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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

#881

Post by ip26 »

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…

It's simpler than that.

- cities are economic engines

- economic engines generate both wealth and tax revenue

- if you don't care for the economic engine, you lose your tax revenue

Everything the government does is built upon tax revenue.

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

#882

Post by [deleted] »

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!…

[deleted]

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

#883

Post by gigatexal »

everdrive wrote: post #842
gigatexal wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I think we are in agreement here. What I was responding to was your seemingly lack of interest in solutions only commenting about still being able to blame folks for decisions they made whereas I think if we are going to spend we should spend to take folks off the streets and get them help or further remove what is seen as a blight to an otherwise beautiful city.

The streets and parks and business fronts are not camping areas.

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

#884

Post by stjohnswarts »

swalling wrote: post #320
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the plan has still failed. If all the key players are on board and you can't even begin to implement the plan, then it was a bad plan, and the people who developed it had little comprehension of reality. We should not attempt this elsewhere.

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…

I don't think lack of tech bros manning high cost corporate square footage is what is causing the homeless, crime, and addiction problems in West Coast cities. It seems more like bad policies to me. The time window to blame everything on covid is passing quickly

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

#885

Post by joenot443 »

duped wrote: post #151
jmcphers wrote: post #82

I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland. Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs. After several decades and many, many millions of dollars spent, the problem is, by every measure, absolutely the worst it's ever…

Is there a measure for how this compares to places without social programs for drug addicts? This is a legitimate question, I don't know if they've done better or worse in the context of the failed war on drugs. Because the country as a whole has been completely ravaged by opiate addiction. It's not just Portland and Seattle. West Virginia doesn't have anything like this, and it's just as badly afflicted. It may be l…

I presently live in New York but I lived in Seattle in 2020. Open air drug use and homelessness in general is unquestionably a bigger problem in Seattle, despite NYC lacking some of the more progressive policies west coast cities have become so famous for. Anyone who's lived in both the east and west coast can attest to the difference, it's so stark that I find it funny people are still asking if broad coastal politics _might_ have something to do with it.

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

#886

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

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 have to pay taxes.

You can vote not to though.

The argument of getting something for the taxes you pay is made because people can vote away taxes.

But yes, it's a troubling argument, because once people start thinking that way they feel like they're owed something. Large swaths of the elderly and the infirm may not be paying taxes but are absolutely owed things that often cost money just because they're a fellow citizen and a member of our society.

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

#887

Post by [deleted] »

swalling wrote: post #293
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…

"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…

[deleted]

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

#888

Post by niceguy1827 »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #807
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.

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…

Just find it humorous that in a programmer's forum everything can be wheeled back to microservices.

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

#889

Post by ddingus »

toyg wrote: post #777
roenxi wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking that as an axiom; then what exactly would the plan be to make the welfare system work? Conservatives are frequently going to be in power, they represent about half the votes. If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only…

Technically, Republicans are not necessarily "half the votes", more like "a third of the votes" which are then joined by another 10-15% of "unfaithful" swing voters - whose opinions don't necessarily overlap 100% with core conservative principles. Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms. You ca…

"Unfaithful"

I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:

Vote for what?

They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.

What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.

And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.

It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.

The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:

A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy

Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...

Today I do not judge others for their votes.

Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.

And I do not blame or shame anyone either.

It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.

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

#890

Post by everdrive »

gigatexal wrote: post #883
everdrive wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I think we are in agreement here. What I was responding to was your seemingly lack of interest in solutions only commenting about still being able to blame folks for decisions they made whereas I think if we are going to spend we should spend to take folks off the streets and get them help or further remove what is seen as a blight to an otherwise beautiful city. The streets and parks and business fronts are not camp…

It sounds like we agree more than I originally understood. I do care about treatment, and despite what my comment might have suggested, I think blame should be wholly separate from punishment or remediation. I don't care particularly if we spend a lot of time blaming drug addicts, only if we get the streets cleaned up, and their lives improved.
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