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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

#661

Post by Scoundreller »

adolph wrote: post #400
tunesmith wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe Portland's efforts caused the rise of fentanyl, though. How do we know it wouldn't be worse, if not for Portland's efforts?

My recollection is that in 2007 Mexico banned pseudoephedrine in order to remove feed stock from meth labs supplying the US.[0,1] As a result of this and other factors suppliers in Mexico found fentanyl, which bypassed growing cycles of agricultural drugs like pot and heroin. During the pandemic, Mexico grew additional trade ties with China which included fentanyl precursor chemicals.[2] 0. https://www.reuters.com/ar…

Plenty of other precursors to use if you can't get pseudoephedrine at scale. Trying to control ultra-small scale producers doesn't accomplish much other than sweeten the cartels (and purity/yields, so I guess that's a positive).

Opioids being more dependence-inducing than stimulants would better explain a production shift.

Big legitimate trading volumes with China (and any other large producer of goods/inputs) make a customs-focussed effort at controlling supply basically impossible.

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

#662

Post by eloisius »

defrost wrote: post #314
overgard wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that alcohol is, by far, the most dangerous drug and it's completely legal, I think there's something to be said for your point. I gotta say though, it's sort of complicated when you're talking about legalizing things that are already legal as prescription drugs (like opiates and benzos). Alcohol is different because it doesn't really have any medical use outside of disinfecting things (it's fairly terrib…

Sydney and a large number of other cities about the globe have injecting centres and decades of public reporting on crime, death, etc. in the vicinty of such centres. They're an interesting middle ground - dedicated medical centres that allow users to inject with clean needles, test drugs for purity, and have narcan and crash carts available for complications. You arrive, show ID, inject your drugs, chill for 20 minu…

It sounds like the primary benefit is reduced ODs for the drug addicts. Does it do anything to benefit productive members of society? Do libraries go back to to being libraries? Do parks once again serve as a place to relax and recreate with family or friends? Does it clean the sidewalk and make them disability-accessible again? Does it stop the property crimes that are committed to buy drugs?

It's an absurd level of misdirected empathy to redirect such massive parts of the society's collective effort to benefit a few people who had some amount of agency in ruining their own lives.

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

#663

Post by WalterBright »

felizuno wrote: post #607
WalterBright wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the people who assaulted you? Were they fully prosecuted?

no, the prosecutors office cut deals with both of them because they were a) only able to schedule murder trials and b) scared to face a jury in Seattle

Awful. It's worse than I thought.

When I first moved to Seattle for my first real job, eons ago, my car was stolen. The police came right out, and found my car (they didn't find the thief). I got the car back.

I guess those days are long gone.

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

#664

Post by 1253513452 »

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.

I don't know about a "drug bar" but I'm of a similar mindset in that I think solutions which punish functional users are unhelpful. It's less obvious who those people are in the case of things like fentanyl but there's no shortage of healthcare, legal, and culinary workers making routine use of illegal stimulants. There's maybe a dialogue to be had there about if it's actually desirable such people's jobs be so demanding they feel the need to use the substances they do of course. But it hardly makes sense to jail them or force them into rehab if they're maintaining a productive lifestyle in my opinion.

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

#665

Post by samlinnfer »

sneak wrote: post #623
tlivolsi wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

A drug dealer who is making money from addicts, many of who become violent to fuel their addictions, deserves summary execution.

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

#667

Post by morelisp »

huytersd wrote: post #583
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You solve homelessness directly by giving people housing. Free housing paid for by people like me, and ideally others, who are more than happy to take what I make and give it to people who need it more than I do. And you don’t need to be rich to do it. It’s a decision on how much money etc you actually need to be fulfilled. If that takes a zombie proof bunker and multiple houses and first class flights and…and… then…

Your thought process in commendable but years of this has made me cynical. No one wants to live in the same apartment complex as junkies. If you put them all together it turns into a crime filled cesspool. A hard drug addict is essentially toxic to any situation you drop them in. The solution is to forcibly treat them in rehab centers and then maybe follow up with free housing. This is followed up by drug testing for…

> No one wants to live in the same apartment complex as junkies.

You sound like you'd be shocked at how many high-functioning junkies live in most apartment complexes in most major cities. Upper-middle-class guys, holding down jobs - at least until a run of bad luck hits.

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

#668

Post by xyzzyz »

morsch wrote: post #636
xyzzyz wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans have no idea how high the cost of living is in Europe relative to wages. Median sale price in Seattle is $560/square foot, which is almost exactly $6000/square meter. With minimum wage at $18.69/hr, that's 320 hours of minimum wage work per square meter. For comparison, average price per square meter in Paris is over 10 000 EUR ($10 700), whereas the minimum wage is 11.50 EUR, giving you a ratio of 870 hour…

Prices per square meter: Marseille: 4300 EUR Birmingham: 3000 GBP Bremen: 3000 EUR Liege: 3000 EUR Antwerp: 2500 EUR València: 2200 EUR Poznan: 2000 EUR These are all major, but not the biggest, cities in their respective country. I'm not saying they are representative (for what, anyway). You'll find major cities that are much more expensive (eg Munich) or cheaper. As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees: h…

OK, let's do some of them, say Poznan (because I'm most familiar with it). It's hard to find median household income figures in Poznan, but you can find that average individual income in it is 22000 EUR/year, and average household income typically is something like 150% of average individual income, so let's take average household income in Poznan to be 33k EUR/year, or 16.5 EUR/hour. This gives us 120 hours/square meter, which is comparable to Seattle.

However, this becomes much worse if you look at after-tax situation. In Poland, at this pay range, your effective tax rate is 27%, whereas in Seattle it's 16%, and you have to then apply 23% VAT to your purchases, compared to 10% sales tax in Seattle.

> As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:

What specifically does it disagree about? It is well known that the effective tax rate on lower half of the population is much lower in US than in almost all of Europe, as my example comparison between US and Poland or France shows. In Europe, the middle class pays the bulk of the tax burden, whereas in US, taxation is much more progressive, and it is the wealthy who pay most of the tax.

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

#669

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

gamblor956 wrote: post #483

As someone who used to represent drug addicts in a past career... Drugs are illegal for a reason. Making drugs legal just makes the problem worse; the reasons most drugs are illegal is because of the many negative side effects they impose on users...and others. Voluntary rehab and counseling don't work. Permissive policies don't work. There are literally thousands of shelters beds empty each night in LA, SF, and Port…

Imo the US (and most countries) really fucked up putting Marijuana down in the same tier as hard drugs.

I feel a lot of people think since Marijuana isn't that bad, neither are the others. Which leads to the number of people voting for these 'decriminalize all drugs' policies.

Doesn't help when you see people comparing Heroin to alcohol or nicotine as well...

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

#670

Post by cjwilliams »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #536

[flagged]

I think perhaps that because solutions have become so partisanly labled, we continue to fail on this. People in this thread are merely asking for common sense policies that exist in basically all other developed countries. This includes socialist countries, where oddly enough disincentives to junkie behavior mean that everyday people can live normal lives in urban places without the constant storm of drug induced bullshit degrading basically everything. Why the American progressives refuse to course correct is inscrutable to me.
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