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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

#991

Post by vGPU »

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…

This is the classic “real communism has never been tried” argument.

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

#992

Post by smsm42 »

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…

Wait, at the end of 2023 we're still allowed to blame covid? Anyway, Portland has been going downhill way before covid, I witnessed it with my own eyes, from early 2000s when I seriously thought maybe it makes sense to move there, to late 2010s where it got seriously scary and you couldn't get through downtown without being harassed repeatedly by beggars and witnessing all the decay. And it's not just drugs, drugs are a symptom, it's all ckmplex of disastrous policies, that yes, affects other West Coast major cities too.

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

#993

Post by smsm42 »

uoaei wrote: post #625
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 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.

Conservatives? In Portland? How exactly did they manage to throw wrenches there? And also in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and other deep blue cities? Maybe we need to give some tin foil hats to the managers of those, to shield them from the evil conservative influence?

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

#994

Post by smsm42 »

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 is not a good test case to decide on one specific policy. It's like testing a cold drug on a person with several cancers - the test can't show any improvement because everything else is so hopelessly broken. I mean, I'm sure their drug policy is broken too, but one should not conclude from this that in a sane city legalize could never work, because Portland is not a sane city.

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

#995

Post by flandish »

boh wrote: post #475
flandish wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can blame capitalism for the problems due to Oxy…

And Communism for problems due to Fentanyl? Drug abuse is politically agnostic.

Incorrect. The literal capital owners used the fucking market to push the sale of these drugs. So much so they caused a problem they now profit off the fix for…

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

#996

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

shiroiuma wrote: post #960
vineyardmike wrote: post #877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back. No, you can't. You have to renounce your US Citizenship to stop paying taxes in the US, no matter where you live. Renouncing requires acquiring citizenship in a new country, which isn't that easy: just ask anyone who's tried to naturalize in the US. >Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay. You're…

Acquiring another citizenship before renouncing is a given, since you can't legally be stateless. How else would it work?

In any case, I've never renounced a citizenship, but I can imagine countries making it hard. Is the process itself difficult, are there requirements other than the international law one of not being stateless?

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

#997

Post by sieabahlpark »

gloosx wrote: post #972
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…

For sure, you have productive members who can execute unlimited violence in the name of law, why not using them to displace the poor and ill away from the streets completely? Clean em up from scum eh. A brilliant idea of a mindful reactionist. The soviets did this by the way, and they were able to completely hide the problem, however they never understood that showing it boldly on the streets to all the "taxpayers" i…

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

#998

Post by selimthegrim »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #709
diob wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest drug users in my life follows Islam. They have struggled with quitting, having a large period of success, but ultimately went back. No one is immune I'm afraid, religion isn't a magic trick.

Unfortunately you are wrong. A single example of a Muslim in a non-muslim society with non-Islamic laws in the technological world says nothing (each of these factors have some effect). See 1400 years of Islamic history. Worked a thousand times better than the failed American Prohibition, and worked sustainably. Worked even in the places without an active government, not to mention the amount of control the governmen…

If you think drug abuse isn't a problem in Muslim countries I invite you to go to Pakistan and talk to all the heroin addicts who will tell you straight to your face that the Prophet only forbade alcohol. I don't know why people downvoted pokerface_86 (maybe the abusive language) but he had a good rejoinder.

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

#999

Post by varelse »

noduerme wrote: post #976
varelse wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes drugs should be legalized and regulated nationally just like Portugal did. But also we should absolutely unambiguously no excuses house and feed the homeless the end full stop we have plenty of money. It just needs to be redirected to doing something productive other than paying endless assemblies of bureaucrats competing with each other to virtue signal the loudest. Because the reason people get hooked on to dru…

>> just like Portugal did Portugal arrests and jails people for dealing drugs, as well as for public displays of disorder.[0] >> Police take the person to a police station and weigh the drugs. If the weight exceeds amounts specified for personal use, then the person is charged and tried as a drug trafficker and can receive prison sentences of 1–14 years. Otherwise, the next day, the person appears at the Commission f…

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

#1000

Post by frankish »

gamblor956 wrote: post #927
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo the US (and most countries) really fucked up putting Marijuana down in the same tier as hard drugs. I feel a lot of people think since Marijuana isn't that bad, neither are the others. Which leads to the number of people voting for these 'decriminalize all drugs' policies. Doesn't help when you see people comparing Heroin to alcohol or nicotine as well...

Marijuana, like all psychoactive drugs, is known to trigger latent mental disorders, which is the primary reason it was made a controlled drug in the first place. It is also known to cause infertility in men and women due to the interaction between THC and various hormones. It also has a number of other negative health effects (e.g., lung cancer, popcorn lung, asthma, etc.) if smoked as weed or vaped which are genera…

Do you have evidence to support your claim? This study[1] has the opposite conclusion regarding "trigger latent mental disorders".

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...

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