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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

#461

Post by arp242 »

randombits0 wrote: post #404
Aurornis wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just legalize it and let people get pure product at dirt cheap prices. 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…

The biggest problem with dying by overdose is measuring the dose. Legal drugs presume quality control and standardized dosing. This, alone, could prevent the majority of opioid deaths.

But this is not about opioid overdose deaths, but random people getting assaulted ("beaten nearly to death ") by meth-heads.

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

#462

Post by hifreq »

BizarreByte wrote: post #277
hifreq wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America has not filled that with anything else 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.

> 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.

I am not surprised by that in the slightest, and I agree that most people struggle with that, myself included. It is THE struggle of our lives.

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.

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

#463

Post by throwaway44773 »

jorvi wrote: post #402
graeme wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really address the comment. Decriminalize = production is criminal, consumption is legal. Legalize = production is legal, consumption is legal. 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 decriminalizat…

> The parent comment was complaining that legal consumption made the environment threatening. 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 har…

All well and good: allow everyone to use as many legalized drugs as they want, but enforce the other laws on those people. Don’t allow anyone to camp in the street, don’t let them steal with impunity. If they want to get wasted on drugs, they should manage to not cause harm to normal citizens.

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

#464

Post by lannisterstark »

shadowtree wrote: post #176

The US is a very young country, with a burn it down and see what happens culture. A frontier state. 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 co…

>The US is a very young country, with a burn it down and see what happens culture.

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.

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

#465

Post by lolinder »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #382
felizuno wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly yes, they were caught with much credit and appreciation to the detectives of SPD. In fact the police were very helpful in accessing support and counseling, and I should be completely honest that I would have described myself as loosely "anti police" until I had this experience. The issue was simply that these men were psychotic after using meth in an uninterrupted fashion, and emboldened by the fact that…

[flagged]

> because the whole point behind decriminalization is that criminalizing homelessness and drug addiction does not have a net positive outcome for them or society.

This is one theory, and it's a theory that's hotly contested. Asserting it as a fact doesn't actually make it one, and we're currently watching several large scale experiments testing if decriminalization helps society. Early results are not promising.

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

#466

Post by nradov »

boopmaster wrote: post #103
jmcphers wrote: post #82

I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland. Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs. After several decades and many, many millions of dollars spent, the problem is, by every measure, absolutely the worst it's ever…

I’m reading there that fentanyl appears to be the culprit. I realize it is a drug, but not sure if that’s even supposed to be in the drugs. Is this really a story of drug dealers cutting the drugs that people wanted.. into a lethal concoction? (Sorry I really don’t know, are users looking for fentanyl?)

The problems with acute fentanyl poisoning are somewhat separate from chronic methamphetamine addiction. Mexican drug cartels have been manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs such as Oxycodone and Xanax but substituting fentanyl for the active ingredient. They simply have bad quality control, so sometimes people who buy street drugs randomly end up with a fatal overdose. Especially if they haven't built up a tolerance.

https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/

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

#467

Post by carlosjobim »

shiroiuma wrote: post #380
1letterunixname wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also true. The decline in community (where religion played a large part in cementing personal and local bonds) and increase in anomie has led not just to deaths of despair and to other symptoms not just loneliness and depression, but on the fringes of alienation and disconnection to where some volatile people go as far hate-fueled "blaze of glory" mass shootings. I find one of the biggest losses, especially i…

>I wouldn't recommend that all things must attempt to recapture the 1950's apartheid and social conservativism in all regards 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 outsid…

> Religion probably worked well and bonding communities back when communities were small and homogeneous and had little contact with the outside world.

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.

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

#468

Post by roenxi »

felizuno wrote: post #168

So much sympathy for drug users and business owners, but what about the private citizens who get victimized by these drug users? 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…

I don't think this particular issue has actually been debated on the internet all that much because I haven't seen it come up that much; the obvious solution is to draw a parallel to alcohol. It is illegal to be drunk and driving. Similarly it can be illegal to be high on something exotic and out in public. As hot takes go that seems fairly cool.

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.

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

#469

Post by thegrim33 »

rjbwork wrote: post #282
felizuno wrote: post #168

So much sympathy for drug users and business owners, but what about the private citizens who get victimized by these drug users? 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…

I actually don't think we should decriminalize. Just legalize it and let people get pure product at dirt cheap prices. 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…

There are countries all over the world that take a much stricter prohibitionist approach, and overwhelmingly do not have the same problem with drugs. Your claims instantly fall apart given the numerous counter examples of countries that DO successfully criminalize drugs.

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

#470

Post by bglazer »

CydeWeys wrote: post #135
legitster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, believe me I don't think it's an easy problem either. My brother is a social worker and I know the stories. 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.

This is exactly the right call, and closer to the way we used to run things -- people acting a nuisance in the city weren't tolerated. We need to go back to it.

Why did we stop?
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