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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

#851

Post by gosub100 »

bsder wrote: post #432
gosub100 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) What gives you the right to tell people to not do something pleasurable? this is a really good question and I had to think about it a lot. I think if all other variables were equal, I would have no problem with people doing something pleasurable. In contrast to say, a strict religious fanatic who vociferously preaches against wanking or rock music. However, I think we can both agree that opiate withdrawals are n…

> for at least the ones who are susceptible to it (as you pointed out, not everyone becomes instantly addicted). And, see, this is the crux. You are banning something for everyone even though only a smaller number seem to be susceptible. The problem is that this applies to a whole bunch of things: porn, gambling, alcohol, etc. Why heroin and not alcohol which, in many ways, is much worse than heroin? I agree that the…

Wrapping this topic up, I realized something very relevant to PDX I wish I had mentioned originally: the fucking weather. Constantly living under gloomy skies and rain has long-term affects on mental health. I would love to see a graph - controlled for all other variables - of opiate abuse vs avg sunshine.

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

#852

Post by mlrtime »

jimbob45 wrote: post #571
legitster wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, even Friends of Trees! Literally planting trees for free got cancelled by Portland because of back-room nonsense: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/11/portland-oregon-tree-...

Cairo wouldn’t comment on the complaints about her management style. Responding on her behalf, Parks and Recreation spokesperson Cherelle Jackson said the bureau wouldn’t comment on “rumors about a member of our team.” “Unfortunately, too many women in male-dominated industries like forestry face this behavior,” Jackson wrote in an email to OPB. “As a Bureau, we will uphold our values for equality and respect for wom…

Most of this thread and politics in general are based around failures being the result of somebody else. There is 0 accountability or self responsibility.

Likewise, when people/groups fail today we want them fired or cancelled. This promotes the "blame someone else" as a self preservation tactic.

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

#853

Post by MichaelZuo »

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…

There's often not even a serious analysis of the environmental, political, and socio-cultural factors behind and around these ideas to determine if they can even theoretically work on paper, even with very generous assumptions.

Let alone whether they can work in the real world.

In this case I don't think anyone in Portland or Oregon attempted such an analysis.

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

#854

Post by cultureswitch »

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.

Actually, I pay taxes because I have to.

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

#855

Post by matheusmoreira »

gexla wrote: post #717
bbor wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” t…

> 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.

> Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere

It's absolutely easy. There is no faster way to kill a city. Drive away the people with money and businesses die, tax revenue plummets and it turns into an irrelevant backwater.

All this stuff costs money. It's always like this, "somebody" gotta go out there and solve these difficult problems. Nobody actually wants to be that somebody though. No one wants to step up and pay for it. If you try to make them pay, they leave.

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

#856

Post by z3ncyberpunk »

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

#857

Post by pr0zac »

anon291 wrote: post #247
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 :(

> They have way more rules than prisons a Rules are good for a well lived life. My house has more rules than prisons.

What, no it doesn't? Like seriously, what?

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

#858

Post by ibeckermayer »

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…

You’re probably discounting how much “everything” actually meant blank check subsidies for addicts, which obviously leads nowhere good.

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

#859

Post by xkekjrktllss »

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…

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

#860

Post by stillwithit »

twelve40 wrote: post #685
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…

I don't buy this "WFH makes downtowns drug-ridden war zones" dichotomy. I've been to downtown Portland before Covid, and it was pretty repulsive, just like SF. Sure, it has deteriorated in both places since, but that was not pre-determined. WFH != war zone in downtown.

Your paraphrase is a strawman (melodramatic one at that). Nice job ripping it asunder to show us all how serious you are
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