To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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 :(
But I think the suffering of the individual is largely unchanged whether it happens out in public or on the periphery. In contrast, I think we as a larger society are suffering from lack of safe and clean public spaces. So we may as well maintain some sort of enforcement.
Torronto is a perfect example. It was merged into Greater Torronto, and those new areas are what led to Trumpist style Rob Ford being elected.
And its also zoning. Its always surprising to me how in the US people don't live in the cities. In Europe, the city center are very lived in. The downtown can't turn into a ghost town, even if everybody works from home.
UK being an exception, sadly. Which is understandable, considering they basically invented the "suburb" concept and then exported it to the colonies.
I live near Manchester, I know, but the city centre is still nowhere as dense (in terms of dwellings) as most towns and cities on the continent. It's changed for sure - lots of old warehouses and factories have turned into flats - but the city has clearly been built for business activity first and foremost. And as soon as you move to smaller towns, like Warrington, the number of people actually sleeping in the immediate town centre falls to almost zero. Brits just want to live in suburbia and in the countryside.
Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments, and it shouldn't be surprising that it is experiencing visible failures this early on, or an indictment of those policies.
Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?
If you really want to destroy a city, I can't think of a better way to do it than going down this path.
I mean, it sounds like what you have now is worse. If your city is going to have an underclass either way, a formal shanty town seems less bad than a homeless encampment.
good or bad? not sure.
Is this really a hard problem to solve? I can certainly buy the argument that criminalizing homelessness doesn't make sense when the "criminal" has no other options. But if someone has a viable option for not living on the street, I'm considerably less sympathetic given the downsides to everyone else involved.
I guess it depends on how we define viable. In my experience working with the homeless, there are a lot of valid reasons shelters are avoided; they can be more dangerous, don't allow pets (who are sometimes the only companions they have), and don't allow families or couples. Whether that is viable or not depends on how you use the word.
It's the dogs that get left alone inside an apartment for 9 hours a day that are unhappy and neglected.
The fact that there are so many strong opinions from people who demonstrate an embarrassingly low understanding of the situation is one of the reasons the problem is so hard to solve in the first place.
A tent in a park, unless in the middle of a trail, doesn't inherently or necessarily make it less usable or less safe.
"We only help those who help themselves", etc.
You get people a safe place to sleep and then provide them with resources to become re-integrated into society, not the other way around.
2. The idea they need constant monitoring comes from the same outdated approach that believes we shouldn't help people unless they deserve it and we can make sure they deserve it. That model has not proven effective and either reducing homelessness or reducing homelessness' external costs on society. It has proven even less effective at improving long term mental health and addiction issues.
3. We have not found a long-term solution to chronic mental health and addiction issues. No approach, yet, has shown outsized performance over any other. Housing First approaches, however, have shown an improvement in homelessness, medical services and criminality – which might be the best we can hope for.
Even just cleaning is a lot of work, not to mention additional maintenance (e.g. filter changes, landscaping, etc.), regularly taking out garbage, not flushing trash down the sewer, etc.
Unless you also want to hire staff to do that for them, in which case, sign me up. I want to live for free too and not have to work and do drugs whenever I want.
> I want to live for free too and not have to work and do drugs whenever I want.
Here's the rub: When you get to the point of needing free housing, you are usually more or less already at the, shal we say, 'mature' phase of your addiction where there is hardly an ounce of joy left to be had from it. The daily grind of figuring out how to get high is basically just your hellish normal, and the best rush you might get here and there in your average month is akin to eating a nice meal, having a good (but not great) conversation, or a satisfying workout.
Compared to good sex? Get out of here. That phase of drug use is long gone. If you want that back even for a fleeting moment you have to go through the hell of withdrawal first. Even doses that put you dangerously close to OD don't really reach that anymore unless you risk them after a period of abstinence (which is where most opiate addicts used to die, back before fentanyl was the norm).
However, with all that said, I'd argue a functional addict is better equipped to deal with the stuff you mention above better than a severe addict who is trying to get sober after years of active addiction. Obviously acute withdrawal is an absolute bastard, but so are the following months of post acute withdrawal (aka your brain and body re-learning how to function at a completely new level of physiology). If we were doing it right, sobriety would be a hard requirement up front, followed by a good deal of support during the transition back into housing.
True, it's much easier to get sober in stable housing. But you know what's even easier still? Continuing to use in a more comfortable and secure environment. Or worse yet, when free housing is still pretty scarce, using your pad as a commodity to score perks from your friends who are still homeless, or worse, using it as a safer and more secure place to stash and deal quantities of drugs to support your addiction directly. Anyone in active addiction will consider these possibilities the moment the lock is turned and they are alone in their new home (not all will act on it, of course). Housing yes, but probably not 'housing first.'
You don't take a patient with a gunshot wound and make sure they have a long term care bed to lie in comfortably while they bleed. You get their ass to the ER and fix the bleed before worrying about the long term stuff.
Free housing paid for by people like me, and ideally others, who are more than happy to take what I make and give it to people who need it more than I do.
And you don’t need to be rich to do it. It’s a decision on how much money etc you actually need to be fulfilled.
If that takes a zombie proof bunker and multiple houses and first class flights and…and… then that’s on your head that you prefer to comfort yourself than take care of others.
You sound like you'd be shocked at how many high-functioning junkies live in most apartment complexes in most major cities. Upper-middle-class guys, holding down jobs - at least until a run of bad luck hits.
Yes. And nobody can handle their shit 100% of the time, so this is really quite a lot of people one or two mistakes away from being on the street. Many of whom you ignorantly count as "clean" friends or neighbors.
How does America go through the whole fucking opioid crisis and still think that addiction is a personal moral failing endemic to some outgroup? It's a sickening view.
So if you can figure out how to dominate a group, you will win and you’ll be rewarded for it. This is why people come here. America is the last place where you can basically do whatever the fuck you want, and as long as you gain enough money and influence, you’ll be celebrated.
I mean Trump EMBODIED what I just described and he not only won the presidency, he has successfully created a cult that could actually ruin everything.
Where else but a lawless wasteland would produce that?
Maybe talking to people one on one asking who they are how their day is, can you help them? Can you get them anything?
This time last year I helped a man named John stop sleeping outside by supporting him and giving him the moral and ethical support that he needed to reconnect with his family and he was off the streets and a couple of months. When we reconnected, he said that it was because of my outreach that he was able to have what he needed to reach back out to his family. It cost me 50 dollars in groceries/medical kit and about an hour of my time.
So it’s eminently possible, you can do it every single day that you go out into the world.
You simply choose not to.
It is also mind-blowing that you would release addicts with essentially zero support. They don't even get ID coming out of prison in Illinois, so they can't access any support services at all.
Again, I don't know what the solution is, but I know some things that don't work :(
What is free housing? Free as in indefinitely free with no strings attached? Free utilities, free services, free food, perhaps free transportation? Free furniture, free healthcare, free drugs, free clothes, free HOA?
Do you think the violent addicts everyone complains about just need a house, and starting from day one they will become productive members of society?
That’s it that’s the solution.
Until every person on earth has a supportive loving community - which mathematically works out very easily - we’ll never solve these problems.
There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this. It’s also not biologically determined - fear and greed are not inherit in humans, those are all learned behaviors. I fear however it’s going to take generations to undo how much we have invested in domination based systems rather than partnership based structures.
> There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this
Yes there is. What you and other "progressives" fail to acknowledge is that for every well meaning supportive and loving member of society there are two people who will use them and their resources endlessly until they drop dead. If your plan is to wait until we change human nature - then good luck.
Want to see a preview? Socialize with families of alcoholics, drug addicts, psychopaths, etc. Look how their "loving and supportive" families are destroyed by one person who abuses them with no end in sight.
Stop fantasizing about changing human nature. The future where we all meditate in peace like that advanced society in Fantastic Planet won't happen any time soon. The more likely future is that we will completely stagnate and fail to resolve any societal issues because we treat people like they are lost babies that just need a supportive and loving community to be found.
Rules are good for a well lived life. My house has more rules than prisons.
Can you even come up with 383 annoying things you require your guests to comply with... let alone 383 PAGES.
Create laws against public drug use, then enforce them.
And the scariest thing (for me personally) is that even if I knew that was a potential outcome, I don’t think it would have stopped me. And I wasn’t a junkie or hopeless addict by any means.
Huge sums were collected, but they haven't really been spent. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the first detox center built with M110 money only opened two months ago, and only has 16 beds: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-se-portl...
And again, literally written into M110 is the idea that treatment is supposed to be cheaper than incarceration. Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape, but the treatment programs are not looking terribly cheap or effective.
The first problem is that the people we're really talking about, the ones living/defecating/etc on the street do not want help.
The second problem is that in order to want to get better, an addict has to hit their personal rock bottom. Programs that keep people floating above their personal rock bottom are like family members enabling addicts. It ultimately doesn't help them.
It's VERY difficult to create social programs that help people want to not be ill, while simultaneously not letting them fall to their own rock bottom.
And then consider the position from the legislature of creating incentives for government programs/NGOs which align with the desired outcomes and it becomes expoentially harder.
Also, while the whole rock bottom trope probably holds some truth for many people, when you make every story all about it you kind of lose the plot. If you try hard enough, you can look at just about anyone's life who has recovered from addiction and create a narrative based on an upward trend after the "worst" moment or period of their addiction. If they had two periods that were basically exactly as bad, you dig around until you find some trivial reason to label the second period as worse, and thus the "real bottom." If someone had their worst period of addiction many years before they actually got to a place where they could maintain sobriety long term it was just a long journey for them. Etc.
I don't think it's red tape as such, but rather that Portland suffers from a problem SF also has, which is that government social services are mostly run via the NGO-Industrial Complex. Money is shoveled into a patchwork of local governments, and then shoveled out into a patchwork of local non-profits, and there's almost no accountability for turning $X into Y results, like you might have with a transportation department or a school district.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/11/portland-oregon-tree-...
That was really depressing to read. She nuked the program because of her ego and then let her black spokesperson blame it on race and gender instead of her own lies and deliberate mismanagement.
Likewise, when people/groups fail today we want them fired or cancelled. This promotes the "blame someone else" as a self preservation tactic.
The treatment programs implemented so far have been incredibly cheap, in the sense that we simply haven't spent any money on them.
M110 has been more expensive than expected, because by not spending money on treatment programs, we caused an assortment of other issues.
M110's effect on society is confounded by its coexistence with a statewide housing crisis that is pushing people into homelessness, and from there it's easy to fall into drug use.
You make a good point. When we look at a program that hasn’t been implemented we must judge all other unrelated programs that were implemented to some degree or another at the same time.
People might want to “see how it works out after implementation” while ignoring the necessity of “going back to the status quo that led to coming up the ideas on the first place”
E.g. what is the outcome of CA Proposition 2 that passed in 2018?
This is in addition to the ~$1.3 billion the state already paid in mental health services: https://www.corvallisadvocate.com/2021/oregon-spends-on-ment...
In addition to resources available at the county level ($2 million came from police defunding): https://www.multco.us/justice-agenda/budget-priorities
From what I see daily, if what Portland is doing is working in any way, then I’d hate to see things if they weren’t working at all. It’s a very sad state of affairs here and it’s hard to recommend that anyone move here unless you’re being paid extremely well AND you love the outdoors AND you’ve lived in a city with a severe drug/homelessness/mental health crisis before.
I moved here in 2007 from the extremely rural South. The day I moved into my Old Town apartment a homeless guy spit on me! What a wake up call to a kid from the country. But I ended up living in that apartment for 10 years and never once felt actually scared in that neighborhood. But now, I actively avoid that neighborhood and getting spit on might be the best possible outcome!
Source: I live in Portland very near Downtown.
There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.
However, I believe a part of that contribution has to be in an objective, quantifiable way - which translates to taxes. The rights we consume from society are tangible and expensive. A city populated only by of poets would collapse of starvation after 12 hours…
That said, if a Society feels they need to foster a specific part of it (culture,social work, etc) they can enact tax breaks to reduce the financial load of those making that contribution.
But taxation comes first (as an obligation).
My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a society that tends to look down on them either as limited (usually from the right) or as “must-be-kept-cotton-balled” (usually from the left).
They want to be seen as people, which is what they are.
This keeps people with severe disabilities out of the workforce more than anything else.
I'd rather that than have someone lose healthcare because they saved $15k (1970 2k in today's money). Or worse, because Grandma left them an inheritance not knowing the impact that has on their heath coverage.
Severe disability does not go away after your bank account hits 2k.
Why the flamebait?
“Zing! dang! Thank you madam! Your money is on the dresser. See you in four years when is reflection time”
Raising children is the greatest, riskiest, and costliest contribution to the world most of us can make. It should be respected.
I didn't ask my ancestors to screw, thanks. I mean, good for them, I guess? But I wish people would stop insinuating that having children is the pinnacle of human achievement, when, in fact, it's actually the bare minimum. I wish they would realize that not everyone needs to have children (the math alone simply doesn't work out on a finite planet...), and I wish they wouldn't cast aspersions on those of us who choose to live the way we do. How about we go after the people who had kids but shouldn't have, instead?
This is a real question, not a rhetorical one, and its answer is subjective to your values and experience. If your answer is something akin to "I am indifferent to whether I exist or not" then your entire argument is logically sound. On the flip side if you attach value to what you have and are, then it logically follows that if you have the chance to "ask your ancestors to screw" - you would.
As for "casting aspersions" and "going after" - that's not what I am doing here. You do you. The more interesting question is - which should society value and which should someone emulate based on their own values. That again goes back to the question I asked. If a view is contingent on someone feeling "meh" about their own existence, it's not a very appealing perspective.
Why does that follow?
spoiler: if not your children, then someone else’s - the robots may not be sufficiently dexterous by that point.
it is fine to not want children. or to want them. to pretend either side is morally superior is rather foolish. practically speaking, you’re gonna need your diaper changed.
And not paying taxed can be because they have no job and make no money, or are so rich as to be able to write off all their income because they think they don’t owe anyone anything.
Stay at home parents would fall into this category. I think the unit is "family" if it's a family, and not "person".
Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.
You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years.
These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.
You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.
You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away.
Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
No, you can't. You have to renounce your US Citizenship to stop paying taxes in the US, no matter where you live. Renouncing requires acquiring citizenship in a new country, which isn't that easy: just ask anyone who's tried to naturalize in the US.
>Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
You're not really a part of the society if you don't live there, but if you're a US Citizen, you're still required to pay both federal and state taxes, even if you've never lived in the US in the first place.
In any case, I've never renounced a citizenship, but I can imagine countries making it hard. Is the process itself difficult, are there requirements other than the international law one of not being stateless?
You can vote not to though.
The argument of getting something for the taxes you pay is made because people can vote away taxes.
But yes, it's a troubling argument, because once people start thinking that way they feel like they're owed something. Large swaths of the elderly and the infirm may not be paying taxes but are absolutely owed things that often cost money just because they're a fellow citizen and a member of our society.
What are they, and can I do them instead of paying taxes? Because paying taxes soaks up double digit percentages of my productive time and I reckon I could add a lot more value to society if I had alternatives.
The ones who are doing better have to actively make the decision every day to be "a productive member of society" and it's extremely difficult for them. Even though they may have been prone to addiction before their medications, this is still something that happened to them.
A lot of people like this exist though. Toronto has a huge problem where the homeless refuse to go to shelters because they don't want to be told they can't use drugs. So they make the conscious decision to opt out of society and stay on the street.
There is no way to get through to people like this. Even if they had their own place they'd probably OD before the end of the week with all their extra comfort and freedom they have. Some people can't be helped and that needs to be something people are more willing to accept.
As for your friends, popping opioids like candy is a poor decision even if your doctor is prescribing it to you. Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. The opioid crisis is not society's fault.
Rarely I'll state something so strongly - this is true at face value but in the context you meant it is so fundamentally wrong it borders insanity.
The entire reason we have regulation and reputation-based systems in place (like diplomas from accredited universities, or the bar, etc.) is to allow the individual to delegate decisions to specialists. That is why practicing medicine without appropriate training is a crime (in most/all countries I know of).
Do you also want me to get out of my car and do some quick analysis of the structural integrity of every bridge I'm going to cross? Or are you goin to blame me if the bridge collapses and kills me?
Again, back to the case at hand - the whole purpose of having medical professionals is to follow their advice.
If they are prescribing you poison the solution is obviously to prosecute them through the judicial system, not undoying every trust-based system that makes complex professions in society even remotely possible/functional
This thread is about the extreme opposite of this, though. Taking from net contributors and using that money to create a place that's to their extreme detriment, because incredibly it's a votewinner, is the current situation.
Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).
Noble savages?
Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest.
Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial.
Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a problem in that they risk their lives for no real benefit to anyone.
This seems like a strange conception of addiction, unless we aren't seriously comparing mountain climbing with heroin. If we are then I wonder what utility the classification of addiction is actually supposed to provide to us.
It seems possible to both agree with the idea that it's bad if a city's downtown is full of homeless drug addicts while disagreeing with the idea of trying to sort city residents into worthy and not worthy.
Why normalize this? The more permissive you get the less pressure there is on fixing it. I’m not saying jail like a thief or murderer would get, but why not make the decision for someone unable to do it themselves and enforce recovery?
- cities are economic engines
- economic engines generate both wealth and tax revenue
- if you don't care for the economic engine, you lose your tax revenue
Everything the government does is built upon tax revenue.
It's an honest question. Social programs cost money, and the money comes from taxes.
I am generally in favor of drugs being legalized and drug addiction being treated as a healthcare policy concern instead of a criminal concern. But the experiment seems to fail more often than not.
It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either
Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown?
I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away
My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.
Tbh Portland didn’t really try to solve homelessness/poverty. Because it knows it can’t, at the city/county level. I mean, what would that even look like? The city taxes alone paying for a huge swath of free housing, at a time when middle class workers can barely afford to live here?
We need to come together as a country and civilization to solve this problem.
based on absolutely nothing other than platitudes
It's absolutely easy. There is no faster way to kill a city. Drive away the people with money and businesses die, tax revenue plummets and it turns into an irrelevant backwater.
All this stuff costs money. It's always like this, "somebody" gotta go out there and solve these difficult problems. Nobody actually wants to be that somebody though. No one wants to step up and pay for it. If you try to make them pay, they leave.
The poor in the US might be less likely to starve now than they were in 1933, but I really think the narrative that the US has been “solving” anything about poverty to be incredibly inaccurate. Some indicators (obviously an impossible point to prove either way):
Poverty is the 4th greatest cause of U.S. deaths - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/17/poverty-4th-greates...
Deaths of Despair are up - https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...
For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
58% of Americans have no savings - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-are-l...
And last but not least: this article ;)
Edit: WAY more importantly I thought about this claim more and maybe I’m giving it too much credit. Are you saying that the people in the Great Depression just didn’t have a good enough work ethic, but now we’ve scared people into having a good work ethic? Cause I don’t think that lines up with my experience in our society or knowledge of our history at all. IMO
The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stopping the drugs entering the country.
I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed, but I implore you to be more empathetic to their situation. I PROMISE you, homelessness is not fun, it does not feel good in any way, and no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint.
This is not a structure. It's a situation.
> I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed
No - the only assumption is yours you're making here. No one is saying that.
> no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint
No one said they would.
This is not a structure. It's a situation.
Otherwise sorry I misinterpreted you —- guess I’ll spend more time reading next time!
I suspect in a few decades forced rehab will become the norm, once you start smoking crack or shooting up in the street. It's pretty obvious for anyone with eyes that at a certain point, homelessness, mental health issues and most importantly drug addiction cannot be covered by "individual freedom" anymore if you want to have a working society.
Of course, having police beat up and arrest or otherwise forcefully move addicts from one place to another or into the prison industrial complex is not likely to work.
Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a full body cast for a bit. The doctor in charge of him decided it was a good time to get him sober, so he spent a couple agonising weeks in a full body cast suffering through heroin withdrawal, and he's been clean since.
When they get out they don't have a family or job or support system to go back to. They won't seek drugs to ease those pains again?
I was clarifying the meaning of the previous comments.
FWIW, I did actually get locked up in a psych ward once, for reasons involving drug abuse, and while it was unpleasant, it probably did do me some good, although I did have a family and support system to go back to.
Furthermore, I'd like to point out that forcing someone to sober up does not mean that you don't help them in other ways, like providing them with a home and assigning someone to help them.
I think it's possible that just giving someone a home and a case worker if they're in the middle of an opiate addiction will not help them find a happy place in the world, and as such, supplementing such aid by using a bit of coercive force to help them kick some bad habits may, in the long run, leave them happier than otherwise.
finally, I apologise if I'm being too sensitive here, but perhaps you could make a slight effort to be a little nicer when conversating, honestly I did find your comment a bit hurtful.
So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|
People were getting ratfucked online for saying "I don't like watching people shit all over the sidewalk" - so you know what? They moved! Maybe out of Portland, maybe politically, but pretending that smoking fentanyl on the MAX is good and normal is just totally insane.
0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-crime-pseudoephedr...
1. https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2005/06/th...
Opioids being more dependence-inducing than stimulants would better explain a production shift.
Big legitimate trading volumes with China (and any other large producer of goods/inputs) make a customs-focussed effort at controlling supply basically impossible.
---
On the flip side I've seen addiction become a much more devastating force in recent years and smart solutions are badly needed.
... unless this harms other, isn't? Drug addicts are causing harm and are burden to society, so why libertarians support them?
In liberal philosophy, value of human life is infinite, thus all humans are equal, thus it's not allowed for someone to cause harm or abuse others. However, why we limit this to humans only? In my opinion, is a bacteria, virus, ideology, hate, chemicals, drugs, pollution, technical problems, climate change, ecology causes harm to humans, then it should be equal to harm done by a human directly.
Why it's illegal to shot someone, but legal to smoke weed near to someone, which leads to addiction and further death? IMHO, it's the same harm, but with extra steps.
My parents smoked when I was a child. The memory of being in the car with the windows up makes me anxious even though it's been probably 30 years since I've been in a car with a smoker. I experience acute irritation when exposed to anyone smoking, and much more widespread smoking is one of the major reasons I dislike visiting Europe. I know that I'm far from alone in feeling this way.
because when you go that granular it's hard to figure out who to blame. is COVID really any one person's fault, even if we narrow it down to a specific patient 0? is that harm intentional and worthy of punishment? Is having a buggy website really "harming a human directly?" And who takes blame? The web dev, the site owner company, the ISP? These start to get unnecessarily nitpicky.
>Why it's illegal to shot someone, but legal to smoke weed near to someone, which leads to addiction and further death?
depends on the drug? Secondhand smoke is a thing but even that has dubious legalities. You're usually not punished for the smoke but for violating the ruls of the premise to not smoke. But nothing is illegal about smoking tobacco in public (as unpleasant as the smoke is).
COVID19 was leaked from "Vector" BSL4 lab in Russia. It's leaked, because first responders broke doors (to check for fire) and stole equipment from BSL4 lab without any protective equipment, then China special police, which was in same city for training with Russians, captured the virus and returned back to China. Then Russian official hide the fact of leaking and start of epidemic, deleted any evidence of that, which they found, except those copies which are in Wayback machine (they are unable to crack the archive so far), and started to blame China (at West), and West (at China and East).
Yes, this is not an one person fault. So what? 7 million died. Should we just ignore that?
> You're usually not punished for the smoke but for violating the ruls of the premise to not smoke.
In my country, it's illegal to smoke near to non-smokers, which helps to reduce spread of smoking. :-/
I still think that this theory is way too convoluted to be true (chinese secret police and stuff), but an entertaining read nevertheless. I wasn't aware of either the explosion or the covid leak allegations.
As typical Russian, you started with FUD. Luckily for us, these news are stored to the archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20191011162034/https://www.nsktv....
"Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc."
Everyone in the city, from the mayor [1] to the head of the largest services non-profit [2] has been yelling from the rooftops about the glacial slowness to effectively spend the allocated funding for drug treatment. Until just months ago, Multnomah County has been sitting on tens of millions of unspent funds,[3] and has been perpetually criticized for spending on harm reduction instead of treatment.[4] We actually closed the only local sobering center in 2020!
1. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/03/20/wheeler-slams-mea...
2. https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/11/15/the-ceo-of-portlands-l...
3. https://katu.com/news/local/multnomah-county-chair-fast-trac...
4. https://www.kptv.com/2023/07/08/multnomah-county-implementin...
The best available evidence is that decriminalization essentially had no effect on overdose deaths (https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/03/ballot-measure-110-di...). It was going to go up no matter what because of the nature of fentanyl. The only thing the failure of Measure 110 has demonstrably done is waste taxpayer funds and give businesses in downtown an excuse for why they are failing (when in reality it has more to do with the death of downtown for purely economic reasons post-COVID, just like other major West Coast cities).
Reductionist perspectives on how politics works always end up at this "one side is dominating the other" kind of narrative but it's never actually that way, both sides still have a lot of influence on the various specifics of the outcome.
It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.
If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.
In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing, but for a better solution (the long term) it involves better education, welfare, health-care and social equality.
You can't try to fix one of these problems while ignoring the others. It won't work.
IMO Portland already does every single one of the solutions that you recommend. It’s not working out for them well, in the same way it isn’t working out for Portugal or Amsterdam.
Maybe some drugs should be restricted and usage controlled. I’m pro legalization, but I would not support opium dens being as common as Starbucks.
In Amsterdam, the drug tourism made the city hard to live in, and the authorities have largely cleaned it up now. Weed is a special case, but using anything else on the street will warrant a check-in from the cops.
In any case, Portugal's strategy was supposed to be diverting funds from the narcotics police to rehabilitation efforts. But those funds have steadily eroded over the years with cost-cutting measures such as the merger of the autonomous drug agency into the main healthcare service. It's not too surprising if it is falling short of its initial success.
Another thing to consider is the inseparability of homelessness and drug abuse issues. It doesn't seem to be possible address one without the other, rising homelessness will inevitably bring more drug abuse. (Still I see fewer homeless people in downtown Lisbon than in Barcelona that won't even let you have a beer in the park).
That is how you actually decrease total cost of living.
The US has been trending up, between housing and transportation, a huge amount of people spend well above 50% of their income on that, and poorer people even more.
Public housing can be part of this, but by itself it wont fix anything.
It’s time we stop deceiving the public.
Otherwise, I would like to apply for a supportive housing unit penthouse on 5th avenue please.
It makes a lot more sense to talk about how to support cheaper communities and migrate people to them than it does to bring down housing costs in expensive areas where the locals are fighting back against bringing in new people.
People in cheaper locations also fight back! Why is that location cheap and why do those people live there? Precisely because the density is so low and the community likes it the way it is. An influx of recently homeless people would be a huge disruption and no one would be happy with the change. Would you want to manage that situation? THINK!
1) Someone says we need housing.
2) I say: great, let's build it!
3) Someone says: but cities are not building enough housing, we need to invest more.
4) I say: great, let's build it anywhere in the US, where it is cheaper too. Population density in the US is very low.
5) Someone says: not like that! Homeless want to live in places like San Francisco, you can't relocate them.
6) I say: nobody can choose to live where they want if they don't have the means for it. <- WE ARE HERE.
To build housing "anywhere in the US" you have to build all the infrastructure that makes it make sense to move people there. This country hasn't built a new city in ages, it just keeps expanding metro areas into sub- and exurbs. Are you also going to fund hospitals? Groceries? Building supply stores? A car for everyone? All the devices and supplies for heating and cooling in adverse environmental conditions? How do you think that's going to make sense financially compared to providing services and housing where people are and where they already have human-scale support systems (friends and family)? And good luck bringing together the different governments at different scales to avoid scope creep, budget bloat, and general coordination problems. You're being so myopic and naive that your smarminess and vitriol toward those you consider undeserving is not even funny, just pitiful. People aren't bits in a machine, you can't just move them effortlessly to new locations.
> you can't just move them effortlessly to new locations.
Turns out we are exactly where I said we would be in this conversation.
We can allocate the homeless to numerous other existing towns without having to build new cities, and most importantly without having to build expensive shelters in places where land is already very expensive, like the coasts.
Where they have friends and family is irrelevant because nobody is entitled to live where they want, unless their families host them. I have friends in Paris that doesn't mean I can demand a flat there. Plus many of them are drug tourists that are from out of town, and those also happen to be the most dangerous ones.
With that said the small minority of homeless that are genuinely looking forward to being re-integrated into society must be given treatment, housing and support. This is a small minority, unfortunately.
[1] - https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...
As someone from the “rest of the world” I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I think this claim is based on a broad misunderstanding of, let’s be honest, Western European politics by people who’ve never voted in elections here.
I live in Switzerland, have lived or worked in the Netherlands, UK and Czechia. The liberal parts of the US are far to the left of any of those countries.
(Yes, healthcare is cheaper, except in Switzerland. It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but on questions related to drug use in the public square, I think you’d find it’s a lot less lenient here than you think.)
Look up some actual political programs from major parties in Western Europe. You’ll be surprised.
I think most Americans have seen a sanitized version of Europe, just like most Europeans have seen the evening news version of America. Both of those ideas are caricatures.
If you're on the street, none of this helps you much, but across many metrics, I think NYC might legitimately be more affordable to live for the working class than London or Paris.
But at any rate, I think European healthcare systems either cost as much as the US (e.g. in Switzerland), end up being two-tier public/private (Czechia), or are near collapse (the NHS).
Union density is higher in the US than in France. French unions make a lot of noise, but don't represent that many people. Unions in many other countries are not very powerful (and the mainstream right is generally opposed to them).
I think there's a way these things are presented for the outside world, that doesn't always match the reality on the ground. I also think there is a tendency for people to pick the example out of a group of 28 countries that best supports their argument in the moment: Swedish unions, Swiss trains and French retirement, as it were.
Australia is way ahead of the US at privatising public transport. Selling off public assets into private hands is a much bigger thing in the UK and Australia than the US. Some Australian states are now even privatising government services such as motor vehicle registration, driver licensing and land title registration. The UK and Australia also have a much bigger culture of commercialising government IP as opposed to the US culture of putting it in the public domain. People always think of the US as more capitalist, but I think these are examples of ways in which the US is less capitalist. Some of these Australian initiatives are almost bordering on anarcho-capitalism (sans the competition part). And they aren’t necessarily the work of “conservatives” - the decision to partially privatise the motor vehicle registry in the State of Victoria was undertaken by the Andrews government, [0] which is arguably the most left-leaning of Australian state governments, in charge of Australia’s most left-leaning state
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-01/victorian-government-...
Now with social/drug policies it's typically more complicated, and there are vast differences between European countries as well (e.g. Sweden is extremely restrictive for drugs and even the major left parties don't push for changes).
The overall point still stands though. Now among the population there is much greater variety, but this is one of the issues with the US two party system, significant portions of views in the electorate are not represented.
In San Francisco when we give homes to drug addicts, the first thing they do is ripping the sink out to sell it and buy more drugs.
There is a serious drug epidemic that needs to be addressed simultaneously as we try to help the super-minority of legitimate homeless that are bad on their luck and need 2-3 months to find a new job and get back on their feet.
More than half suffer substance abuse. Accounting for the fact that many of them would deny admitting to drug use when asked, this is probably a conservative number and the percentage is much higher. Also this is an US average, and it doesn't take into consideration "drug tourism" in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle where drug use is literally the main goal thanks to easy drug access, therefore the drug-related homelessness ratio in some places is much higher.
They also probably take into account both housed an unhoused homeless, with the nuance that unhoused homeless are more likely to be druggies and to refuse shelter. Therefore the percentage of homeless population we see every day in our streets (which is the subset of homeless more likely to affect our day-to-day lives) have very likely an higher percentage of drug use.
Finally, the US actually has another problem: we can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.
[0] https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
[1] https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...
Homeless is in part composed of three things (in Portland):
- Substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, etc)
- Mental health (coincides with the above!)
- Housing (which normally stabilizes, somewhat, both of the above!)
We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland, which makes the former two more visible and at times problematic.
For as long as we keep ignoring this, we are stuck in nuances.
These people don't want to get better, so we need to mandate treatment (and give them one of the many available supportive housing units after accepting treatment) or - if they refuse treatment - relocate them where they cause no harm other than themselves. Might as well call it a "government-assisted suicide" campus, because this is what it already is in every major American city nowadays. Today, we are literally letting them die on our streets.
Nobody in modern public discourse is complaining about homeless in the context of a regular Joe bad on his luck, who after a while - with dignity and hard work - goes back to a stable life. We should give our all to him and homeless like him.
You are right, on average they cannot maintain housing, which is why I said "subsidized" - which ensures they don't become homeless (aka publicly visible).
> We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland
What that doesn't solve is the substance abuse, which is a mental health problem. If your intent is to solve both then you need to spend on mental healthcare and subsidized single unit housing. If you just want them off the street and concentrated to certain areas (eg: where I live in Portland) then you just need subsidized housing.
They need to be housed in something like a prison or a psychiatric hospital, after being convicted with due process.
https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wea...
Source? This reads like a Leftist talking point. I’d be interested in understanding who trained on you on this idea.
Also, the reason they can't succeed much beyond a few lefty cities is because they can't stop saying insanely stupid shit, like the suggestion that Boeing workers should seize Boeing factories and use them to make city buses instead of airplanes. Most of America doesn't go in for this kind of nonsense. This is a real example btw: https://www.kiro7.com/news/seattle-city-councilmember-elect-...
In what way? Compared to almost everywhere on earth, American politicians are extremely xenophilic, extremely tolerant of sexual minorities, extremely feminist, more inclined towards individual freedoms in general and perhaps slightly more capitalist.
All of these things are different axes of politics that are correlated differently in different regions of the world.
Pretty much only on the issue of taxes. But the right-wing parties surging in popularity in Europe right now make Trump look like Jimmy Carter.
I already have to pay a 1% tax on all household earnings above $200k. Before haters hate, please realize I'm already paying 10% to the state on all earned income. Plus the federal rates.
Oregon has consistently mismanaged funds. Giving them more money won't fix anything. They don't know how to spend it.
I'm tired of keeping zero income until the end of April. Especially when all I have to show for it is constant homeless drug addicts. Lwt the private sector handle it or enforce no camping laws and sober folks up in a cell or ship them away, or just give them all fet lined drugs to permasolve the issue.
The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.
Nobody is saying conservatives have infiltrated the Portland political scene, only that we see similar failures in other contexts when initiatives are half-assed (on purpose). Similar circumstances-- not identical.
- This is just a common American tactic
- There are other, less nefarious, reasons this happens
Including conservatives in a context where they don't exist and shifting the goal posts outside of American politics on a whim is both entirely inappropriate and distracting if your goal is to discuss how Portland can be better. Nobody in Portland is sabotaging our committees is my point; at the very least they're not doing so intentionally.
What you do get here is what some people call "everything bagel style liberalism" where we do everything, but nothing particularly well, and there is really no North Star when it comes to ethos.
If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only real choice is to abandon the welfare system. Otherwise, the alternative is to abandon the welfare system spitefully in a way that doesn't achieve anything for anyone.
Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms.
You can quickly judge the actual opinion of the overwhelming majority of voters on completely abolishing welfare provisions, when you mention a few magic words that happen to extend those provisions to "normies" (medicare etc).
I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:
Vote for what?
They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.
What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.
And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.
It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.
The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:
A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy
Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...
Today I do not judge others for their votes.
Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.
And I do not blame or shame anyone either.
It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.
The optics on that term warrant the framing for reasons already given.
Sidenote: one of the most difficult aspects of threaded text dialog is a very high degree of intent ambiguity is ever present. Same goes for overall emotional perception.
Because of this, I avoid personal judgment and very frequently avoid the top responses to "things one may feel compelled to respond to", which are righteous indignation and subject change.
Much better to assume a friendly dialog, give benefit of the doubt and see where it all may lead.
If nothing else, flat out asking about other people state is often better than declaring it out of hand.
The two major parties share the partisan vote.
This means Republicans are actually a quarter of us along with Dems.
Party line voting is not the only game in town. Roughly half the nation wants to vote FOR something, not AGAINST "the bad guys"
With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.
They're pushed out, either through police violence or a complete lack of viable social support systems. There's many ways to discourage folks from sticking around through ad hoc policies without putting it explicitly into law, or else to simply not mandate the kind of support that other cities have.
Conservatives (and the threat of conservative backlash) can nonetheless meaningfully influence the shape of institutional policies that hinder the stated goals of the organization, municipal government or otherwise. It's not at "tyranny of the minority" levels in many cases but that doesn't mean they're completely shut out.
Intention matters little when it comes to outcomes -- this is the credo of the consequentialist. It's about the material facts as regards what specific elements of specific policies promote or discourage this or that outcome. Deft policymakers can find sneaky leverage points that are only obvious in retrospect as having been a significant influence on the outcome vis a vis the stated goals of the policy in the first place, and it would be naive to assume that large political organizations (parties, PACs, etc.) on both sides don't develop and hire talent to provide exactly this kind of service. It's a battle of shadow consultancies just as much as it is a battle between ideologically-motivated parties, even though you are only exposed to the dramas of the latter in news media.
I’ll pass, thanks.
Remote work was already growing, COVID just accelerated a societal change already in progress. Without COVID, we probably would have eventually ended up in the same place as we are now, it just would have taken longer.
And even years before COVID, I think the US was already ahead of many other countries in this transition. I remember my first business trip to the US in early 2008, I went to Oracle’s office in Orlando, it was near-deserted-I asked where everyone was, I was told “they’re all working from home”. Whereas, back in Australia (Oracle included), there was still a very strong culture of “if I can’t see you at your desk then you aren’t working”. Or similarly, even back then many of the US Oracle executives had remote EAs - remote EAs were not much of a thing in Australia at that time
Maybe in some places that might be true, but people are still in jail from the past.
Zurich did a great job, especially with the transformation of the infamous needle park.
Today Platzspitz has been cleaned up and restored, and is presented by the authorities as a peaceful, family-friendly garden.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park?wprov=sfti1#
So hands off was a total failure, so they gave up and forcibly removed people.
Just because democracy took off in America doesn't mean it will take off in Iraq.
Just because drug legalization worked in Zurich doesn't mean it will work in Portland.
That's false. I'd say "prove me wrong", but first, define "huge". Compare and contrast to cities of similar size in the US and globally.
who are we prioritizing in this situation and why? i care more about the people who have their lives together, they deserve priority.
What about drug use as a privilege? If you’re living on the street, your litter is all over the street, and you never pay taxes, then you lose your privilege.
Granted, it may be much harder to make a "drugs bar", but we can use comparable metrics to deem who is too unfit to independently do that stuff and if they need intervention.
Just because drugs are decriminalized doesn’t mean it has to be a free for all.
I find the alcohol culture n the US pretty outputting. The US model of 'get hammer in a bar and then drive home'. Not a great model.
So to say 'we solved this' is kind of ridiculous at least from my outside perspective.
One is available without prescription on every streetcorner, with use allowed in public in proximity to others, and the other is a public health epidemic.
Tobacco has a lot to answer for but it isn't the same kind of issue at all. It doesn't destroy communities so directly.
You might argue that it's the alcohol doing the zombification but I posit that surely the tobacco also has something to do in this equation.
Moronic analogy.
All the food carts across from the building where I used to work left, the Indian buffet restaurant closed, walking up around 10th near the Target to check out other restaurants I loved many I saw many barricaded former businesses.
The city used to be beautiful. It used to be vibrant and bustling with people and tourists and working professionals but when I was there last retracing my steps as if I was working and living there again it was not the Portland I remember. It’s disheartening.
That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not. I believe in helping people when they can’t help themselves. But allowing open drug use, camping in front of businesses, etc., doesn’t do much for said businesses and people to invest in your city leaving you with less tax revenue to help these very same folks with.
It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time.
I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case since 2020.
If you want services, good luck. Feds extracted that money and feed it to cloud app companies to keep you all happy and you still aren’t.
Let’s keep giving Elon forever to fail to reach Mars and complain government experiments are failures right away.
Americans have a credibility problem. Work less and less but expect more and more because we have a lot of hallucinated wealth. Where do the real workers come from if everyone is doing office work? Now that other nations have matured after WW2 rebuild, how do we justify taking more for less output?
1945-2000s was a statistical anomaly. America needs to sober up.
It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.
PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.
But from what I know the police in Paris sometimes clear away the tent cities from the streets.
Portland specifically has less police officers per capita than Haiti.
You probably should blame them. They let their personal problems collectively spiral out of control so badly that they became society's problem, and an entire city was degraded because of it. Blame can still be assigned to the pitiable.
The streets and parks and business fronts are not camping areas.
This happened on such a scale that I can't help but wonder if the results as seen in Portland, Vancouver, Sf ... were the intention.
"Wow! Homeless people still exist! In my city?! That's not very nice! And the police threw away the cover photo lady's tent and pepper-sprayed her friends sleeping bag? That's really not very nice! All to clean up the area for the visit of some official?"
The violence with which many camps are removed is abhorrent to many, as is the idea of shuffling them around for mere cosmetic purposes (not to actually get them into a better place), so there's a naive "everybody be nice! leave those poor people alone!" attitude that doesn't actually care about pesky details.
Since their experience is hypothetical and they're idealizing and romanticizing The Homeless, discussion on practical realities like the number of violent felons and sex offenders in camps is shut down with a classic "that never happens". They'll pretend it's some kind of made-up minority and not the bulk of people who can't/won't go to a shelter (i.e, because they have warrants or have been banned for bad behavior).
Sure, they got what they asked for, but I don't believe they ever really considered what they were asking for, beyond "stop being mean".
That is, the state does in fact have certain obligations, regardless of any personal feelings one may have.
Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.
People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.
I worry that we will need to return to widespread suffering just to relearn the same things we knew only a free short generations ago.
Homelessness correlates pretty tightly with prevailing rents. People end up on the street and do drugs because once you've hit rock bottom why not?
Still, I think other people have a right to walk the streets undisturbed, so I don't see an easy, clean solution solving everything at once. But banning public drug use, is very fine with me.
I could build myself a really cool James Bond-style tent house in Central Park and live there in the summers for basically free. I'd like that.
I'm not entitled to it.
Voters can easily decide that the sidewalk is no longer a place for people to rot on.
"I think other people have a right to walk the streets undisturbed"
And when you ban public drug use and enforce it, you automatically remove all junkies from public spaces.
Depends on your definition of "use".
I can do a bunch of meth somewhere discreet, and then party on the streets without actively "using" drugs for hours - days even!
And people bothering other people on the streets is not alright and should be stopped any way, drugs in their blood or not.
I did not say that, you probably confused my comment with someone else.
Fine them and take their drugs would be a simple one.
Take their drugs? Oh no. They'll just get more, eventually. It's not like they have a lifetime supply stashed away. They generally do the drugs shortly after getting them. They're unlikely to have any to take.
You act as if the police are complete morons and totally incompetent and haven't thought of any or tried any alternatives - anywhere in the world.
"You act as if the police are complete morons and totally incompetent and haven't thought of any or tried any alternatives - anywhere in the world"
That's the thing. Addicts on the streets in europe for example, are a rare thing. And I know many other places on the world, with no junkies on the streets either. And also with a way lower prisoner to population ratio. So maybe there are other ways, besides just jailing everyone. (Which is pretty expensive btw.)
This is because most of Europe has better social safety nets and didn't have an opioid crisis (also partly because of its safety nets), not because they "banned" anything. Drugs and active drug users are in the end still pretty easy to find in central areas in major cities if you look; and if the police do get involved you definitely go to jail.
Have you been to europe? I was born and live here and have been to allmost every other EU state and people going to jail for drugs is allmost not existent to my knowledge - unless people are dealing big quantities. (Or doing other crimes while drugged, but then they go for the other crimes and not the drugs)
"Drugs and active drug users are in the end still pretty easy to find in central areas in major cities if you look"
You can also find many drunk people, if you go to the pubs - but I don't remember the last time, I saw junkies in the streets. Of course, seeing people who likely do drugs regular, sure, but minding their own buisness and going somewhere, not occuping the streets and scaring normal people, which I thought is what we are talking about here.
Total idiocy.
I don’t believe addicts and even to extension a lot of dealers should be locked up. I agree generally that nonviolent crimes probably don’t net benefit the community by locking people up. Assuming we are talking about our existing prison system.
For addicts unfortunately I don’t know what else is possible beyond locking them up in mental health institutions. Perhaps we need to try out new types of addiction centers that we can enroll people into? I don’t know what the answer is and I am not sure if we have the help of history. We certainly had drugs in the past but most of the time it sounds like people were drunks. Now we have a crisis of addicts using drugs that are unstoppable.
I wish I had a better idea but everything so far has not worked. There is probably a cutoff. You have the individuals that are not possible to bring back and the ones that could maybe become recovering addicts. The ones that are not coming back just need to go to state institutions.
If everyone on the entire planet was addicted to meth and did it daily, but there was a single meth user who decided to twerk naked at the top of the metro stairwell and assault people, that one person should be imprisoned. Why you ask? Because every other person on the planet is (as you say) functional. Nobody cares if you decided to do drugs and then fall asleep at home while paying your bills (ie: functioning). People do care about naked twerking people at the top of metro stairwells who routinely assault passers-by.
The aforementioned "functioning, respected and powerful people" are able to conceal or internalize the cost of their problems and aren't usually a problem for the public at large.
With that in mind, the problem is really just being persistently a public danger/nuisance. The only relevance of addiction to this is that addicts are frequently unresponsive to incentives that would be sufficient for non-addicts.
Right now the nyc transit system is on the pay what you wish system because the voters have decided they can’t bear to see people locked up for not paying. You can hem and haw, but that’s the consequence.
I see lots of other ways, the most simple one: just take away their drugs, if they use drugs in public.
If you do this regulary, no junkie will go somewhere, where he will seriously risk loosing his stuff.
Locking up people at some point is also possible, but there are lots of other ways before that.
Seems short sighted. Do you know how people act when they want to get high and can't? When they're going through serious withdrawal?
Just taking their drugs is going to get people hurt. They will either hurt themselves, or they will hurt other people.
They got all of the carrots sure, but there was no stick. The reason these programs have success elsewhere is that they give people the choice of prison or treatment.
Also, nowhere except the US just decided to legalize public drug use. In fact one of the goals of harm reduction programs in other places is to get the users out of public spaces.
It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.
The US had far better economic growth then Europe in general. With much of Europe barley growing since early 2010.
Why do people no live in these areas? Why are there so many homeless in the first place.
It seems like some things don’t have perfect solutions and we are “stuck” picking which downsides we want to deal with.
It seems that if we want to be the most kind to druggies (not lock them up) it comes at the expense of the normies - people trying to live, work, raise families, run businesses, etc.
It seems that for the last few decades society decided that normies are fine and even privileged and therefore it’s fine to hurt them a little to benefit the “disadvantaged”. What I think we are seeing now that doubling down on druggies etc still doesn’t really help them (because frankly their problems are internal and a druggie by definition is in a baaaad place) while it also hurts the people trying to live a good life and who by the way pay for everything.
I do hope that people start to recognize this. We need to feel good making choices in favor of families over druggies, when we have to.
Is it possible to decriminalise, yet also make it undesirable, or socially unacceptable?
As an outsider, the increase in drug use does not appear to be helping your countries mental health.
What is wrong with this approach:
Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is.
If someone’s addiction has become unmanageable to the point where they are doing drugs on the street, it is a kindness and a necessity to take their agency away from them.
If someone is an addict but otherwise functions, it is none of anyone’s business.
Exactly. I can't imagine somebody on weed would bother people that much.
But if you steal from people, leave your unclean syringes lying around, etc. you're a hazard to society and need to be dealt with. So we need to enable law enforcement to deal with that properly.
If you're drunk and belligerent, which happens a lot, you shouldn't be able to do that legally either.
So as long as you're not a menace to society, I don't see why you shouldn't have that freedom. But as soon as your freedom causes issues for others, it needs to be dealt with.
Maybe allowing meth, fentanyl, heroin and such is the problem. I would bet almost all the big problems are due to the users of these.
It does not work where the "Deep State" is the enemy and grifters run for Congress to become Twitter trolls.
You are blaming Portland's currently fail[ed|ing] policies on federal congress members that have nothing to do with Portland?
This is a progressive failure
I think more to the point the issue is that you can't legislate morality. Some people will break the law no matter how harsh the penalty, and some people will take advantage of permissiveness no matter how much you try to help. Some problems the government just can't fix.
It is not that the ideas are wrong.
It is that they are not the correct moves for a team that is not ready for them.
I know it sounds like a silly parallel. But changing societies is hard, long, unique and not well understood process. It makes sense to try to learn from examples where it is much easier to gather some information.
When I come to meet a team that has trouble (I work as an advisor and help teams that have trouble), I am not coming with a library of good solutions BECAUSE IT IS FUCKING NOT WORKING. Time and time again, I am repairing after previous people who did just that -- they came with a solution thinking they know it all because it worked somewhere. More often than not they have observed something working, they learned elements they could easily understand and they tried to transplant and failed miserably.
So whether you are trying to fix a team or fix a homelessness problem, you have to come with an empty mind and willingness to relentlessly problem solve. And look at those other successful examples as examples to learn from but not necessarily duplicate.
Let alone whether they can work in the real world.
In this case I don't think anyone in Portland or Oregon attempted such an analysis.
A lot of us here have more experience in working or introducing microservices that shaping drug abuse policy. I would be surprised if there was one politician here who actually was responsible for dealing with the problem himself/herself.
Maybe like $2 trillion over a decade?
However, isn't this a little bit like state gun control? Legislation and public services being wildly different across a border that anyone can cross at will creates border effects. Is it possible that Portland is attracting a ton of junkies from elsewhere?
Also this is another exhibit for my pet theory that progressive and idealistic politics are more effective at large scales whereas conservative and managerial politics are better suited to the local level of governance.
If I want to pop some mdma and enjoy myself at a live show, or do shrooms and go hiking, or smoke some weed and relax in a hammock and listen to my favorite album, or do some speed and clean my house, or spend a weekend dozing off with some heroin, then I ought to be allowed.
If however I get into fights, puke and shit in public, nod off laying spread eagle across the sidewalk or in the doorway of a business that’s trying to open in the morning, trespass and steal anything that’s not nailed down, start completely unsafe and inappropriate fires, and menace innocent passerbys on thoroughfares - I should be stopped.
Drugs writ large are not the problem. Drugs are what you make of them. Users who cause problems should be dealt with. Users who don’t should be left unharassed. Drunken brawling? Straight to jail. Drunken hugging? Let people have fun.
The reality is that people in the throes of drug addiction have already lost their agency, so some kind of coercive intervention will often be necessary to break the cycle. By refusing to do this out of a (commendable) compassionate impulse, we are making the situation worse.
In general the last ~5 years of living here has been a lesson of how important order (i.e. the enforcement of rules and norms) is for a functioning society. You could say it is the foundation of all social goods.
Watching the city's decline up close has deeply altered my political beliefs on a number of topics – this is one of them.
Most drug users don't want to get off drugs. That's why you need an intervention. No addict likes interventions either. You have to be really self disciplined to turn yourself into treatment.
VS
Fentanyl. Opioid epidemics. Addition as business model.
See the chart: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
I'm worried that cannabis is less likely to be legalised elsewhere due to pharma drugs being so harmful.
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-inju...
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?)
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
Absolutely phenomenal journalism that nobody is paying attention to unfortunately
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I am aware
> raising it is mostly up to you
The rent? Or the salary?
> Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse
Like I said, 3xrent creates a homeless me, no drugs involved
https://web.archive.org/web/20211022190558/http://allhomekc....
Rather I think the problem is that half assed decriminalization efforts simply aren’t enough and that drug overdose has become a much more severe issue because of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of fentanyl. What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts. In addition full legalization and regulated drug markets (preferably via pharmacies with a strict non-profit motive) wouldn’t hurt either.
What Seattle has done is basically just decriminalization without any of the support needed to go with it. Yes we support addicts and spend a lot of money on their care, however these are all suffering from austerity and are often just post-hoc measures (which often cost more in the long run).
So you have fentanyl, not much housing, not much treatment, not enough hospital space. People get addicted, at least some move here when addicted and then they are stuck.
It's also not just a seattle problem. Alaska has also been struggling with lots of deaths from drug abuse or overdose. Wasilla - https://alaskapublic.org/2023/04/10/troopers-warn-of-lethal-..., Anchorage - https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2023/07/27/anchora...
How many productive members of society does it take to support each drug addict? Should there be any calculation, or should we say "whatever it takes"?
More realistically smaller total staff than 20 dealt with 3,800 addicts in an 18 month trial a decade and a half ago with benefits to the community (reduced expenses from deaths, overdoses, central record keeping, etc) that were considered worthwhile to keep such centres going until the present day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608095
FINAL REPORT OF THE EVALUATION OF THE SYDNEY MEDICALLY SUPERVISED INJECTING CENTRE
https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/5706/1/MSIC_final_evaluation_...
might be of interest to some.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/20/california-a...
There are legitimate causes for the blight in Seattle but lack of jobs and low wages aren’t one of them.
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.
If anything, I'm stunned that the price for square foot in Paris is only 180% of that in Seattle.
Seattle is not a cosmopolitan global city, this is true, but Paris wishes it had Seattle’s economic dynamism by almost any measure. Like many European cities, its status is the accumulated capital of a prior era that is not being replenished at replacement rate. I have my qualms about Seattle but European cities are largely worse when looking forward.
How is this relevant to my point, which is that in Paris (and most of major European metros), the prices-to-incomes ratio is much worse than in Seattle, and pretty much anywhere in US? In what way it is a crown jewel, if, by US standards, 3/4th of the population barely makes the ends meet?
Marseille: 4300 EUR
Birmingham: 3000 GBP
Bremen: 3000 EUR
Liege: 3000 EUR
Antwerp: 2500 EUR
València: 2200 EUR
Poznan: 2000 EUR
These are all major, but not the biggest, cities in their respective country. I'm not saying they are representative (for what, anyway). You'll find major cities that are much more expensive (eg Munich) or cheaper.
As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/france/individual/taxes-on-pers...
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/taxes-on-per...
However, this becomes much worse if you look at after-tax situation. In Poland, at this pay range, your effective tax rate is 27%, whereas in Seattle it's 16%, and you have to then apply 23% VAT to your purchases, compared to 10% sales tax in Seattle.
> As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
What specifically does it disagree about? It is well known that the effective tax rate on lower half of the population is much lower in US than in almost all of Europe, as my example comparison between US and Poland or France shows. In Europe, the middle class pays the bulk of the tax burden, whereas in US, taxation is much more progressive, and it is the wealthy who pay most of the tax.
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").
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
It would be nice if life wasn't so stressful all the time for so many people. Look at all the wild drivers, the lack of camaraderie in basic everyday life interactions, you can point to all manner of social ills and if you empathize with those who are struggling to get by -- which is most people according to every statistic released in the last 6 years about it -- you would easily make the connection between worrying about not having a bed and enough food and the kinds of shitty behavior people end up enacting.
Those cities don't have a problem with homelessness because their cities either suck to live outside in the winter or suck to live outside in the summer.
You'll also note the high proportions allocated to police in every city budget (NYC cops get something like $5 billion per year!). The difference between some cities and others is primarily the level of controls they put on police re: homeless people because of progressive policies. The cities with hardline positions look better because the homeless are pushed out, not because the homeless find homes there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapo...
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.
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.
Then they’re out of the way.
One or way or another, none of us are getting out of this alive. Not sure where the religious conviction we must save all souls comes from or has any value.
Who is to say any progress we make won’t be undid by another pandemic we cannot predict, or some nutter launching the nukes
We have political agents hell bent on war and subjugating undesirables, rather than pushback against them let’s focus on some people who don’t want to live?
Why not ask Oceangate how the war against physics is going. It will always win and erode any social progress we think we made
I don't think that's the goal. The goal is to attempt to reduce harm of something that removes freedom. Try asking a drug addict if they want to keep taking drugs. I suspect you'll be surprised at the answer. Stopping drugs would be like achieving abstinence as the primary form of contraceptive. Both are impossible because they work on the same soup of chemicals, but one has evolved with some form of continuation in mind. The other is a direct injection, orders of magnitude stronger, that just fucks up all the machinery of the brain.
But hey the toxic mess we leave for the future to suffer through won’t be our problem so shrug
This is the most disingenuous and self righteous thread I’ve ever been involved with. Traditional catechisms and stubbornness will win out against physical reality. RBG fans I guess.
If the car has doors your can't unlock, and the plane forced you to fly or you die from withdrawals, both of which follow you around you're whole life honking their horns begging you to get back in, even if you do manage to stop, then your analogy could make sense.
Do you have any experience with addiction?
Having experience with the pain it causes, and not liking the idea of more families being ripped apart/abandoned due to a few milligrams, isn't self righteous as much as sympathetic. I think there's some compromise between complete freedom and "this thing completely removes freedom, so maybe it's a bad idea".
Both times my family wished for euthanization options rather than watch family rot
But patronizing high minds said no; in our society they must suffer until they die
Americans have spent so much time huffing toxic positivity whippets.
All the high minded worship and praise of the economy, tech, feeding notions of American exceptionalism has led us to believe we really can do anything
But we all can’t live forever and have no guarantee the future won’t just screw it all up again
Physics rules, not human philosophy. Reality itself is the root of our misery. There’s no eradicating suffering without eliminating humans; we cannot violate physics and the physical word fosters suffering. Erosion and entropy of all structure.
This forum is sounding way too religious. Thought it was science nerdy when I signed up but it’s just typical “America great!”
You generate waste and increase costs by reducing resources for others
You get in the way of others free agency due to management of your mess
Just by existing you impose yourself on others. Stop pretending physical reality doesn’t apply to you an vacuous political poetry about rights waves away externalized burdens your elder self will foist on the next generation to preserve your perception of rights at the cost of them to perceive what they value for themselves
I’ve been in pain from surgery multiple times, it’s awful. You’d leave dying people in pain to suffer through it versus violate spoken tradition of the dead. Our own experiences mean nothing to you, just adherence to philosophy.
No, we're better off regulating safety, setting increasingly strict pollution and mileage standards, and continuing to update laws to eliminate behaviors such as DUI or texting to continue to have those freedoms while limiting externalities.
What are your thoughts on the death penalty in Singapore?
Surely some people became addicted to it (not that different from alcohol, nicotine, fatty sweets, or various prescription drugs), but it didn't destroy society.
One thing that’s missing in a lot of these discussions is strength and education. What strength was the Bayer drugs vs things available today, and how well informed was the average person that this was a product they could access recreationally.
Now there's more of a safety net (money, foster care, and ambulances/ERs) which is largely good, but provides more opportunity to enable addicts.
1) Not everybody reacts that way.
I've only ever been given high-end opioids when in extreme pain, but I hate the sensation.
My brain feels like it's encased in concrete. A higher dose simply puts me to sleep.
2) What gives you the right to tell people to not do something pleasurable?
Really. Many people have rough lives. We should help them find joy somewhat safely rather than shunt them into the dark.
this is a really good question and I had to think about it a lot. I think if all other variables were equal, I would have no problem with people doing something pleasurable. In contrast to say, a strict religious fanatic who vociferously preaches against wanking or rock music.
However, I think we can both agree that opiate withdrawals are not pleasurable, nor is the change in an addict's personality when they start putting drugs high and above everything else in life. I think we can also agree that there is a continuity between "pleasurable" and "not pleasurable", and opiates give the user so much pleasure that pales in comparison to anything else. Enough to substantially change their personality, for at least the ones who are susceptible to it (as you pointed out, not everyone becomes instantly addicted). So that's where my case for prohibition comes from.
There's the whole "Rat Park Experiment" that I think deserves a mention. Whether the experiment itself has been debunked (I can't remember) is irrelevant. I think it's worth asking the same question of Portland: is there opportunity here? Can someone get an entry-level job and be happy? If not, why? This is a liberal, government-micromanaged city. Why are things so dismal that people are choosing not to work? (If you wonder why I'm suddenly making this a partisan issue, it's because (1) the government has their hands on all the controls so obviously they could fix things, and (2) people are suggesting regulation of dope, so if the gov can't regulate a simple local economy, why would we think they can suddenly be the new dope dealer?). Why don't they double down on their taxes and fees and manipulate the city such that an entry-level, full-time employee at Dollar General or Taco Bell can rent his own apartment, raise a family with their spouse, have healthcare, own a car, have a vacation, and a 401k? The reason is because the far left doesn't actually represent the people. They'd rather distract everyone with gender pronouns and anti-racism red-herrings while their own citizens check-out of the late-stage capitalist hellscape their government created for them.
And, see, this is the crux. You are banning something for everyone even though only a smaller number seem to be susceptible.
The problem is that this applies to a whole bunch of things: porn, gambling, alcohol, etc. Why heroin and not alcohol which, in many ways, is much worse than heroin?
I agree that the base problem is that life sucks for many people, and we need to fix that. However, that problem is going to be slow in fixing, and we need interim, probably sub-optimal solutions in the meantime.
"Given the legal opportunity to purchase X, some people will absolutely overdo it." This goes for some ridiculous things like Pokemon cards or collectible shoes as well. Should we ban those?
And many people bring test kits to festivals and raves and clubs and bars already. So this is 100% a proven solution for light recreational party usage.
I agree with skepticism about addicts (especially someone living on the street, etc)
We don’t offer them in most places because (a) nobody wants a safe drug use center near them because drug users will come to it and (b) a really despicable and unfortunately common attitude that harm reduction is bad because it keeps drug users alive.
Yes?
When you're having surgery and the anesthesiologist uses a mixture of fentanyl and propofol, such that you safely wake up, they aren't just guessing.
One problem is that what's out on the street isn't necessarily fentanyl in the first place, but any one of hundreds of fentanyl analogs, which all vary in potency. You have no idea whether what you're measuring is fentanyl.
If you "give information and supplies", how do you keep the government out of it? At the very least, the government has to decriminalize what you're doing. Then what; someone has to pay for it. What about liability? If someone dies and it turns out you gave them the supplies, you're liable.
That's a rather emotional place to make an argument, in my opinion.
They're not assumptions if they are his/her lived experiences.
Joe Perry & Steven Tyler (Aerosmith's "Toxic Twins") are still here. Clapton lives. So does Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.
All those guys would be long dead if there had been fentanyl lacing back in the 70's.
You can name a few of the richest people ever to do drugs who haven't died -- but how many have? And how many people without resources to pull them back from consequences of an overdose have died versus have used long-term and lived?
(For the record, I think I'm not really on the other side of the larger argument here, but I don't think your argument here is a convincing one.)
Oh, plenty!
Though ime most users don't die. Which is why I support legalization. What I watched happened with my drug phase and others, it was mostly a phase and people just needed time, support and patience to get through to other side. There might be extreme examples ruining it for all, but I saw a lot of people stop after some serious use.
Unfortunately some die because of the policy we have like a few people I knew personally. All uncessarry.
I don't have time to really get into the weeds for this discussion, but I can at least do the weaker refutation of this very general claim by way of a counterexample. Professor Carl Hart is one such example that came up in a seminar on substance use disorder during my undergraduate program in integrative neuroscience. [0]
I'm sorry you're dealing with someone who does not have a functional, productive relationship with a substance. What you're describing is true of a lot of things though, not just "hardcore" drugs. If you've lived with or know a gambling/sex addict you know exactly what I'm referring to. How these things hijack our neurology is really complex and it unfortunately boils down to more than "avoid these high risk things". Not sure if you have access to academic journals, but public libraries often can provide access to reputable research on substance use disorder in humans, as well as actual experimentation in animal models such as mice. There are a lot of people whose incentives align with yours for tackling this problem, and the solutions they propose are worth a shot. Clearly the war on drugs has not worked and we agree on that at least. What are we going to try next?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/06/meet-carl-ha...
There are plenty of people who fit this description, and heroin isn't the root cause of their problem. It's just a symptom of a deeper problem. For every person like this, there's someone who dabbles with heroin/etc and still goes to work every day and has a healthy relationship with their family.
Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.
Very true, alcohol is much worse by most metrics, both in terms of number of addicts, number of deaths/year [1][2] and general damage done to the body. [3][4]. (I'm not trying to be cynical, just stating facts.)
> Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.
There's no data on self-reported addiction, for obvious reasons, but there is data on overdoses: "Fatalities involving only heroin appear to form a minority of overdose occasions, the presence of other drugs (primarily central nervous system depressants such as alcohol and benzodiazepines) being commonly detected at autopsy." [5]
I've met good people addicted to heroin. They've been through more hell than the rest of us can ever understand, almost entirely because of those times when they couldn't access it. If I could press a button to forever ban them access to any opioid, I'd press that button; they'd get over it in a few months and thank me. But that's impossible. The second best option is to allow them access to a clean, low-cost, prescription of it for the rest of their life.
[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/ [2] https://drugabusestatistics.org/heroin-statistics/ [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002239... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7328574/ [5] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1360-0443....
141,000 Americans die from the effects of alcohol each year. That would include factors such as increased heart attacks, etc. It is not merely looking at deaths from delerium tremens or the like.
Nonetheless, 177 million Americans[1] use alcohol annually. That is a 0.079% fatality rate.
So, the [direct + indirect] deaths from alcohol are 19.6x smaller per user than the direct deaths from heroin. I would wager if you included indirect effects, the difference is 100x or more against heroin.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...
I know drug consumption usually go up when legalized, but a regulated heroin market would ideally be under very strict regulation, much stricter then alcohol or weed. It would most likely involve getting a prescription and buying it at a pharmacy. There would probably be strict no advertising and no branding. As well as a strict non-profit requirements for makers and distributes.
Is this true per capita?
Meaning after a few times of someone finding black market heroin, they can prove addiction - and then get it for low cost on the taxpayers dime, indefinitely and forever. Even better, the heroin addicts with less restraint about only using their supply will know who to beat and steal from to get more.
I'm not saying addicts are inherently bad people. I am saying heroin users are unlikely to have the self-control to stick to their prescribed amount, every day for the rest of their lives. We all have bad days and need something to make them suck less.
>I've met good people addicted to heroin. They've been through more hell than the rest of us can ever understand, almost entirely because of those times when they couldn't access it. If I could press a button to forever ban them access to any opioid, I'd press that button; they'd get over it in a few months and thank me. But that's impossible. The second best option is to allow them access to a clean, low-cost, prescription of it for the rest of their life.
How can you say both of these things? People who try to act like alcohol is worse than Heroin do more harm than good, but you even seem to understand it is worse with your last paragraph.
Of the hundreds of millions of users of alcohol, surely we don't even have to look up a study to find that the percentage of people who "been through more hell than the rest of us can ever understand, almost entirely because of those times when they couldn't access it" is less than Heroin.
There was a lot of illegal OxyContin use but most of it was well regulated and under the control of doctors and pharmacists.
For instance oxycodone and many powerful painkillers are afaik not available as tablets in many countries, only given through IV's and injections in hospitals for serious enough conditions, or under serious constraints like palliative treatments. If you are recovering from an injury and are allowed to leave hospital, all what you should be allowed to take is paracetamol or ibuprofen for a limited time and that's it.
We shouldn't have to enter war against pain. Pain is not necessarily harmful, they are useful signals that can let people assess their recovery and physical state. Trying to avoid pain is trying to avoid reality. It is deemed to fail.
Nobody should take opiods painkillers for minor injuries and ailments, it just doesn't make sense.
Anyone knows that who followed current events during the opiod epidemic and read some Wikipedia on it.
And actually, it's not just fentanyl, but fentanyl-like compounds that, even if controlled to the same concentration, have varying degrees of strength.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fentanyl_analogues
"The structural variations among fentanyl-related substances can impart profound pharmacological differences between these drugs, especially with respect to potency and efficacy"
You don't know which fentanyl analog is in that heroin dose, and how much of it.
Astounding.
To most people 'fentanyl' == 'The Devil', and rightly so after so many deaths.
However it does still have legitimate medical use.
Why not ban nicotine, by the same logic as heroin?
The key difference is that nicotine is a mere stimulant, while heroin alters your perception, it literally changes the way you see good and bad, because it's the ultimate feel-good substance. I have zero qualms about legalizing LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, etc. Likely even cocaine. But legalization of opioids would require a lot of preliminary work, to somehow allow the addicts function in a socially compatible way when badly wanting a dose.
It must be noted that a physiological addiction to opiates does not form from a first dose, and not even from the first ten doses, so infrequent recreational use is possible, given a right psychological preparation. This is similar to alcohol.
because nicotine doesn't increase crime rates on society.
They have decriminalized possessing less than 2.5 grams of
- Opioids (such as heroin, morphine, and fentanyl)
- Crack and powder cocaine
- Methamphetamine (Meth)
- MDMA (Ecstasy)
It's a trial basis from Jan 31 2023 until Jan 31 2026, so we should get a good amount of data and evidence to see if this leads to better or worse outcomes for people and society as a whole.
[1] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/overdose/decriminalizatio...
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.
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.
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-dru...
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.
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.
I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.
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.
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.
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s, a time and place when homelessness was rampant, but your typical homeless person was a slow-to-move 50 year old wino, not a psychotic 20 year old on fentanyl and meth. Leaving aside the difference in the drugs, I think it's worse because: We do have, and have had a lot of people living in underpasses in Portland for the last 30 years. Most of those people are unfortunate locals who fell through the cracks, not the new crop who just showed up from Florida. Underpasses are full, and have been full, for decades. Many of us have tried to help. The increased visibility is a sign of two things: (1) overflow, and (2) much more dangerous chemicals.
For instance, you wouldn't find this kind of thing happening ten years ago: https://www.koin.com/news/portland/eight-overdosed-on-fentan...
I could only read the title but from what I can come up these people would have overdosed, the only difference with public drug use is they die in front of everyone. What I am concerned is it should actually trigger a response towards helping addicts get access to safer drugs, and finding a way for them to stay functionnal and harmless in our society. Instead people want to try to hide the problem under the carpet but it will not work either.
Imagine if prohibition had ended just in Chicago. Chicago would have been overrun with alcoholics.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
1. Public drunkness is still a problem 2. Drunk driving still kills a lot of people. Legalization of alcohol doesn't help.
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.
Sincerely, Portland Native
The crime of the War on Drugs was that we had double standards, not that we had a War on Drugs.
(And if no to alcohol, then what about marijuana?)
Are you arguing that no recreational or unsanctioned use of any banned substance should be tolerated?
For context:
- MDMA shows promise treating PTSD. Currently Schedule 1 - total ban
- Psilocybin and other psychedelics reportedly beneficial for end-of-life care, notably in the case of cancer patients. Currently Schedule 1 - total ban
- Marijuana is also still Schedule 1 at the federal level
Schedule 1 is normally also a ban on research but luckily we've seen some improvement in this area. Why? Because the illegal market still exists, and people __do__ discover genuine medical uses for currently banned substances
That could just be a coincidence though - that increasing the price of homes caused people to stop being able to afford them.
Some quotes from him:
>Hitler massacred 3 million Jews ... there's 3 million drug addicts. There are. I'd be happy to slaughter them
>Just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you're a son of a bitch
Under your system she would've never decided to get clean then? Also dying much earlier than she would've had to and probably adding a bunch of burden to the health system. People chastice cigarete smokers for much less.
If you ask that guy who is today an adult, I can tell you he doesn't have second thoughts and would probably punch you in the face if you told him that heroine had no bad effects.
I gotta say though, it's sort of complicated when you're talking about legalizing things that are already legal as prescription drugs (like opiates and benzos). Alcohol is different because it doesn't really have any medical use outside of disinfecting things (it's fairly terrible as an anesthetic or as a tranquilizer), but there's something kind of weird about having former prescription drugs just be legal over the counter. How many people might bypass their doctor and start using strong opiates for pain that might not need it and end up in a bad spot?
I don't think you can go so far as like w/ alcohol where you just show an ID and buy whatever you want, but it does seem like there needs to be some way to ensure the product is safe. Maybe a compromise might be some sort of free testing kits, or something like narcan on hand in a safe space.
They're an interesting middle ground - dedicated medical centres that allow users to inject with clean needles, test drugs for purity, and have narcan and crash carts available for complications.
You arrive, show ID, inject your drugs, chill for 20 minutes or so, and then leave.
The long term results are no increase in crime, reduction in death from overdose and dirty needle infections, HIV, etc, improvement in drug quality (now that the users can readily test quality there's more discernment in the market and a reduction in blatant over cutting bad mixes into the illegal supply).
Public drug use | shooting up is still illegal - this is reduced as there is a centre to go to, etc.
One other benefit is being able to easily and routinely survey drug users and adapt public policy to changing situations on the ground, early detection of changes in illegal supply, etc.
They cost money to run, they save money on reduction in public funds spent on the problems they reduce.
It's an absurd level of misdirected empathy to redirect such massive parts of the society's collective effort to benefit a few people who had some amount of agency in ruining their own lives.
Another poster did the math here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608506
The thing about most (not all) illegal drugs is most of them have some sort of positive usage outside of abuse. Opiates can be effective for pain, benzodiazepines for acute anxiety, stimulants for ADHD or narcolepsy, etc. Alcohol despite its useful social role (I'm not telling you all to be tee-totallers) is basically just a poison that has a small handful of short term nice effects and a long tail of effects that are a disaster.
Anyway, I question the math in the other post about heroin because it's essentially ignoring the dangers of a bad supply. People do safely take other (prescribed) opiates safely. I imagine that alcohol would be a lot more dangerous if we were back in prohibition times with like bath tub gin.
Yeah, I don't know about that – plenty of "functional alcoholics" around, sure, but also plenty of not-so-functional alcoholics around, as well as the wife-and-kid-beater alcoholics.
Heroin is not alcohol and doesn't induce aggression in the same way, but it's also a lot more addictive, and especially at low wages getting your daily dose can be a challenge – so "junkies" will not be eliminated outright. I consider it an open question whether they will be reduced – it's very possible (perhaps even plausible), but I certainly wouldn't consider it a forgone conclusion.
> My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years.
Dick van Dyke was a chain-smoker until well in to his 70s and he's currently doing well at the age of 97.
These are the sort of things where you really need to look at overall effects and statistics, rather than individual cases.
Legalizing will reduce violence, reduce accidental overdoses and poisonings, and give the state regular contact points with users (to hopefully funnel them to assistance). Safe use sites would go some way towards hiding the problem if managed well.
Legalizing will not solve the problem of addiction. It will not solve overdoses (many overdoses are not caused by surprise differences in dose; people often overdose after relapse, or deliberately seek out stronger than usual supplies).
We have to accept that legalizing will solve some problems, but will likely keep killing at least some people.
Housing is another solution to hiding the problem. But housing just hides the drug use problem. It will probably also kill people - people who overdose on the sidewalk are more likely to be narcaned than people using alone.
Free housing + free drugs for opiate addicts would go a long ways towards solving the issue for everyone who isn’t an opiate addict, and probably cheaper than imprisoning or healing addicts.
I’d prefer treatment but the local officials have already proven incapable of that. The county is already very good at handing out needles, smoking kits, and boofing literature, so handing out fetty should be a very light lift administratively.
https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Measures/Analy...
Surely we can solve this inability to regulate with even more regulation. Just one more regulation bro... trust me bro. Just a bit more power and money to the government bro. It's all gonna be great! Just give a little bit more in taxes, bro. It's going to be a utopia, you'll see!
No, the voters decriminalized drugs with a constitutional amendment.
Decriminalization is the only ethical way to move forwards. For decades now we have abused our own populace and those of other countries to the point of parody in the name of this prohibition, and, shock of shocks, it has failed, just like prohibition did, with the added benefit of we have the documents from the Nixon administration who were quite ready to say, behind closed doors anyway, that the entire point from the start of the war on drugs was openly to fuck with hippies and black people at scale, and that was before the CIA was flooding ghettos across the country with drugs to find/launder money for their operations.
None of this has ever been about the fucking drugs, it has always been yet another cudgel wielded by the state to further it's own ends. IF we decide we need to regulate substances based on actual scientific documented evidence, not puritan sensibilities of sin and vice, then so be it and we can figure that out after the fact. But until then, the entire existing systemic infrastructure for it is frankly, poisoned. It is not fit for the task it is entrusted and should be destroyed.
Burn it down, and start over.
Prohibition was a massive success where did you get the impression it didn't work? Nothing has ever reduced domestic violence or alcohol related deaths as much. Even after being repealed it fundamentally changed how Americans interact with alcohol; how much people drink is still massively below what is was pre-prohibition.
> Burn it down, and start over.
They did and the whole article is just about how much worse it made everything. Not just visible issues or people complaining about moral issues but OD deaths surged.
It also more or less created organized crime in the United States, and laid the foundations for every illicit-business-at-scale that would follow it. Of course it reduced alcoholism: alcohol was illegal, and anything made illegal will be necessarily reduced in availability. But it didn't get rid of it, and it made the alcohol that remained far more dangerous:
- The economics of smuggling meant that lighter alcohol like beer and wine were far less profitable to transport than hard liquors like whiskey, bourbon, vodka, and moonshine. SO MUCH moonshine.
- Because the aforementioned products were illegal, there was now zero government oversight involved in their production and distribution, meaning you often had no idea what the fuck you were actually buying and if it was any good, or hell, even safe to consume. Much like the war on drugs, and, if you wanna get REAL political, the fall of Roe v Wade, making it illegal, be it booze, smokes, pot, meth, or abortion doesn't make it not happen: it makes it unsafe.
- Worse still, the legal issues meant that if a particular establishment was selling unsafe liquor, you couldn't do shit about it because, again it's illegal and any report to authorities about the lack of safety put you in legal hot water. This meant the enforcement that did exist was basically down to the aforementioned organized crime rings, who didn't bother with a jury trial, they'd just put you in a hole out in the woods.
And, naturally, no taxes are paid on all this commerce that is very much still happening, and is riskier to the people engaged in it, to suit the puritan sensibilities of a loud minority. Which is probably a big part of why it was no longer the law of the land. And that's all before you consider the fact that it flies directly in the face of all the individual freedom that this country's supposed to be built on in the first place (not that that's usually true, but in such matters, I think we should strive for it.).
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.
I was really hoping that for once we might have a reasoned debate about decriminalisation (or not). I can see we are yet again going down the same route of many people simply relaunching their pro/anti positions.
If you ever despair of politics, this is why; this is politics done badly.
The US has spent more than a trillion on the War on Drugs, we should use a fraction of that on housing and healthcare, instead of thinking about restarting the trillion dollar war on drugs
How much have we spent on police in this time? I think it’s worth spending a trillion to fight the war on murder, theft and rape…
I think the problem is quite the opposite from your diagnosis. There are no standards for legislation “success” or “failure”. Very few bills actually achieve their stated aims, and all the ones that don’t are kept on the books, then the results are blamed on under-budgeting, or partisan politics (which should be foreseeable if true).
A rehabilitation program requires a very high level of trust from those seeking help, especially so if the program is trying to pull people off of the streets.
Re-criminalizing drug usage would make it difficult to convince people that they won't be arrested.
Admittedly, I don't know how this problem has been approached elsewhere and what was needed to actually improve things.
The Oregon Health Authority then sat on that money for several years, bickering about procedures, policies, etc, and not a single dollar was sent out for several years after the law changed.
Treatment centers are finally starting to get open, years late. In the meantime, we spent years decriminalizing the drugs, while then guiding people into treatment, with no actual treatment available to them (and literally amassing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for it, before spending anything)
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-se-portl...
Either let people do drugs and let them worry about the consequences, or, if society is going to be on the hook for the consequences, don't. There is no feasible way to hold both positions at the same time.
Nobody’s a victim when a kid falls and breaks an arm while skateboarding, but we have programs like CHIP to help kids have access to healthcare to get that arm treated, regardless.
The kid is going to be fine after they are in a cast for a few weeks/months. A fentanyl addict, even with million of dollars over a few years of treatment, is more than likely never going to be OK again. Both involve moral hazard (if society is responsible for the consequences), but the consequences of both aren't similar at all.
If I may try to thread this needle:
- drug use has serious consequences for users directly and for society
- imprisonment is not effective at curbing drug use in individuals or systemically, because illicit drugs will always be available, see prohibition for the strongest case here
- illicit drug trafficking increases other criminal elements like gang violence, petty theft, etc, incurring high costs on society
- it is believed that addressing the causes for hardcore drug use as a mental and physical health issue may actually reduce drug use
- that work may be expensive today, but is expected to become a net positive over time as drug use declines
The idea is literally investing to fix a problem properly, rather than slapping on ever more expensive band-aid solutions as the problem gets worse.
If you don't believe health care can reduce drug use, that may be a sound position to hold, but if you believe it is effective it is absolutely not at odds to both desire investment in it and to seek decriminalization.
I disagree that hardline policies can't work. In China, there is no social safety net for drug users (nor much for anyone else), nor is there much sympathy for it, therefore...drug abuse happens for sure, but it just doesn't survive very long (one way or the other).
But regarding more permissive western cultures: imprisonment in the American system of "we put you away and don't bother with substance abuse treatment in prison" doesn't work, but there are definitely alternatives to that (flood prisons with substance abuse treatment programs).
As a tax payer it's perfectly reasonable that I don't want to pay for that, though.
If after a decade it ends up being very expensive but very effective, or moderately expensive and moderately effective, or expensive and not very effective, we can make better informed decisions -- rather than stick with prison by default, just because it is cheapest for now.
Say we put someone in prison then treat them for drug use and it works. This person is cured, found jesus, and will never touch another drug in their life. Why would you still keep them in prison? They’d have been sentenced to a time in prison regardless. Why? Would you propose a system of early release for cured drug offenders?
But we can’t really go there as a western country, so we try to socially reduce the consequences of drug use: not only are we not going to throw you in jail, but we are going to make sure you don’t starve/freeze to death and we will even try to cure you (even if we are going to fail at that most of the time).
If we had drug treatment in prison that worked, we would be horribly stupid not to just lean in on that. I’m totally for “go to prison but get out of you get clean.” Who wouldn’t?
It seems like the best case scenario is "We legalize drugs and then raise tax dollars and then use that money to fund programs so that people that are addicted aren't harmed too much in the long run" just seems not ideal.
I get the arguments for personal liberty, but we wouldn't allow other risky behavior that has a such huge societal cost.
Former city council members often railed against it; as a member they’d be assigned city bureaus (fire, police…) to basically manage day to day.
Former members complained they were so busy dealing with office work rather than understanding Portlands problems in the abstract and crafting legislation. Also the mayor was on the council and did the same job.
The hope is the new system (mayor and council are now separate entities, city manager oversees bureaus so mayor and council can focus on legislative matters).
Also I’d like to point out every city in the US is a raging dumpster fire of homeless, collusion, graft, fraud… Portland isn’t unique and it’s hardly as bad as say PA cities. America is a shithole country full of FOMO obsessed fast fashion clothes, food, gadgets, and media and gives zero fucks about setting that aside to clean itself up. Garbage in garbage out
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.
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...
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.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...
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.
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.
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.
This I support 100%.
> paid for by the state/federal level
This I can't. That's not "we" in any sense or form; that's other people's money taken away from them by violence or threat of violence.
If you encourage people to help others (as we should!), then we should help people ourselves. Not delegate it to others, especially if they're not doing it voluntarily.
And if no individual is feeling charitable that day, then no help would be provided?
What if that reduces our policies, in every area, to zero effectiveness?
All your suggestions are depend on locking people up to force it. Your post is just saying we need "corrective" prisons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Research disagrees.[1]
[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
Any organization that actually helped deal with homelessness with the intent to help people, rather than the intent to "clean up the streets" (especially in countries that "solved", compared the US, this problem) will be more than happy to explain to you all the ways in which this claim is just complete nonsense, and will be equally happen to explain to you how much harm yelling "they're all criminals" does.
To pretend that people choose to be homeless, or that homeless folks somehow have a better life when they're not on drugs that dull that experience and so should be trivially capable of choosing not to do drugs, is simply bonkers.
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!
^ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness?
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.
These policies eliminate the cliff off which people fall, resulting in living/defecating on the streets. There will still be some tiny fraction that are too ill/handicapped to work, but once their numbers are so small it becomes easier to help them on a case by case basis. Defining a top-down, centrally planned strategy from afar is the opposite of how to help anyone.
One more time, for these people what are your options except giving them free housing, jailing them, or letting them live unhoused?
Reducing the problem is nice but you still have to a policy at the bottom when all else still fails.
At the scale we're talking about here, the problem described in the subject of this thread is already solved.
Which is really just a particularly expensive and unpleasant home when you put it in this context.
You didn't really answer the question and just jumped to your own conclusion.
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.
https://iea.org.uk/publications/socialism-the-failed-idea-th...
But seriously, though our GDP may be lagging behind the US, we do seem to be able to deal with homelessness and drug addiction somewhat better.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/11/28/in-sweden-bill...
I'm always happy to learn from countries which have succeeded at something, but insofar as Europe has succeeded at things, it hasn't been a simple matter of "end capitalism". The devil is in the details.
Also remember that Europe freerides on the US a great deal. They get bargain prices on drugs+health innovations discovered by US companies, and have an amazing defensive arrangement in NATO that comes at low cost for them and the US hardly benefits from.
Drugs+innovations are largely funded by the public sector (see a previous discussion on HN I can't find right now), but in Europe we don't have a predatory healthcare industry.
As for NATO, that was formed to stop the entirety of the Eurasian landmass falling under Soviet control. It is hard to imagine an isolated US fairing too well in that kind of world.
Insofar as Europe pays less for drugs than the US, the US is subsidizing drug development. (I.e. when pharma companies decide whether they will recoup their R&D costs for a new drug, they are disproportionately looking to countries that pay the most.) Public/private doesn't affect my point here -- the US shouldn't necessarily copy the European model if the success of the European model is based on freeriding, even if it's freeriding on US govt spending.
>As for NATO, that was formed to stop the entirety of the Eurasian landmass falling under Soviet control. It is hard to imagine an isolated US fairing too well in that kind of world.
The US has oceans on both sides and friendly nations on our borders. We're gonna be fine. Isolationism was working perfectly well for us prior to WW2.
If you really believe in the European model, you should advocate for Europe to defend itself. Stand up for what you believe in. If the European model is truly effective, then Europe should be perfectly capable of taking care of itself. The US can then offer humanitarian alliances to other, poorer countries that actually need help.
The US is dependent on international trade - not least for Middle East oil. How you going to get that if the Med and the Gulf are Soviet lakes?
For sure Europe should shoulder it's burden when it comes to defense - but the reason you have homeless people in every major city is not because of your defense bill! It is because your society is malfunctioning.
Bear in mind that isolationism is exactly what Putin's Russia (and Xi's China) wants, be careful that you are not being indoctrinated by anti-US interests.
2 ways of describing the same thing. The difference between US "profiteering" vs Europe "getting a bargain" depends on your reference point. At the end of the day, the US is doing more to foot the bill for new drugs, and Europeans point and laugh instead of saying thank you.
>The US is dependent on international trade - not least for Middle East oil
The US is now a net energy exporter. I think we should retool to reduce dependence on foreign oil and reduce foreign entanglements. Should be good for the climate as well. And much cheaper than helping Europe with defense.
>For sure Europe should shoulder it's burden when it comes to defense - but the reason you have homeless people in every major city is not because of your defense bill! It is because your society is malfunctioning.
Resources are finite. You earlier implied that the US govt should spend more on social programs. That means either taking on more debt (terrible idea), or reducing large expenditures like defense. Furthermore, if it's true that the US is "malfunctioning", increased expenditure on social programs (as you earlier implied, remember our discussion was originally about capitalism vs social democracy) wouldn't necessarily even fix the problem.
This was a sufficiently disingenuous argument on your part that I don't plan to reply further in this thread.
>Bear in mind that isolationism is exactly what Putin's Russia (and Xi's China) wants, be careful that you are not being indoctrinated by anti-US interests.
I see Europeans trash the US about as much as I see Russia/China trashing the US. Where are the anti-US interests?
I never saw a Russian or Chinese person claim that US society is "malfunctioning". How would you feel if I said Europe was "malfunctioning" due to its low GDP?
You're talking about US interests. Being friendly with other major powers like Russia and China is in the US interest, for the purpose of preventing another world war. But at the end of the day, NATO is not in the US interest -- certainly not after the cold war has ended, which you seem to have forgotten about (cf "Soviet lakes"). Nor does it make sense as a humanitarian alliance. It's time for the US to leave. It's also time to charge Europeans more for drugs. They need to pay their fair share.
Now we have Amazon drivers and packers with cameras in their face every day, working themselves so hard that they have to piss into bottles - every motion, breath, and second tracked - and people are convinced this is freedom, that our system is freedom.
What a joke.
Further.. the idea that someone is going to improve their situation in any other than the most short sighted terms by "self medicating" with something like Methamphetamine or Heroin is completely ridiculous. I am absolutely not comfortable standing by to see how that story plays out, I know exactly how it plays out, and it's completely inhumane to pretend that you don't either.
I'm sure I'm not alone in using drugs (alcohol, caffeine, pot) for many reasons other than to "make them feel good when they don't feel good". Which along with equating use with abuse is such a shallow, narrow minded and ignorant view of drugs.
But of course, those two are not mutually exclusive - you can have both forms of addiction, and they do often merge into one with many types of drugs. Even if you beat extremely physiologically addictive drugs, you can lust for the effects many years / decades later, because of how good they made you feel.
And as you become addicted, usually at the expensive of everything else in your life, depression will set in - which just amplifies the need to escape.
The big problem with homelessness, and those types of drug users, is that a solid chunk of them have underlying mental illnesses - which may have lead to the drug use (self medication), or came out after drug use. These are the type of patients that simply can't function on their own. If you give them a free apartment, they're not able to live there.
I don't think radical decriminalization is the root problem - but rather the utter lack of (mental) healthcare.
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.
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?
The "Seattle is Dying" documentary describes a treatment program called the "MAT Program" (medically assisted treatment) that is used in Rhode Island prisons. They interview several people -- both leaders of the program and former addicts -- who speak positively about it: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?si=ZkMQb3tb5P_Ztbvs&t=2645
Doing so improves the addicts life in the medium-long term, and provides an immediate consequence. Its something that many addicts actually want, that society wants, yet no one has the balls to actually do it.
You have poor countries with no expensive treatment facilities re-distributing money to Democrat donors...why do these people think no-one uses drugs in these countries?
This kind of "compassion" is, ironically, complete anathema to anyone who lives in a left-wing society. The US version of left-wing politics is characterized by extreme individualism, it is on a spectrum along with Republicans, not something distinct in any way.
As a human who doesn't live in the US, the sad part isn't the people using drugs, it is the people who are gleefully pushing them into a situation where there are no disincentives towards self-destructive behaviour. Result: more suffering, more people gleefully suggesting that even more individualism will fix it, etc.
The other thing that is unique about the US is the lack of punishment for drug dealers. People on the left complain about pollution, drug dealers are ruining the lives of tens of thousands of people...stand aside, they say, for the entrepreneur?
It is complete madness, but you talk to anyone in the US about this subject and you realise immediately why they have this problem: they care about themselves, that is it.
Decriminalization is thus accidentally necessary to gain a better control of the situation, but then you do need to actually seize control of the situation. There need to be institutions to help get people away from drugs.
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.
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.
We are talking about what those regulations should be and what to do when people break the regulations.
If someone breaks those regulations, then they face similar kinds of penalties as people who produce and consume alcohol would. I really do not understand why people do not draw the same conclusion as if we don't already have a terribly destructive drug that society has more or less made peace with.
I don’t know nearly enough about the behavior of mentally ill homeless people and how it varies with addiction status and current meth levels, but I think there is no shortage of recent reports of dangerous addicts in various cities.
Regulation sounds good, but it doesn't just happen because it's written down. Enforcement is the messy part.
I am?
My question stands, then: does "legalize and regulate" mean that there would be regulations preventing the stated problems in Portland, and that they'd be actually enforced? Or is it essentially just the same as plain legalization?
They can get help if they want to get over the addiction and otherwise they can get a job so they can get a place to do drugs legally.
They are a part of society and their actions have negative consequences for others. We regulate that.
I think you're imagining a hypothetical scenario that doesn't match the problems described in the article.
Portland isn't having problems with crime and homelessness because responsible adults are consuming moderate amounts of drugs from the comfort of their homes on the weekends.
> If someone breaks those regulations, then they face similar kinds of penalties as people who produce and consume alcohol would.
I think you've missed the point of the article and what's being discussed. Decriminalizing drug use means removing those penalties, which has resulted in widespread public drug use in those cities.
Nowadays, the messaging is quite different. And we’re starting to learn that the opioids may not even work for the things people like using them for, regardless of how dangerous they are:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Yes, that’s an RCT with oxycodone users reporting more pain after 6 weeks compared to placebo.
What is the compulsion to find some tiny fragment of an argument to go against the obvious? Maybe it's because you'd need an absolutely idealized scenario to take legalizing drug use seriously.
You know those countries that legalized drugs? Feel free to look up how well that's going.
Doctors already know how those work, and we don't have to allow marketing them.
What are all these scenarios where policy makers have absolute control of how drugs are sold and consumed? Meth is illegal, as in we don't allow "marketing" today. But if it was legal, it'll only be the marketing that will be the potential problem? What is the point of these arguments? The low enforcement/legalization options have been tried in various places in various ways, not one has gone well. Besides magical thinking, what is the actual argument that legalizing drugs makes it less of a problem?
I think I would be just fine with a change like that. If sales of a product can be restricted, why should advertising for that product need to be unrestricted?
It doesn't feel to me like advertising is more of a fundamental right than engaging in sales.
I don’t know whether anyone has ever tested the constitutionality of the relevant laws and regulations, but they exist and are enforced.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2017/00...
I don’t, and never have, seen posters in doctors’ offices suggesting that patients get ahead of their symptoms (of hunger? sleepiness? distraction?) by taking prescription meth. And I’ve never heard any suggestion that the high incidence of methamphetamine is caused by its legality.
The issue with Oxycontin (and related opioid painkillers) wasn't the legal status. It was over prescription triggered by a range of unethical actions by pharmaceutical companies (mainly Purdue Pharma) plus some doctors who took advantage of the situation.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
What's already started happening is that the black market prices continue to be cheaper (because dealers don't have to pay taxes, insurance, or any other costs associated with legitimate businesses) and legitimate businesses can't compete, and they go under.
It's interesting to me that the same people the scream about muh socialism and want legal drugs aren't willing to pay the price for it.
I don't want legal drugs for me, but to get rid of the criminal distribution networks, and reduce the lengths addicts need to go to in order to procur drugs (which may often culminate in robbery and theft)
Plus cheaper, easier accessible drugs lower crime, overdoses...how?
This lets the addicts get their hits without overdosing, without them having to steal or sell themselves to buy the next hit, and they're not funding narco cartels and terrorists.
As long as you short-sighted folks keep this idiotic social experimentation out of Oregon, go nuts. We’ve had enough of being the nation’s testbed of half-assed radical policy.
Did you miss the part where we were suggesting the government didn't make money off of this?
Legalization has nothing to do with socialism. It’s a libertarian policy.
Socialists would tend to favour prohibition, because the costs to society as a whole (increased healthcare and law enforcement costs, economic impact of addicts not working, increased crime, etc) would be considered to outweigh the individual freedom of being able to consume whatever drugs you want.
The parent comment was complaining that legal consumption made the environment threatening.
>maim and kill users, push users into poverty, and generate and push the externalizes of drug use onto the rest of society.
None of these appear to hinge on decriminalization vs. legalization. Alcohol, for example, maims and kills users, pushes severely addicted users into poverty, and externalizes the problems of its use onto society.
Use went down during prohibition, use went up during legalization. So in effect you're proposing we increase these problems as related to meth and other hard drugs.
(This is not an argument for prohibition of alcohol, it is merely listing the cons of legalization)
What the top comment is implying as far as I can see is that going soft on drugs (“philosophical”, “internet argument”) is a solution for pen-pushers.
Fucked up as his story may be, what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing? Do we really think amping it up will make things better?
Legalization combined with harm reduction and strictly regulated point of sales (think how Sweden treats alcohol by selling it through systembogalets) is what will ultimately pull us out of the pit. Nothing else will.
A good chunk of society wants to get high, as long as they’re not serviced legally they are financing criminal empires. Not only are you getting no tax on those sales, you have to spend buckets of money on law enforcement to fight those criminal empires. Not to mention you’ll also have to spend money on police, EMT, hospital hours etc to cope with the less stable subsect of drug users, because they are currently out of government purview and thus unmanageable.
It shouldn’t even be a partisan thing, the right could easily sell it as increasing government revenue and restoring law and order. All without it costing the regular taxpayer a penny, as you can fund the new system with the drug tax.
I haven't studied this extensively, and I know that it's widely accepted that the war on drugs was unsuccessful, but I would caution against conflating "it didn't completely solve the problem" with "it had no positive impact at all." As a parent comment mentioned, periods of prohibition are generally associated with lower consumption overall (across both legal and illegal channels).
It doesn't matter if it had any positive impact, the negative impact outweigh them so much it's a downright crime against humanity that imprisoned millions of people in a system that constitutes modern day slave labor.
A lot of comments here have a "Portland was a lot better before decriminalization" theme. So at least some people might think the war on drugs was working out better than the current policies.
I'm not saying we should bring back the war on drugs, but the argument you are making can no longer be taken for granted.
A full-on "war on drugs" and "do noting" are both extremes. Not many people are in favour of a war on drugs, but that doesn't mean complete laissez-faire policies are the solution either.
"Drugs are illegal" and "war on drugs" are NOT the same thing.
What’s an unmentioned but relevant issue to me is how things like MDMA and ketamine (users are less harmed and harmful than with alcohol) are lumped in with hardcore opioid and meth abuse. There’s “hard”drugs and then there’s HARDdrugs.
I’d rather see the really hardcore stuff not even sold in specialized stores with the other stuff, but rather directly distributed through places similar to methadone clinics. They can give whoever wants the drug the full PR on how this substance very likely will get a grip on you and demolish your life. Clinics themselves are quite grim, making the whole atmosphere around recreational use less enticing. And you can put a higher age limit like 21 or even 24 on it.
To be clear, I hate seeing people sleep on the street. It's terrible, but they don't have good options.
Maybe we can craft better laws that just enforce them get aspect.
But if it is flat out illegal then some amount of trying to hide it will occur. As a result, maybe those two meth heads would have not been wondering around in the public where they will harm others.
Making legal and taxing it would still result in the meth head problem, and potentially increase bad behaviors associated with getting money to buy the higher taxes drug.
Having traveled to Portland recently and witnessed the public drug problem first hand, I have no idea how anyone would think that increasing availability of the drugs would improve the situation.
The only thing legalization and widespread availability would help is reducing deaths from tainted drugs. While that is a significant problem, anything that increases the availability and reduces the price of a drug addiction will also fuel drug use among the public. I've heard people try to argue the inverse, but removing penalties, decreasing prices, and improving availability simply cannot do anything other than increase consumption.
Reduce, yes, but it's not a magic bullet. Many opioid deaths are from people taking pharmaceuticals in precisely measured doses, often in conjunction with other drugs. Others are from people who misjudge their tolerance after extended breaks, such as after relapsing.
Regardless, it's an entirely separate discussion than the problem in the main article: Increasing availability of drugs will worsen the societal problems in places like Portland.
I suspect increased availability of drugs would also lead to more deaths from polydrug abuse. People who normally take one drug might be more tempted to start mixing drugs if it's as easy as picking up some extra pills at the drug center down the street.
It turns out that there’s no real correlation between having drug addicts on the streets and the level of drug use in the area or even mental illness. Unemployment doesn’t even predict homelessness, and neither does weather, or laws pertaining to the homeless.
By far, the best predictor is housing affordability and availability.
It says it doesn’t matter either way, so they are wrong (if they win, it won’t help), but also irrelevant.
I think that partially motivated the study. Climate also doesn’t seem to matter, neither does hiring more police, or really anything politicians have funded in the last decade.
Mandatory rehabilitation would do a lot. But rehabilitation would work much worse in an environment where relapse is easily attainable, anyone who has had any kind of addiction will tell you that.
I think part of the problem is people with no real experience pushing their narrative. Many honest drug addicts will tell you the actual solutions that will be around wholistic rehabilitation: withdrawals treatments, reintegration into society, no permanent records, removing stigma. And some would prefer to be funneled into that rather than go to rehabilitation by free will. Free will stands no chance against a heroin or meth addiction.
My family member works in a psychiatric clinic in Central Europe. They deal with severe addictions. They have proper rehabilitation programs with dedicated facilities where people with severe addictions that have led to mental disorders learn to reintegrate with life, attend job interviews, take care of themselves, and so on. I have spent my childhood around these people as family members of clinicians would attend various events (Christmas parties, weddings, funerals, other outings, etc) and I have not felt threatened by anyone in rehabilitation.
But yeah, what I see in West Coast cities is threatening. It’s a day and night difference between that and proper care for hard drug addicts though. West Coast is what ignoring the problem looks like. Central Europe is what solving the problem looks like. In both cases, hard drug sales are not legal.
And the solution is ridiculously simple. If someone is acting out in public due to drugs, police would be called. The police would deliver them to a psychiatric clinic in a municipal hospital. The clinic would put them in a ward and on a rehab program, start withdrawals management, set up a social worker for employment, and so on. It would take several months to rehabilitate someone and some people would go through the program a few times. Not all of it is easy and the taxpayer pays for the healthcare. But that’s the cost of solving this problem, and that does solve it.
Your problem doesn’t seem to be drugs but (probably) the defacto police work stoppage? That’s the problem in the Bay Area atleast [1]
https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/police-staffing-crisis-san-...
This seems like you’re implying that stricter enforcement and tougher punishments are useless?
I tend to agree, we saw bright and clear as day with the “war on drugs” that being more vicious to addicts didn’t work and the problem only grew.
Im certainly no expert though, and what often seems to be missing from these conversations is actual experts who research and actively work amongst these addicted and homeless people.
It’s wild how often we have conversations about incredibly complicated and wildly nuanced subjects with very little back and forth from those with far more expertise than ourselves. Then we scratch our heads and tilt our heads in confusion.
In the face of imminent threat, only personal preparedness is of value.
Drug use has grown much faster under the current regime of tolerance of drug use. There were lots of problems with the war on drugs, but the idea that it didn't reduce drug use isn't based on evidence.
As an analogy, skin cancer had been rising despite sunscreen.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP909.html
2nd, if you prefer a more direct account, this doctor describes the effects of BC's safe supply program. Basically they bought opiods and gave them out for free to addicts. These were often resold, crashing the market price, increasing consumption of these as a gateway drug. This is to illustate the expected effects of a lower price: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-we-must-end-...
This widely cited study on prohibition of alcohol in the USA found a long run 30% cut while prohibition was in force, with a sharper initial cut: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675...
Overall legal production is generally cheaper, and a cheaper price produces higher equilibrium use. You could of course tax legal drugs, but you'd need a war on illegal supply to enforce that.
The issue was simply that these men were psychotic after using meth in an uninterrupted fashion, and emboldened by the fact that the police were not allowed to interrupt their daily drug use or property crimes. I'm very confident that if possession/use of meth had been treated criminally these men would not have been in our neighborhood and able to target me. During pretrial I was made aware that they had been contacted multiple times in the days before my assault but police were not allowed to arrest them despite the fact that they were using/in possession of methamphetamine.
In your specific case, it means a low-level drug offender going to jail and coming out hardened using more aggressive drugs, evermore ready to unleash violence at worse levels.
I'm happy to think through what a low-recidivism version of "treated criminally" could be, but it is not any of the options we currently have.
The paper I linked has some interesting suggestions as to how to change the current incarceration systems to support actual drug treatment.
P.S: I think police should have better tools, and better pay (it's a hard job!) but also higher accountability, Police vs. Anti-Police is a made-up twitter dichotomy.
""" To me it's not so much about punishing drug use (jail time), it's about stopping drug addiction (intervention and recovery). For example I think intervening in such a way that a user is confirmed to get at least a few hours of sleep before potentially using meth again would be a big start.
I'll admit that I support confiscating drugs when found, but I'm not advocating that arrest is always appropriate. I am in favor of punishing selling meth, which I acknowledge is perhaps hypocritical given my other beliefs knowing that plenty of people sell to support their habits.
I do think it's important to have a mechanism of mandatory intervention, and my non-lawyer understanding is that criminalizing drugs is really the only way to put mandatory intervention on the table. I met mothers who could not force their children into rehab, for example. I should be clear that I don't feel this way about all drugs, but I think that methamphetamine specifically poses a risk to the safety of both users and people around them that merits mandatory intervention.
If we had functional mechanisms to to enact mandatory interventions for users that were non-criminal I'm definitely open to that. Depending on the targeted success rate it seems like inpatient detox + rehab would be required in many cases, and I am simply not aware of non-judicial ways we can force a person into those circumstances against their will (which in the case of meth I admit I support even if that opinion is controversial).
I am not an expert, but nonetheless I'm now entangled with the topic as one that defines significant aspects of my life (loss of smell and hearing, PTSD, facial disfiguration). I think we can do better than we have been, both recently and since Nixon, but I think that having tough conversations is part of how we'll get better. My experience is that people in my situation frequently have our perspectives invalidated as "politically incorrect" or otherwise irrelevant [...], and I wanted to speak up to make sure people know that we exist and we don't want our numbers to grow. """
Do you think an addict considers the closure rates on assault cases before harming a stranger?
Actually, yes. These people are not instinct-driven animals completely incapable of thought.
Similarly, if you know that drunk driving is very likely to get you caught then you will do that less than if you know there's 0% of getting caught.
Sometimes people have only one choice, but they almost always have agency.
But if you deny the addict any agency, you deny the possibility of eventual recovery. One could also point to the Sacklers as the ones with agency in that scenario. But somebody made choices; it didn’t just happen and there’s nothing that anyone could have done.
EDIT: Rephrased retribution->recompense, that is to say recompense is good, but is not optimized for avoidance in the future (i.e. a system-wide fix)
[1]: https://urbanist.co/public-transportation-reduces-drunk-driv...
Walking through downtown Seattle at night with a suitcase trying to find my hotel is the first time in my life I thought I was about to be attacked or robbed, but thankfully I only had stuff thrown at me by the junkies.
Portland and Seattle in the past few years look completely different than they did even a few years ago. Both cities have always had run down parts, but now it feels like the blight permeates almost everything. Some of my favorite places to visit have either closed entirely or now have limited hours and require me to buzz in at the front door so someone can visually verify that I'm not a threat. I can't explain how strange it feels for this shift to have happened in a matter of years.
Honestly, it’s much better than I’m used to. In a day of walking around, only one drugged out person was screaming uncontrollably. When he saw me, he politely asked for a light, and I said no, so he went back to screaming at nothing in particular.
It’s not like I was tripping on human feces (SF, post-pandemic, though they seemed to have cleaned things up a bit for APEC) or needles (various cities in Europe, pre-pandemic).
I don’t mean to trivialize the problems in Seattle. It is much worse than it was. However, it’s better than average these days.
At least in California, housing shortages are a big root cause, as is the broken approach to mental health care: It’s basically illegal to treat someone during a psychotic episode until they’ve already committed some serious violent crimes.
The law does not allow citizens to protect their property, and the police won't, either. So what to do? Leave.
Even then, the clerk watched the whole thing while not calling 911. The police didn’t come out and would only take a report if they went to the station, which they ended up not doing.
If something like that isn’t even making it into the crime stats…
I'm genuinely curious but I'm also biased. I was a homeless street addict myself for a long time and the only way I ever got out was a combination of harm reduction and expensive medical attention I am in no way entitled to as an american.
Most of my problems were ultimately caused by carceral violence and I can't really see how more of it would have helped me. But idk, open to other views I guess.
Me and most people I met who were victimized by drug users "blame addiction" in the narrow sense that we don't think the people who victimized us would have behaved that way in the absence of the drugs. I don't think the general attitude was that drug users are bad people, more that drug use can result in people acting in ways that they otherwise wouldn't. I certainly don't think using any drug reduces a person's human value.
I'm in support of targeting pathways and outcomes that I think might be similar to yours. We probably have different perspectives on some forms of harm reduction and agree on others, which I think is inevitable based on our different experiences. I think we agree that medical attention and pathways to overcoming addiction outside of jail are important ingredients to a successful recovery.
To me it's not so much about punishing drug use (jail time), it's about stopping drug addiction (intervention and recovery). For example I think intervening in such a way that a user is confirmed to get at least a few hours of sleep before potentially using meth again would be a big start.
I'll admit that I support confiscating drugs when found, but I'm not advocating that arrest is always appropriate. I am in favor of punishing selling meth, which I acknowledge is perhaps hypocritical given my other beliefs knowing that plenty of people sell to support their habits.
I do think it's important to have a mechanism of mandatory intervention, and my non-lawyer understanding is that criminalizing drugs is really the only way to put mandatory intervention on the table. I met mothers who could not force their children into rehab, for example. I should be clear that I don't feel this way about all drugs, but I think that methamphetamine specifically poses a risk to the safety of both users and people around them that merits mandatory intervention.
If we had functional mechanisms to to enact mandatory interventions for users that were non-criminal I'm definitely open to that. Depending on the targeted success rate it seems like inpatient detox + rehab would be required in many cases, and I am simply not aware of non-judicial way we can force a person into those circumstances against their will (which in the case of meth I admit I support even if that opinion is controversial).
I am not an expert, but nonetheless I'm now entangled with the topic as one that defines significant aspects of my life (loss of smell and hearing, PTSD, facial disfiguration). I think we can do better than we have been, both recently and since Nixon, but I think that having tough conversations is part of how we'll get better. My experience is that people in my situation frequently have our perspectives invalidated as "politically incorrect" or otherwise irrelevant (not what you're doing BTW thank you for your perspective), and I wanted to speak up to make sure people know that we exist and we don't want our numbers to grow.
Congratulations on your recovery, and FWIW I really like your your username/giraffes :)
This is about as helpful as "please go to welfare office and tell everyone to just work harder" or "please go to a substance abuse center and tell everyone to just, you know, stop using drugs mkay?" or "please go to a prison and tell everyone that crime is bad and they just need to fly right and everything will be fine."
Because we can say the exact same thing in the other direction. Go to a group that's grieving over car deaths, and tell them you're glad that resources that could have helped are instead going to fight the war on drugs.
Since this method gets such contradictory results, maybe it's a bad method for evaluating things!
It seems to me like there are places where it does, and places where it doesn't. In the places where it works, everyone agrees that it works, and in the places where it doesn't, everyone agrees that it doesn't.
I'm very curious about the underlying factors for this.
I'm sorry for calling you out, after seeing this comment it's obvious I would have done better to give you some space to think. It's an emotionally charged experience that I'm still learning how to rationalize years later - but haste makes waste and I was hasty.
I just want to make sure people know that victims like me exist, and though we are often treated as if our perspectives are invalid/uncouth/politically incorrect most of us simply want to stop other people from going through similar experiences. Telling people off doesn't spread that message and isn't helping bring smart ideas to the table, which I regret.
Decriminalization was a nice dream to solve a lot of misery.
At this moment, it feels society cares less about me and others who want to use public services than the addicts.
It's been an especially hard couple of months here in Portland. I've traveled around, hoping to find a new place to live. But all the big US cities with good transit suffer the same issues. At best, I wish I could move to another country I could live in and feel I had a sense of agency, if anyone would have me. But at this point I'm feeling like it's time to give up.
I mean really… “have you thought about moving to another country that speaks a different language and is a 20 hour flight from anyone you know?”
Currently looking at Europe. But immigration is hard anywhere. And there are tax implications I don't understand well.
> In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; ... no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
— Hobbes, Leviathan
Notably, Hobbes's point is that we entered a social contract—placing a Power above ourselves—in order to avoid this eternal warfare.
The kind of environment you describe, where the government cannot protect you from violence and so you have to protect yourself, is the definition of a failed state. It's not a normal situation that happens with normal governments.
I was jumped from in front and behind by two people by complete surprise and tackled to the ground. The amount of time between the beginning of the assault and losing consciousness was only a few seconds. From the video it looks like they already tried to kill me by repeatedly stomping on my head and kicking me in the face. I'm speculating but I think if they found a gun on me they would have just shot me with it.
What neighborhood was this in? I used to do long urban hikes throughout Seattle and have had a few close calls with near-mugging. Since the pandemic it has begun to feel really risky to randomly wander around.
I have helped a group that rescued several people (I believe most with drug addiction) from the streets[1]. What they do, and several other groups, and also government institutes do, is offer voluntary recovery programs that are legitimately very good. You can go there and they'll take care of you, including professional psychologist/psychiatrist support (and medicine to help get off drugs); in the main institution we're working with[2], former homeless and former drug dependents help directly in welcoming people. I'm not sure that's the whole solution to the drug problem, but I think it's part of the solution -- getting out in the streets, offering help to the homeless and addicts, and if they want, taking them somewhere that'll offer shelter and recovery from addiction. [3]
There's one rule in those places: you can't go in with drugs with you. Of course, if the person becomes too violent then they might not be able to deal with them either.
Please, go out there and help (while staying safe too, preferably in a group) -- or help institutions that do this kind of work (like we say, everyone can play a role, be it in a kitchen, on the streets, or with donations). I think it's groups like this that keep things from falling apart.
There are many people on the streets for whom drugs are just a quick escape mechanism, and have economic issues, mental health issues, or health issues (or all together), and a compassionate community/institutions that helps everyone recover is what really is needed I think.
Pretending they don't exist or as a friend calls "shuffling them around" doesn't work.
[1] Our group offers a meal once a week (Sunday nights, where they have difficulty finding something to eat), and we offer taking them off the streets. It's incredible what genuinely caring about people will do: I've seen people cry when you hand them a plate of food.
[2] It's this one: https://www.missaobelem.org/; This one is state funded and excellent as well: https://hub.spdmafiliadas.org.br/ (called HUB)
[3] Other important parts being, educating people about the tragedy of drug abuse, and providing community and support so they don't resort to drugs, and also preventing selling.
The issue with drug criminalisation is that people get arrested who weren't going to hurt anyone, weren't any threat to themselves, haven't done anything objectionable and nevertheless were risking prison. The wins on that front should be preserved.
Nope, try suggesting that in much of the mainstream/popular internet and you'll be immediately pounced on for discriminating against the homeless (and then the people who said that will get pounced on for saying homeless rather than "unhoused"). "So you think it should be legal for rich people to get high but not poor people". Pretty soon someone will bring race into it too.
Honestly it seems to me like that stuff is happening less and less often. It just comes with not talking to literal children all the time. I'm all for privacy but i think in these arguments we should really be allowed to know who is 14 and who isn't. I think a big part of the toxicity and radicalism on the internet is that we're now having to have political discussions invaded by literal high schoolers. No one would privilege their ridiculous opinions at the Thanksgiving dinner table
It's already illegal to drive impaired, doesn't matter your intoxicant. It could even be legally prescribed by a doctor.
But it's much more legal to sell alcohol than it is any other drug. Put the onus on the drug sellers to provide a safe controlled place to consume... which I hope comes with some legality and maybe some access to the banking system.
Why do drug cartels thrive? Simple: because drugs are illegal in the USA. By legalizing drugs, we would bankrupt them.
Still it's really amazing what mental gymnastics people make to justify the norms. You've got fear instilled in your decision to go outside your house and still call yourself the land of the free.
I really think that a lot of stereotypes about the region are outdated by about 20 or 30 years by this point.
Either way It’s less about “we should let people sell meth” and “we should let people sell meth if the only other option is just jailing them” IMO. obviously no one wants to see or be homeless drug addicts taking up public space. But we don’t really have a ton of options without systemic change
That doesn't score virtue points in hipster society.
When I first moved to Seattle for my first real job, eons ago, my car was stolen. The police came right out, and found my car (they didn't find the thief). I got the car back.
I guess those days are long gone.
Sorry this happened to you but every human has the god given right to use whatever substances they please and no government can tell them otherwise.
Perhaps your anger should be focused at the government officials and local policies for allowing these people to live in tents on public property and use drugs in public.
Drugs are for people with jobs to enjoy.
So there’s a push to decriminalize because the alternative is jailing non violent drug offenders. This is counterproductive in many ways and keeps them in cycles that enable addiction like preventing gainful employment, increasing access to network of people that can provide hard drugs, increase hopelessness and worthlessness, increase likelihood of violent behavior, etc.
A better system would be to decriminalize with the alternative of connecting people with serious and persistent mental health issues to significant inpatient mental health supports. Not someone that smokes pot or drops acid every once and a while, but the people like you describe that abuse hard drugs like methamphetamine or fentanyl to the point that they become homeless and frequently experience psychosis. Programs that provide housing, counseling, rehab, etc. but again most people vehemently oppose this for various reasons. Distrust of psychiatry, refusal to fund government programs, a libertarian belief that a person should be able to let themselves self destruct even if it destroys the community around them, etc
So here we are
Aren't tax-paying citizens allowed to demand that they be able to walk into a train station that doesn't smell like urine and fecal matter?
I agree with you, the government is supposed to serve the tax-paying and law abiding citizens. But this oppressor-victim ideology that's spreading everywhere is blinding everyone from seeing it.
> 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)
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.
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-chok...
How the hell did this guy get to Oregon? I doubt he was a drug tourist. Makes you wonder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Does anyone want to try that experiment?
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...?
Smells like drugwar propaganda.
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.
And I'm here for it (as a Portland resident). My sympathy for the homeless/addicted population here has gone to basically 0.
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)
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.
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…
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-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-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.”
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.
The US is a baby in terms of structures and culture.
Vienna has been continuously operating as a city since being a Roman fort, Vindobona = you can see the ruins directly in the city center.
India is a very young country. Indians as multiple civilizations/peoples are some of the oldest ones. Two completely separate things. Shame you can't see that.
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.
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.
Maybe the US is lacking in those programmes and is why the drug legalization programme is not effective in Portland?
The size of a country isn't an excuse for any of this. You won't find this phenomenon in other large developed countries either, not with these specifics.
This is about laying down the law in a very basic way.
Hymns are a better opiate of the masses than fentanyl.
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.
That's not an issue that America has to solve (i.e. the government or the society). It's an individual need that every individual is responsible for.
You shouldn't be surprised then when vast amounts of people fail to fill a hole that for the vast majority of human history was filled for them.
I honestly believe most people simply aren't capable of making their on meaning or purpose out of nothing.
Being told as a child that if you take drugs you will go to hell is not a meaningful alternative. Not for incredibly complex thinking beings that we are.
Submitting to Jesus, being a part of the "right" religious group is not a benefit to the human race as a whole. It's poison, promoted by power hungry maniacs.
Social programs, education, keeping corporations in check - these are meaningful alternatives to the idea that we need to bring Jesus back to control the population.
Indifference is worse than extreme atheism or fundamentalism because those two options are actually concerned about others
The indifferent person could care less whether you believe or don't, it's your own "individual responsibility", they owe nothing to you and you owe nothing to them
Widespread indifference will bring about the slow dismantlement of society
Finding purpose and our place in the world is our individual responsibility. Don't confuse it with the lies of eternal heaven at the cost of total submission in this life that your religion is promoting.
I've really only witnessed such open drug abuse in countries with strong Christian influence, e.g. the US and Latin America. Might be worth investigating why widespread debilitating drug abuse stems from that background.
I think religion is declining because people are discovering there are many ways to perform self-discovery and practice fulfillment.
The only aspect of religion that has been beneficial to modern society is providing a social venue for others to interact. This can be achieved by building stronger neighborhoods and encouraging the development of more welcoming social venues -- something that I think is the cure to America's loneliness epidemic.
Let's suppose this were true. If, as you say, it's all about purpose and meaning, then we would expect that although everyone's conception of these things is different, it would still provide the same benefit. However, this is not what we find. Markers of purpose and meaning (such as suicide rate, depression, etc) are getting worse, not better.
So we're forced to come to terms with a few possible conclusions, none of which are very good for your point of view. Either the systems people are coming up with are insufficient to achieve the same goals or people are not coming up with their own system and are left to flounder.
> This can be achieved by building stronger neighborhoods and encouraging the development of more welcoming social venues -- something that I think is the cure to America's loneliness epidemic.
How is Europe doing on these indicators? Or anywhere else?
Can something be simultaneously true and patronizing?
Just looking at how humans in general behave worldwide, I'd say that yes, people are really quite stupid.
Surely there is another way? Stronger families, philosophy, sports, education? Humanism over religion - the only truly universal approach.
I find one of the biggest losses, especially in dense cities, is that the churches and community orgs there often lack local, long-term ties to said communities. Also, there are a number of religious institutions in big cities that are sometimes open only on (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday depending on their beliefs) and don't provide as much closeness and synomie for people as rural religious institutions do.
I wouldn't recommend that all things must attempt to recapture the 1950's apartheid and social conservativism in all regards, but a crucial linchpin of a functional society appears to be missing. It is not necessarily religion or faith, but it includes a lack of love for, and trust of, others where America went from community-individual balanced to hyperindividualism with a dysfunctional social safety net.
I don't think you can avoid this. If you bring back religion, you necessarily have to accept apartheid and social conservatism. The two go hand-in-hand.
Religion probably worked well for bonding communities back when communities were small and homogeneous and had little contact with the outside world. But in an era of global travel and communications, it doesn't work: we have to have huge wars to decide whose religion is the correct one. Just look at what's going on with Israel lately. Different religions can't peacefully co-exist, so devastating wars are necessary to maintain order.
Religion has been more impactful in spreading knowledge and connecting cultures around the world than the printing press, radio and the internet combined. Religion for a long time was the only contact with the outside world. Christianity today is more or less the culture and knowledge from thousands of years and countless different tribes and cultures, fused into one piece. Spread worldwide by preaching, manuscripts, monks, monasteries and by the sword. Compared to most ideologies that only spread by the sword, ancient and modern.
The default human condition is to spread by breeding among your own people, and exterminate other people. Sometimes just the men and the boy children, to breed with the women. Sometimes by exterminating everybody and even eating them. Cannibalism and human sacrifice was the default human condition for tens of thousands of years, or maybe even for millions of years, before the light came to man.
Thinking that religion is only war and oppression is like thinking math is only for calculating artillery. It's a limited perspective.
If it's a binary choice of opiate addiction vs. religious practice, sure. But for many, the hole that some fill with religion is filled with other sorts of meaning-giving practices. Not to take away from the comfort, stability and hope that religious affiliation provides for many; but for others the source of connection to the transcendent and to contributing to concerns beyond oneself comes in different forms.
I increasingly believe the same and I don't believe the vast majority are capable of filling it on their own in a healthy way, but there are a lot of other social factors at play too.
Consider video games as the opiate instead. At least they don't fuck up your health and you might come out with stronger problem solving skills.
The idea that we just need to invest more and more into this extremely corrupt industry has no merit.
Caveat: unemployment statistics don't count people who aren't seeking work. Which chronically homeless and/or drug addicted people usually do not.
> The unemployment rate measures the share of workers in the labor force who do not currently have a job but are actively looking for work. People who have not looked for work in the past four weeks are not included in this measure.
https://www.epi.org/newsroom/useful_definitions/
Basically what unemployment rate tells us is that USA has enough jobs for people who want to work. It says nothing about people who have given up looking.
That's a fair point. If people are not seeking work but claim benefits indefinitely, doesn't this require a different solution than blaming the society and expecting taxpayers to take care of that?
https://www.kqed.org/news/11668623/why-do-thousands-of-l-a-s...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/san-f...
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/top-stories/story/2020-...
> wages are the lowest they have been in decades
This is an endless argument. Why can't a person with 0 skills rent an apartment in San Francisco? Some wages are very low. If you can't afford rent in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, move to a cheaper place, don't become homeless in SF.
Do you want me to solve this for you? Here you go:
- Find a job in Wallmart in Fresno (if you insist on staying in CA): https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/0619201885FE-cashier-fro... (Cashier, $16-$26 an hour)
- Find a cheap rental in Fresno: e.g. this studio is $800 https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/719-W-Hammond-Ave-Fresno-...
- Sign up for free health insurance: https://www.coveredca.com/
Most people are born and raised in the same city or area their whole lives. The adult illiteracy rate is 20% and less than 40% get any kind of 4 year degree. Options are limited. People will cling to hope and the life (and community!) they know, until they're broke and lost their job... and at that point, they straight up can't move to Fresno and start that Walmart job. Walmart wouldn't hire them without a local place to live, and cheap Fresno landlords wouldn't rent to someone without a local job. Neither Walmart nor the landlord has an incentive to change, they're doing just fine exploiting the local Fresno populace.
Low-skill/low-pay life situations are a completely different reality than what well-off knowledge workers know.
Respectfully, you misplace the responsibility. When people go through a rough breakup, we don't call for the person experiencing attachment anxiety to be housed with their ex just because it would make things easier for one party at least temporarily. Life is full of hard moments and challenging choices. The fact that something is hard doesn't mean giving up is the healthiest path that the society should encourage.
Talk to people who work in social services. The fact is, visibly homeless (street homeless, most often addicted people) are in this situation not because they have tried everything else and have no choices. They don't seek employment and often refuse help. They are not part of a community (unless you consider other homeless people they randomly ended up living close to their true community).
As usual, the discussion about homeless is kind of pointless without clarifying which segment we are talking about. Homeless families with children, disabled non-addicts, etc are not someone I include in this discussion, and I never see them living on the street.
> Do you want me to solve this for you? Here you go:
As if your list was anything close to a viable solution for someone already homeless and addicted.
With this post, you're right - it is absolutely more complex. There are absolutely families on the street, they're just more likely in cars or squatting rather than assaulting people.
Beds can be located in places that lock people out of employment or introduce them to toxic elements... and becoming unhoused by itself causes mental health issues in a society which does nothing but stigmatize that from birth to adulthood.
Even within treatment, skilled help is chronically burned out and mediocre help is worse than a rubber duck.
There's a need for structural reform, from policing through sentencing and voluntary/mandatory rehabilitation, as well as public education. Not to mention real estate bottlenecks that drive up prices for everone from low-income odd-job workers, to the city police force, to building new institutional facilities, to staffing social services.
To add an independent voice, here's ChatGPT responding to "summarize this article in one paragraph", for each article you linked to:
> https://www.kqed.org/news/11668623/why-do-thousands-of-l-a-s...
The article discusses the significant problem of empty beds in Los Angeles County's homeless shelters, despite a large homeless population. Investigations reveal safety and sanitation issues in many shelters, such as bedbugs, rats, foul odors, and lax medical care. Half of the LAHSA shelters had 78 percent utilization. Homeless individuals cite issues like theft, harassment, and violence within shelters, prompting some to prefer living on the streets. There's no unified oversight system, and the is much room for improvement to ensure humane conditions in shelters.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/san-f...
Approximately 7,800 homeless people in San Francisco, 2,100 have been approved for subsidized housing, yet challenges persist in moving them indoors. The city cites issues such as a shortage of case managers, complicated paperwork, and resistance from the homeless to certain unit conditions. Although efforts have been made to address the problem, including a $62 million investment in case managers, the average wait time has increased to five months, a significant delay considering the program's annual budget of $356 million. The article calls for an in-depth audit of the permanent supportive housing program and urgent action to house homeless individuals promptly.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/top-stories/story/2020-...
The article discusses California's Project Roomkey initiative, launched by Governor Gavin Newsom in April 2020 to lease 15,000 hotel rooms for homeless individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the program's progress has been slow, with only about half of the rooms occupied over a month into its implementation. Challenges include delays in preparing rooms for occupancy, a shortage of service providers, and difficulties in transitioning residents into permanent housing. While some counties, like Sacramento, have seen relative success, others, such as San Diego and Orange County, struggle to fill leased rooms. The initiative, funded by FEMA, targets homeless individuals aged 65 or older and those with health conditions susceptible to COVID-19, but the article raises concerns about the overall effectiveness and limited coverage of the program in addressing the state's homelessness crisis.
E.g. we have invested $62M in case managers to handle 2100 approved cases? With the program's annual budget being $365M? This shows a ridiculous level of bloat and corruption. Do we need to spend $30K per case, considering that this doesn't cover the shelter expense?
I am not opposed helping people in need, I am opposed the idea that we just need to spend more money. And then next year a little bit more. More taxes, more case managers, more street cleaning teams, more safe injection sites. None of that is solving homelessness, all of that is contributing to making the homeless industry bigger.
* show up
* not be high or drunk when showing up
* adhere to a schedule
* read
* follow instructions
* not cuss out his boss or customers
* count money
* not steal money
* operate a computerized cash register
A large number of homeless probably could not do these things.
Shelters have a lot of restrictions that keep swaths of homeless out. For instance most don't allow animals or carts. If you're homeless and don't want to abandon those you're stuck on the street. There might be reasons for restrictions but they exist and homeless are excluded from shelters because of them.
Once again, I'm not endorsing or condoning this, just trying to show you how they conceptualize their form of justice.
Do you feel that the Canadian government should be tortured and put to death for legalizing marijuana?
Do you feel the same for Singapore where smoking tobacco is legal?
- Have a government who owns almost all the land, and provide subsidized housing to over 75% of the citizens.
- Provides universal healthcare, again subsidized through the government
- And forces quotas for all ethnicities to ensure everyone is equally represented everywhere.
So I guess we could try it Singapore's way, but Republicans keep saying it's a bad idea.
Yes, this is not a hypothetical. Are you under the impression that people don't want to move there?
- Have extreme penalties for drug offenses.
- Have highly effective surveillance and law enforcement.
I guess we can all find what we want in Singapore: an effective police state winning the war on drugs, or an effective welfare state.
Maybe stop cherry picking the parts that you like and pretending like they're the parts that worked?
https://www.unodc.org/pdf/report_2000-09-21_1.pdf
https://www.unodc.org/pdf/trends2003_www_E.pdf
https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR_2008_eng_we...
To be clear, I'm 100% behind Singapore's drug laws. Not having to deal with psychotic methheads is my #1 thing about this place (compared with Australia).
But I do wonder if their laws would work elsewhere (i.e. some place that's not a tiny island with a culturally conservative population).
But ofc this is the unthinkable for West. Downvote, pass.
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.
No one is immune I'm afraid, religion isn't a magic trick.
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.
That's pretty normal for even some secular (non religious) Americans of European ancestry and their friend groups, I (as one) observe. We were far more interested in sports so that booze would be an interruption in ... sports, for example. I do not know how common that is.
> But ofc this is the unthinkable for West.
No, it's not. (See above.) The thing is that "westerners" that match your friend groups definitely exist with their own matching westerner friend groups, which i guess is a happy surprise. it might be we're not obvious though, to your point.