Welcome!
TT Wright has lived in Oregon with family since 2008. She was born and raised in San Francisco. As an older member of Gen heX, she spent the entirety of her teenage years ensconced in the eighties. Her twenties played out against the backdrop of 1990s New York City, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Her thirties expanded to include Southwest Alaska. Developing a personality off-screen was a luxury and a life-saver.
Wright’s introduction to html <3.2> by Bay Area tech/creatives at the San Francisco Digital Media Center in 1996 led to early work in web design. Highlights: meeting David Talbot during the infancy of salon.com and being flown to Redmond, Washington on a Microsoft jet as part of a pitch team for a dial-up interactive web mystery that featured an “eyeful of Shockwave Flash animated scenes”.
She studied addiction at UC Berkeley and immersed herself in Bay Area drug reform beginning in 1999. In 2000 she was a public speaker supporting the first ballot initiative decreasing criminal drug penalties in California. Read more about this experience here.
In 2018 she was appointed to an administrative board by the Oregon Supreme Court to conduct reviews of foster care placements on behalf of the DOJ in Deschutes County. Over the two years she served her community in this capacity, she was exposed to hundreds of pages of case files as well as direct contact with the kids, biological parents, foster parents, attorneys, DHS caseworkers and CASA volunteers.
This experience gave her an unvarnished look at how addiction can impact family systems.
The URL is short for Democratic Mainstay. Wright was a partisan Democrat until 2023. Her initial concept was to chat about Oregon drug policy Democrat to Democrat. As the years wore on and things got worse, an unwavering ideological commitment to harm reduction sundered her from the Oregon Democratic Party. (now this convo is technically unaffiliated voter to Democrat.) The story evolves, but the domain remains the same. May the best drug policy ideas win.
Forming the following opinion — by championing access as drugs have become stronger, deadlier and more addictive, progressive drug policy has contributed to an increased rate of addiction, which has contributed to a bigger market for the cartels creating a viscous cycle — is the reason I’m no longer an Oregon Democrat. My former political tribe are still trying to justify Measure 110 as good law that got a bad rap — there’s been no reflection or accountability from the activists and state leaders who midwifed statewide decriminalization. This topic is too known to me to parrot prescribed orthodoxy. Strict partisanship can become a mental cage. Thank you, reader, for the chance to rattle out of mine.
