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>> decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated. This has been an increasingly popular argument here in Portland since decriminali

>> decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated. This has been an increasingly popular argument here in Portland since decriminalization. It's deployed, generally, in terms of re-criminalizing hard drugs until there's a well thought out framework for safe, regulated legalization. While I agree in principle [edit: let's say I did agree, but my views on this subject have shifted radically since I voted in favor of decriminalization - and I'll admit I was naive and wrong], I think that while decriminalization without regulation is clearly catastrophic, legalization with regulation would also not be desirable so long as it's confined to one local city, county or state, in the midst of a nationwide fentanyl crisis. Portland simply does not have the capacity or infrastructure to accept further waves of addicts from all over the country who come here to live on the street. Legalization means more regulatory burden, more services for out of town addicts paid by a dwindling local tax base that's quickly being displaced and/or opting to leave. To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide. In any case, Portland can't go it alone anymore. And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.

varelse 3y ago
Yes drugs should be legalized and regulated nationally just like Portugal did. But also we should absolutely unambiguously no excuses house and feed the homeless the end full stop we have plenty of money. It just needs to be redirected to doing something productive other than paying endless assemblies of bureaucrats competing with each other to virtue signal the loudest. Because the reason people get hooked on to drugs is they have nothing better to do with their lives and they've run out of Hope but that runs straight into the effective altruist and effective acceleration as the gender here so it's not going to happen.
- noduerme 3y ago
  >> just like Portugal did Portugal arrests and jails people for dealing drugs, as well as for public displays of disorder.[0] >> Police take the person to a police station and weigh the drugs. If the weight exceeds amounts specified for personal use, then the person is charged and tried as a drug trafficker and can receive prison sentences of 1–14 years. Otherwise, the next day, the person appears at the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction for an interview by a psychologist or social worker. Next comes an appearance before a three-person panel that will provide guidance about how to stop drug use. This is the stick which accompanies the carrot. The trouble with decriminalization in Portland is that there's no stick. Sure - make drugs legal, I don't care what people do with their bodies! But make sure they don't become a menace. Housing the homeless is really a separate topic. I'm all for making sure that no one in this country is ever homeless. The drug culture, however, in Portland is comprised mostly of able young men and women under the age of 30. They're willfully homeless because they've given up the idea of having a life, in favor of the drugs they're on. You say there are no excuses about housing and feeding the homeless. But facts on the ground are: There is a highly visible group of people who are choosing to be homeless, robbing people and serving their own addiction, and (1) people who are actually homeless not by their own fault are the first victims of this, and (2) the general population here who are extremely caring are absolutely sick of it. The backlash is inevitable, and no amount of moralizing will change that. I don't believe in "effective altruism" or "acceleration" - I think a 4-day work week or a universal basic income is a recipe for disaster. People need to feel a purpose. Hell, even dogs and horses need a purpose, or they get depressed. Accommodating their worst impulses is worse than doing nothing at all. [0] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
gopher_space 3y ago
> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis. People couldn't just go to a store; trusted family advisors were overprescribing due to intentionally misleading advertising. The addiction crisis is what happens when insurance no longer covers the pills.
- noduerme 3y ago
  I'd say the addiction crisis started when people got addicted. The attendant economic and social crisis then got worse as legal pills became less available. But whether someone gets addicted by way of an overprescribing doctor or by way of picking a bottle of laudinum off the shelf at a liquor store, that person is probably going to become addicted. The question is whether that means they'll have to go looking for potentially dangerous street drugs.
LoganDark 3y ago
> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis. That is not what "legalized" means. It's still illegal to have opioids from anywhere other than your own prescription, which means that people without a prescription are basically on their own, have to get it through illegitimate means, and are all the way back to not knowing what they're getting. If I wanted a supply of, say, LSD, I am not going to accept a doctor telling me how much I can have, when and where I can have it (as in current legalized psilocybin clinics). I want to buy some from the store, take it home, and enjoy it in my own, safe environment, with friends and people I can trust. Is that so hard to ask? It's not like it's any less safe than stuff like alcohol or tobacco, in fact there isn't even any known LD50 yet. The only risk is things being sold as LSD that aren't actually, which is basically the same scenario as the current opioid crisis.
chmod600 3y ago
"To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide." I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.
- svnt 3y ago
  This happens all the time and is in practical use one of the best justifications for regulation. There must be a more specific term for it I’m forgetting, but it is essentially the tragedy of the commons. There are many things that are good for society where if one business did them, that business would lose market share or cease to exist, but it is in the public interest that the specific thing be done. Regulation is the proven answer there. In this case the primary difference is we are talking about regulating cities instead of companies.
  - rcbdev 3y ago
    I feel like this is a roundabout form of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    I think this is closer to my point, which was that some ideas can only work at scale. That doesn't mean they will work at scale. But having them fail small doesn't prove or disprove anything. So you come up with a federated database model for your company with 30 employees, and find yourself in dev hell and wasting resources on an expansion that could have been solved with a slightly larger monolith. That means you chose the wrong tool for the local job. It doesn't mean the other tool couldn't be effective for a larger job.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Are the results that bad? Or are the results exactly the same but more visible (i.e. homeless addicts are not just being hidden below the concrete of highway interexchange instead of being able to live in the city center)?
  - 3y ago
drewg123 3y ago
I agree. Any one city that gets out in front will be overwhelmed with a national population of addicts flocking to it. Legalization has to happen nationally. Imagine if prohibition had ended just in Chicago. Chicago would have been overrun with alcoholics.
willy_k 3y ago
> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis. Well yeah, when you have criminally-encouraged over prescription of highly addictive, fairly dangerous drugs, you’re going to create an addiction crisis, but the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs. Before the prescription crackdown and fentanyl prevalence, some people who got addicted turned to heroin, and some of those people ODed, but now nearly every addicted individual only has access to fentanyl-laced street opiates. Methadone clinics are a decent example of how regulation helps this issue.
- noduerme 3y ago
  >> Methadone clinics are a decent example Sure, they can help, but wouldn't you say that's treating the symptoms rather than the disease? >> the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs But you just said the initial reason was "criminally-encouraged over prescription". How do you not trace the deaths now all the way back to that? The thing about opioids is that you develop tolerance. I guess if those people were still getting higher and higher prescribed doses, they would never need to dip into illegal markets where their drugs might be contaminated with fentanyl. But it's hard for me to cut off the search for a root cause of deaths at this latest unavailability. The root cause is the over-prescription in the first place. Stigmatization serves a role. I'm a smoker - but I know anti-smokers will agree with me, that stigmatizing my behavior prevents more people from starting to do something terrible to their health. And if that's true, then legalization would be a root cause of the next wave of deaths. It's the addiction that kills; the erstwhile lack of good drugs is just the way it happens to kill some people.
  - willy_k 3y ago
    What’s the disease? Is it the body’s down-regulation of opioid receptors? If so, then you’re right. But if it also includes the impact of an active opioid addiction on one’s lifestyle, methadone clinics help treat that, which in turn makes it much easier to address the former. I think for practical purposes, it’s most helpful to ascribe it to a recent and controllable factor. Otherwise, you could say that the “no medical benefit” scheduling of cannabis also contributed. Restricting medical pain management options to (with a few exceptions) just opioids when there was an unexplored (medically) class of less addictive, less destructive, physiologically safe medicine, definitely didn’t curb the opioid issue. I agree that stigmatization is a good thing, but if all tobacco products got taken off shelves overnight, people wouldn’t stop smoking, they’d just have to buy on an unregulated (unsafe) market. Not saying that current regulation is perfect, but at least it can be controlled, which allows the market to move in (hopefully) the right way. > The thing about opioids is that you develop tolerance. This isn’t really unique to opioids, and I picture the legalization/regulation being discussed in this thread as more along the lines of existing cannabis programs, though obviously stricter in whatever necessary dimensions. > It's the addiction that kills Not necessarily, now at least. Lifestyle, maybe, but plenty of people now are overdosing on fentanyl from just experimenting, not even necessarily with opioids. And yes it is dumb to experiment with unknown street narcotics, but I’d be surprised if you took your first sip of alcohol when you were 21, and it’s the same principle of doing something that feels forbidden (and will make you feel good). And, if it were during prohibition, that sip could have had methanol in it. Now it can’t because of legalization and regulation.
briHass 3y ago
I thought the drug laws in question were, or rather had to be, enacted at the state level. Why does the issue seem to be most pronounced in Portland but not as significant in the rest of Oregon? What would be different if the experiment was done on a national scale? It seems to me that you would still see the worst impacts confined to a few major cities. I would hypothesize that other factors come into play like lax enforcement/penalties for petty crime, availability of free support services, and general sentiment/tolerance of degeneracy (though it sounds like that is changing.)
- noduerme 3y ago
  It's really, really bad in Eugene, Oregon. And Salem is a mess too. But the Portland metro is by an order of magnitude more populous. It's also desperately underfunded, and it's got a situation in which the populace mostly hates the police, and the police feel the same way back. (Which led to an amazing announcement during early Covid, when people were being assaulted and houses broken into all over the city): https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/portland-police-will-stop-responding-in-person-to-calls-that-arent-life-threatening-citing-coronavirus-concerns/283-ca357f8c-d0f1-42e4-b9f4-d3696b203494 https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/portland... This effect hasn't worn off. And the combination of lawlessness and drug availability in Portland has led to a massive influx of people from every other part of the country that has less tolerance for a combination of open drug use + antisocial behavior. I don't think support services even register as part of the draw. There are no cops here and drugs are everywhere, it's open season on people who own property (still), or just anyone walking down the street with $10 in his pocket. It's a separate subject whether the Portland police are essentially allowing this because (a) they're pissed off at the DA who won't prosecute anyone they arrest and (b) they're pissed off at the denizens and (c) they can't even hire anyone from Portland itself, since Portlanders hate the police so much. All those are basically true, and they're holding the city hostage by not doing their job. But this is why it doesn't work on a local level. If half the junkies in Idaho weren't robbing people here to buy fentanyl, they'd have to rob people in Boise. White America did not give a fuck about the effects of street drugs on their loved ones when only Black Americans were enduring the crack epidemic. They only started to care once it affected their neighbors and their kids. Shipping those all off to the one place in the country that allows reckless abuse and has no enforcement is a way of washing their hands of their problems and blaming "liberal cities" like ours.

varelse 3y ago

Yes drugs should be legalized and regulated nationally just like Portugal did. But also we should absolutely unambiguously no excuses house and feed the homeless the end full stop we have plenty of money. It just needs to be redirected to doing something productive other than paying endless assemblies of bureaucrats competing with each other to virtue signal the loudest. Because the reason people get hooked on to drugs is they have nothing better to do with their lives and they've run out of Hope but that runs straight into the effective altruist and effective acceleration as the gender here so it's not going to happen.

noduerme 3y ago
>> just like Portugal did Portugal arrests and jails people for dealing drugs, as well as for public displays of disorder.[0] >> Police take the person to a police station and weigh the drugs. If the weight exceeds amounts specified for personal use, then the person is charged and tried as a drug trafficker and can receive prison sentences of 1–14 years. Otherwise, the next day, the person appears at the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction for an interview by a psychologist or social worker. Next comes an appearance before a three-person panel that will provide guidance about how to stop drug use. This is the stick which accompanies the carrot. The trouble with decriminalization in Portland is that there's no stick. Sure - make drugs legal, I don't care what people do with their bodies! But make sure they don't become a menace. Housing the homeless is really a separate topic. I'm all for making sure that no one in this country is ever homeless. The drug culture, however, in Portland is comprised mostly of able young men and women under the age of 30. They're willfully homeless because they've given up the idea of having a life, in favor of the drugs they're on. You say there are no excuses about housing and feeding the homeless. But facts on the ground are: There is a highly visible group of people who are choosing to be homeless, robbing people and serving their own addiction, and (1) people who are actually homeless not by their own fault are the first victims of this, and (2) the general population here who are extremely caring are absolutely sick of it. The backlash is inevitable, and no amount of moralizing will change that. I don't believe in "effective altruism" or "acceleration" - I think a 4-day work week or a universal basic income is a recipe for disaster. People need to feel a purpose. Hell, even dogs and horses need a purpose, or they get depressed. Accommodating their worst impulses is worse than doing nothing at all. [0] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]

gopher_space 3y ago

> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis. People couldn't just go to a store; trusted family advisors were overprescribing due to intentionally misleading advertising. The addiction crisis is what happens when insurance no longer covers the pills.

noduerme 3y ago
I'd say the addiction crisis started when people got addicted. The attendant economic and social crisis then got worse as legal pills became less available. But whether someone gets addicted by way of an overprescribing doctor or by way of picking a bottle of laudinum off the shelf at a liquor store, that person is probably going to become addicted. The question is whether that means they'll have to go looking for potentially dangerous street drugs.

LoganDark 3y ago

> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis. That is not what "legalized" means. It's still illegal to have opioids from anywhere other than your own prescription, which means that people without a prescription are basically on their own, have to get it through illegitimate means, and are all the way back to not knowing what they're getting. If I wanted a supply of, say, LSD, I am not going to accept a doctor telling me how much I can have, when and where I can have it (as in current legalized psilocybin clinics). I want to buy some from the store, take it home, and enjoy it in my own, safe environment, with friends and people I can trust. Is that so hard to ask? It's not like it's any less safe than stuff like alcohol or tobacco, in fact there isn't even any known LD50 yet. The only risk is things being sold as LSD that aren't actually, which is basically the same scenario as the current opioid crisis.

chmod600 3y ago

"To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide." I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.

svnt 3y ago
This happens all the time and is in practical use one of the best justifications for regulation. There must be a more specific term for it I’m forgetting, but it is essentially the tragedy of the commons. There are many things that are good for society where if one business did them, that business would lose market share or cease to exist, but it is in the public interest that the specific thing be done. Regulation is the proven answer there. In this case the primary difference is we are talking about regulating cities instead of companies.
- rcbdev 3y ago
  I feel like this is a roundabout form of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
- noduerme 3y ago
  I think this is closer to my point, which was that some ideas can only work at scale. That doesn't mean they will work at scale. But having them fail small doesn't prove or disprove anything. So you come up with a federated database model for your company with 30 employees, and find yourself in dev hell and wasting resources on an expansion that could have been solved with a slightly larger monolith. That means you chose the wrong tool for the local job. It doesn't mean the other tool couldn't be effective for a larger job.
prmoustache 3y ago
Are the results that bad? Or are the results exactly the same but more visible (i.e. homeless addicts are not just being hidden below the concrete of highway interexchange instead of being able to live in the city center)?
- 3y ago

drewg123 3y ago

I agree. Any one city that gets out in front will be overwhelmed with a national population of addicts flocking to it. Legalization has to happen nationally. Imagine if prohibition had ended just in Chicago. Chicago would have been overrun with alcoholics.

willy_k 3y ago

> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis. Well yeah, when you have criminally-encouraged over prescription of highly addictive, fairly dangerous drugs, you’re going to create an addiction crisis, but the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs. Before the prescription crackdown and fentanyl prevalence, some people who got addicted turned to heroin, and some of those people ODed, but now nearly every addicted individual only has access to fentanyl-laced street opiates. Methadone clinics are a decent example of how regulation helps this issue.

noduerme 3y ago
>> Methadone clinics are a decent example Sure, they can help, but wouldn't you say that's treating the symptoms rather than the disease? >> the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs But you just said the initial reason was "criminally-encouraged over prescription". How do you not trace the deaths now all the way back to that? The thing about opioids is that you develop tolerance. I guess if those people were still getting higher and higher prescribed doses, they would never need to dip into illegal markets where their drugs might be contaminated with fentanyl. But it's hard for me to cut off the search for a root cause of deaths at this latest unavailability. The root cause is the over-prescription in the first place. Stigmatization serves a role. I'm a smoker - but I know anti-smokers will agree with me, that stigmatizing my behavior prevents more people from starting to do something terrible to their health. And if that's true, then legalization would be a root cause of the next wave of deaths. It's the addiction that kills; the erstwhile lack of good drugs is just the way it happens to kill some people.
- willy_k 3y ago
  What’s the disease? Is it the body’s down-regulation of opioid receptors? If so, then you’re right. But if it also includes the impact of an active opioid addiction on one’s lifestyle, methadone clinics help treat that, which in turn makes it much easier to address the former. I think for practical purposes, it’s most helpful to ascribe it to a recent and controllable factor. Otherwise, you could say that the “no medical benefit” scheduling of cannabis also contributed. Restricting medical pain management options to (with a few exceptions) just opioids when there was an unexplored (medically) class of less addictive, less destructive, physiologically safe medicine, definitely didn’t curb the opioid issue. I agree that stigmatization is a good thing, but if all tobacco products got taken off shelves overnight, people wouldn’t stop smoking, they’d just have to buy on an unregulated (unsafe) market. Not saying that current regulation is perfect, but at least it can be controlled, which allows the market to move in (hopefully) the right way. > The thing about opioids is that you develop tolerance. This isn’t really unique to opioids, and I picture the legalization/regulation being discussed in this thread as more along the lines of existing cannabis programs, though obviously stricter in whatever necessary dimensions. > It's the addiction that kills Not necessarily, now at least. Lifestyle, maybe, but plenty of people now are overdosing on fentanyl from just experimenting, not even necessarily with opioids. And yes it is dumb to experiment with unknown street narcotics, but I’d be surprised if you took your first sip of alcohol when you were 21, and it’s the same principle of doing something that feels forbidden (and will make you feel good). And, if it were during prohibition, that sip could have had methanol in it. Now it can’t because of legalization and regulation.

briHass 3y ago

I thought the drug laws in question were, or rather had to be, enacted at the state level. Why does the issue seem to be most pronounced in Portland but not as significant in the rest of Oregon? What would be different if the experiment was done on a national scale? It seems to me that you would still see the worst impacts confined to a few major cities. I would hypothesize that other factors come into play like lax enforcement/penalties for petty crime, availability of free support services, and general sentiment/tolerance of degeneracy (though it sounds like that is changing.)

noduerme 3y ago
It's really, really bad in Eugene, Oregon. And Salem is a mess too. But the Portland metro is by an order of magnitude more populous. It's also desperately underfunded, and it's got a situation in which the populace mostly hates the police, and the police feel the same way back. (Which led to an amazing announcement during early Covid, when people were being assaulted and houses broken into all over the city): https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/portland-police-will-stop-responding-in-person-to-calls-that-arent-life-threatening-citing-coronavirus-concerns/283-ca357f8c-d0f1-42e4-b9f4-d3696b203494 https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/portland... This effect hasn't worn off. And the combination of lawlessness and drug availability in Portland has led to a massive influx of people from every other part of the country that has less tolerance for a combination of open drug use + antisocial behavior. I don't think support services even register as part of the draw. There are no cops here and drugs are everywhere, it's open season on people who own property (still), or just anyone walking down the street with $10 in his pocket. It's a separate subject whether the Portland police are essentially allowing this because (a) they're pissed off at the DA who won't prosecute anyone they arrest and (b) they're pissed off at the denizens and (c) they can't even hire anyone from Portland itself, since Portlanders hate the police so much. All those are basically true, and they're holding the city hostage by not doing their job. But this is why it doesn't work on a local level. If half the junkies in Idaho weren't robbing people here to buy fentanyl, they'd have to rob people in Boise. White America did not give a fuck about the effects of street drugs on their loved ones when only Black Americans were enduring the crack epidemic. They only started to care once it affected their neighbors and their kids. Shipping those all off to the one place in the country that allows reckless abuse and has no enforcement is a way of washing their hands of their problems and blaming "liberal cities" like ours.