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To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

nytimes.com

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Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#61

Post by xvector »

vore wrote: post #50
kepler1 wrote: post #38

I commented a few times here over the years criticizing decriminalization as it came up as an option, against loud / vociferous people saying, how can you continue to embrace criminal penalties that clearly aren't working. As if it were crazy to believe that people need laws to obey. I said that you can make all the rational step-wise choices in the world, and find yourself led down a path to oblivion, where you've m…

The problem is that the people using drugs out in public are already at rock bottom: there aren't many punishments you can use to deter that, short of putting them in jail and when they come out they're just going to be using drugs in public all over again. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea of mandatory treatment but as it stands, "enforcing some harsh laws" doesn't do anything to curb recidivism – temporarily incar…

At the very least it cleans up the streets. I really don't care to see people shooting up every time I leave the BART. Enabling that is not a good use of my tax dollars.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#62

Post by krupan »

beachy wrote: post #49
golergka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if we...i don't know, actually helped people!? 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.

So in your worldview, all "helping" should happen voluntarily, with no state/federal assistance. And if no individual is feeling charitable that day, then no help would be provided?

If we ever end up in a situation where nobody is feeling charitable then we are screwed as a society no matter what.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#63

Post by xvector »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #21
brianjking wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we...i don't know, actually helped people!? Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until this country starts actually helping people. * Quality drug treatment that is paid for by the state/federal level. * Job training/retraining that is paid for at the state/federal level. * Affordable, high quality education that helps people not get interested in, have time for, be so full of despair that they resort to…

> 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 pu…

I do not know where the collective delusion that strict punishments do not work has come from. The data shows they work exceedingly well globally.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#64

Post by _a_a_a_ »

kepler1 wrote: post #47
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these "practically infeasible (or very expensive) associated programs" in your view (genuine question)

The treatment / rehab / injection / addict housing programs (and more) that are required when you decide that having people use drugs isn't something that they believe they will be punished for anymore and no longer exercise some measure of self-caution to avoid falling into. The near-hospital-like facilities and salaries of people you have to pay for to replace that self- or state-policing, and now have to clean up…

A few minutes ago I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38605643#38606523 in response to a poor quality pro-legalisation post. TBH yours is anti-legalisation with really no more factual content in it either.

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.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#66

Post by qingcharles »

legitster wrote: post #57

Drug legalization is something I have come 180 on (or at least, 90 degrees). Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc. ODs have more than doubled, and the shelters are half empty! They are not one more social program away from cleaning out the streets. I think the experiment has radically failed and I'm ready to say I was wrong. While I don't want to go back t…

This is such a hard problem to solve. I work with drug and alcohol addicts regularly and addiction is such a damned nightmare.

And every homeless person hates shelters. They have way more rules than prisons and all of the drama.

I don't know what the solutions are :(

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#67

Post by qingcharles »

flerchin wrote: post #3
oh_sigh wrote: post #2

I lived in Portland before the decriminalization laws passed in 2020, and from my perspective, drugs were already effectively decriminalized for the in-your-face-homeless, which I think is the most obvious social problem that people in Portland are trying to fix. At least that is my view based on the very common observation of people doing hard drugs in public. The people drugs weren't decriminalized for before 2020…

What if they spent more than a few nights in corrective housing? Actually drying out, and getting treatment? I get that you can't force someone to want to get better, but you can lock them away if they refuse and keep breaking the law. Right? The whole situation is horrible. I moved away from Portland around the turn of the century, and it's unrecognizable to me when I go back to visit family.

The problem is that most addictions need years of treatment. Years and years :(

I work with people coming out of prison who have been clean for a decade and the first thing they do is go and score some meth or crack or whatever. After a decade without!

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#68

Post by analognoise »

spaceribs wrote: post #16
deepfriedchokes wrote: post #12

Drug use is a mental health issue. People take things that make them feel good when they don’t feel good. They’re just self medicating and we need to start treating it as a symptom of an underlying issue rather than the issue itself. Same with the obesity epidemic. It’s not the what, it’s the why.

What if the underlying issue is capitalism itself though?

In the Soviet Union, it was illegal not to work. They would have killed (not a high bar for them given their body count, so excuse the colloquialism) to have a camera watching every worker.

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.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#69

Post by rokkitmensch »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #46
reducesuffering wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P2P meth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylacetone

P2P is a methamphetamine precursor, not a drug in itself AFAIK Edit: I did a search and can't find much. There seems to be a lot of bullshit but suspiciously little by way of solid info. The best I could find was this so-called super meth is simply higher in the dextro isomer which gives the high (the levo being less interesting effect-wise). But that's well known already so...?

Correct.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#70

Post by [deleted] »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #21
brianjking wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we...i don't know, actually helped people!? Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until this country starts actually helping people. * Quality drug treatment that is paid for by the state/federal level. * Job training/retraining that is paid for at the state/federal level. * Affordable, high quality education that helps people not get interested in, have time for, be so full of despair that they resort to…

> 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 pu…

[deleted]
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