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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

#821

Post by mlrtime »

renegade-otter wrote: post #801
dougmwne wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which congress trolls?

You are blaming Portland's currently fail[ed|ing] policies on federal congress members that have nothing to do with Portland?

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

#822

Post by NoGravitas »

Eumenes wrote: post #140
drewg123 wrote: post #110

Nowhere in these comments have I see anybody take the position that decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated. I have a close friend whose relative is a heroin addict. According to her, a lot of overdoses are due to almost no "heroin" actually being heroin, rather its fentanyl cut to varying degrees of strength. Not knowing what you're taking, and not knowing how strong it is, can lead…

Your argument is tired. There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict. Most don't quit after a 20 year on and off relationship with it. They die and usually cause mayhem in the process - to society, their loved ones, the healthcare system, law enforcement, etc. I'm dealing with a very serious addict in my life right now and how "clean" the drug is makes no difference. They steal and lie non-stop. They cause ma…

Plenty of gamblers and alcoholics fit that description, too.

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

#823

Post by u32480932048 »

ipaddr wrote: post #775
achenet wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

comment you are replying to said "forced rehab" - this is not sheltering people from the consequences of their actions, it's forcing them to accept them and change those actions. Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a…

So your plan is to lock them into psychiatric wards. Then let them out and they will be productive members of society because that's how it worked for someone who can back from Vietnam once you heard. When they get out they don't have a family or job or support system to go back to. They won't seek drugs to ease those pains again?

So you heard once that someone lost their entire family and support system because of a single inpatient stay?

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

#824

Post by TrackerFF »

deepfriedchokes wrote: post #12

Drug use is a mental health issue. People take things that make them feel good when they don’t feel good. They’re just self medicating and we need to start treating it as a symptom of an underlying issue rather than the issue itself. Same with the obesity epidemic. It’s not the what, it’s the why.

Well, you have psychological and physiological addiction. Normal "happy" people get addicted all the time - we've seen that with prescription drugs. That's almost purely a physiological addiction.

But of course, those two are not mutually exclusive - you can have both forms of addiction, and they do often merge into one with many types of drugs. Even if you beat extremely physiologically addictive drugs, you can lust for the effects many years / decades later, because of how good they made you feel.

And as you become addicted, usually at the expensive of everything else in your life, depression will set in - which just amplifies the need to escape.

The big problem with homelessness, and those types of drug users, is that a solid chunk of them have underlying mental illnesses - which may have lead to the drug use (self medication), or came out after drug use. These are the type of patients that simply can't function on their own. If you give them a free apartment, they're not able to live there.

I don't think radical decriminalization is the root problem - but rather the utter lack of (mental) healthcare.

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

#825

Post by silent_cal »

skyyler wrote: post #203
Eumenes wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source is my personal experience dealing with individuals involved in addiction. No amount of "experts" claiming we need to legalize hardcore drugs is going to change my opinion, thats for sure.

So you're not even interested in hearing people that actually have done research, you're just going to run with your assumptions? That's a rather emotional place to make an argument, in my opinion.

This is the fallacy of scientism. You don't have to do a peer-reviewed research paper to see the truth. Firsthand observation is still the primary way we know the truth. Research depends on observations, not the other way around.

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

#826

Post by eric_cc »

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,…

> I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.

Source? This reads like a Leftist talking point. I’d be interested in understanding who trained on you on this idea.

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

#827

Post by gosub100 »

kazinator wrote: post #199
gosub100 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been any research into how to measure potency (of fentanyl) and cut it properly? Maybe we could keep the government out of it, and instead give information and supplies to measure the potency correctly? I've heard that one way OD's happen is the substance is not homogeneous, so they can consume half the bag fine, then one dose is super-charged and puts them into OD (because fent can be up to thousands of ti…

> Has there been any research into how to measure potency (of fentanyl) and cut it properly? Yes? When you're having surgery and the anesthesiologist uses a mixture of fentanyl and propofol, such that you safely wake up, they aren't just guessing. One problem is that what's out on the street isn't necessarily fentanyl in the first place, but any one of hundreds of fentanyl analogs, which all vary in potency. You have…

The anesthesiologist doesn't pull out a test strip and check (measure) the purity of the fent they pump the patient with, so you are incorrect. I'm suggesting providing addicts with the tools to measure their own dope's potency so they can avoid OD.

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

#828

Post by thworp »

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!…

I think you accurately characterized a sizable portion of the electorate, not just in the US but in many Western countries. That still leaves me wondering what the social workers, homeless advocates, Mission workers etc were doing.

Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.

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

#829

Post by lawlington »

u32480932048 wrote: post #813
ninth_ant wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that shelters have "drama" and "rules" is not a compelling reason for someone to make a home in an area that is intended for public use, and render it unusable and unsafe for others. Is this really a hard problem to solve? I can certainly buy the argument that criminalizing homelessness doesn't make sense when the "criminal" has no other options. But if someone has a viable option for not living on the stree…

> make a home in an area that is intended for public use, and render it unusable and unsafe for others A tent in a park, unless in the middle of a trail, doesn't inherently or necessarily make it less usable or less safe.

[dead]

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

#830

Post by WrongAssumption »

bitcharmer wrote: post #758
swalling wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc." This is not even remotely true. Everyone in the city, from the mayor [1] to the head of the largest services non-profit [2] has been yelling from the rooftops about the glacial slowness to effectively spend the allocated funding for drug treatment. Until just months ago, Multnomah County has been sitting on tens of m…

Appreciate your comment. Terrifyingly high number of commenters (likely Americans) drawing flawed conclusions. We tried and failed, therefore this problem is unsolvable. Dozens of cities in other parts of the world had much success, so maybe you're doing it wrong? Zurich did a great job, especially with the transformation of the infamous needle park.

“ However, lack of control over what went on in the park caused a multitude of problems. Drug dealers and users arrived from all over Europe, and crime became rampant as dealers fought for control and addicts (who numbered up to 1,000 ) stole to support their habit. The once-beautiful gardens had degraded into a mess of mud and used needles, and the emergency services were overwhelmed with the number of overdoses, which were almost nightly. Platzspitz, or Needle Park as it was then known, became a source of embarrassment to the Zurich municipal council and in 1992, police moved in to clear up the park.[clarification needed] The drug scene then moved to the adjacent area of Letten railway station, which closed services in 1989. This spot was also cleared by police in 1995.

Today Platzspitz has been cleaned up and restored, and is presented by the authorities as a peaceful, family-friendly garden.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park?wprov=sfti1#

So hands off was a total failure, so they gave up and forcibly removed people.

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