9 ms·

I lived in BC for 40 years and this policy affected me negatively it turned my neighborhood from a clean safe place to a nightmare. This always turns Into a fla

I lived in BC for 40 years and this policy affected me negatively it turned my neighborhood from a clean safe place to a nightmare. This always turns Into a flamewar online, I will keep it at this. I am happy they are finally changing something, whatever they were doing was terrible but I hope whatever they do now, a better solution is found, whatever that means.

aunty_helen 2y ago
I saw this first hand from the locals too in Lisbon. I was up the hill looking over a wall to get a photo of the bay from down a side street. I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top Of the wall as a kind of razor wire. When I looked closely and slightly over the wall I found syringes with remnants of brown tar leaking of of them. Less than the time it took me to realize a window in the house opened and someone was clearly going to give me a good yelling at but when she saw we were just tourists in the alley closed the window mumbling something and left us alone. So yea, what it does to communities is bad but the solution isn’t to look back at old ways hoping things will change if we try again. As you’ve mentioned, a better solution needs to be found, but it’s a difficult problem, and there aren’t many great ideas going around
- SECProto 2y ago
  > I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top Of the wall as a kind of razor wire. That has nothing to do with drug policy, and is common in many places around the world. https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ifbvbh/is_placing_broken_glass_on_top_of_house_walls/ https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ifbvbh/is_... https://www.reddit.com/r/HostileArchitecture/comments/eh9fz4/broken_glass_bottles_built_into_the_walls_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HostileArchitecture/comments/eh9fz4...
  - Affric 2y ago
    Drugs are criminalised here and it still happens. Safe injecting room actually means less of this stuff on the streets round my house.
    - throwaway290 2y ago
      If BC will recriminalize "use in public spaces", presumably means injection rooms can remain. Best of both worlds?
      - Affric 2y ago
        True. Having read the article I am interested in what the penalty would be. If you can’t do it with a civil penalty then criminal proceedings make sense I guess.
  - aunty_helen 2y ago
    This is correct, I mentioned it more as a scene setting mechanism. A quiet alleyway with a wall you can’t climb over at the end. Seems like a nice quiet place to shoot up.
- pedrogpimenta 2y ago
  But you have no idea how it was before, do you?
- foldr 2y ago
  This doesn't seem like a particularly good example of the negative effects on communities. Fundamentally, your story is that you looked over a wall and then someone opened a window and didn't shout at you.
  - aunty_helen 2y ago
    The lady was obviously conditioned to think noises in the alley meant people shooting up heroin. Sorry your weren’t there to see it but the discarded drug paraphernalia and then scowl on her face which subsided when she realized we were taking photos and not horse really was the important aspects of the story
- ranguna 2y ago
  You should've seen what it was before. Read up on Portuguese drug history before you speak please. Decriminalising drug usage was a good move by the Portuguese government and it improved the population's wellbeing significantly by introducing rehab instead of imprisonment. Also, you'll find things like that on every capital of the world, no exceptions. Maybe you'll notice it a little less in Singapore, where drug consumption can lead to the death sentence.
  - aunty_helen 2y ago
    I’m aware of Portuguese drug policy as I would say most people here. There’s a 6 monthly refresher article on the front page. Decriminalization and the rehabilitation focus that followed has been a huge success for Portugal’s drug taking population. I was excited to see it in action when I was there but what I found and what I mentioned earlier wasn’t all positives. For example, everywhere outside at night in Lisbon you’re going to have people trying to sell you coke. A guy from the tour group I was in was getting free samples poured into his hand. The level of pushy these sellers are too, I had a guy follow me into a _bank_ offering me his mothers home phone number that I could call if the coke he was trying to sell me was shit quality. The discussion though is the impacts of this policy on local communities. I’ll defer to my last paragraph on this from my previous post. Lastly, I’ve never been chased or offered a free sample in any other European capital, even the party ones. Once in South America though.
bluefirebrand 2y ago
I grew up in BC, lived there almost 30 years before I moved away. I loved in Downtown Victoria for most of the 2010s and I got to watch streets turn from being nice to being sketchy and the sketchy ones became downright dangerous A mcdonalds near where I lived went from being a place that a bunch of older folks would get coffee and do a crossword in the mornings, to a place where you might sometimes find human feces on the floor. No exaggeration. It was really sad to watch
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  I'm not really aware of the measures that were taken but the situation you originally described seemed wonderful. What were the problems solved by the legalization?
  - afavour 2y ago
    As I understand it the intention behind decriminalization was to accept the reality of the situation that addicts aren’t likely to be dissuaded from taking drugs simply because it’s illegal. Rather than push them to the fringes of society (where they’ll likely spiral into deeper and deeper depths) you should try to keep them closer than help them out of the addiction. Obviously this didn’t work. I have sympathy with the viewpoint though. Far too often when we’re faced with difficult situations like this our instinct is to throw someone in jail. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t really help us in the long term, it just lets us put it out of sight and out of mind in the short term. (as someone who spent some time in Vancouver long before decriminalization… there were areas incredibly rough with homeless and drug use back then too. It didn’t magically arrive when decriminalization was passed, I doubt it’ll disappear with recriminalization)
    - porknubbins 2y ago
      It was easy to think, because of movies or pop culture, that cops are a bunch of mean uptight jerks throwing harmless kids in jail for “smoking the reefer”. But that view was a little naive. It now seems that everyone from citizens who call the cops to judges and parole boards are not just arbitrarily cruel but have a pretty fine tuned sense of “this person is harmless” or “this person is an antisocial menace and needs to be off the street”. At least this has become my view after working with prisons. We were doing an ok job and have changed in the name of progress.
iraqmtpizza 2y ago
Letting people shoot up on your porch was the only thing they could think of to keep housing prices in check
- cjk2 2y ago
  That's pretty funny but sad. I'm not even in BC or the US but I had to remove the light bulb from my porch to stop people shooting up in there and poking the syringes in my plants. I still have "HIV yucca" as it's known now. It's totally illegal here but it didn't stop people doing it. Want to fix this? Start with the problems in society that lead to it.
  - tomp 2y ago
    What “problems in society” lead to this? Humans are infinitely adaptable and we live on a hedonic treadmill. Regardless of material and/or social circumstances, there’s gonna be a subset of people who will continue to find existence a terrifying suffering, and will seek escape, including drugs. No society in history has fixed the first problem. But we can keep negative externalities minimal by outlawing public use of drugs.
    - cjk2 2y ago
      I don't have an answer and I agree with you with the latter (so does HIV yucca)
      - SomeoneFromCA 2y ago
        What is HIV yucca?
        cjk2 2y ago
        See parent comment. HIV yucca is the yucca plant which friendly heroin users left their needles in on my porch.
    - tonyarkles 2y ago
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
I believe it. Drug liberalization advocacy suffers from at least two flaws: the failure to understand the instructive dimension of law, and naïveté concerning the harm drugs cause and the power of personal responsibility when drugs enter the mix in light of human frailty. In the first case, one end of the law is to teach good behavior by punishing what is bad, and perhaps incentivizing what is good. Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason. Any attack on reason of this kind is gravely immoral, and constitutes a direct assault on human flourishing and what is most essential to human beings. The result is the degradation of the human person and the degeneration of society. The common good suffers greatly, as you have described, and since the primary purpose of law and the governments that make law is to guard the common good, it falls to governments to criminalize and regulate drug availability and use. In the second case, ask yourself why anyone takes drugs. Unhealthy curiosity. Boredom. Escapism. Mental illness. There is no legitimate reason for drug liberalization as there is no legitimate reason to take hard narcotics recreationally (I emphasize that word because there is a place for regulated use in the context of medicine under the principle of double effect). Liberalization lowers the barrier of entry by signaling that using narcotics is no big deal. And yet it is a big deal. The instructive dimension of the law, by penalizing use, helps counteract the foolishness and frailty of human beings that would bring ruin to such people and those around them. Libertarian anthropology does not stand a chance in the face of reality. (Obviously, plenty of substances are psychoactive, and I do not propose a categorical ban on everything from cough medicine to cigars to Merlot to coffee. I am no teetotaler. We know what kind of drug use is problematic when we say “doing drugs”. Prudent regulation that takes into account a number of factors like the severity and nature of chronic and acute harm, how addictive something is and its potential for abuse, dosage, etc. It’s one thing to chew on a coca leaf, another to snort 30 mg of powder.)
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  > Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason. This blanket statement heavily depends on which specific drug we are talking about. Or rather, do you feel the same way about alcohol and nicotine?

aunty_helen 2y ago

I saw this first hand from the locals too in Lisbon. I was up the hill looking over a wall to get a photo of the bay from down a side street. I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top Of the wall as a kind of razor wire. When I looked closely and slightly over the wall I found syringes with remnants of brown tar leaking of of them. Less than the time it took me to realize a window in the house opened and someone was clearly going to give me a good yelling at but when she saw we were just tourists in the alley closed the window mumbling something and left us alone. So yea, what it does to communities is bad but the solution isn’t to look back at old ways hoping things will change if we try again. As you’ve mentioned, a better solution needs to be found, but it’s a difficult problem, and there aren’t many great ideas going around

SECProto 2y ago
> I noticed there was bits of broken bottle cemented into the top Of the wall as a kind of razor wire. That has nothing to do with drug policy, and is common in many places around the world. https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ifbvbh/is_placing_broken_glass_on_top_of_house_walls/ https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ifbvbh/is_... https://www.reddit.com/r/HostileArchitecture/comments/eh9fz4/broken_glass_bottles_built_into_the_walls_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HostileArchitecture/comments/eh9fz4...
- Affric 2y ago
  Drugs are criminalised here and it still happens. Safe injecting room actually means less of this stuff on the streets round my house.
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    If BC will recriminalize "use in public spaces", presumably means injection rooms can remain. Best of both worlds?
    - Affric 2y ago
      True. Having read the article I am interested in what the penalty would be. If you can’t do it with a civil penalty then criminal proceedings make sense I guess.
- aunty_helen 2y ago
  This is correct, I mentioned it more as a scene setting mechanism. A quiet alleyway with a wall you can’t climb over at the end. Seems like a nice quiet place to shoot up.
pedrogpimenta 2y ago
But you have no idea how it was before, do you?
foldr 2y ago
This doesn't seem like a particularly good example of the negative effects on communities. Fundamentally, your story is that you looked over a wall and then someone opened a window and didn't shout at you.
- aunty_helen 2y ago
  The lady was obviously conditioned to think noises in the alley meant people shooting up heroin. Sorry your weren’t there to see it but the discarded drug paraphernalia and then scowl on her face which subsided when she realized we were taking photos and not horse really was the important aspects of the story
ranguna 2y ago
You should've seen what it was before. Read up on Portuguese drug history before you speak please. Decriminalising drug usage was a good move by the Portuguese government and it improved the population's wellbeing significantly by introducing rehab instead of imprisonment. Also, you'll find things like that on every capital of the world, no exceptions. Maybe you'll notice it a little less in Singapore, where drug consumption can lead to the death sentence.
- aunty_helen 2y ago
  I’m aware of Portuguese drug policy as I would say most people here. There’s a 6 monthly refresher article on the front page. Decriminalization and the rehabilitation focus that followed has been a huge success for Portugal’s drug taking population. I was excited to see it in action when I was there but what I found and what I mentioned earlier wasn’t all positives. For example, everywhere outside at night in Lisbon you’re going to have people trying to sell you coke. A guy from the tour group I was in was getting free samples poured into his hand. The level of pushy these sellers are too, I had a guy follow me into a _bank_ offering me his mothers home phone number that I could call if the coke he was trying to sell me was shit quality. The discussion though is the impacts of this policy on local communities. I’ll defer to my last paragraph on this from my previous post. Lastly, I’ve never been chased or offered a free sample in any other European capital, even the party ones. Once in South America though.

bluefirebrand 2y ago

I grew up in BC, lived there almost 30 years before I moved away. I loved in Downtown Victoria for most of the 2010s and I got to watch streets turn from being nice to being sketchy and the sketchy ones became downright dangerous A mcdonalds near where I lived went from being a place that a bunch of older folks would get coffee and do a crossword in the mornings, to a place where you might sometimes find human feces on the floor. No exaggeration. It was really sad to watch

noufalibrahim 2y ago
I'm not really aware of the measures that were taken but the situation you originally described seemed wonderful. What were the problems solved by the legalization?
- afavour 2y ago
  As I understand it the intention behind decriminalization was to accept the reality of the situation that addicts aren’t likely to be dissuaded from taking drugs simply because it’s illegal. Rather than push them to the fringes of society (where they’ll likely spiral into deeper and deeper depths) you should try to keep them closer than help them out of the addiction. Obviously this didn’t work. I have sympathy with the viewpoint though. Far too often when we’re faced with difficult situations like this our instinct is to throw someone in jail. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t really help us in the long term, it just lets us put it out of sight and out of mind in the short term. (as someone who spent some time in Vancouver long before decriminalization… there were areas incredibly rough with homeless and drug use back then too. It didn’t magically arrive when decriminalization was passed, I doubt it’ll disappear with recriminalization)
  - porknubbins 2y ago
    It was easy to think, because of movies or pop culture, that cops are a bunch of mean uptight jerks throwing harmless kids in jail for “smoking the reefer”. But that view was a little naive. It now seems that everyone from citizens who call the cops to judges and parole boards are not just arbitrarily cruel but have a pretty fine tuned sense of “this person is harmless” or “this person is an antisocial menace and needs to be off the street”. At least this has become my view after working with prisons. We were doing an ok job and have changed in the name of progress.

iraqmtpizza 2y ago

Letting people shoot up on your porch was the only thing they could think of to keep housing prices in check

cjk2 2y ago
That's pretty funny but sad. I'm not even in BC or the US but I had to remove the light bulb from my porch to stop people shooting up in there and poking the syringes in my plants. I still have "HIV yucca" as it's known now. It's totally illegal here but it didn't stop people doing it. Want to fix this? Start with the problems in society that lead to it.
- tomp 2y ago
  What “problems in society” lead to this? Humans are infinitely adaptable and we live on a hedonic treadmill. Regardless of material and/or social circumstances, there’s gonna be a subset of people who will continue to find existence a terrifying suffering, and will seek escape, including drugs. No society in history has fixed the first problem. But we can keep negative externalities minimal by outlawing public use of drugs.
  - cjk2 2y ago
    I don't have an answer and I agree with you with the latter (so does HIV yucca)
    - SomeoneFromCA 2y ago
      What is HIV yucca?
      - cjk2 2y ago
        See parent comment. HIV yucca is the yucca plant which friendly heroin users left their needles in on my porch.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

I believe it. Drug liberalization advocacy suffers from at least two flaws: the failure to understand the instructive dimension of law, and naïveté concerning the harm drugs cause and the power of personal responsibility when drugs enter the mix in light of human frailty. In the first case, one end of the law is to teach good behavior by punishing what is bad, and perhaps incentivizing what is good. Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason. Any attack on reason of this kind is gravely immoral, and constitutes a direct assault on human flourishing and what is most essential to human beings. The result is the degradation of the human person and the degeneration of society. The common good suffers greatly, as you have described, and since the primary purpose of law and the governments that make law is to guard the common good, it falls to governments to criminalize and regulate drug availability and use. In the second case, ask yourself why anyone takes drugs. Unhealthy curiosity. Boredom. Escapism. Mental illness. There is no legitimate reason for drug liberalization as there is no legitimate reason to take hard narcotics recreationally (I emphasize that word because there is a place for regulated use in the context of medicine under the principle of double effect). Liberalization lowers the barrier of entry by signaling that using narcotics is no big deal. And yet it is a big deal. The instructive dimension of the law, by penalizing use, helps counteract the foolishness and frailty of human beings that would bring ruin to such people and those around them. Libertarian anthropology does not stand a chance in the face of reality. (Obviously, plenty of substances are psychoactive, and I do not propose a categorical ban on everything from cough medicine to cigars to Merlot to coffee. I am no teetotaler. We know what kind of drug use is problematic when we say “doing drugs”. Prudent regulation that takes into account a number of factors like the severity and nature of chronic and acute harm, how addictive something is and its potential for abuse, dosage, etc. It’s one thing to chew on a coca leaf, another to snort 30 mg of powder.)

nextaccountic 2y ago
> Drugs are opposed to the objective human good, and gravely so, for one, because they cripple the effective exercise of reason. This blanket statement heavily depends on which specific drug we are talking about. Or rather, do you feel the same way about alcohol and nicotine?