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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

#491

Post by biggestlou »

mikhael wrote: post #429
arandomsapien wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm severely visually impaired. I walk and use public transit. Currently in the pacific northwest. My quality of life has decreased so much since covid and when these policies came into effect. I tripped over someone asleep on the train floor and they lost their shit. I was really scared. One of dozens of instances. And the cities in general must become less walkable to avoid crime. Fences around apartments that mean…

hopefully this doesn’t sound insulting - have you considered cities outside of the US, like Tokyo or others in Japan?

Emigration to Japan is well nigh impossible

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

#492

Post by KennyBlanken »

ars wrote: post #420
KennyBlanken wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Just take away their meth. That's it. All the rest of what you wrote is just pointless exaggeration.

And how do you propose to do that?

By isolating them?

Okay, how do you do that?

Put them in already overcrowded prisons where there aren't free cells, because the prisons are full of people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses?

Put them in treatment centers...that don't have the beds? Or the staff?

Or do you intend to cut the supply, using some technique which has been undiscovered by US law enforcement, fifty years into the "war on drugs"? Or, any other developed nation for that matter?

"just" take away their meth, and you have the nerve to accuse me of pointless exaggeration

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

#493

Post by mbrumlow »

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…

I think sometimes the point to make something illegal is not to stop it. But to make the behavior unacceptable to do in public.

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.

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

#494

Post by arp242 »

1shooner wrote: post #381
pj_mukh wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they ever caught? This seems like assault (and battery?) all already illegal. 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-...

Likewise, the problem isn't the drunk driver, it's that the drunk driver killed your family. Do you think an addict considers the closure rates on assault cases before harming a stranger?

> 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.

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

#495

Post by pj_mukh »

1shooner wrote: post #381
pj_mukh wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they ever caught? This seems like assault (and battery?) all already illegal. 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-...

Likewise, the problem isn't the drunk driver, it's that the drunk driver killed your family. Do you think an addict considers the closure rates on assault cases before harming a stranger?

Well no, the problem is transit-poor environments that force every old trip to be a car trip [1]. What you're asking for is recompense, what I'm asking for is a system wide permanent fix.

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...

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

#496

Post by thegrim33 »

theklr wrote: post #448
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…

Sadly they never fixed the supporting issues, low wages, inability of affordable housing at pace to keep up with growth. It’s like they just thought giving an aspirin was going to cure the flu.

This is basically just a moving the goalposts argument. The public was told that the policies would fix/help/address the problem. The public was conned into throwing literally billions of dollars at these policies and programs. And then after the programs fail, you can't just say "well of course it failed, we didn't do X and Y". If that's the case, we should never have spent billions of dollars on programs and policies that we knew would fail without X and Y.

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

#497

Post by bbor »

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…

Do you have some stats to back up the implied claim that homeless drug users significantly raise assault rates? Portland is a very safe city AFAIK.

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

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

#498

Post by thefourthchime »

mikhael wrote: post #429
arandomsapien wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm severely visually impaired. I walk and use public transit. Currently in the pacific northwest. My quality of life has decreased so much since covid and when these policies came into effect. I tripped over someone asleep on the train floor and they lost their shit. I was really scared. One of dozens of instances. And the cities in general must become less walkable to avoid crime. Fences around apartments that mean…

hopefully this doesn’t sound insulting - have you considered cities outside of the US, like Tokyo or others in Japan?

Austin is quite visually impaired friendly. The Texas School for the Blind is here and I often see people walking around with canes. You also won't trip over anyone sleeping on the streets, save a couple of places downtown.

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

#499

Post by recursive »

slily wrote: post #268
theossuary wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what they do is: - 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.

If Singapore's economic and social policies were successful, surely people would want to move there? Perhaps skepticism is warranted from teh evil republicanz - the subject of this submission, decriminalization of drug use, was touted largely by left-wingers based on a few similar, seemingly-successful, small-scale efforts in Europe. Now we know how that turned out.

> If Singapore's economic and social policies were successful, surely people would want to move there?

Yes, this is not a hypothetical. Are you under the impression that people don't want to move there?

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

#500

Post by recursive »

notfed wrote: post #368
notyofriend wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can someone pushing themselves to the limit of heroin od have anything sustainable.

[flagged]

How? Why? It seems like a reasonable question to me, so maybe I'm prejudiced too. That's entirely possible. What's the prejudice? How do I stop? Why is this a bad question? Does it have an answer?
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