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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 politicia
by 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 agoI’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 agoSome 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 agoI 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
- nradov 3y agoThe problems with acute fentanyl poisoning are somewhat separate from chronic methamphetamine addiction. Mexican drug cartels have been manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs such as Oxycodone and Xanax but substituting fentanyl for the active ingredient. They simply have bad quality control, so sometimes people who buy street drugs randomly end up with a fatal overdose. Especially if they haven't built up a tolerance. https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/ https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/
- pjs_ 3y agoThis is a curve that goes up but do the other curves go up more or less? Did places with different strategies perform better or worse, relatively speaking? I can sort of imagine that all the curves go up, given that we added a drug that is 50X stronger than heroin to the mix Edit: to clarify, not trying to be an asshole, I have no idea what the answer is here, would be very interested to find out
- duped 3y agoIs there a measure for how this compares to places without social programs for drug addicts? This is a legitimate question, I don't know if they've done better or worse in the context of the failed war on drugs. Because the country as a whole has been completely ravaged by opiate addiction. It's not just Portland and Seattle. West Virginia doesn't have anything like this, and it's just as badly afflicted. It may be less visible because it doesn't have the same population density.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago[flagged]
- silent_cal 3y agoI think it's less a question of the amount of social programs and more about how aggressive the police are about public drug use and assaults by the homeless. Walk around cities in southwest Florida for example (Tampa, Naples etc.) and you'll feel pretty safe.
- joenot443 3y agoI presently live in New York but I lived in Seattle in 2020. Open air drug use and homelessness in general is unquestionably a bigger problem in Seattle, despite NYC lacking some of the more progressive policies west coast cities have become so famous for. Anyone who's lived in both the east and west coast can attest to the difference, it's so stark that I find it funny people are still asking if broad coastal politics _might_ have something to do with it.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoI live in Seattle and recently visited NYC. It was shocking how much cleaner it was, at least the neighborhoods I spent time in. I expected at least similar levels but I saw nothing like Seattle's public drug use and mental health crises on the streets.
- duped 3y agoMy question isn't about how visible drug addiction is but any actual metrics that can compare actual drug addiction rates and prevalence between places with decriminalization and those without. Because just some cursory googling suggests that these cities do have less incidence of drug addiction/use per capita. But I don't really know how accurate that info is, and anecdata doesn't count.
- ratg13 3y agoI think other cities bussing and flying homeless people out west outweighs every possible policy change. We’ll never know if any of these policies stood a chance due to the USA viewing the west coast as a dumping ground for homeless people. Next time you’re passing by these people, ask them where they are from originally. Locals are like 20% of the problem.
- margalabargala 3y agoWhere I live (central Oregon), this is not the case. More than 80% of our homeless population are people that were born and raised here, and were priced out of housing and onto the streets due to housing prices skyrocketing to eyewatering levels. It has tripled in the last ten years, with a 1-br apartment going for under $600 in 2013 now going for $1700. The homelessness here is homegrown, not imported. Portland is better housing-wise, but not by much. Considering how most people who are both homeless and on drugs were homeless first, then turned to drugs, I think this is a strong confounding factor. It's hard to saw what effect decriminalization has had on drug use when it's adjacent to a housing crisis that is manufacturing more homelessness and drug use all on its own.
- briffle 3y agoNot sure if they still do, but Eugene used to buy you a one-way bus ticket to Portland or Salem and some food vouchers if you claimed to have family there. They didn’t really verify.
- singlepaynews 3y agoAgreed. This suggests to me that homelessness and drug use may be orthogonal problems. If you triple my rent over the next 10 years, without raising my income, then I'm gonna be homeless. No drug use necessary, batteries included, no assembly required.
- meiraleal 3y agoDo you know that the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary, right? And raising it is mostly up to you. Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse
- theklr 3y agoSadly they never fixed the supporting issues, low wages, inability of affordable housing at pace to keep up with growth. It’s like they just thought giving an aspirin was going to cure the flu.
- thegrim33 3y agoThis is basically just a moving the goalposts argument. The public was told that the policies would fix/help/address the problem. The public was conned into throwing literally billions of dollars at these policies and programs. And then after the programs fail, you can't just say "well of course it failed, we didn't do X and Y". If that's the case, we should never have spent billions of dollars on programs and policies that we knew would fail without X and Y.
- UtopiaPunk 3y agoCities primarily need affordable and low income housing. If you're trying to deal with your demons sleeping under a bridge, you're going to get warped. The social safety nets in this country are so inadequate, so when people fall, they fall hard.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoHow do you define “low wages”? Current minimum wage in Seattle is $18.69/hr, which is higher than the median wage in several US States and almost all of Europe. Cost of living is high but not that much higher than the more expensive parts of Europe. There are legitimate causes for the blight in Seattle but lack of jobs and low wages aren’t one of them.
- xyzzyz 3y agoAmericans have no idea how high the cost of living is in Europe relative to wages. Median sale price in Seattle is $560/square foot, which is almost exactly $6000/square meter. With minimum wage at $18.69/hr, that's 320 hours of minimum wage work per square meter. For comparison, average price per square meter in Paris is over 10 000 EUR ($10 700), whereas the minimum wage is 11.50 EUR, giving you a ratio of 870 hours of min wage work per square meter, almost 3 times more expensive. When you compare them by median household income, Seattle is around $110k/year, which is $55/hour, giving 110 hours/square meter for median family. In Paris, for comparison, median household income is 44k EUR/year, which is 22 EUR/hour, resulting in 454 hours/square meter, which is 4 times more expensive than in Seattle for median family, even worse than for minimum wage. These were before-tax figures, and doing after tax makes the situation even more lopsided: US tax system is much more progressive than European, and so taxes for median and below are extremely low compared to Europe. At Seattle minimum wage, the effective tax rate is around 15%, whereas in France, at minimum wage you're still paying 25% in income tax. To top it off, in France, the VAT is 20%, compared to 10% in Seattle. You can do the same calculation for most of Europe, and you'll find the same: pretty much all large metros in Europe are almost universally less affordable than most expensive metros in US, including NYC and SF.
- uoaei 3y agoHarm reduction and rehab still only treats the symptom, not the cause. The cause is financial instability brought on by insecurity in housing, food access, etc. It's an issue of human dignity in the economic sphere that drives people to such depths, not recreation. Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").
- Exoristos 3y agoIt's the other way around. They've lost their jobs and their homes -- and their friends -- and their families, because of drugs.
- knowledge-clay 3y agoDrugs did not cause rents in Seattle to triple over the last 15 years
- icholy 3y agoIt goes both ways.
- six_four_eight 3y agoUndoubtedly that can be the cause in some cases, but there are counterexamples. Like West Virginia which has a bad opioid addiction problem yet relatively low homeless rate. What does appear highly correlated is homeless rates vs. cost of housing to income ratios. Find a city with a real estate bubble, and you'll likely find a large tent city too.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago"We have to fix every single problem to prevent people from smoking meth in public." No we don't. This wasn't a problem 10 years ago. This isn't a problem in much, much poorer countries. This isn't a problem in fucking Houston or Tampa or NYC or Boston. I get that you want to overthrow Capitalism, but the rest of us want to live a normal life without junkies shitting on our stairs
- bufio 3y agoCorrelation, causation, etc.
- adrr 3y agoCan always look at places that don't have drug problems like Singapore, Qatar or UAE. decriminalization. look at china who also had a crippling opiate problem with opium and it wasn't solve with decriminalization. Opoids have no place in society and there's no such thing as harm reduction when it comes to opioid use besides complete prohibition. I know 4 people who have died from opioid over doses, and just recently lost a former coworker last week. Fentantyl is a society destroyer and it's just getting worse.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoAre those really good comparison countries though? To me, it seems like some of their basic views on rights are antithetical to those in the US, going way beyond how to deal with drug problems.
- adrr 3y agoJapan,Taiwan and south Korea as more examples. Japan has life sentences for opioid distribution/sale. Taiwan has mandatory 3 year sentencing simple possession of class 1 drugs (Opioids). South Korea also has very strict sentencing laws for opioid possession and usage ranging from 1 to 3 years. Most of laws were influenced by the Opium wars 100 years ago.
- kevingadd 3y agoSo you're basically advocating for widespread rollback of civil rights, based on the examples you chose?
- google234123 3y agoYou don’t have a right to theft. Let’s go back to punishing crime.
- kevingadd 3y ago"punishing crime" is a frankly insulting understatement of the way countries like Singapore or the UAE treat accused criminals. Not to mention the list of things that count as crimes there. I mean if you're that angry about shoplifters or homeless people doing drugs on the street, okay, but don't be dishonest about what these role model countries actually do
- hospitalJail 3y agoI wonder if it attracted a 'type'. Because I know many people who have since moved to portland and they all have a type. It could be that portland is taking a huge number of people that would otherwise be a drain elsewhere. Maybe we shouldnt consider this an outright failure, but look at some federal support.