41 ms·

To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

• oh_sigh 3y ago
  I lived in Portland before the decriminalization laws passed in 2020, and from my perspective, drugs were already effectively decriminalized for the in-your-face-homeless, which I think is the most obvious social problem that people in Portland are trying to fix. At least that is my view based on the very common observation of people doing hard drugs in public. The people drugs weren't decriminalized for before 2020 were the mostly normal citizens. After all, if someone has a house or a job or a car, you can take that away from them by punishing them, and that is what the cops would do. But if someone is already sleeping on the street, is arresting them and having them spend a few nights in jail and then going back out the streets going to change anything? A cop might walk right past a man smoking meth in the street, but if you get pulled over for a broken headlight, and the cops might call out drug sniffing dogs, find a small amount of heroin in your possession, and throw you in jail for months.
  • flerchin 3y ago
    What if they spent more than a few nights in corrective housing? Actually drying out, and getting treatment? I get that you can't force someone to want to get better, but you can lock them away if they refuse and keep breaking the law. Right? The whole situation is horrible. I moved away from Portland around the turn of the century, and it's unrecognizable to me when I go back to visit family.
    • brianjking 3y ago
      What if we...i don't know, actually helped people!? Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until this country starts actually helping people. * Quality drug treatment that is paid for by the state/federal level. * Job training/retraining that is paid for at the state/federal level. * Affordable, high quality education that helps people not get interested in, have time for, be so full of despair that they resort to these hard drugs. * Quality, affordable, accessible mental health services IN ADVANCE of a crisis. Locking people up or making drugs illegal will change nothing but cause there to be more pain.
      • tick_tock_tick 3y ago
        > Locking people up or making drugs illegal will change nothing but cause there to be more pain. All your suggestions are depend on locking people up to force it. Your post is just saying we need "corrective" prisons.
      • timeagain 3y ago
        Having worked in shelters, these are all nice ideas and would take an amount of funding and staffing tantamount to freeway construction. Except freeway construction pays more and is a lot more pleasant.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • hnthrowaway6543 3y ago
        > Locking people up or making drugs illegal will change nothing but cause there to be more pain. Making drugs illegal and locking people up, or straight up executing them, is actually extremely effective at stopping drug addiction, as seen in many east Asian countries, particularly Japan, Korea and Singapore. As well as the middle east. It's an uncomfortable truth for the Western world because we don't like strict punishments for nonviolent crimes, and for good reason. But let's not pretend that the heavy-handed corporal punishment approach doesn't work.
        • jimbob45 3y ago
          Did you leave out the Philippines on purpose? Isn't it kind of the posterboy for executions of this nature?
        • xvector 3y ago
          I do not know where the collective delusion that strict punishments do not work has come from. The data shows they work exceedingly well globally.
          • reducesuffering 3y ago
    • wombat-man 3y ago
      Yeah, mandatory treatment is a touchy subject, and getting it funded is a task itself. I think we might see better results if we had a doctor advised period of mandatory treatment. Maybe 1-6 months based on the situation. Unfortunately I don't think such a thing is feasible in the US at the moment.
    • jgon 3y ago
      This is the right answer and it is hopefully one people will converge on, although true to form it will be after trying everything else. Its super frustrating in a lot of cities right now because the current political environment seems to want to have a "stochastic junkie" if you will. When it comes to violence, disorder, theft and just generally refusing to be part of society in a non-harmful way all we get right now is a ton of verbiage about how addiction is a disease, these people can't be held responsible for the actions they've undertaken, they're serving their addiction, etc, etc, etc. And so then someone says "Well if they are completely incapable of conducting themselves rationally then we should probably step in and force them into treatment to remove the thing that is making them act this way." And of course a huge uproar comes in response from the same enablers "We can't force them into treatment! They have rights! We need to wait until they choose to enter treatment and they have to consciously take responsibility for completing the treatment." And so we're caught in this terrible in-between with people who can't be held responsible for their actions, but who also can't have the state enforce care on them unless they ask for it, and regular citizens just trying to peacefully live their lives bear the brunt of it. Its a luxury belief whose costs are disproportionately borne by the lower income members of society which makes it even more galling to watch it masquerade as some sort of progressivism. Ultimately people are going to force politicians to make a choice. If these people aren't responsible then the state needs to step in until they can become responsible. If they have inalienable rights then they also have responsibilities that come with those rights and need to be punished for their misdeeds. The current path is not cutting it and the voting public is waking up to that.
      • hotpotamus 3y ago
        I've been locked in a hospital for chemical dependency treatment, so I have a hard time believing that it's impossible to force people into it. There was, of course, a huge bill that my insurance largely covered, but I suspect that homeless peoples' health insurance is not so good.
        • User23 3y ago
          You'd be wrong. Medicaid is fantastic. No copays (nominally there are, but you can just not pay, which obviously street junkies opt for), no premiums, full service. The only drawback is it represents a kind of prisoner's dilemma defection and when a sufficiently high percentage of the population gets a clue and starts reliably defecting the whole system is going to collapse. Not for lack of payment, but simply for lack of beds, doctors, and nurses.
    • TheRealPomax 3y ago
      This sounds a little like treating a symptom so one can pretend they don't need to solve the actual problem, which is homelessness. Which you solve by providing housing, and a long term caretaker-supported program to help folks clean up, get good psychiatric help and therapy, another pass at the educational system, and then hopefully at the end of all that, a new shot at a normal life. That costs a lot of money. Something that people who want to live in a city that's livable should probably be willing to collectively pay for. But don't.
      • flerchin 3y ago
        The junkies are the problem. Homelessness is another problem, sometimes intertwined, but distinct. All the housing in the world doesn't change the hordes addicted to meth or fent, who would be an absolute plague even in some sort of magically awesome free housing situation.
      • autokad 3y ago
        its very rare a person goes homeless because the prices in downtown Seattle are expensive. if housing goes up, you move to a place its more affordable - not to the street. The reason for this homelessness surge is drugs. Many of these people its a lifestyle choice, one that works very well for what they want. They get to beg, do drugs, and sell stolen goods all in one spot, its very convenient. yes, if you have been paying attention, all those store robberies and car break ins is very much related. many of those instances, the hot goods are exchanged for cash at these tent areas - some even have xmas lights! > "hopefully at the end of all that, a new shot at a normal life." What makes you think they even want that? They want to do drugs, they want to not work. we should re-criminalize public drug use, followed by not allowing people to set up permanent residence anywhere they please. All of a sudden, less people would want to choose that lifestyle.
        • pseudalopex 3y ago
          > its very rare a person goes homeless because the prices in downtown Seattle are expensive. if housing goes up, you move to a place its more affordable - not to the street. Research disagrees.[1] [1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/08/22/how-housing-costs-drive-levels-of-homelessness https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
    • qingcharles 3y ago
      The problem is that most addictions need years of treatment. Years and years :( I work with people coming out of prison who have been clean for a decade and the first thing they do is go and score some meth or crack or whatever. After a decade without!
      • breckenedge 3y ago
        Are you sure they were actually clean in prison?
        • qingcharles 3y ago
          Yes, I was in with many of them. While you can get anything you want at a cost inside Illinois prisons, hard drugs like coke, meth, crack are actually very hard to come by. 99% of the drugs are "K2" and weed.
  • chaseha 3y ago
    “When we push it back into the criminal system, it pushes people back into the shadows,” Ms. Hurst said. “People will die because of this.” ^ this quote from the article speaks plainly why it's dangerous to recriminalize. Agreed w/ your perspective on prior laws hurting disproportionately normal citizens who still had (some) property/livelihood to damage through arrest. Not agreeing w/ the status quo in Portland, though - from friend's accounts it has become a tough place to walk around. I appreciate the fine line the government is trying to walk here. Hopefully they can accelerate some of the drug treatment options concurrently.
    • 0max 3y ago
      One common theme I've noticed with Progressive policy on the west coast is that well make the progressive amendments to our laws and policies, but we don't have the institutions to support those policies. At least with Portugal, they have a stick in their policy that enforces treatment and medical attention if you're strung out and using on the street. Also, Channel 5 did a great piece on the Safe Injection Site in SF. When talking to the "real ones", the safe site made all the difference in people's lives when it was available.
  • legitster 3y ago
    I think the difference is that drug use was at least kept out of nice/touristy parts of town. There was lots of blatant drug use all over town, but you could expect to go to Powells or Pioneer Courthouse Square without seeing people smoking out of pieces of foil. So while it was not a great or sustainable system to have police clear out good neighborhoods and force addicts into designated bad areas, having a city be equally unappealing to everyone is in the long run a lose-lose trade-off.
  • Der_Einzige 3y ago
    Oregon banned cops pulling people over for broken cars btw, a lot of the issues described in this thread are also because the locals here rightfully hate the police and have muzzled them.
• jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
  It's really frustrating to see this headline. The officials decriminalized drugs, wiped their hands and backed off from any follow-up legislation to keep it working correctly. It reminds me a lot of the ACA. Officials got the bill passed and have collectively stopped making updates to the program to keep it healthy, but then constantly criticize its faults. American politics are sad in that it's hard to celebrate any victories when you know those victories are doomed to mismanagement anyway.
  • jdminhbg 3y ago
    > The officials decriminalized drugs, No, the voters decriminalized drugs with a constitutional amendment.
  • kepler1 3y ago
    If decriminalization relies on a whole raft of practically infeasible (or very expensive) associated programs to make it work, is it really a viable strategy?
    • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      What are these "practically infeasible (or very expensive) associated programs" in your view (genuine question)
      • kepler1 3y ago
        The treatment / rehab / injection / addict housing programs (and more) that are required when you decide that having people use drugs isn't something that they believe they will be punished for anymore and no longer exercise some measure of self-caution to avoid falling into. The near-hospital-like facilities and salaries of people you have to pay for to replace that self- or state-policing, and now have to clean up after those who have been given free license to use drugs, and get them back on some productive life track. As GP was alluding to, all the things that require spending $ on, which people aren't apparently willing to spend after the symbol of voting for decriminalization. Which, if they're a mandatory part of decriminalization, but people never end up paying for, mean that decriminalization isn't actually a viable policy.
• deepfriedchokes 3y ago
  Drug use is a mental health issue. People take things that make them feel good when they don’t feel good. They’re just self medicating and we need to start treating it as a symptom of an underlying issue rather than the issue itself. Same with the obesity epidemic. It’s not the what, it’s the why.
  • spaceribs 3y ago
    What if the underlying issue is capitalism itself though?
    • golergka 3y ago
      You're right: if they didn't have food, they wouldn't be able to afford drugs either.
      • spaceribs 3y ago
        There is an extensive market around drug addiction, be it prisons, police budgets, drug companies, rehab clinics, and of course news media/politics. You didn't really answer the question and just jumped to your own conclusion.
    • chaseha 3y ago
      So what alternative are you proposing? Socialist countries have addiction issues too...
      • spaceribs 3y ago
        When I think about the endgame of capitalism, I think about the kids in coalmines and the gilded age, the extractive and horrible conditions that allow for widespread unfulfilling company-store-owned worklife to flourish under the guise of progress. I'm not sure if there are any solid alternatives for this endgame actually, but we may already be in it, and pervasive addiction to me seem to go hand it hand with unhappiness.
    • 3y ago
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  Criminalization works, even without sniffing dogs and modern surveillance, when the crime is also a sin. See Islam. To this day I know no relative or close friend of mine who ever drank any alcohol, nor one which used any drugs. But ofc this is the unthinkable for West. Downvote, pass.
  • rokkitmensch 3y ago
    You'd need a paradigm that permitted sins, comrade. You're speaking a language they literally can't hear.
  • unethical_ban 3y ago
    The word you're looking for is shame. I'm not sure the benefits of increased shame in society is worth the danger of allowing radical Islam or Christianity to flourish in a free society. Of course, there are wonderful atheists and non-Abrhamic believing people in the world, and there is Hamas and ISIS. I'd rather live in Portland than Tehran.
    • rokkitmensch 3y ago
      Shame is just another social control tool. Who holds the stick, and what they seek to accomplish with the beatings is a more interesting question IMO.
  • jddj 3y ago
    Confident delivery, but very naive perspective
  • diob 3y ago
    One of the biggest drug users in my life follows Islam. They have struggled with quitting, having a large period of success, but ultimately went back. No one is immune I'm afraid, religion isn't a magic trick.
    • Aerbil313 3y ago
      Unfortunately you are wrong. A single example of a Muslim in a non-muslim society with non-Islamic laws in the technological world says nothing (each of these factors have some effect). See 1400 years of Islamic history. Worked a thousand times better than the failed American Prohibition, and worked sustainably. Worked even in the places without an active government, not to mention the amount of control the governments had over individuals in the past was far lower due to lack of necessary technology. As a Muslim myself, I’d never drink and use drugs even if I was the only person on Earth. Due to fear of God. Muslim people whom I know closely (family, friends) are of the same sentiment. What does a Christian think will happen if he drinks in secret? For most sects, he is forgiven anyways because Christ. Atheists? Nothing. Muslims? There is accountability in the form of punishment in the afterlife.
• rokkitmensch 3y ago
  What is this "potent new methamphetamine"? Mainstream outlets keep parroting this line, but I have yet to see any convincing chemistry.
  • reducesuffering 3y ago
    P2P meth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylacetone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylacetone
    • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      P2P is a methamphetamine precursor, not a drug in itself AFAIK Edit: I did a search and can't find much. There seems to be a lot of bullshit but suspiciously little by way of solid info. The best I could find was this so-called super meth is simply higher in the dextro isomer which gives the high (the levo being less interesting effect-wise). But that's well known already so...?
      • rokkitmensch 3y ago
        Correct.
      • reducesuffering 3y ago
        Yes, but I'm answering what is commonly referred to as the "new meth" or "super meth." The higher purity involving P2P. For example: https://www.pharmchek.com/resources/blog/the-rise-of-super-meth-the-destructive-effects-of-p2p-methamphetamine https://www.pharmchek.com/resources/blog/the-rise-of-super-m...
  • rokkitmensch 3y ago
    To answer my own question, the phenylacetone process is cheaper, simpler, and produces higher purity (~90% from 80%) product. Smells like drugwar propaganda.
• heinrich5991 3y ago
  https://archive.is/IwMPY https://archive.is/IwMPY
• kepler1 3y ago
  I commented a few times here over the years criticizing decriminalization as it came up as an option, against loud / vociferous people saying, how can you continue to embrace criminal penalties that clearly aren't working. As if it were crazy to believe that people need laws to obey. I said that you can make all the rational step-wise choices in the world, and find yourself led down a path to oblivion, where you've made drug use not a crime, and find yourself in a drug-problem-overwhelmed city. Lo and behold, we find years later, people awaken to the fact that decriminalization might not work, and countless people having left the city because of it, and probably more importantly, tons of people falling victim to the scourge of drugs. Sometimes, as unkind as it sounds and expensive as it is, you need to enforce some harsh laws and have people understand that you won't tolerate certain behaviors, lest your society fall apart.
  • vore 3y ago
    The problem is that the people using drugs out in public are already at rock bottom: there aren't many punishments you can use to deter that, short of putting them in jail and when they come out they're just going to be using drugs in public all over again. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea of mandatory treatment but as it stands, "enforcing some harsh laws" doesn't do anything to curb recidivism – temporarily incarcerating people falling out of the bottom of society is not a long term fix for society.
    • kepler1 3y ago
      Well, what about the value of making clear to people that in case they fall over that edge and start using drugs, they will be punished? Police being able to arrest people and caution them, rather than being told to actively ignore it? In order to stop them from tempted to try it or go further, and prevent more people from joining that group? Or the people who deal drugs? Which decriminalization basically removed any check function on?
      • vore 3y ago
        The material problem is that their lives are often so miserable that feeling good from doing drugs even under threat of incarceration overrides most punishments you could dish out.
• legitster 3y ago
  Drug legalization is something I have come 180 on (or at least, 90 degrees). Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc. ODs have more than doubled, and the shelters are half empty! They are not one more social program away from cleaning out the streets. I think the experiment has radically failed and I'm ready to say I was wrong. While I don't want to go back to locking people in jail just for being addicts, cities still need to be a place that people actually want to live in. Revenue prospects for the city are becoming horrid and there is not a lot of runway to continue throwing money at the problem.
  • xvector 3y ago
    I feel the same way about SF. This whole experiment has been a massive failure.
    • hooverd 3y ago
      Eh, all the stimulant use you don't see on the streets is surely responsible for much Value Creation.
      • thrawy2to15 3y ago
        A lot of drug users are trying self medicate their ADHD or BPD (the most common), or just their sense of existential dread. So at least in the case of ADHD some amount will be actually treating their condition with the stimulants whether they realize it or not.
  • qingcharles 3y ago
    This is such a hard problem to solve. I work with drug and alcohol addicts regularly and addiction is such a damned nightmare. And every homeless person hates shelters. They have way more rules than prisons and all of the drama. I don't know what the solutions are :(
    • alostpuppy 3y ago
• analognoise 3y ago
  I would absolutely not be surprised if there was an intense "information shaping" activity on this post.
• neonate 3y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20231211210126/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/us/portland-oregon-drug-laws.html/ http://web.archive.org/web/20231211210126/https://www.nytime...
• jmcphers 3y ago
  I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland. Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs. After several decades and many, many millions of dollars spent, the problem is, by every measure, absolutely the worst it's ever been. https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/safety-injury-prevention/overdose-prevention-response/data-dashboards https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/safety-inju...
  • junofan 3y ago
    [dead]
  • boopmaster 3y ago
    I’m reading there that fentanyl appears to be the culprit. I realize it is a drug, but not sure if that’s even supposed to be in the drugs. Is this really a story of drug dealers cutting the drugs that people wanted.. into a lethal concoction? (Sorry I really don’t know, are users looking for fentanyl?)
    • hyperliner 3y ago
      [dead]
    • lbotos 3y ago
      Some are, some aren't. Some people do drugs to feel like a god, others to escape god. Jack the Bipper by Channel 5 was pretty solid. I'd recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLGRGZTk51w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLGRGZTk51w
      • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        I subscribe to the channel 5 Patreon, and it has been shocking in its coverage of all the stuff. Absolutely phenomenal journalism that nobody is paying attention to unfortunately
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  The root cause in both instances isn't drugs and so infinite spending or (de)criminalization won't matter. The core issue is hope. In the absence of work for the abled and care for the disabled and housing, there isn't much hope and so crimes, habits, and deaths of despair take hold. Without holistic and comprehensive betterment of people who feel ignored and cheated, there isn't much for this growing sector of society to look forward to. It should be no wonder why many people are so desperate and put faith in a lying, vindictive con artist like Trump.
  • wussboy 3y ago
    Do you have any evidence for this?
    • josefritz 3y ago
      This is well documented and even acknowledged by the US government. https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2-5-million-uncounted-unemployed-currently-ignored-in-official-unemployment-calculations/ https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2-5-million-uncounted-unemplo... https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2020/05/08/the-unseen-unemployed-why-skyrocketing-unemployment-numbers-are-incomplete/?sh=2a5901d314f5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2020/05/08/the-un...
  • afarrell 3y ago
    I have come to the conclusion that lots of humans have a religion-shaped hole in their psyche. It is far better to fill it with a stable, local, hope-giving religion. Hymns are a better opiate of the masses than fentanyl.
    • rpmisms 3y ago
      Almost like we are hard-wired for belief. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.h...
    • hifreq 3y ago
      While I agree that the reduction in the role of religion in the US is partially to blame for the increase in severe cases of drug addition, the idea that we need to bring religion back essentially to control people is extremely patronizing. Basically, we are saying that some people are too stupid to live productively if they are not controlled by fairy tales. This is the same approach as we are seeing in the "far left" bubble in the context of this issue: street drug addicts have no responsibilities and agency, the society has to accommodate their every whim, including ignoring all illegal activities they are engaged in. Until we acknowledge that benefits come with responsibilities we are not going to solve this.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  Doesn't the sale need to be legal to remove the criminal element from the entire thing?
• coffeecloud 3y ago
  There’s got to be some middle ground between locking up people for substance use disorder and allowing people to make public spaces unusable with their antisocial behavior. In my mind it’s something like “drugs are legal but public drug use and public intoxication are strictly illegal.” It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.
  • Consultant32452 3y ago
    >It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in. The problem is feeling like you owe it to addicts to provide them with a place to use. Privatize all the public spaces: parks, sidewalks, etc. Grant strong property rights to those spaces.
    • coffeecloud 3y ago
      You can get all high and mighty about who deserves what, or you can actually solve the problem and give people housing for free (or throw them in jail.) Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness?
      • Consultant32452 3y ago
        > give people housing for free (or throw them in jail.) This is a false choice. >Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness? I can be right and also live in a city without homelessness. I'll just ship them to wherever you live, because you're so nice that you are volunteering to take care of the problem.
        • coffeecloud 3y ago
          What option is there besides give people housing, let them lived unhoused, or jail them for not acquiring housing?
          • Consultant32452 3y ago
• drewg123 3y ago
  Nowhere in these comments have I see anybody take the position that decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated. I have a close friend whose relative is a heroin addict. According to her, a lot of overdoses are due to almost no "heroin" actually being heroin, rather its fentanyl cut to varying degrees of strength. Not knowing what you're taking, and not knowing how strong it is, can lead to a lot of problems. If people knew what they were getting, and it was legal, you could have "functional addicts" that cause little or no societal harm. My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years. She held down a job, paid rent, paid taxes, etc. She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl. Think of it this way: My drug of choice is tequila. When I buy a bottle of 80 proof tequila, I buy it from a state licensed store. I have confidence that its 40% alcohol, and that its safe to drink. It is sold by a reputable company with a brand reputation. What we have today with illegal or "decriminalized" drugs is the equivalent of people dying from drinking bathtub gin during prohibition.
  • cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    This is not a strong argument as it doesn't consider all aspects. 1. Public drunkness is still a problem 2. Drunk driving still kills a lot of people. Legalization of alcohol doesn't help.
    • d1str0 3y ago
      Its definitely interesting how some places are outright banning tobacco sales, and other places are decriminalizing hard drugs.
    • Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      History shows that making it illegal didn't work either.
      • chmod600 3y ago
        When it comes to dangerous drugs, nothing "works". We have to choose the least-bad policies. A lot of people, including me, thought the war on drugs was pretty much the worst policy position. Now I'm seeing that there are (perhaps) worse policies. We need to be quantitative and nuanced, not speak in sweeping characterizations.
• namesbc 3y ago
  What a diaster of a response. The war on drugs was deadly failure that we should never try again.
  • anonygler 3y ago
    It was a failure because it wasn’t enforced uniformly, not because it existed. We need a new War on Drugs, but crack and cocaine should have equivalent (harsh) penalties.
• somewhereoutth 3y ago
  A counter-point: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/ https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio... > And in Portugal, no distinction is made between “hard” or “soft” drugs, or whether consumption happens in private or public. What matters is whether the relationship to drugs is healthy or not. Interesting. Of course Portugal has a stronger social safety net, indeed stronger social fabric (though sometimes it feels a bit too strong)
  • 23B1 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, are you Portuguese or do you live there?
    • somewhereoutth 3y ago
      I live here. There is almost no crime, the streets are clean, very few (visible) homeless, good public transport. I wish they'd cheer up a bit though, maybe colour outside the lines occasionally.
      • 23B1 3y ago
        You're very lucky, a beautiful country and people.
• notyofriend 3y ago
  Singapore has no drug problems. You might think what they do is extreme but it works.
  • tensor 3y ago
    Murdering people does make them go away yes.
    • anonygler 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • d0odk 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • RajT88 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • d0odk 3y ago
            Yes, absolutely.
      • memonkey 3y ago
        I have been thinking about how I (and many others) go to work for a corporate job that has ultimately no meaning in life just to be able to get paid to provide for a family that i only get to hang with on saturday and sunday and if i'm lucky 2 weeks straight out of the year. am i alive?
        • hotpotamus 3y ago
          Presumably you at lease derive meaning from your family; not all of us even have that. I often hear “Had a wife in kids in Baltimore, Jack. I went out for a ride and I never went back” from “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen in my head when I think about mid-life discontent. That and “Office Space”; it seems to be the rule that we experience it rather than the exception.
• felizuno 3y ago
  So much sympathy for drug users and business owners, but what about the private citizens who get victimized by these drug users? I was beaten nearly to death (in broad daylight, in a residential neighborhood) in Seattle in 2020 by two men enabled to descend into meth addiction by permissive policies. In my victim support group I met so many people - innocent people - permanently injured & disfigured like me, or raped, or psychologically destroyed by meth users who had been allowed to live in tents in their neighborhoods and use hard drugs undisturbed until it was too late. It's easy to treat this like a philosophical topic when you've had the privilege not to pay any personal price. For some of us it's more than an argument on the internet. If you think we should allow people to sell/buy/use meth please have the courage to attend a support group for victims of violent crimes. I doubt you'd claim a moral high ground for decriminalization to the faces of victims like me who have had our lives destroyed by meth users.
  • rjbwork 3y ago
    I actually don't think we should decriminalize. Just legalize it and let people get pure product at dirt cheap prices. There's no reason to fund crime (drug dealers/organized crime), maim and kill users, push users into poverty, and generate and push the externalizes of drug use onto the rest of society. This is the choice we have made and continue to make a society under a prohibitionist regime, decriminalization or not.
    • losteric 3y ago
      That's an orthogonal issue to dealing with addiction, which would be a problem regardless of legalization status...
    • running101 3y ago
      Illogical thinking
    • chmod600 3y ago
      What does "legalize and regulate" mean? Isn't that true of most drugs? We are talking about what those regulations should be and what to do when people break the regulations.
• shadowtree 3y ago
  The US is a very young country, with a burn it down and see what happens culture. A frontier state. It is amazing to watch the speed run of recreating basic civilization from first principles. Why do laws exist? Why do we need traffic signals? You think I am joking? Portland disbanded traffic law enforcement! After quite a lot of traffic deaths, mostly minorities they tried to protect, they just reinstated traffic cops. More black people were killed by this decision than by cops in Portland... Source: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/05/09/portland-oregon-police-reinstating-traffic-safety-division/ https://www.opb.org/article/2023/05/09/portland-oregon-polic... "Portland has experienced record levels of traffic fatalities in the years since Lovell emptied the traffic division. In 2021, 63 people died in traffic-related deaths in Portland — the highest number in at least three decades. Portland matched that count in 2022." https://www.koin.com/news/pbot-to-address-street-safety-as-city-deals-with-dramatic-rise-in-traffic-deaths/ https://www.koin.com/news/pbot-to-address-street-safety-as-c... "Multnomah County Public Health Manager Brendon Haggerty said. “The third reason this is especially alarming for public health is that we see racial disparities.” He added, “in Multnomah County, the death rate from traffic crashes among the Black population is about twice the rate of the non-Hispanic, white population.”
  • Inward 3y ago
    Very young courtry but most successful in the last 200 years What do you mean by young? Roman Empire young? Relative terms like young/old when applied to a country that’s a melting of all others let’s me believe you’re not an American or have studied American history in depth.
  • lannisterstark 3y ago
    >The US is a very young country, with a burn it down and see what happens culture. The United States as a nation-state is older than almost all of European nation-states, barring a few. It is one of the few nation-states that has continually existed since its foundation, without interruption. Germany for example was unified in 1871. Were there 'Germans' (who spoke the language) before then? Sure. Germany? No. Neither Prussia nor Austria is the German nation-state. The modern German state was recreated after WW2 in 1940s. France is on its god knows what number of Republic now after Kingdom-Republic-Empire-Republic revolutions etc (although I'll grant that 'France' as a singular 'country' is older than the US). Italy was unified well later. The dutchy of Poland is not the modern Poland, etc. It is one of the oldest(among the other very few) continually existing nation-states still alive today.
• irrational 3y ago
  How about doing something about the graffiti? The city is such an eye sore.
• anon291 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • melvyn2 3y ago
    Prohibition increased alcohol-related deaths and created a black-market of products so much worse than the regulated market before or after[0]. I would say that, in fact, prohibition did not work. And neither does current drug prohibition. Fentanyl deaths are directly caused by the black-market supply of drugs in the US, and it isn't "decriminalized" cities like Portland that are leading these charts[1]. The current drug prohibition just means that the demand that will always exist is being supplied by mis-dosed poison instead of a well-regulated market like modern alcohol (and marijuana in some states). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_Prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_Prohibition [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
    • anon291 3y ago
      Prohibition reduced the rate of alcohol related deaths: 1. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit... 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088683/death-rate-rate-during-prohibition/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088683/death-rate-rate-... 3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42705455?typeAccessWorkflow=login https://www.jstor.org/stable/42705455?typeAccessWorkflow=log... Your article only counts alcohol-caused deaths. Indeed, it fails to account for domestic violence deaths. Although it's true that hundreds of alcoholics died, their children were spared their violent tendencies. One could argue that prohibition pushed the consequence of death on the guilty instead of the innocent, which, if we have to choose between the two, seems the appropriate direction. So while a few hundred alcoholics died, many more children and women lived. Why is this even a debate? The data are so abundantly clear.
• etchalon 3y ago
  I'd be interested to hear from people in large European cities and whether public drug use and homelessness are as big of an issue there as they are here. I've only been to a handful of European cities, and none seem to struggle with either to the extent we see in larger cities in the US.
  • knallfrosch 3y ago
    Public drug use is something that I've never seen in Bavaria. Altough you'll be able to find it if you know where to look. Seriously though, leftist cities like Berlin have the same problems as the US, although on a much smaller scale. It's what D. Trump would call an shithole. Bavaria is clean, because we enforce a restrictive drug policy. As for homeless, we've got some, but they're voluntarily so. The shelters don't accept alcohol, drugs nor dogs. They gather far away from any business/residintial area. (In my local town, under a bridge between a river and an animal shelter.)
• 23B1 3y ago
  I'm a Portland native, born and raised. It was great up through the early 90s, and then turned into an absolutely bonkers shithole run by people too dumb and too extremist to be considered even progressive (I support many progressive polices and causes fwiw). I basically was ran out of my own town when the politicians, police, and moonbat locals – many of whom were not born there – started thinking of Portland as some sort of weird test bed, layering on all kinds of experimental policies and governance. It hollowed out the downtown area, made it nigh on impossible to start a business, and made everything bonkers expensive. I'm sad to say I had no choice but to leave. All of these decisions left very little opportunity to build a career (many of the businesses left) own a house (NIMBY 'urban planning' made housing unattainable) and of course the streets became as gross as the Mission in SFO. It's like the worst of the Hippy Boomers were able to enact all of their worst policies in one small town and now it's a microcosm of their weird blend of laissez-faire social policies mixed with maximcally-extractive taxation and fiscal policies.
• iteratethis 3y ago
  I find it astonishing that nobody has the common sense to consider that the nature of this epidemic is uniquely American, and thus learn from the plenty of developed nations that don't have this problem. You will barely find any find meth or fentanyl in Western Europe. You won't have zombie blocks nor would they ever be tolerated at this scale. The absurd amount of deaths would trigger urgent and decisive actions. Nor would frequent petty crimes be tolerated. In the Dutch city that I live, there were imminent threats of looting during the lockdown curfew days. Vast crowds of local men, including the local football hooligans, formed a spontaneous army awaiting the looters. They would not allow their town to be trashed. Everybody stood for the integrity of their community: citizens, police, businesses. Public disorder is not tolerated, not at a large scale anyway. The attitude to just let it spiral out of control is anything but "progressive". You have a right to public order, clean cities, consistency in applying justice, it's the basis of a functioning society.
  • Aurornis 3y ago
    > I find it astonishing that nobody has the common sense to consider that the nature of this epidemic is uniquely American, and thus learn from the plenty of developed nations that don't have this problem. FYI, most American cities aren't like this. The article describes Portland for a reason: They're one of a small number of cities that experimenting with decriminalization (combined, theoretically, with treatment programs) under the theory that it would improve the situation. It has not improved the situation. I think you might be viewing America through the lens of whatever stories make the news headlines, which is an aggregate of all the worst situations in the country. It's not representative of the entire country. The US has about 200X more land than the Netherlands. It's huge and more diverse than you might be used to if you're imagining it as a parallel to where you lived.
    • sneakerblack 3y ago
      I'm not too familiar with the situation in Portland, but I have heard that programs which decriminalize drugs and provide care centers are not effective without existing social nets such as solid unemployment programmes and public health programmes that treated addicts can use to get themselves out of the socio-economic hole they got themselves into Maybe the US is lacking in those programmes and is why the drug legalization programme is not effective in Portland?
• diebeforei485 3y ago
  What happens if we stop all the drug-related services? Stop the free needles and foil and pipes, and ban public drug use. Does anyone want to try that experiment?
• catwalk_moto 3y ago
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• cratermoon 3y ago
  Banning public drug use will simply criminalize the actions of the poor and vulnerable. Rich people can continue to hoover up kilos of coke in their gated enclaves. Where is a person living on the street supposed to go to enjoy their completely legal cannabis product?
  • next_xibalba 3y ago
    So we only care about either the rich or the destitute? How about the vast majority of people in between those poles who don’t want to be harassed by crazed meth heads or walk their kids past a forest of fent zombies? Crazy how people think there is a viable solution other than strict intolerance of public drug use. The mental gymnastics are gold medal worthy. (Also, I know quite a few rich people and none of them do coke. They’re problem is booze and food-just like everyone else in America)
• port914 3y ago
  Drug use is illegal. Assault is illegal. Robbery is illegal. Rape is illegal. Enforce the laws. My car was broken into in San Francisco, robbed in broad daylight. The police told me to just turn it in to my insurance. Who pays insurance? We do. So I got robbed and you all who pay for insurance got robbed. I wonder why.
• senderista 3y ago
  The same people who loudly signal their progressive bona fides won't hesitate to silently vote with their feet if they feel unsafe.
• purpleblue 3y ago
  Criminalizing drug addiction is wrong, but letting drug addicts proliferate and live in squalor with no consequences is even worse. The pendulum has swung so far to the left, and now everyone is suffering. It really makes me wonder what these drug proliferation activists are thinking. Do they really think that seeing people lying on the sidewalks in their own feces is freedom or a good thing?
• alex_lav 3y ago
  Keyword _public_ And I'm here for it (as a Portland resident). My sympathy for the homeless/addicted population here has gone to basically 0.
• LAC-Tech 3y ago
  This discourse is so tiresome. There are low crime jurisdictions on this planet that do not have drug epidemics. We know what policies work. They're not pretty, but they're effective. Harden your heart and implement them, or live with the consequences.
  • coffeecloud 3y ago
    Effective at what? The whole reason Portland tried something different is that the last 50 years have proven drugs laws to be largely ineffective at preventing drug abuse and its related issues. Clearly this style of decriminalizing has also proven ineffective, but it’s not like we had a working system before.
• gamblor956 3y ago
  As someone who used to represent drug addicts in a past career... Drugs are illegal for a reason. Making drugs legal just makes the problem worse; the reasons most drugs are illegal is because of the many negative side effects they impose on users...and others. Voluntary rehab and counseling don't work. Permissive policies don't work. There are literally thousands of shelters beds empty each night in LA, SF, and Portland because drug addicts would rather keep their drugs and paraphernalia than have a warm, safe space. The rare rich person who can control their habit or the consequences of their drug use because they've got a wealthy family to take care of them shouldn't be the basis for determining policy for the hundreds of people who can't. Forced rehab works. Imprisonment works. Losing custody works. Some amount of externally-inflicted mental pain is necessary to overcome addiction to serious drugs like meth and cocaine because without it an addict will never develop the mental fortitude to stop using.
  • ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
    Imo the US (and most countries) really fucked up putting Marijuana down in the same tier as hard drugs. I feel a lot of people think since Marijuana isn't that bad, neither are the others. Which leads to the number of people voting for these 'decriminalize all drugs' policies. Doesn't help when you see people comparing Heroin to alcohol or nicotine as well...
    • gamblor956 3y ago
      Marijuana, like all psychoactive drugs, is known to trigger latent mental disorders, which is the primary reason it was made a controlled drug in the first place. It is also known to cause infertility in men and women due to the interaction between THC and various hormones. It also has a number of other negative health effects (e.g., lung cancer, popcorn lung, asthma, etc.) if smoked as weed or vaped which are generally avoided if marijuana is consumed as an edible or liquid.
      • frankish 3y ago
        Do you have evidence to support your claim? This study[1] has the opposite conclusion regarding "trigger latent mental disorders". [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178123003700 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
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  • cjwilliams 3y ago
    I think perhaps that because solutions have become so partisanly labled, we continue to fail on this. People in this thread are merely asking for common sense policies that exist in basically all other developed countries. This includes socialist countries, where oddly enough disincentives to junkie behavior mean that everyday people can live normal lives in urban places without the constant storm of drug induced bullshit degrading basically everything. Why the American progressives refuse to course correct is inscrutable to me.
• deleted 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• INTPenis 3y ago
  You can't decriminalize or legalize hard drug use without first tackling the reason people use drugs. Otherwise they'll just end up in downtown again, shooting up in public. And you can't ban public drug use unless you want to build a lot of new jails. So the answer is to put all drug users into one place, like The Wire. It'll be the nastiest place on earth, but at least all other places will be prettier.
• elurg 3y ago
  How the fuck was "public drug use" not already illegal?
• tycho-newman 3y ago
  The problem is fentanyl. It is cheaper than dirt and can be laced into almost anything. A lethal dose is easy to administer. Fentanyl is also extremely addictive.
• meindnoch 3y ago
  Ok, but have they tried - checks notes - more programs maybe? :-/
• batushka3 3y ago
  Try to invite Xi Zhinpin, he cleaned San Francisco streets in just a few days.
• fredgrott 3y ago
  The problem will be that we already know the cycle of illegal drug use->jail->out of jail with worse stuff is not working.. What would work better.... illegal drug use->modified jail sentence for non violent offenders to be in ail-designed-rehab I say modified in that successful completion of rehab steps gets parts of sentence modified... But at the same time we need to address the legal drug problem that lead to 50% of this problem in the first place....stats show huge amount of people who got addicted to legal opoids before their illegal drug use...yes it is actually 50% in places in the US.... And saying something failed because of under usage is not actually saying it failed but saying incentives to use it are not aligned.
• anyonecancode 3y ago
  Doesn’t Portland have a housing affordability problem? Why was the answer to “people are using drugs in public because they can’t afford a place to do it in private” to legalize public use? I swear we’ll do anything to address the consequences of lack of housing except actually build enough houses.
• physhster 3y ago
  It's getting to a point where addicts have more rights than law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. This has to stop.
• Kaotique 3y ago
  It seems trying to solve the homeless drug addiction crisis is putting the cart before the horse. Why are there so many homeless drug users in the first place? Any real solution for the problem would be to prevent people from ending up like this. If you fall out of the rat race in the US you are screwed. No job, no insurance, no health care, no house, no car followed by homelessness and drug use. After all that it would take an insane amount of effort to get you back up to the ladder. I know socialism is the big scary word in the US, but socialist European countries mostly prevent people from falling down the ladder that far and fast and the amount of homeless and drug use is significantly lower over here.
  • buzzert 3y ago
    > If you fall out of the rat race in the US you are screwed. No job, no insurance, no health care, no house, no car followed by homelessness and drug use. After all that it would take an insane amount of effort to get you back up to the ladder. This isn't true at all. The US has a good social safety net, just like European countries. San Francisco in particular has free, universal healthcare, rent assistance programs, eviction protection programs, public transportation, pretty much everything you mentioned. The problem is if you're a nuisance to your neighbors (i.e., smoking drugs indoors, which my downstairs neighbor decided to start doing during 2020), you will be kicked out if you don't own your place (and you don't have an HOA). At which point, you can go to a shelter (of which there are many in SF), but if you refuse to do that, well…
• toyg 3y ago
  ITT: lots of people who seriously believe (or pretend they believe) that you can fix a deep and complex social problem as drug use, in 3 years, with a couple of laws. The war on drugs is three-generations old; it will take at least a generation after abandoning it to see good results. Of course there will be mistakes on the way (and allowing brazen drug use in public spaces is probably one of those - a lot of stuff that is absolutely fine to do in private is not allowed on the streets). That doesn't mean you throw away the baby with the bathwater.
• superseeplus 3y ago
  I’m not sure how well it will work but NYC is experimenting with supervised consumption centers. The goal is twofold: Reduce overdose deaths by having trained medics on hand and convince users to enroll in rehabilitation programs.
• CedarMills 3y ago
  I have no more sympathy left for drug users after my wife was attacked in daylight in downtown Portland on the way to work. Enablement is not compassion.
• Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  The police in Portland usually won't even show up when people call from stores being (nonviolently) stolen from. How would they suddenly have the bandwidth (and/or will) to enforce this?
• bentt 3y ago
  One of the unfortunate side effects of criminalizing drug use has been the muddying of the ethical landscape around law breaking. The argument that drug use laws are unjust has bled into a belief that other illegal behavior is somehow excusable when committed by an addict. So it's not that Portland made a mistake in decriminalizing public drug use. Their mistake was that they stopped enforcing other laws around the misbehavior addicts engage in.
• xrd 3y ago
  I'm from Portland. And, recently moved to Florida. This issue feels a lot less cut and dried than people make it out. One thing I've noticed in Florida is that there are no public spaces. Every park has explicit hours, where it is illegal to be there after 10 pm. And, there are blue lives matters signs everywhere, so I'm sure that the police round up anyone who doesn't comply. Also, Florida has a low prison population rate, only 900 per 100k. Low when you compare it to other states that is. Northern states are much lower, like Oregon at 550. Taking 40,000 people off the street is one way to solve homelessness. I bet there are lots of people in Florida who live cheaply away from any population centers because of the police presence and to avoid imprisonment. Those people probably would be homeless on the West Coast. There was an extremely high people case in Portland recently where a man attacked two young black men on the train. His name is Adrian Cummings. Supposedly he was let out of jail in Oregon and that's indicative of a failure of the criminal justice system because he should have been in jail long before that assault. But he's a Floridian. He had a lengthy criminal record before reaching Oregon and his drug addiction didn't start in Oregon. The transformation of his face over a short period due to drug addiction is crazy to see in his mug shots. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2017/03/07/deputies-man-choked-attempted-to-rape-woman/ https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2017/03/07/deputies-man-chok... How the hell did this guy get to Oregon? I doubt he was a drug tourist. Makes you wonder.
• mrangle 3y ago
  1. Drug use and the fallout was infitesimal compared to what it is after it was widely culturally promoted and approved of. Neither has alcohol abuse been supplanted. 2. Drug addicts (which especially includes pot users) will argue for maximum legalization until everyone is blue in the face, and despite any counter argument. Such is the nature of addiction. At some point, people need to be again ignored for the social good. Drug use legalization advocates will always remain, but they will be less with time.
• matthewmorgan 3y ago
  After any period of repression there's a rebound effect, it happened after the prohibition of alcohol was rescinded too. Unfortunately, the insane 'war on drugs' has created much harder and more dangerous substances than alcohol.