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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

#871

Post by nullc »

polski-g wrote: post #846
Intermernet wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That would be "lock up publicly problematic addicts" not "addicts" in general.

The aforementioned "functioning, respected and powerful people" are able to conceal or internalize the cost of their problems and aren't usually a problem for the public at large.

With that in mind, the problem is really just being persistently a public danger/nuisance. The only relevance of addiction to this is that addicts are frequently unresponsive to incentives that would be sufficient for non-addicts.

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

#872

Post by swalling »

eric_cc wrote: post #819
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 reads like total denial. COVID was years ago. The city I’m in bounced back and was mostly normal late 2021. I also was interested in the outcome of Portland’s experiment. It has failed. The war on drugs is anti-liberty and I recognize its racist roots. But racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023. Again, denial and excuses. The war on drugs AND Portland’s experiment are BOTH failures. I we…

Which city are you in? All of the major West Coast cities have not had downtown office occupancy return to pre-pandemic rates as far as I am aware.

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

#873

Post by qingcharles »

huytersd wrote: post #583
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…

Your thought process in commendable but years of this has made me cynical. No one wants to live in the same apartment complex as junkies. If you put them all together it turns into a crime filled cesspool. A hard drug addict is essentially toxic to any situation you drop them in. The solution is to forcibly treat them in rehab centers and then maybe follow up with free housing. This is followed up by drug testing for…

I can attest to part of this. I spent several months in a halfway house earlier this year for those coming out of prison. Putting (mostly) addicts together in one building was total and utter chaos. They all fed off each other. The few that were trying to stay sober and get employment had an insane challenge because everyone around them was using and stealing their stuff to sell for drugs. It was crazy.

It is also mind-blowing that you would release addicts with essentially zero support. They don't even get ID coming out of prison in Illinois, so they can't access any support services at all.

Again, I don't know what the solution is, but I know some things that don't work :(

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

#874

Post by nullc »

oneshtein wrote: post #704
dylan604 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What nonsense is this? Smoking weed next to someone does not lead to addiction. Every place that I am familiar with some form of legalized marijuana consumption says you can't do it just any old place you feel like. So this is also just more BS being spread. You have a very misconstrued understanding of something, and now you're calling it libertarianism.

Passive smoke leads to addiction. It's proven for tobacco. It's the mechanism of the propagation. After some hours of breathing small doses of tobacco smoke, people start to like tobacco smoke and want to smoke it too. Weed or tobacco is not important here.

I'm surprised to hear that-- got a cite?

My parents smoked when I was a child. The memory of being in the car with the windows up makes me anxious even though it's been probably 30 years since I've been in a car with a smoker. I experience acute irritation when exposed to anyone smoking, and much more widespread smoking is one of the major reasons I dislike visiting Europe. I know that I'm far from alone in feeling this way.

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

#875

Post by infamouscow »

thwarted wrote: post #680
vineyardmike wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is more to life than paying taxes Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.

There is no option to opt-out of paying taxes and voluntarily live in the woods.

You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years.

These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.

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

#876

Post by bentt »

One of the unfortunate side effects of criminalizing drug use has been the muddying of the ethical landscape around law breaking. The argument that drug use laws are unjust has bled into a belief that other illegal behavior is somehow excusable when committed by an addict.

So it's not that Portland made a mistake in decriminalizing public drug use. Their mistake was that they stopped enforcing other laws around the misbehavior addicts engage in.

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

#877

Post by vineyardmike »

infamouscow wrote: post #875
thwarted wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to life than paying taxes Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.

There is no option to opt-out of paying taxes and voluntarily live in the woods. You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years. These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.

You get collective benefit even if you live in the woods. You can’t opt-out because you don’t opt out of the benefit.

You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.

You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away.

Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.

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

#878

Post by schrijver »

eloisius wrote: post #662
defrost wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sydney and a large number of other cities about the globe have injecting centres and decades of public reporting on crime, death, etc. in the vicinty of such centres. They're an interesting middle ground - dedicated medical centres that allow users to inject with clean needles, test drugs for purity, and have narcan and crash carts available for complications. You arrive, show ID, inject your drugs, chill for 20 minu…

It sounds like the primary benefit is reduced ODs for the drug addicts. Does it do anything to benefit productive members of society? Do libraries go back to to being libraries? Do parks once again serve as a place to relax and recreate with family or friends? Does it clean the sidewalk and make them disability-accessible again? Does it stop the property crimes that are committed to buy drugs? It's an absurd level of…

How it worked in Amsterdam in the 90ies is that the government also started to provide the drugs (Methadon) for the heroin addicts… The addicts were responsible for lots of petty crime in order to fund their habit (stealing car radios, muggings) and this decreased. So this helped make the city a more liveable place, not just for addicts.

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

#879

Post by jstarfish »

oooyay wrote: post #682
uoaei wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Conservatism isn't the point, it's the specific tactics being used that they're highlighting. IIRC the same tactics were recommended in that WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" that still makes the rounds on the internet.

The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.

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

#880

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

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