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

801–810 of 1001 posts

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

#801

Post by renegade-otter »

dougmwne wrote: post #795
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…

I’ll add another inconvenient truth that I’ve realized. You can copy every law and policy that’s working so well in some other (Scandinavian) place and have it still fail horribly. That’s because it was never the laws that were working, but the society and culture as a whole. You can’t bring good laws to a place with a disintegrating social fabric and expect the same results.

Absolutely this. A country needs a healthy government and public employees dedicated and honest. A culture of sacrifice for public good. Not "but meeeeee!" culture.

It does not work where the "Deep State" is the enemy and grifters run for Congress to become Twitter trolls.

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

#802

Post by knowledge-clay »

Exoristos wrote: post #651
uoaei wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harm reduction and rehab still only treats the symptom, not the cause. The cause is financial instability brought on by insecurity in housing, food access, etc. It's an issue of human dignity in the economic sphere that drives people to such depths, not recreation. Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of cave…

It's the other way around. They've lost their jobs and their homes -- and their friends -- and their families, because of drugs.

Drugs did not cause rents in Seattle to triple over the last 15 years

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

#803

Post by c22 »

hifreq wrote: post #609
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…

Yes, and we can solve drug addiction directly by giving people drugs. What is free housing? Free as in indefinitely free with no strings attached? Free utilities, free services, free food, perhaps free transportation? Free furniture, free healthcare, free drugs, free clothes, free HOA? Do you think the violent addicts everyone complains about just need a house, and starting from day one they will become productive me…

No, but they will probably start pooping at their house.

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

#804

Post by NoGravitas »

meiraleal wrote: post #695
singlepaynews wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This suggests to me that homelessness and drug use may be orthogonal problems. If you triple my rent over the next 10 years, without raising my income, then I'm gonna be homeless. No drug use necessary, batteries included, no assembly required.

Do you know that the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary, right? And raising it is mostly up to you. Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse

Maybe raising it is "up to you", but it's up to you within the context of an existing economy, not a vacuum. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already..."

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

#805

Post by LargeTomato »

u32480932048 wrote: post #798
thworp wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Por…

In my experience, they're inexperienced with the world and of a background where problems like these are only hypothetical, and therefore very black and white. It's easy to get behind the feel-good answer if you know nothing about the problem other than a Vox explainer you read 5 minutes ago. They don't know what real harm reduction actually looks like, because that would take more than hitting Like and Share. "Wow!…

Respect is for humans. If you rot your brain until you begin to revert to primal instincts the state is under no obligation to accommodate you.

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

#806

Post by NoGravitas »

eloisius wrote: post #545
runarberg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is it. A lot of the unhoused in Seattle are locals or in state, and many of the out of state are from neighboring states such as Idaho or other West Coast states. Rather I think the problem is that half assed decriminalization efforts simply aren’t enough and that drug overdose has become a much more severe issue because of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of fentanyl. What needs to happen…

> What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts How many productive members of society does it take to support each drug addict? Should there be…

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. "

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

#807

Post by onetimeuse92304 »

dougmwne wrote: post #795
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…

I’ll add another inconvenient truth that I’ve realized. You can copy every law and policy that’s working so well in some other (Scandinavian) place and have it still fail horribly. That’s because it was never the laws that were working, but the society and culture as a whole. You can’t bring good laws to a place with a disintegrating social fabric and expect the same results.

Yes. Exactly same way that trying to transplant ideas like agile or microservices or testing driven development fails so miserably most of the time.

It is not that the ideas are wrong.

It is that they are not the correct moves for a team that is not ready for them.

I know it sounds like a silly parallel. But changing societies is hard, long, unique and not well understood process. It makes sense to try to learn from examples where it is much easier to gather some information.

When I come to meet a team that has trouble (I work as an advisor and help teams that have trouble), I am not coming with a library of good solutions BECAUSE IT IS FUCKING NOT WORKING. Time and time again, I am repairing after previous people who did just that -- they came with a solution thinking they know it all because it worked somewhere. More often than not they have observed something working, they learned elements they could easily understand and they tried to transplant and failed miserably.

So whether you are trying to fix a team or fix a homelessness problem, you have to come with an empty mind and willingness to relentlessly problem solve. And look at those other successful examples as examples to learn from but not necessarily duplicate.

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

#808

Post by silent_cal »

panick21_ wrote: post #748
johnnyanmac wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We have different rules for drinking in public and public intoxication. I think this person is talking about public intoxication.

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

#809

Post by toyg »

ITT: lots of people who seriously believe (or pretend they believe) that you can fix a deep and complex social problem as drug use, in 3 years, with a couple of laws.

The war on drugs is three-generations old; it will take at least a generation after abandoning it to see good results. Of course there will be mistakes on the way (and allowing brazen drug use in public spaces is probably one of those - a lot of stuff that is absolutely fine to do in private is not allowed on the streets). That doesn't mean you throw away the baby with the bathwater.

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

#810

Post by carlmr »

whiddershins wrote: post #757
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…

Locking people up for being addicts is not the same as locking people up for using in the street. What is wrong with this approach: Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is. If someone’s addiction has become unmanageable to the point where they are doing drugs on the street, it is a kindness and a necessity to take their agency away from them. If someone is an addict but otherwise functio…

> Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is.

Exactly. I can't imagine somebody on weed would bother people that much.

But if you steal from people, leave your unclean syringes lying around, etc. you're a hazard to society and need to be dealt with. So we need to enable law enforcement to deal with that properly.

If you're drunk and belligerent, which happens a lot, you shouldn't be able to do that legally either.

So as long as you're not a menace to society, I don't see why you shouldn't have that freedom. But as soon as your freedom causes issues for others, it needs to be dealt with.

Maybe allowing meth, fentanyl, heroin and such is the problem. I would bet almost all the big problems are due to the users of these.

Post reply on HN