Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 1001 posts

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

#731

Post by thworp »

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…

> Portland did everything! [...]

They got all of the carrots sure, but there was no stick. The reason these programs have success elsewhere is that they give people the choice of prison or treatment.

Also, nowhere except the US just decided to legalize public drug use. In fact one of the goals of harm reduction programs in other places is to get the users out of public spaces.

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

#732

Post by thecopy »

samlinnfer wrote: post #672
strken wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like you're advocating a stance where anyone who shows up to a music festival with a bag of weed for their friends should be shot. That's a rather extreme position that seems much worse than the potential harms from the drug itself. Can you go into more detail?

Your argument is a strawman because the people on the streets are not there because they are addicted to weed. China has learnt this the hard way when opium almost destroyed their nation and lead to a century of humiliation, I don't see why the US wants or should repeat the same mistake.

>dealers should be handled as Duterte advocated

Some quotes from him:

>Hitler massacred 3 million Jews ... there's 3 million drug addicts. There are. I'd be happy to slaughter them

>Just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you're a son of a bitch

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

#733

Post by robertlagrant »

bbor wrote: post #594
CydeWeys wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” t…

> I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away

The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stopping the drugs entering the country.

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

#734

Post by panick21_ »

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…

That's a very American perspective. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more.

It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.

The US had far better economic growth then Europe in general. With much of Europe barley growing since early 2010.

Why do people no live in these areas? Why are there so many homeless in the first place.

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

#735

Post by roenxi »

uoaei wrote: post #625
swalling wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taking that as an axiom; then what exactly would the plan be to make the welfare system work? Conservatives are frequently going to be in power, they represent about half the votes.

If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only real choice is to abandon the welfare system. Otherwise, the alternative is to abandon the welfare system spitefully in a way that doesn't achieve anything for anyone.

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

#736

Post by blackshaw »

sneak wrote: post #616
beezlewax wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ODs have more than doubled because of fentanyl but I suspect you know this already.

Cigarettes kill 7x as many as fentanyl every hour, day, week, month, and year. One is available without prescription on every streetcorner, with use allowed in public in proximity to others, and the other is a public health epidemic.

Cigarettes kill you slowly over decades, fentanyl can kill a first-time user with a single dose.

Moronic analogy.

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

#737

Post by panick21_ »

Intermernet wrote: post #696
oooyay wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Portland. Conservatives do not have anything to do with our city or the county of Multnomah. We haven't elected a conservative since the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_McCready . We're the second highest taxed city in the nation. If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.

I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative. In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing,…

What American cities need more then public housing, is housing. Actual policies that increase housing stock and make it possible to live in these places without a car.

That is how you actually decrease total cost of living.

The US has been trending up, between housing and transportation, a huge amount of people spend well above 50% of their income on that, and poorer people even more.

Public housing can be part of this, but by itself it wont fix anything.

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

#738

Post by Consultant32452 »

uoaei wrote: post #628
Consultant32452 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[flagged]

TLC told me to keep doing more of what is failing in Portland and San Francisco.

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

#739

Post by t8sr »

Intermernet wrote: post #696
oooyay wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Portland. Conservatives do not have anything to do with our city or the county of Multnomah. We haven't elected a conservative since the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_McCready . We're the second highest taxed city in the nation. If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.

I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative. In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing,…

> “ compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.”

As someone from the “rest of the world” I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I think this claim is based on a broad misunderstanding of, let’s be honest, Western European politics by people who’ve never voted in elections here.

I live in Switzerland, have lived or worked in the Netherlands, UK and Czechia. The liberal parts of the US are far to the left of any of those countries.

(Yes, healthcare is cheaper, except in Switzerland. It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but on questions related to drug use in the public square, I think you’d find it’s a lot less lenient here than you think.)

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

#740

Post by panick21_ »

lmm wrote: post #540
bglazer wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did we stop?

Feels like a follow-on from the "white flight" phenomenon. The rich and/or influential (that is, middle-/upper-class, but Americans aren't used to thinking that way) people who set policy for a city no longer live or even spend any time downtown. They push for the policies they think are right, but there's no feedback mechanism to tell them what effect they're actually having.

This was part of the 'efficiency' drive. Many cities added or merged with lots of the subburbs. And then those subburbs control policy.

Torronto is a perfect example. It was merged into Greater Torronto, and those new areas are what led to Trumpist style Rob Ford being elected.

And its also zoning. Its always surprising to me how in the US people don't live in the cities. In Europe, the city center are very lived in. The downtown can't turn into a ghost town, even if everybody works from home.

Post reply on HN