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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

#841

Post by rayiner »

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.

Scandinavia isn’t uniformly permissive with drugs. Sweden is quite anti-drug.

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

#842

Post by everdrive »

gigatexal wrote: post #790
everdrive wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Addiction and the like has a genetic component. Also we, as a society, voted to stop investing in services like mental institutions or publicly available and affordable healthcare... so yeah sure blame the victims: they at one point had their faculities but now some are so far addicted they don't act as you or I would expect but in service of their addictions or afflictions.

Most things have a genetic component. Blame doesn't disappear because someone was more predisposed towards something. For instance, men are generally more predisposed to violence than women. Any sane person would agree there is a likely a genetic component to this fact. But if a man beats his wife, we still can and should blame him, even if it were true that with different genetics he would not have beaten his wife. (or more realistically, with different genetics he would have likely never married the same woman.)

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

#843

Post by polski-g »

panick21_ wrote: post #727
stillwithit wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone. It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time. I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case s…

These problems are so American. 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. Why do people no live in these areas? It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement. PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.

Europe has much higher police officers per capita than the US.

Portland specifically has less police officers per capita than Haiti.

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

#844

Post by cultureswitch »

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 think you're completely correct in local terms for the interest of Portland. And personally I think this was a wholly predictable outcome.

However, isn't this a little bit like state gun control? Legislation and public services being wildly different across a border that anyone can cross at will creates border effects. Is it possible that Portland is attracting a ton of junkies from elsewhere?

Also this is another exhibit for my pet theory that progressive and idealistic politics are more effective at large scales whereas conservative and managerial politics are better suited to the local level of governance.

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

#845

Post by namlem »

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…

They most certainly did not do everything. The Portuguese model works fairly well, but that requires arreatijng drug users and making them show up to court. They don't send people to prison for drug use but they still entangle them in the legal system.

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

#846

Post by polski-g »

Intermernet wrote: post #705
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should be locked in jail for being drug addicts. Give it a few more years and you'll change your opinion on that too.

Many functioning, respected and powerful people in society are drug addicts. You will almost certainly know some.

How is that relevant to the naked twerking person at the top of the metro stairwell?

If everyone on the entire planet was addicted to meth and did it daily, but there was a single meth user who decided to twerk naked at the top of the metro stairwell and assault people, that one person should be imprisoned. Why you ask? Because every other person on the planet is (as you say) functional. Nobody cares if you decided to do drugs and then fall asleep at home while paying your bills (ie: functioning). People do care about naked twerking people at the top of metro stairwells who routinely assault passers-by.

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

#847

Post by flir »

freetanga wrote: post #632
flir wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which do you prefer to tack on the end of that: "...except for the disabled" or "...and to hell with the disabled"? Both are widely used.

I have people with disabilities in my family so I know their realities up close - unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops. My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a…

Good. Now... why isn't an addiction a disability?

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

#848

Post by cultureswitch »

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

In what way? Compared to almost everywhere on earth, American politicians are extremely xenophilic, extremely tolerant of sexual minorities, extremely feminist, more inclined towards individual freedoms in general and perhaps slightly more capitalist.

All of these things are different axes of politics that are correlated differently in different regions of the world.

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

#849

Post by gexla »

culopatin wrote: post #796
gexla wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.

And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit

Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.

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

#850

Post by keenmaster »

rayiner wrote: post #841
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.

Scandinavia isn’t uniformly permissive with drugs. Sweden is quite anti-drug.

They might have actually been thinking of Portugal
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