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To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

nytimes.com

641–650 of 1001 posts

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

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's not enough housing, where are people supposed to sleep? To be clear, I hate seeing people sleep on the street. It's terrible, but they don't have good options.

Maybe if they werent constantly cycling through erratic meth benders and on a constant search to steal enough to afford their next high, they might have a better chance at affording housing. Im all for housing those who need it. And housing is too expensive in cities, but the meth/fent addict who cant even manage to keep their pants on has more severe problems than the going rate on a studio apartment.

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

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated. 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 s…

"To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide." I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.

Are the results that bad? Or are the results exactly the same but more visible (i.e. homeless addicts are not just being hidden below the concrete of highway interexchange instead of being able to live in the city center)?

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

#643

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…

One thing all these cities with catastrophic street drug use have in common is also bonkers housing crisis.

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?

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Bucks are free, just print them. Wait, no, money are digital now, press a button and make money numbers.

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

#645
post #234

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Opioids keep the top spot of addictiveness. The second place firmly belongs to nicotine. It's way more addictive than. say, cocaine. 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, psi…

> Why not ban nicotine, by the same logic as heroin? because nicotine doesn't increase crime rates on society.

Nicotine is also legal, safe-per-dose and easy to get.

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

#646
post #419

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Stay strapped. Sorry to be harsh, but it’s not policies that keep you and yours safe. You need to protect you and yours and government policies aren’t going to protect you from hard drug users. Sorry you had a terrible experience but since ancient times people have weapons to defend against any enemy.

I will say here what I have said many times in real life: if I had been carrying a gun I would probably have been shot with it - dead men tell no tales and they certainly ran my pockets. 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…

That is chilling. I am so sorry you experienced this.

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.

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

#647
post #274

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> She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl. 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.

I'm genuinely curious why you think she should get clean. I fail to see what sort of burden she'd put on the health care system. AFAIK, long term opoid use is less dangerous than cigarette smoking, and the highest danger is of falls. ( https://fpm.ac.uk/opioids-aware-clinical-use-opioids/long-te... ) That's when the user knows what they're taking..

Because the few people I knew in real life that did it died and all the people I know that didn't do it are still alive. One of them was a single mom and left a 12 year old alone.

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.

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well if an adult was found to be a nuisance and was unable to care for themselves, they would be put into the mental hospital. Unfortunately, due to some issues, those did not work out too well.

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

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What circumstance? The clamor to use prison time as a solution to homelessness and drug use?

You know what thread we're in, right? You know what circumstances I'm referring to..

People generally don’t ask you to clarify if they know what you’re talking about.

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

#650

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…

Correlation, causation, etc.
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