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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

#931

Post by n8cpdx »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #588
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…

Decriminalizing test kits that let you identify the presence of fentanyl in other drugs would be a great start - but those are instead illegal and classified as “paraphernalia”.

That law was already fixed in Portland (and the rest of Oregon). Test strips are still classified as paraphernalia, but there’s a carve out making them legal now.

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Measures/Analy...

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

#932

Post by jdhzzz »

swalling wrote: post #872
eric_cc wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the original commenter, but I took the response regarding bounced back to refer to retail commerce, not office occupancy. I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.

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

#933

Post by immanentize »

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…

>racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023.

Maybe in some places that might be true, but people are still in jail from the past.

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

#934

Post by adrr »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #718
adrr wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can always look at places that don't have drug problems like Singapore, Qatar or UAE. decriminalization. look at china who also had a crippling opiate problem with opium and it wasn't solve with decriminalization. Opoids have no place in society and there's no such thing as harm reduction when it comes to opioid use besides complete prohibition. I know 4 people who have died from opioid over doses, and just recently…

Are those really good comparison countries though? To me, it seems like some of their basic views on rights are antithetical to those in the US, going way beyond how to deal with drug problems.

Japan,Taiwan and south Korea as more examples. Japan has life sentences for opioid distribution/sale. Taiwan has mandatory 3 year sentencing simple possession of class 1 drugs (Opioids). South Korea also has very strict sentencing laws for opioid possession and usage ranging from 1 to 3 years. Most of laws were influenced by the Opium wars 100 years ago.

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

#935

Post by mips_r4300i »

thworp wrote: post #828
u32480932048 wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think people in western countries have been a victim of our own successes, where we enjoy such a prosperous (relative to most of history) life that we now unwittingly afford the luxury of forgetting how raw human behavior actually works.

People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.

I worry that we will need to return to widespread suffering just to relearn the same things we knew only a free short generations ago.

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

#936

Post by AmpsterMan »

chmod600 wrote: post #316
noduerme wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated. This has been an increasingly popular argument here in Portland since decriminalization. It's deployed, generally, in terms of re-criminalizing hard drugs until there's a well thought out framework for safe, regulated legalization. While I agree in principle [edit: let's say I did agree, but my views on this subject have shifted radically s…

"To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide." I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.

while I understand the hesitation, there are many solutions that only make sense at scale.

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

#937

Post by odessacubbage »

ninth_ant wrote: post #113
qingcharles wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a hard problem to solve. I work with drug and alcohol addicts regularly and addiction is such a damned nightmare. And every homeless person hates shelters. They have way more rules than prisons and all of the drama. I don't know what the solutions are :(

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…

i felt similarly until i actually ended up homeless and had to deal with shelters. they are shockingly non-viable and since most close early in the day, getting a bed for the night and getting employment so you can stop being homeless end up as mutually exclusive propositions.

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

#938

Post by skissane »

jdhzzz wrote: post #932
swalling wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the original commenter, but I took the response regarding bounced back to refer to retail commerce, not office occupancy. I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.

> I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.

Remote work was already growing, COVID just accelerated a societal change already in progress. Without COVID, we probably would have eventually ended up in the same place as we are now, it just would have taken longer.

And even years before COVID, I think the US was already ahead of many other countries in this transition. I remember my first business trip to the US in early 2008, I went to Oracle’s office in Orlando, it was near-deserted-I asked where everyone was, I was told “they’re all working from home”. Whereas, back in Australia (Oracle included), there was still a very strong culture of “if I can’t see you at your desk then you aren’t working”. Or similarly, even back then many of the US Oracle executives had remote EAs - remote EAs were not much of a thing in Australia at that time

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

#939

Post by avgcorrection »

jstarfish wrote: post #901
avgcorrection wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers. Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).

> Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? Noble savages? Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest. Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial. Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a…

Drug addicts are victims of a very civilizational pathology, so more like the opposite of savages. I was more getting at whatever good they might do (?) in their own very informal societies—societies that most people either shy away from or are oblivious to, so it’s very difficult for most people to know whatever pro-social activities they do.

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

#940

Post by robertlagrant »

bbor wrote: post #896
robertlagrant wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stoppin…

The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”. Just to pick one. I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed, but I implore you to be more empathetic to their situation. I PROMISE you, homelessness is not fun, it does not…

> The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”.

This is not a structure. It's a situation.

> I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed

No - the only assumption is yours you're making here. No one is saying that.

> no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint

No one said they would.

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