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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

#621

Post by janalsncm »

huytersd wrote: post #575
qingcharles wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

Solution is easy. If you’re visibly publicly intoxicated with hard drugs, you go to a special rehab that’s essentially prison without the violent criminals. If you’re already a violent criminal, you get put into a segregated area. You then get forcibly treated. If youv’e stayed clean for a set number of months, you get to leave. None of this shows up on any permanent/criminal record.

Agreed. I will add that we’ve come full circle on psychiatric hospitals, which is essentially what you’re describing in different words. Budget cuts and deinstitutionalization meant many of those were closed down 50 years ago.

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

#623

Post by sneak »

tlivolsi wrote: post #501
anonygler wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Decriminalizing drugs has skyrocketed schizophrenia and homelessness. Drugs should only be legalized in specific, medically necessary situations. Recreational use should be stigmatized and dealers should be handled as Duterte advocated. The crime of the War on Drugs was that we had double standards, not that we had a War on Drugs.

[flagged]

GP’s coded language (“should be handled as Duterte advocated”) is advocating for summary executions for those committing nonviolent, victimless offenses, carried out between consenting adults.

This is not sensible, nor does it even respect basic human dignity. To elevate it or advocate for it is evil.

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

#624

Post by hamburglar »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #601
acchow wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prohibition also failed horribly. We need a middle ground. 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.

I thought we solved this with alcohol already. Can you drink? Yes. are you allowed to be shit faced drunk in the streets? No. Are there lounges to drink safely and responsibly? Yes. 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.

Indeed. You don’t get put in prison for being drunk. Maybe you spend a night in the drunk tank and then get released and are free to go repeat the same mistake. We don’t just let you roll around on the sidewalk downtown while continuing to drink.

Just because drugs are decriminalized doesn’t mean it has to be a free for all.

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

#625

Post by uoaei »

swalling wrote: post #320
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the plan has still failed. If all the key players are on board and you can't even begin to implement the plan, then it was a bad plan, and the people who developed it had little comprehension of reality. We should not attempt this elsewhere.

No, actually we should be trying to fix the stupid mistakes that were made in implementation of the plan, not roll it back and keep on fighting an equally moronic, ineffective, and racist War on Drugs elsewhere. 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 bec…

This is the classic approach of conservatives: throw wrenches in every part of a welfare system, then point to its failures to justify its dissolution. See: Medicare, public education, etc.

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

#626

Post by defrost »

eloisius wrote: post #620
runarberg wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, whatever it takes. A society which doesn’t take care of their sick is a failed society. Seattle is the richest city in one of the richest state of the richest country in the world. If we wanted to we could easily take care of anyone that needed it.

At some point we have to say it takes too much. If it takes 20 college-educated social workers, medical professionals, etc. just to enable one junkie to eek out a miserable existence doing drugs and sleeping on the street, it's too much. Their lifestyle is untenable. On some level, we have to accept that one can fuck up one's own life, and fuck it up so badly that others can't fix or maintain it for you.

Sure, it's a cost benefit analysis.

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.

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

#627

Post by uoaei »

jdminhbg wrote: post #122
legitster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, there were a lot of programs that existed before M110, and part of the bill of goods that was sold with M110 was that it was going to make it easier for people to access existing resources without fear of law enforcement. 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 program…

> Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape 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 y…

Exactly right. Hard not to see it as a shadowy system of back-scratches and kickbacks between mayors' offices and the folks who run the NGOs. It's remarkable how hard it is to hold NGOs accountable when they're using public funds.

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

#628

Post by uoaei »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #107
legitster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, there were a lot of programs that existed before M110, and part of the bill of goods that was sold with M110 was that it was going to make it easier for people to access existing resources without fear of law enforcement. 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 program…

There's two problems with these programs. 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.…

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

#629

Post by dtx1 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #129
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…

The first priority should be cleaning up the cities for the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Absolutely do not let drug addicts overwhelm your downtown cores and make them terrible. You don't need to lock them up indefinitely, but you do need to move them somewhere else where they won't have hugely negative effects on the city and its populace. It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for t…

The sad reality is that current forms of law enforcement aren't working when it comes to hard drugs and addiction. Putting people in prison for getting addicted to crack is not exactly going to make anyones lifes better. But it has also become quite obvious that you can't have free-range junkies shooting up in what is supposed to be the economic center of a city.

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.

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

#630

Post by stillwithit »

gigatexal wrote: post #615
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…

Former Portland native here: it hasn’t worked. I was back just a year or two ago and 5th ave near the waterfront was overrun with homeless openly shooting up and accosting folks. 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…

WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone.

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.

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