxed. You get put into a trance and you’re just out. You’re bent over, drooling on yourself.”

The high does not last long, so your days become spent in its constant pursuit. “Once I was hooked on fentanyl it was game over, because that drug is just so addictive. I mean, your life changes.”

For the next six months, Evan barely left his tent. On several occasions he overdosed. The first time was when he tried “feddy” – the term used for pure fentanyl in powder form, rather than the small blue pills with which he was familiar. “Smoke this!” someone told him. “This is better, it’s stronger!” He shakes his head. “And all of a sudden, the next thing you know, you’re waking up with people who just brought you back to life.”

In late 2020, Oregon had begun a pioneering experiment with drug decriminalisation. It made the possession of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine, punishable by a ticket and a maximum $100 fine, and intended to direct hundreds of millions of legalised cannabis tax dollars towards creating an addiction services infrastructure. The problem was that Oregon’s existing infrastructure, and its access to behavioural and mental health services, had been among the worst in the nation, and its health authority was already struggling to deal with the effects of the pandemic – even hiring counsellors was proving difficult. Simultaneously, homelessness was growing across the state, as was fentanyl addiction. Those who had supported the experiment began to recoil from it when faced with homeless encampments, open-air drug use and visibly mentally ill people on the streets.

By 2022, Evan was living in a camp on a vacant lot off Burnside, Portland’s main thoroughfare. “We lived in a pile of trash, pretty much,” he says. “And people hated us so much because it was on a commute, so people would ride down this street on their bicycles to go to work and we were just like this disgusting eyesore of trash people on the corner, and they’d yell at us and spit at us, and it was a terrible, terrible, terrible time.

“Portland was a very scary place. I saw dead bodies on the street. Just lying there. If someone ODed, they’d roll them up in a sleeping bag and roll them over to the curb and just leave them there.” There was a lot of crime and a lot of violence. A woman he knew was murdered and one time, a man who had been going through the camp robbing people showed up and attacked him. “I hate even talking about this, but I stabbed him with a knife because he tried to kill me,” he says. His attacker survived but, fearing reprisal, Evan left the camp and moved in with a woman who was living in a “wet house” – a community where drug addicts live together.

One snowy evening, the woman locked him out and Evan, barefoot in just yoga pants and a T-shirt, was forced to walk back to the camp. Finding it was now abandoned, he climbed through piles of rubbish to get to his tent. It was then that he learned an important lesson: “The last thing you should do is light a fire inside the tent,” he says, and for a moment I glimpse the humour of the old Evan. The fire was inside a metal grate where he had once burned candles, intended to keep him warm. “And the wax started dripping, and it dripped fire on to objects on the ground, on to the tent itself, so it started catching on fire, too. The fire just kept spreading, spreading on everything, and I couldn’t breathe. I barely made it out with my life.”

In Pennsylvania, Jordan and his wife, Kristin, were trying to find news of Evan. They scoured the internet for any mention of him. Jordan even left his telephone number with the police to call him in the event of Evan’s arrest. But it had been six months since they had heard anything and they feared the worst.

Jordan was standing in their kitchen one Wednesday morning when he received a message from the owner of the Coppertail brewery. It was a screengrab of an email from Evan: “I’ve been struggling with mental health and drug abuse for the last two years,” he wrote. “I got myself off the streets, I’m in this halfway house, and I’m trying to find a way to earn some money.” At the end of the message, he had left a phone number. “I just cried in my kitchen by myself,” Jordan says.

When he called the number, Evan explained how in desperation he had crawled his way through the streets of Portland to the same rehab facility Jordan had first taken him to. In the intervening years he had visited the facility “probably 10 to 20 times”, Evan tells me now. “They give you drugs that help you sleep, they give you food, you get warmed up.” The idea is you will then be assigned a caseworker, but on previous visits the system was so stretched that none could be found.

This time it was different. “They finally had someone who could work with me and get me into a programme where I could detox and stabilise,” he says.

By now Evan was identifying as a trans woman named Cass – something he at the time regarded as the culmination of becoming everything his father was not, though he has since decided he no longer identifies as Cass. He was able to gain admission to a programme run by the charity Bridges to Change. “I stayed in a house that was for trans people and women,” he says. “It was more of a nurturing, loving environment than the places where it was all males. You want to hear terrible stories about what life is like on the streets? Mine is nothing compared with what the women have to go through.”

He lived in the house for eight months. The conditions of the programme required him to be clean and sober, and perform household chores, and to go to group therapy five days a week. For the first time in his life, Evan was able to begin unpacking his history.

Slowly, he began to feel better, and to gain some perspective on his fentanyl addiction. “Some people start out as heavy drug users, then end up on the streets; others, like me, found drugs when they were on the streets,” he says. “Some people, they always have that urge and they have to constantly fight that feeling. Now I’m off of everything, I don’t have any urge to use again, ever. I just remember it as being awful and miserable.”

Once they were back in touch, Jordan and Evan spoke most evenings. One day, Jordan asked where he would be expected to go after Bridges to Change. The next step, Evan told him, was a wet house. “He sounded really scared, really shaky,” Jordan says. “Look, how about if you just come here?” Jordan suggested. He admits he had not fully run the idea past his wife at that point. Across the screen, he looks sheepish. “I may have jumped the gun on that.”

Kristin Jordan teaches at a school not far from the home she shares with Jordan, three dogs, 12 chickens and their daughter, Evie. Although for a long time his artwork had hung all over the family’s house, Kristin had met Evan only once, seven years earlier, for a couple of hours over dinner.

Still, when her husband suggested they bring him from Portland to live with them, she was surprisingly open to the idea. Jordan had asked her a question that had stuck with her, she says: “What kind of world do you want our daughter to live in – the kind of world where people do this, or where they don’t?”

Evie was 11 then. Jordan sat her down and explained his conundrum. “I said to her, ‘Listen, your safety, your happiness, that is my first responsibility. And we could bring this person here, and he could leave, he could die, he could relapse. Think about the mental health toll that could take on our family, especially you.’” What do we do, he asked her. “And she thought about it for a minute, and she said, ‘You know, I think I would feel worse if we did nothing.’”

Evan eventually moved to live with the family in the summer of 2023. Kristin, then on her summer break from teaching, began sorting Evan’s practicalities. “He needed medication, which meant he needed a doctor, which meant he needed health insurance, which meant he needed to apply for benefits, and in order to do that he had to become a resident of Pennsylvania,” she says. “It was a lot of paperwork.”

Meanwhile, Evan began weaning himself off Suboxone, the drug administered for opiate addiction. “It was horrendous,” Kristin says. “He would be shaking and throwing up, and his legs were seizing up. We had him in the emergency room a couple of times because of the side-effects. It was so hard to watch.”

By November last year he was clean and for a time he seemed together. He moved out of the family’s spare room and into an apartment they had built above the garage. But by spring, they were starting to worry. “Some of the face paint was coming back,” Jordan recalls. “And weird behaviour, not making sense, talking to himself. Clearly the voices were louder and louder and louder.”

In June, Kristin received a call at work. It was Evan. “Jordan’s trying to kill me!” he screamed. There had been a verbal altercation and Jordan had called the police and an ambulance. She drove home immediately and spotted Evan walking out of the neighbourhood. “I got him in the car, and he just sat with me till the ambulance came,” she says. “I will never forget the look on his face. It was terror.”

Kristin sat with Evan in the emergency room for 12 hours, until he was finally able to get a schizophrenia diagnosis and the medication he needed. When he returned to the family home, he gradually seemed to settle into himself again. “The jewellery came off, the makeup came off. And he was Evan.”

There is something striking, I say to Kristin, in the fact that Evan, who lost his mother at the age of 11, should be taken in by the parents of an 11-year-old child. “I think about who he was as a little kid all the time,” she says. “The stories he tells me, my heart breaks for that.” For her part, she had always imagined having a big family, but later learned this would not be possible. “I told Evan, I think this was meant to be. I know it sounds cheesy, but I have all of this love to give and this person comes into my life that needs me as a mother.”

Evie and Evan are now the greatest of friends. They watch anime movies together and look after Evie’s pet rats. Having seen at close range the complexities of navigating recovery and mental health services, Evie now hopes to become a psychologist. “It’s just been inspirational,” Kristin says. “I teach kids all the time: all families look different. And our family is complete with Evan as a part of it.”

It is a Monday when I next speak to Evan. He has spent the weekend watching baking shows and working on a new commission from an old client. We talk a lot about the past, then the future. “I definitely think about how I want my life to go now,” he says. More than anything, he would like to help people. “I’d like to give back, not only on the streets with drug addiction, but with mental health awareness.”

Portland has changed again, too. In January, a 90-day state of emergency was declared to address the fentanyl crisis in the city. It allowed state, county and city employees to coordinate strategies to tackle the spiralling drug problem. “Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive,” said Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek. As of September, the state also re-criminalised the possession of hard drugs.

Evan has not been back to Portland. He is no longer in touch with his wife, or his brother, or his friends from before, or the people he met when he lived on the street. Sometimes he thinks back to all the things that went wrong. How he changed. How the city changed.

I tell him how much he still seems like the Evan I knew. Still, I am surprised that he would want to speak about everything that happened. “I feel it’s an important thing because it shows redemption,” he tells me. “It shows people can be seen to be so far gone, and in the darkness, and there’s no help for that person. But that person can still always be helped.”