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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

#741

Post by knallfrosch »

etchalon wrote: post #262

I'd be interested to hear from people in large European cities and whether public drug use and homelessness are as big of an issue there as they are here. I've only been to a handful of European cities, and none seem to struggle with either to the extent we see in larger cities in the US.

Public drug use is something that I've never seen in Bavaria. Altough you'll be able to find it if you know where to look.

Seriously though, leftist cities like Berlin have the same problems as the US, although on a much smaller scale. It's what D. Trump would call an shithole. Bavaria is clean, because we enforce a restrictive drug policy.

As for homeless, we've got some, but they're voluntarily so. The shelters don't accept alcohol, drugs nor dogs. They gather far away from any business/residintial area. (In my local town, under a bridge between a river and an animal shelter.)

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

#742

Post by 1shooner »

shermantanktop wrote: post #504
arp242 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can tell a lot about how someone thinks by listening for denial of agency. The CEO had to do it; that drug addict had no choice; he had to defend his honor; she couldn’t lie. Sometimes people have only one choice, but they almost always have agency.

Your experience of addiction must be significantly different than mine.

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

#743

Post by avgcorrection »

vineyardmike wrote: post #569
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…

I hate the messaging of “for the actual taxpayers” phrase even if I agree mostly with the sentiment. There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of…

We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers.

Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).

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

#744

Post by zztop44 »

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.

Christ, I’ve been visibly publicly intoxicated with hard drugs on a number of occasions (many years ago) while holding down a respectable middle class professional job (and being good at it!). If I’d been forced into months(!!) of rehab I’d have lost my job and had to move cities and/or change industries (it’s a small world and people talk).

And the scariest thing (for me personally) is that even if I knew that was a potential outcome, I don’t think it would have stopped me. And I wasn’t a junkie or hopeless addict by any means.

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

#745

Post by hypertele-Xii »

beezlewax wrote: post #660
sneak wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That being the case doesn't negate the fact that cigarette users are not turned into some version of the walking dead but who'd do literally anything for a fix. Tobacco has a lot to answer for but it isn't the same kind of issue at all. It doesn't destroy communities so directly.

I've seen plenty of people do nothing but drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, and complain, all day, every day, year after year.

You might argue that it's the alcohol doing the zombification but I posit that surely the tobacco also has something to do in this equation.

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

#746

Post by rzl1235 »

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,…

[dead]

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

#747

Post by thworp »

dtx1 wrote: post #629
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…

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 th…

The approach of giving an addict that is arrested on theft and other charges a choice of prison or treatment is used successfully (as successful as it can be) in many EU countries. Obviously this cannot work if nobody gets convicted for anything short of murder, the incentives don't work.

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

#748

Post by panick21_ »

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.

And somehow in Europe people drink on the streets all the time and its mostly fine. Cities are not overrun by drunks and people live and work there just fine. People chilling in the streets and parks together drinking beers and so on.

I find the alcohol culture n the US pretty outputting. The US model of 'get hammer in a bar and then drive home'. Not a great model.

So to say 'we solved this' is kind of ridiculous at least from my outside perspective.

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

#749

Post by everdrive »

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…

>That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not.

You probably should blame them. They let their personal problems collectively spiral out of control so badly that they became society's problem, and an entire city was degraded because of it. Blame can still be assigned to the pitiable.

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

#750

Post by thworp »

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…

I really don't know where American ""progressives"" (they're sociopaths imo) got the idea that harm reduction and decriminalization involves just letting people rot (and shoot up) in the streets and just releasing people on no bail. That is not done in any of the places these people use as positive examples of the policy working.

This happened on such a scale that I can't help but wonder if the results as seen in Portland, Vancouver, Sf ... were the intention.

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