To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use | Hacker News Reader

To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

nytimes.com

374 pointsmikhael1,069 comments

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 to locking people in jail just for being addicts, cities still need to be a place that people actually want to live in. Revenue prospects for the city are becoming horrid and there is not a lot of runway to continue throwing money at the problem.

   "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 millions of unspent funds,[3] and has been perpetually criticized for spending on harm reduction instead of treatment.[4] We actually closed the only local sobering center in 2020!

1. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/03/20/wheeler-slams-mea...

2. https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/11/15/the-ceo-of-portlands-l...

3. https://katu.com/news/local/multnomah-county-chair-fast-trac...

4. https://www.kptv.com/2023/07/08/multnomah-county-implementin...

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 because of the nature of fentanyl. The only thing the failure of Measure 110 has demonstrably done is waste taxpayer funds and give businesses in downtown an excuse for why they are failing (when in reality it has more to do with the death of downtown for purely economic reasons post-COVID, just like other major West Coast cities).

There are a million reasons a plan like could fail that have nothing to do with with it being a good or bad plan, though. And there are a lot of people invested in making sure a plan like this fails, so that the people who supported it in the first place come to the same conclusion as you.

“They did everything except what would work! Let’s all give up and go back to things that definitely don’t work. It’s the only option.”

So this might be a problem specific to Portland. The government is structured to fail. Hopefully it changes.

So, how and why are they "sitting on unspent funds"? Are there delays in building plans or legislature slowing stuff down?

Appreciate your comment. Terrifyingly high number of commenters (likely Americans) drawing flawed conclusions. We tried and failed, therefore this problem is unsolvable. Dozens of cities in other parts of the world had much success, so maybe you're doing it wrong?

Zurich did a great job, especially with the transformation of the infamous needle park.

“ However, lack of control over what went on in the park caused a multitude of problems. Drug dealers and users arrived from all over Europe, and crime became rampant as dealers fought for control and addicts (who numbered up to 1,000 ) stole to support their habit. The once-beautiful gardens had degraded into a mess of mud and used needles, and the emergency services were overwhelmed with the number of overdoses, which were almost nightly. Platzspitz, or Needle Park as it was then known, became a source of embarrassment to the Zurich municipal council and in 1992, police moved in to clear up the park.[clarification needed] The drug scene then moved to the adjacent area of Letten railway station, which closed services in 1989. This spot was also cleared by police in 1995.

Today Platzspitz has been cleaned up and restored, and is presented by the authorities as a peaceful, family-friendly garden.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park?wprov=sfti1#

So hands off was a total failure, so they gave up and forcibly removed people.

Be cautious about applying lessons across significantly different culture.

Just because democracy took off in America doesn't mean it will take off in Iraq.

Just because drug legalization worked in Zurich doesn't mean it will work in Portland.

Doing some research on needle park- it looks like the experiments with allowing drug use were a massive failure, absolutely ruining the park, and it was ultimately cleaned up by law enforcement

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 them much worse either, while it will make life for everyone else substantially better -- and we should be prioritizing the welfare of the productive members of society who actually pay to make all of it possible. Right now way too many cities have lost the plot by being too permissive of violations of the social contract, and everyone suffers as a result.

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 their ability to contribute back.

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.

Well, I agree halfway… at the core of any social contract are rights and obligations. I think part of those obligations are to contribute to society (I think we agree up to this point)

However, I believe a part of that contribution has to be in an objective, quantifiable way - which translates to taxes. The rights we consume from society are tangible and expensive. A city populated only by of poets would collapse of starvation after 12 hours…

That said, if a Society feels they need to foster a specific part of it (culture,social work, etc) they can enact tax breaks to reduce the financial load of those making that contribution.

But taxation comes first (as an obligation).

> 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 their ability to contribute back.

This thread is about the extreme opposite of this, though. Taking from net contributors and using that money to create a place that's to their extreme detriment, because incredibly it's a votewinner, is the current situation.

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.).

I think it's also bad messaging (even though I agree with the overall sentiment as well) because "paying taxes" and "being productive" are sliding scales rather than binary. And a lot of people can and do extend the argument to prioritizing people who pay the most taxes or the right kind of taxes or are productive in the right way. In the context of who a city is "for", it often becomes about prioritizing people who own their dwelling over those who rent, even though renters certainly meet the threshold of contributing to a society and paying taxes.

It seems possible to both agree with the idea that it's bad if a city's downtown is full of homeless drug addicts while disagreeing with the idea of trying to sort city residents into worthy and not worthy.

> There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial.

What are they, and can I do them instead of paying taxes? Because paying taxes soaks up double digit percentages of my productive time and I reckon I could add a lot more value to society if I had alternatives.

But our society rewards your societal contributions via monetary rewards which results in you paying taxes. Sure, the money you get does not necessarily reflect the value of you contributions fairly in most cases, but I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society.

And not paying taxed can be because they have no job and make no money, or are so rich as to be able to write off all their income because they think they don’t owe anyone anything.

The sad reality is that current forms of law enforcement aren't working when it comes to hard drugs and addiction. Putting people in prison for getting addicted to crack is not exactly going to make anyones lifes better. But it has also become quite obvious that you can't have free-range junkies shooting up in what is supposed to be the economic center of a city.

I suspect in a few decades forced rehab will become the norm, once you start smoking crack or shooting up in the street. It's pretty obvious for anyone with eyes that at a certain point, homelessness, mental health issues and most importantly drug addiction cannot be covered by "individual freedom" anymore if you want to have a working society.

Of course, having police beat up and arrest or otherwise forcefully move addicts from one place to another or into the prison industrial complex is not likely to work.

I think you can provide services (shelters, etc) AND crackdown with a view to cleaning the city for regular people (rather than just specifying taxpayers).

Absolutely agreed + the second you start shaming people for complaining about this you've lost the plot

People were getting ratfucked online for saying "I don't like watching people shit all over the sidewalk" - so you know what? They moved! Maybe out of Portland, maybe politically, but pretending that smoking fentanyl on the MAX is good and normal is just totally insane.

  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” that ends up being a nice trip for said undesirables

Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown?

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

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" is the first step to solution

...but you do need to move them somewhere else ...

So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|

> Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc.

Huge sums were collected, but they haven't really been spent. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the first detox center built with M110 money only opened two months ago, and only has 16 beds: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-se-portl...

While this is true, there were a lot of programs that existed before M110, and part of the bill of goods that was sold with M110 was that it was going to make it easier for people to access existing resources without fear of law enforcement.

And again, literally written into M110 is the idea that treatment is supposed to be cheaper than incarceration. Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape, but the treatment programs are not looking terribly cheap or effective.

> Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape

I don't think it's red tape as such, but rather that Portland suffers from a problem SF also has, which is that government social services are mostly run via the NGO-Industrial Complex. Money is shoveled into a patchwork of local governments, and then shoveled out into a patchwork of local non-profits, and there's almost no accountability for turning $X into Y results, like you might have with a transportation department or a school district.

There's two problems with these programs.

The first problem is that the people we're really talking about, the ones living/defecating/etc on the street do not want help.

The second problem is that in order to want to get better, an addict has to hit their personal rock bottom. Programs that keep people floating above their personal rock bottom are like family members enabling addicts. It ultimately doesn't help them.

It's VERY difficult to create social programs that help people want to not be ill, while simultaneously not letting them fall to their own rock bottom.

And then consider the position from the legislature of creating incentives for government programs/NGOs which align with the desired outcomes and it becomes expoentially harder.

> Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape, but the treatment programs are not looking terribly cheap or effective.

The treatment programs implemented so far have been incredibly cheap, in the sense that we simply haven't spent any money on them.

M110 has been more expensive than expected, because by not spending money on treatment programs, we caused an assortment of other issues.

M110's effect on society is confounded by its coexistence with a statewide housing crisis that is pushing people into homelessness, and from there it's easy to fall into drug use.

> While this is true, there were a lot of programs that existed before M110

You make a good point. When we look at a program that hasn’t been implemented we must judge all other unrelated programs that were implemented to some degree or another at the same time.

People might want to “see how it works out after implementation” while ignoring the necessity of “going back to the status quo that led to coming up the ideas on the first place”

There are many other examples of failed policies that increased financial pressure on taxpayers but did not result in an overall improvement in the homeless situation.

E.g. what is the outcome of CA Proposition 2 that passed in 2018?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_2

Former Portland native here: it hasn’t worked. I was back just a year or two ago and 5th ave near the waterfront was overrun with homeless openly shooting up and accosting folks.

All the food carts across from the building where I used to work left, the Indian buffet restaurant closed, walking up around 10th near the Target to check out other restaurants I loved many I saw many barricaded former businesses.

The city used to be beautiful. It used to be vibrant and bustling with people and tourists and working professionals but when I was there last retracing my steps as if I was working and living there again it was not the Portland I remember. It’s disheartening.

That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not. I believe in helping people when they can’t help themselves. But allowing open drug use, camping in front of businesses, etc., doesn’t do much for said businesses and people to invest in your city leaving you with less tax revenue to help these very same folks with.

>That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not.

You probably should blame them. They let their personal problems collectively spiral out of control so badly that they became society's problem, and an entire city was degraded because of it. Blame can still be assigned to the pitiable.

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.

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 Portland, Vancouver, Sf ... were the intention.

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! Homeless people still exist! In my city?! That's not very nice! And the police threw away the cover photo lady's tent and pepper-sprayed her friends sleeping bag? That's really not very nice! All to clean up the area for the visit of some official?"

The violence with which many camps are removed is abhorrent to many, as is the idea of shuffling them around for mere cosmetic purposes (not to actually get them into a better place), so there's a naive "everybody be nice! leave those poor people alone!" attitude that doesn't actually care about pesky details.

Since their experience is hypothetical and they're idealizing and romanticizing The Homeless, discussion on practical realities like the number of violent felons and sex offenders in camps is shut down with a classic "that never happens". They'll pretend it's some kind of made-up minority and not the bulk of people who can't/won't go to a shelter (i.e, because they have warrants or have been banned for bad behavior).

Sure, they got what they asked for, but I don't believe they ever really considered what they were asking for, beyond "stop being mean".

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 since 2020.

If you want services, good luck. Feds extracted that money and feed it to cloud app companies to keep you all happy and you still aren’t.

Let’s keep giving Elon forever to fail to reach Mars and complain government experiments are failures right away.

Americans have a credibility problem. Work less and less but expect more and more because we have a lot of hallucinated wealth. Where do the real workers come from if everyone is doing office work? Now that other nations have matured after WW2 rebuild, how do we justify taking more for less output?

1945-2000s was a statistical anomaly. America needs to sober up.

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.

These problems are so American. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more. Why do people no live in these areas?

It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.

PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.

Bucks are free, just print them. Wait, no, money are digital now, press a button and make money numbers.

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 examples where it is much easier to gather some information.

When I come to meet a team that has trouble (I work as an advisor and help teams that have trouble), I am not coming with a library of good solutions BECAUSE IT IS FUCKING NOT WORKING. Time and time again, I am repairing after previous people who did just that -- they came with a solution thinking they know it all because it worked somewhere. More often than not they have observed something working, they learned elements they could easily understand and they tried to transplant and failed miserably.

So whether you are trying to fix a team or fix a homelessness problem, you have to come with an empty mind and willingness to relentlessly problem solve. And look at those other successful examples as examples to learn from but not necessarily duplicate.

Scandinavia isn’t uniformly permissive with drugs. Sweden is quite anti-drug.

+1. This is the core issue.

Absolutely this. A country needs a healthy government and public employees dedicated and honest. A culture of sacrifice for public good. Not "but meeeeee!" culture.

It does not work where the "Deep State" is the enemy and grifters run for Congress to become Twitter trolls.

I appreciate your sharing and open mindedness.

It seems like some things don’t have perfect solutions and we are “stuck” picking which downsides we want to deal with.

It seems that if we want to be the most kind to druggies (not lock them up) it comes at the expense of the normies - people trying to live, work, raise families, run businesses, etc.

It seems that for the last few decades society decided that normies are fine and even privileged and therefore it’s fine to hurt them a little to benefit the “disadvantaged”. What I think we are seeing now that doubling down on druggies etc still doesn’t really help them (because frankly their problems are internal and a druggie by definition is in a baaaad place) while it also hurts the people trying to live a good life and who by the way pay for everything.

I do hope that people start to recognize this. We need to feel good making choices in favor of families over druggies, when we have to.

How much is the effect exacerbated by Portland being a kind of a magnet? In a large country like the US there is a lot of potential for immigration and making the situation very skewed.

I often feel this is what's happening: Portland and a few other cities around the nation prioritize helping folks in a big way, and we wind up serving a national need not a city need.

also by the milder climate.

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 street, I'm considerably less sympathetic given the downsides to everyone else involved.

> someone has a viable option for not living on the street

I guess it depends on how we define viable. In my experience working with the homeless, there are a lot of valid reasons shelters are avoided; they can be more dangerous, don't allow pets (who are sometimes the only companions they have), and don't allow families or couples. Whether that is viable or not depends on how you use the word.

They are going to live on the street whether you think it's ok or not. Homeless people avoiding shelters has been a thing since looong before homelessness was even talked about in terms of decriminalizing (and legalized drugs were a literal pipe dream). Having talked to many homeless people over the years, shelters really do sound quite awful, actually worse than jail in many ways.

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.

> make a home in an area that is intended for public use, and render it unusable and unsafe for others

A tent in a park, unless in the middle of a trail, doesn't inherently or necessarily make it less usable or less safe.

Oh, believe me I don't think it's an easy problem either. My brother is a social worker and I know the stories.

But I think the suffering of the individual is largely unchanged whether it happens out in public or on the periphery. In contrast, I think we as a larger society are suffering from lack of safe and clean public spaces. So we may as well maintain some sort of enforcement.

This is exactly the right call, and closer to the way we used to run things -- people acting a nuisance in the city weren't tolerated. We need to go back to it.

It’s a difficult problem. I don’t think it works for the individual on the street suffering. I don’t think institutions are great either but no worse than becoming a zombie on the street I would hope.

Solution is easy. If you’re visibly publicly intoxicated with hard drugs, you go to a special rehab that’s essentially prison without the violent criminals. If you’re already a violent criminal, you get put into a segregated area. You then get forcibly treated. If youv’e stayed clean for a set number of months, you get to leave. None of this shows up on any permanent/criminal record.

Christ, I’ve been visibly publicly intoxicated with hard drugs on a number of occasions (many years ago) while holding down a respectable middle class professional job (and being good at it!). If I’d been forced into months(!!) of rehab I’d have lost my job and had to move cities and/or change industries (it’s a small world and people talk).

And the scariest thing (for me personally) is that even if I knew that was a potential outcome, I don’t think it would have stopped me. And I wasn’t a junkie or hopeless addict by any means.

Agreed. I will add that we’ve come full circle on psychiatric hospitals, which is essentially what you’re describing in different words. Budget cuts and deinstitutionalization meant many of those were closed down 50 years ago.

Permanent Housing is the only solution. Shelters are at best temporary to survive a cold night, but they are not a solution for a sustainable life.

People who are addicts and have other mental issues are not well-equipped to maintain housing. Whatever housing you'd give them would very quickly turn into a slum.

Even just cleaning is a lot of work, not to mention additional maintenance (e.g. filter changes, landscaping, etc.), regularly taking out garbage, not flushing trash down the sewer, etc.

Unless you also want to hire staff to do that for them, in which case, sign me up. I want to live for free too and not have to work and do drugs whenever I want.

How can someone pushing themselves to the limit of heroin od have anything sustainable.

The only solution to what? While it might get the off the street, it will not cure the addiction. Are you then going to say that someone must be sober before receiving housing? So, again, what is it solving that it is the only thing that can solve it?

> 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?

We appreciate you

I don’t want people locked in jail, but I do think that something akin to the Baker Act needs to be implemented. There are clearly many people who need help but are not willing to seek help themselves. It’s safe to say that they aren’t in control of their own actions and are a danger to everyone around them. It’s not compassion to simply let them rot on the street.

I have been in the same boat while living in SF.

I don’t believe addicts and even to extension a lot of dealers should be locked up. I agree generally that nonviolent crimes probably don’t net benefit the community by locking people up. Assuming we are talking about our existing prison system.

For addicts unfortunately I don’t know what else is possible beyond locking them up in mental health institutions. Perhaps we need to try out new types of addiction centers that we can enroll people into? I don’t know what the answer is and I am not sure if we have the help of history. We certainly had drugs in the past but most of the time it sounds like people were drunks. Now we have a crisis of addicts using drugs that are unstoppable.

I wish I had a better idea but everything so far has not worked. There is probably a cutoff. You have the individuals that are not possible to bring back and the ones that could maybe become recovering addicts. The ones that are not coming back just need to go to state institutions.

We used to have a system in the uk where the addicts were prescribed drugs by government sponsored medics. It actually worked quite well, and you can give them a bonus if they get a productive job. Sadly that sort of stuff while effective at helping drug addicts tends to be an easy target for politicians wanting to be 'tough on drugs'. As well as getting addicts off the street and not killed it means less money for drug dealers so the whole thing dwindles.

Addiction counseling works on some people. But you have to address root cause. The drugs are the symptom. For some they just like to get messed up. For some they use it to tune out. For some they just do not want to feel sick. For some the like the idea that they live the way they want to. Sometimes a pause in being messed up lets people see they have hit the bottom. But there is always more bottom which can cause more of the cycle.

But some people actually do prefer to rot on the street on their own terms, than rot in some asylum cell locked up.

Still, I think other people have a right to walk the streets undisturbed, so I don't see an easy, clean solution solving everything at once. But banning public drug use, is very fine with me.

Of course some people prefer a to b. It doesn't automatically mean they are entitled to it.

I could build myself a really cool James Bond-style tent house in Central Park and live there in the summers for basically free. I'd like that.

I'm not entitled to it.

Voters can easily decide that the sidewalk is no longer a place for people to rot on.

yeah cities are zones of massive economic importance, we can't keep penalizing the people who work there because some drug addicts won't abandon the corner they sleep on. its literally insane.

who are we prioritizing in this situation and why? i care more about the people who have their lives together, they deserve priority.

Portland has way more problems than just drug. I don't feel safe walking in downtown even during the day. Parking is a gamble whether or not you get your windows broken, almost a third of my friends had terrible experience when parking overnight in Portland, doesn't matter if it was a public park or in a hotel park.

I don't believe Portland's efforts caused the rise of fentanyl, though. How do we know it wouldn't be worse, if not for Portland's efforts?

My recollection is that in 2007 Mexico banned pseudoephedrine in order to remove feed stock from meth labs supplying the US.[0,1] As a result of this and other factors suppliers in Mexico found fentanyl, which bypassed growing cycles of agricultural drugs like pot and heroin. During the pandemic, Mexico grew additional trade ties with China which included fentanyl precursor chemicals.[2]

0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-crime-pseudoephedr...

1. https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2005/06/th...

2. https://coffeeordie.com/china-mexican-cartel-alliance

Plenty of other precursors to use if you can't get pseudoephedrine at scale. Trying to control ultra-small scale producers doesn't accomplish much other than sweeten the cartels (and purity/yields, so I guess that's a positive).

Opioids being more dependence-inducing than stimulants would better explain a production shift.

Big legitimate trading volumes with China (and any other large producer of goods/inputs) make a customs-focussed effort at controlling supply basically impossible.

The problem isn’t drug legalization, the problem is the inability to deal with irresponsible drug users. Blanket drug bans unjustly punish responsible users, and enable selective enforcement based on the bias of those in power e.g. the police and we all know where that gets us.

If I want to pop some mdma and enjoy myself at a live show, or do shrooms and go hiking, or smoke some weed and relax in a hammock and listen to my favorite album, or do some speed and clean my house, or spend a weekend dozing off with some heroin, then I ought to be allowed.

If however I get into fights, puke and shit in public, nod off laying spread eagle across the sidewalk or in the doorway of a business that’s trying to open in the morning, trespass and steal anything that’s not nailed down, start completely unsafe and inappropriate fires, and menace innocent passerbys on thoroughfares - I should be stopped.

Drugs writ large are not the problem. Drugs are what you make of them. Users who cause problems should be dealt with. Users who don’t should be left unharassed. Drunken brawling? Straight to jail. Drunken hugging? Let people have fun.

Prohibition also failed horribly. We need a middle ground.

What about drug use as a privilege? If you’re living on the street, your litter is all over the street, and you never pay taxes, then you lose your privilege.

I thought we solved this with alcohol already. Can you drink? Yes. are you allowed to be shit faced drunk in the streets? No. Are there lounges to drink safely and responsibly? Yes.

Granted, it may be much harder to make a "drugs bar", but we can use comparable metrics to deem who is too unfit to independently do that stuff and if they need intervention.

Indeed. You don’t get put in prison for being drunk. Maybe you spend a night in the drunk tank and then get released and are free to go repeat the same mistake. We don’t just let you roll around on the sidewalk downtown while continuing to drink.

Just because drugs are decriminalized doesn’t mean it has to be a free for all.

And somehow in Europe people drink on the streets all the time and its mostly fine. Cities are not overrun by drunks and people live and work there just fine. People chilling in the streets and parks together drinking beers and so on.

I find the alcohol culture n the US pretty outputting. The US model of 'get hammer in a bar and then drive home'. Not a great model.

So to say 'we solved this' is kind of ridiculous at least from my outside perspective.

I don't know about a "drug bar" but I'm of a similar mindset in that I think solutions which punish functional users are unhelpful. It's less obvious who those people are in the case of things like fentanyl but there's no shortage of healthcare, legal, and culinary workers making routine use of illegal stimulants. There's maybe a dialogue to be had there about if it's actually desirable such people's jobs be so demanding they feel the need to use the substances they do of course. But it hardly makes sense to jail them or force them into rehab if they're maintaining a productive lifestyle in my opinion.

> Portland did everything! [...]

They got all of the carrots sure, but there was no stick. The reason these programs have success elsewhere is that they give people the choice of prison or treatment.

Also, nowhere except the US just decided to legalize public drug use. In fact one of the goals of harm reduction programs in other places is to get the users out of public spaces.

If you are unwilling to lock people up—whether in jail or elsewhere—that’s the only opinion you get to have. Every other “rule” you propose is meaningless.

Right now the nyc transit system is on the pay what you wish system because the voters have decided they can’t bear to see people locked up for not paying. You can hem and haw, but that’s the consequence.

I suppose you meant "option" and in general that, the only solution is locking people up?

I see lots of other ways, the most simple one: just take away their drugs, if they use drugs in public.

If you do this regulary, no junkie will go somewhere, where he will seriously risk loosing his stuff.

Locking up people at some point is also possible, but there are lots of other ways before that.

> Just take away their drugs, if they use drugs in public.

Seems short sighted. Do you know how people act when they want to get high and can't? When they're going through serious withdrawal?

Just taking their drugs is going to get people hurt. They will either hurt themselves, or they will hurt other people.

No, you’re right. Empathy doesn’t work with certain drug use (opiates, meth, crack etc.). They need to be forcibly put in rehab that is akin to jail until they’re clean for a while. It still shouldn’t be a felony on your record though because that effectively ends any chance of rebuilding your life if you do recover.

I don’t see why it has to be one way or the other: either no enforcement or sending kids caught with a joint to prison. For people who have clear drug problems, they need to go into rehab, voluntarily or not.

This would require selective enforcement under current laws, or defining "clear drug problem" for purposes of a new one.

I voted for 110. I regret it now. An idea I have in my darker moments, which as I said in another comment here are becoming more frequent... Is that we should have single occupancy rooms where drugs are provided to people and they can get high as much as they want so long as they stay put there. As soon as they want to stop, support swoops in and gets them in a system. If they want to go back, they are free to do so.

That's a very American perspective. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more.

It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.

The US had far better economic growth then Europe in general. With much of Europe barley growing since early 2010.

Why do people no live in these areas? Why are there so many homeless in the first place.

With my personal experience of knowing so many addicts that have been in/out of various recovery programs, I'm totally at a loss. I too leaned libertarian with let people do the drugs they want, but that's back when I thought people were only doing things for recreation. I didn't have experience with true addicts until I was older. I've even played with liking the idea of a version of The Wire's Hamsterdam on the sole basis of the yo-yo lifestyle of recovery/relapse is just something that has no real answer.

Just giving a voice to those who do maintain responsible recreational use, because that crowd very much exists. It might go unnoticed since they usually don't die or screw up their lives because of it.

---

On the flip side I've seen addiction become a much more devastating force in recent years and smart solutions are badly needed.

> I too leaned libertarian with let people do the drugs they want

... unless this harms other, isn't? Drug addicts are causing harm and are burden to society, so why libertarians support them?

In liberal philosophy, value of human life is infinite, thus all humans are equal, thus it's not allowed for someone to cause harm or abuse others. However, why we limit this to humans only? In my opinion, is a bacteria, virus, ideology, hate, chemicals, drugs, pollution, technical problems, climate change, ecology causes harm to humans, then it should be equal to harm done by a human directly.

Why it's illegal to shot someone, but legal to smoke weed near to someone, which leads to addiction and further death? IMHO, it's the same harm, but with extra steps.

>why we limit this to humans only? In my opinion, is a bacteria, virus, ideology, hate, chemicals, drugs, pollution, technical problems, climate change, ecology causes harm to humans, then it should be equal to harm done by a human directly.

because when you go that granular it's hard to figure out who to blame. is COVID really any one person's fault, even if we narrow it down to a specific patient 0? is that harm intentional and worthy of punishment? Is having a buggy website really "harming a human directly?" And who takes blame? The web dev, the site owner company, the ISP? These start to get unnecessarily nitpicky.

>Why it's illegal to shot someone, but legal to smoke weed near to someone, which leads to addiction and further death?

depends on the drug? Secondhand smoke is a thing but even that has dubious legalities. You're usually not punished for the smoke but for violating the ruls of the premise to not smoke. But nothing is illegal about smoking tobacco in public (as unpleasant as the smoke is).

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.

So what exactly did they do that was their one step too far, was it just the tolerance of the drug users?

Is it possible to decriminalise, yet also make it undesirable, or socially unacceptable?

As an outsider, the increase in drug use does not appear to be helping your countries mental health.

One thing all these cities with catastrophic street drug use have in common is also bonkers housing crisis.

Homelessness correlates pretty tightly with prevailing rents. People end up on the street and do drugs because once you've hit rock bottom why not?

People should be locked in jail for being drug addicts. Give it a few more years and you'll change your opinion on that too.

Many functioning, respected and powerful people in society are drug addicts. You will almost certainly know some.

That viewpoint is both draconian and fiscally irresponsible

I feel the same way about SF. This whole experiment has been a massive failure.

Eh, all the stimulant use you don't see on the streets is surely responsible for much Value Creation.

A lot of drug users are trying self medicate their ADHD or BPD (the most common), or just their sense of existential dread.

So at least in the case of ADHD some amount will be actually treating their condition with the stimulants whether they realize it or not.

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.

Locking people up for being addicts is not the same as locking people up for using in the street.

What is wrong with this approach:

Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is.

If someone’s addiction has become unmanageable to the point where they are doing drugs on the street, it is a kindness and a necessity to take their agency away from them.

If someone is an addict but otherwise functions, it is none of anyone’s business.

> Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is.

Exactly. I can't imagine somebody on weed would bother people that much.

But if you steal from people, leave your unclean syringes lying around, etc. you're a hazard to society and need to be dealt with. So we need to enable law enforcement to deal with that properly.

If you're drunk and belligerent, which happens a lot, you shouldn't be able to do that legally either.

So as long as you're not a menace to society, I don't see why you shouldn't have that freedom. But as soon as your freedom causes issues for others, it needs to be dealt with.

Maybe allowing meth, fentanyl, heroin and such is the problem. I would bet almost all the big problems are due to the users of these.

Does Portland's program do anything to address the mental health problems underlying much of this drug abuse?

$1.3 billion statewide approved in 2021: https://www.oregon.gov/oha/HSD/AMH/Pages/index.aspx

This is in addition to the ~$1.3 billion the state already paid in mental health services: https://www.corvallisadvocate.com/2021/oregon-spends-on-ment...

In addition to resources available at the county level ($2 million came from police defunding): https://www.multco.us/justice-agenda/budget-priorities

I guess it won't make much of a difference if people can easily opt-out for a life of addiction on the streets.

No.

From what I see daily, if what Portland is doing is working in any way, then I’d hate to see things if they weren’t working at all. It’s a very sad state of affairs here and it’s hard to recommend that anyone move here unless you’re being paid extremely well AND you love the outdoors AND you’ve lived in a city with a severe drug/homelessness/mental health crisis before.

I moved here in 2007 from the extremely rural South. The day I moved into my Old Town apartment a homeless guy spit on me! What a wake up call to a kid from the country. But I ended up living in that apartment for 10 years and never once felt actually scared in that neighborhood. But now, I actively avoid that neighborhood and getting spit on might be the best possible outcome!

Source: I live in Portland very near Downtown.

They most certainly did not do everything. The Portuguese model works fairly well, but that requires arreatijng drug users and making them show up to court. They don't send people to prison for drug use but they still entangle them in the legal system.

I think you're completely correct in local terms for the interest of Portland. And personally I think this was a wholly predictable outcome.

However, isn't this a little bit like state gun control? Legislation and public services being wildly different across a border that anyone can cross at will creates border effects. Is it possible that Portland is attracting a ton of junkies from elsewhere?

Also this is another exhibit for my pet theory that progressive and idealistic politics are more effective at large scales whereas conservative and managerial politics are better suited to the local level of governance.

Worth differentiating recreational drugs that are not perfectly fine to use and continue with normal (if not better) life.

Fentanyl. Opioid epidemics. Addition as business model.

See the chart: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...

I'm worried that cannabis is less likely to be legalised elsewhere due to pharma drugs being so harmful.

Does this analysis also consider the wide ranging massive impact of fentanyl and similar drugs that have skyrocketed drug overdose problems in all communities in the past five years?

Realistically speaking, homeless drug users don't want treatment or shelter; they want to be left alone to do drugs.

Most drug users don't want to get off drugs. That's why you need an intervention. No addict likes interventions either. You have to be really self disciplined to turn yourself into treatment.

it's not like we have room in the jails either, we still routinely release people due to lack of space

I live in Portland and I 100% agree with this. I say this as someone who voted for Measure 110 and now regrets that vote. At this point I would support a straight-up repeal. At least under the old system some people who were arrested were able to get clean in jail, or were able to enter court-mandated treatment programs.

The reality is that people in the throes of drug addiction have already lost their agency, so some kind of coercive intervention will often be necessary to break the cycle. By refusing to do this out of a (commendable) compassionate impulse, we are making the situation worse.

In general the last ~5 years of living here has been a lesson of how important order (i.e. the enforcement of rules and norms) is for a functioning society. You could say it is the foundation of all social goods.

Watching the city's decline up close has deeply altered my political beliefs on a number of topics – this is one of them.

> They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc.

That's false. I'd say "prove me wrong", but first, define "huge". Compare and contrast to cities of similar size in the US and globally.

So the Shelters are half full? That is higher success rate than most VC startups and cost a lot less too

ODs have more than doubled because of fentanyl but I suspect you know this already.

Cigarettes kill 7x as many as fentanyl every hour, day, week, month, and year.

One is available without prescription on every streetcorner, with use allowed in public in proximity to others, and the other is a public health epidemic.

That being the case doesn't negate the fact that cigarette users are not turned into some version of the walking dead but who'd do literally anything for a fix.

Tobacco has a lot to answer for but it isn't the same kind of issue at all. It doesn't destroy communities so directly.

Cigarettes kill you slowly over decades, fentanyl can kill a first-time user with a single dose.

Moronic analogy.

"We've tried nothing and we are all out of ideas"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas

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

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 been. https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/safety-inju...

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 less visible because it doesn't have the same population density.

This is a curve that goes up but do the other curves go up more or less? Did places with different strategies perform better or worse, relatively speaking? I can sort of imagine that all the curves go up, given that we added a drug that is 50X stronger than heroin to the mix

Edit: to clarify, not trying to be an asshole, I have no idea what the answer is here, would be very interested to find out

I’m reading there that fentanyl appears to be the culprit.

I realize it is a drug, but not sure if that’s even supposed to be in the drugs.

Is this really a story of drug dealers cutting the drugs that people wanted.. into a lethal concoction?

(Sorry I really don’t know, are users looking for fentanyl?)

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 lost a former coworker last week. Fentantyl is a society destroyer and it's just getting worse.

Harm reduction and rehab still only treats the symptom, not the cause. The cause is financial instability brought on by insecurity in housing, food access, etc. It's an issue of human dignity in the economic sphere that drives people to such depths, not recreation.

Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").

I wonder if it attracted a 'type'. Because I know many people who have since moved to portland and they all have a type.

It could be that portland is taking a huge number of people that would otherwise be a drain elsewhere. Maybe we shouldnt consider this an outright failure, but look at some federal support.

I think other cities bussing and flying homeless people out west outweighs every possible policy change.

We’ll never know if any of these policies stood a chance due to the USA viewing the west coast as a dumping ground for homeless people.

Next time you’re passing by these people, ask them where they are from originally.

Locals are like 20% of the problem.

Correlation, causation, etc.

Sadly they never fixed the supporting issues, low wages, inability of affordable housing at pace to keep up with growth. It’s like they just thought giving an aspirin was going to cure the flu.

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 to a lot of problems. If people knew what they were getting, and it was legal, you could have "functional addicts" that cause little or no societal harm. My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years. She held down a job, paid rent, paid taxes, etc. She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl.

Think of it this way: My drug of choice is tequila. When I buy a bottle of 80 proof tequila, I buy it from a state licensed store. I have confidence that its 40% alcohol, and that its safe to drink. It is sold by a reputable company with a brand reputation. What we have today with illegal or "decriminalized" drugs is the equivalent of people dying from drinking bathtub gin during prohibition.

>> 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 since I voted in favor of decriminalization - and I'll admit I was naive and wrong], I think that while decriminalization without regulation is clearly catastrophic, legalization with regulation would also not be desirable so long as it's confined to one local city, county or state, in the midst of a nationwide fentanyl crisis. Portland simply does not have the capacity or infrastructure to accept further waves of addicts from all over the country who come here to live on the street. Legalization means more regulatory burden, more services for out of town addicts paid by a dwindling local tax base that's quickly being displaced and/or opting to leave.

To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide. In any case, Portland can't go it alone anymore.

And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.

Heroin is very different from Tequila, so I don't think it's fair to compare them just because they are both "drugs".

Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.

Your argument is tired. There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict. Most don't quit after a 20 year on and off relationship with it. They die and usually cause mayhem in the process - to society, their loved ones, the healthcare system, law enforcement, etc. I'm dealing with a very serious addict in my life right now and how "clean" the drug is makes no difference. They steal and lie non-stop. They cause massive amounts of anxiety and stress to people who love them. They disappear for weeks on end and every time you get a text or call, you think its someone saying they're dead. They treat you like a monster if you don't want to engage with their BS anymore. They claim to want "help" but when push comes to shove, they want to be enabled. After many years of this, you realize that some people simply want to live this lifestyle. The war on drugs was extreme in one direction, and your suggestion, is in the other.

> 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.

Anyone knows that who followed current events during the opiod epidemic and read some Wikipedia on it.

And actually, it's not just fentanyl, but fentanyl-like compounds that, even if controlled to the same concentration, have varying degrees of strength.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fentanyl_analogues

"The structural variations among fentanyl-related substances can impart profound pharmacological differences between these drugs, especially with respect to potency and efficacy"

You don't know which fentanyl analog is in that heroin dose, and how much of it.

In Portland and generally agree. And the people saying alcohol isn’t comparable should look at the stats - death from alcohol is a huge, but normalized and largely invisible issue.

Legalizing will reduce violence, reduce accidental overdoses and poisonings, and give the state regular contact points with users (to hopefully funnel them to assistance). Safe use sites would go some way towards hiding the problem if managed well.

Legalizing will not solve the problem of addiction. It will not solve overdoses (many overdoses are not caused by surprise differences in dose; people often overdose after relapse, or deliberately seek out stronger than usual supplies).

We have to accept that legalizing will solve some problems, but will likely keep killing at least some people.

Housing is another solution to hiding the problem. But housing just hides the drug use problem. It will probably also kill people - people who overdose on the sidewalk are more likely to be narcaned than people using alone.

Free housing + free drugs for opiate addicts would go a long ways towards solving the issue for everyone who isn’t an opiate addict, and probably cheaper than imprisoning or healing addicts.

I’d prefer treatment but the local officials have already proven incapable of that. The county is already very good at handing out needles, smoking kits, and boofing literature, so handing out fetty should be a very light lift administratively.

You should watch what is happening in British Colombia, Canada right now.

They have decriminalized possessing less than 2.5 grams of

- Opioids (such as heroin, morphine, and fentanyl)

- Crack and powder cocaine

- Methamphetamine (Meth)

- MDMA (Ecstasy)

It's a trial basis from Jan 31 2023 until Jan 31 2026, so we should get a good amount of data and evidence to see if this leads to better or worse outcomes for people and society as a whole.

[1] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/overdose/decriminalizatio...

Well, also the only reason a lot of people turned to heroin in the first place was that OxyContin was taken away from them.

There was a lot of illegal OxyContin use but most of it was well regulated and under the control of doctors and pharmacists.

to me it seems like you need a strongly enforced social norm that doesn't include all the worst bits of drug abuse (crime, public defecation, graffiti, other public nuisance/problem things) regardless of whether you legalize and regulate or make it extremely illegal. My preference would be for legalize and regulate and social order enforcement because it would cause a lot less misery but I don't see how this works if people are going to be allowed to leave needles everywhere, routinely vandalize and break into cars and buildings, etc. We should have never gotten rid of the enforcement aspect for the bad behavior when we we getting rid of the criminal aspect of the drug use.

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”.

Literally, fentanyl is legal and regulated. It's used as an anaesthetic.

Not all addictions are the same. Nicotine is extremely addictive but you will never have a total breakdown of your life which is essentially a guarantee with heroin, whether you get it legally or not. There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict (outside of extremely rare cases). Even if they received very pure heroin for free they would be dead within the next decade or two.

Feel free to experiment with this in your own city, ideally in your own neighborhood.

Sincerely, Portland Native

> She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl.

Under your system she would've never decided to get clean then? Also dying much earlier than she would've had to and probably adding a bunch of burden to the health system. People chastice cigarete smokers for much less.

This is not a strong argument as it doesn't consider all aspects.

1. Public drunkness is still a problem 2. Drunk driving still kills a lot of people. Legalization of alcohol doesn't help.

I think the actual problem is people can’t seem to just use enough to stay functional. Given the legal opportunity to purchase heroin, most people will absolutely overdo it.

> you could have "functional addicts" that cause little or no societal harm

Yeah, I don't know about that – plenty of "functional alcoholics" around, sure, but also plenty of not-so-functional alcoholics around, as well as the wife-and-kid-beater alcoholics.

Heroin is not alcohol and doesn't induce aggression in the same way, but it's also a lot more addictive, and especially at low wages getting your daily dose can be a challenge – so "junkies" will not be eliminated outright. I consider it an open question whether they will be reduced – it's very possible (perhaps even plausible), but I certainly wouldn't consider it a forgone conclusion.

> My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years.

Dick van Dyke was a chain-smoker until well in to his 70s and he's currently doing well at the age of 97.

These are the sort of things where you really need to look at overall effects and statistics, rather than individual cases.

If at first you don't succeed, double down.

Hard disagree. Decriminalizing drugs has skyrocketed schizophrenia and homelessness. Drugs should only be legalized in specific, medically necessary situations. Recreational use should be stigmatized and dealers should be handled as Duterte advocated.

The crime of the War on Drugs was that we had double standards, not that we had a War on Drugs.

I mean, I remember how things were before fentanyl came around (as an outside observer, not as a user) and heroin was a horrible, life-destroying drug addiction back then as well. And I think it was and is convincingly argued that it is much more addictive than alcohol.

> drugs need to be legalized and regulated.

Surely we can solve this inability to regulate with even more regulation. Just one more regulation bro... trust me bro. Just a bit more power and money to the government bro. It's all gonna be great! Just give a little bit more in taxes, bro. It's going to be a utopia, you'll see!

Has there been any research into how to measure potency (of fentanyl) and cut it properly? Maybe we could keep the government out of it, and instead give information and supplies to measure the potency correctly? I've heard that one way OD's happen is the substance is not homogeneous, so they can consume half the bag fine, then one dose is super-charged and puts them into OD (because fent can be up to thousands of times stronger than a morphine equivalent). Maybe teach addicts how to dissolve their dope in a liquid and reconstitute it so it's homogeneous in potency? Addicts can be extremely cunning with their drive to get money for dope, so I dont see why they can't use that will power to their advantage. I wonder if they could also get a primitive CPAP machine to keep them breathing if they do OD? IIRC death comes from lack of breathing, not acute toxicity or anything.

Considering that alcohol is, by far, the most dangerous drug and it's completely legal, I think there's something to be said for your point.

I gotta say though, it's sort of complicated when you're talking about legalizing things that are already legal as prescription drugs (like opiates and benzos). Alcohol is different because it doesn't really have any medical use outside of disinfecting things (it's fairly terrible as an anesthetic or as a tranquilizer), but there's something kind of weird about having former prescription drugs just be legal over the counter. How many people might bypass their doctor and start using strong opiates for pain that might not need it and end up in a bad spot?

I don't think you can go so far as like w/ alcohol where you just show an ID and buy whatever you want, but it does seem like there needs to be some way to ensure the product is safe. Maybe a compromise might be some sort of free testing kits, or something like narcan on hand in a safe space.

It's really frustrating to see this headline. The officials decriminalized drugs, wiped their hands and backed off from any follow-up legislation to keep it working correctly. It reminds me a lot of the ACA. Officials got the bill passed and have collectively stopped making updates to the program to keep it healthy, but then constantly criticize its faults. American politics are sad in that it's hard to celebrate any victories when you know those victories are doomed to mismanagement anyway.

The 'officials' did not do that. The voters did, it was state ballot measure. They decriminalized Drugs, to encourage treatment. And moved quite a large percentage of taxes from Marajuana dispenseries to help pay for it. Then left the Oregon Health Authority in charge of distributing the money to build all these new treatment facilities. (Oregon is near the bottom in treatment centers per capita in the US).

The Oregon Health Authority then sat on that money for several years, bickering about procedures, policies, etc, and not a single dollar was sent out for several years after the law changed.

Treatment centers are finally starting to get open, years late. In the meantime, we spent years decriminalizing the drugs, while then guiding people into treatment, with no actual treatment available to them (and literally amassing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for it, before spending anything)

I still don't see how "Drugs should be decriminalized because taking drugs is a victimless crime" and "Society needs to sync a lot of resources in tackling drug abuse" are compatible positions to hold at the same time.

Either let people do drugs and let them worry about the consequences, or, if society is going to be on the hook for the consequences, don't. There is no feasible way to hold both positions at the same time.

> The officials decriminalized drugs,

No, the voters decriminalized drugs with a constitutional amendment.

Perhaps they should have done the “follow-up legislation” before the decriminalization then?

I think the problem is quite the opposite from your diagnosis. There are no standards for legislation “success” or “failure”. Very few bills actually achieve their stated aims, and all the ones that don’t are kept on the books, then the results are blamed on under-budgeting, or partisan politics (which should be foreseeable if true).

If decriminalization relies on a whole raft of practically infeasible (or very expensive) associated programs to make it work, is it really a viable strategy?

I think the average person (including myself) is just skeptical this is a problem worth having. A rube goldberg where everything has to go right.

It seems like the best case scenario is "We legalize drugs and then raise tax dollars and then use that money to fund programs so that people that are addicted aren't harmed too much in the long run" just seems not ideal.

I get the arguments for personal liberty, but we wouldn't allow other risky behavior that has a such huge societal cost.

I'm curious, what's the "updates to the program" that were required? I'm not well informed on this issue.

Who do you think legalizing drugs is going to benefit? What followup are you looking for?

Sorry to hear of your sense of frustration. Can you please elaborate on what you believe was “working correctly,” and the associated superior cost-benefit tradeoffs.

Until recently Portland had a shitty local government structure that voters recently approved to modernize.

Former city council members often railed against it; as a member they’d be assigned city bureaus (fire, police…) to basically manage day to day.

Former members complained they were so busy dealing with office work rather than understanding Portlands problems in the abstract and crafting legislation. Also the mayor was on the council and did the same job.

The hope is the new system (mayor and council are now separate entities, city manager oversees bureaus so mayor and council can focus on legislative matters).

Also I’d like to point out every city in the US is a raging dumpster fire of homeless, collusion, graft, fraud… Portland isn’t unique and it’s hardly as bad as say PA cities. America is a shithole country full of FOMO obsessed fast fashion clothes, food, gadgets, and media and gives zero fucks about setting that aside to clean itself up. Garbage in garbage out

As someone who used to represent drug addicts in a past career...

Drugs are illegal for a reason. Making drugs legal just makes the problem worse; the reasons most drugs are illegal is because of the many negative side effects they impose on users...and others.

Voluntary rehab and counseling don't work. Permissive policies don't work. There are literally thousands of shelters beds empty each night in LA, SF, and Portland because drug addicts would rather keep their drugs and paraphernalia than have a warm, safe space. The rare rich person who can control their habit or the consequences of their drug use because they've got a wealthy family to take care of them shouldn't be the basis for determining policy for the hundreds of people who can't.

Forced rehab works. Imprisonment works. Losing custody works. Some amount of externally-inflicted mental pain is necessary to overcome addiction to serious drugs like meth and cocaine because without it an addict will never develop the mental fortitude to stop using.

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...

I lived in Portland before the decriminalization laws passed in 2020, and from my perspective, drugs were already effectively decriminalized for the in-your-face-homeless, which I think is the most obvious social problem that people in Portland are trying to fix. At least that is my view based on the very common observation of people doing hard drugs in public.

The people drugs weren't decriminalized for before 2020 were the mostly normal citizens. After all, if someone has a house or a job or a car, you can take that away from them by punishing them, and that is what the cops would do. But if someone is already sleeping on the street, is arresting them and having them spend a few nights in jail and then going back out the streets going to change anything?

A cop might walk right past a man smoking meth in the street, but if you get pulled over for a broken headlight, and the cops might call out drug sniffing dogs, find a small amount of heroin in your possession, and throw you in jail for months.

What if they spent more than a few nights in corrective housing? Actually drying out, and getting treatment? I get that you can't force someone to want to get better, but you can lock them away if they refuse and keep breaking the law. Right? The whole situation is horrible. I moved away from Portland around the turn of the century, and it's unrecognizable to me when I go back to visit family.

“When we push it back into the criminal system, it pushes people back into the shadows,” Ms. Hurst said. “People will die because of this.”

^ this quote from the article speaks plainly why it's dangerous to recriminalize. Agreed w/ your perspective on prior laws hurting disproportionately normal citizens who still had (some) property/livelihood to damage through arrest.

Not agreeing w/ the status quo in Portland, though - from friend's accounts it has become a tough place to walk around. I appreciate the fine line the government is trying to walk here. Hopefully they can accelerate some of the drug treatment options concurrently.

I think the difference is that drug use was at least kept out of nice/touristy parts of town.

There was lots of blatant drug use all over town, but you could expect to go to Powells or Pioneer Courthouse Square without seeing people smoking out of pieces of foil.

So while it was not a great or sustainable system to have police clear out good neighborhoods and force addicts into designated bad areas, having a city be equally unappealing to everyone is in the long run a lose-lose trade-off.

Oregon banned cops pulling people over for broken cars btw, a lot of the issues described in this thread are also because the locals here rightfully hate the police and have muzzled them.

There’s got to be some middle ground between locking up people for substance use disorder and allowing people to make public spaces unusable with their antisocial behavior.

In my mind it’s something like “drugs are legal but public drug use and public intoxication are strictly illegal.” It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.

>It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.

The problem is feeling like you owe it to addicts to provide them with a place to use. Privatize all the public spaces: parks, sidewalks, etc. Grant strong property rights to those spaces.

Drug use is a mental health issue. People take things that make them feel good when they don’t feel good. They’re just self medicating and we need to start treating it as a symptom of an underlying issue rather than the issue itself. Same with the obesity epidemic. It’s not the what, it’s the why.

Yet.. there are people who take things to make them feel good when they already feel good.

Further.. the idea that someone is going to improve their situation in any other than the most short sighted terms by "self medicating" with something like Methamphetamine or Heroin is completely ridiculous. I am absolutely not comfortable standing by to see how that story plays out, I know exactly how it plays out, and it's completely inhumane to pretend that you don't either.

Oregon shut down most of their mental health facilities in the 80's and early 90's. We literally have a federal judge letting charged criminals out free, becuase they have sat in jail for sometimes months before even being evaluated by the state hospital to see if they are competent/capable of defending themselves. They literally have 2 state hospitals for the entire state, and one of them is only 1/3 capacity, but they can't seem to staff it, and the other is well over 100% capactity, and forced to release people because of inhumane overcrowding. (and way understaffed, since it turns out people don't like to be beaten up by patients, with no help, protection, or training, for what is essentially entry level pay)

Drug *abuse* is maybe a mental health issue.

I'm sure I'm not alone in using drugs (alcohol, caffeine, pot) for many reasons other than to "make them feel good when they don't feel good". Which along with equating use with abuse is such a shallow, narrow minded and ignorant view of drugs.

Well, you have psychological and physiological addiction. Normal "happy" people get addicted all the time - we've seen that with prescription drugs. That's almost purely a physiological addiction.

But of course, those two are not mutually exclusive - you can have both forms of addiction, and they do often merge into one with many types of drugs. Even if you beat extremely physiologically addictive drugs, you can lust for the effects many years / decades later, because of how good they made you feel.

And as you become addicted, usually at the expensive of everything else in your life, depression will set in - which just amplifies the need to escape.

The big problem with homelessness, and those types of drug users, is that a solid chunk of them have underlying mental illnesses - which may have lead to the drug use (self medication), or came out after drug use. These are the type of patients that simply can't function on their own. If you give them a free apartment, they're not able to live there.

I don't think radical decriminalization is the root problem - but rather the utter lack of (mental) healthcare.

What if the underlying issue is capitalism itself though?

I commented a few times here over the years criticizing decriminalization as it came up as an option, against loud / vociferous people saying, how can you continue to embrace criminal penalties that clearly aren't working. As if it were crazy to believe that people need laws to obey.

I said that you can make all the rational step-wise choices in the world, and find yourself led down a path to oblivion, where you've made drug use not a crime, and find yourself in a drug-problem-overwhelmed city.

Lo and behold, we find years later, people awaken to the fact that decriminalization might not work, and countless people having left the city because of it, and probably more importantly, tons of people falling victim to the scourge of drugs.

Sometimes, as unkind as it sounds and expensive as it is, you need to enforce some harsh laws and have people understand that you won't tolerate certain behaviors, lest your society fall apart.

The US is genuinely like a third-world country, in this regard. And apparently lots of adults in that country think they are doing the compassionate thing by allowing to people use drugs?

You have poor countries with no expensive treatment facilities re-distributing money to Democrat donors...why do these people think no-one uses drugs in these countries?

This kind of "compassion" is, ironically, complete anathema to anyone who lives in a left-wing society. The US version of left-wing politics is characterized by extreme individualism, it is on a spectrum along with Republicans, not something distinct in any way.

As a human who doesn't live in the US, the sad part isn't the people using drugs, it is the people who are gleefully pushing them into a situation where there are no disincentives towards self-destructive behaviour. Result: more suffering, more people gleefully suggesting that even more individualism will fix it, etc.

The other thing that is unique about the US is the lack of punishment for drug dealers. People on the left complain about pollution, drug dealers are ruining the lives of tens of thousands of people...stand aside, they say, for the entrepreneur?

It is complete madness, but you talk to anyone in the US about this subject and you realise immediately why they have this problem: they care about themselves, that is it.

The problem is that the people using drugs out in public are already at rock bottom: there aren't many punishments you can use to deter that, short of putting them in jail and when they come out they're just going to be using drugs in public all over again. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea of mandatory treatment but as it stands, "enforcing some harsh laws" doesn't do anything to curb recidivism – temporarily incarcerating people falling out of the bottom of society is not a long term fix for society.

If it's criminalized there's no way to go and no way to control things. So that's definitely not the right way.

Decriminalization is thus accidentally necessary to gain a better control of the situation, but then you do need to actually seize control of the situation. There need to be institutions to help get people away from drugs.

So much sympathy for drug users and business owners, but what about the private citizens who get victimized by these drug users?

I was beaten nearly to death (in broad daylight, in a residential neighborhood) in Seattle in 2020 by two men enabled to descend into meth addiction by permissive policies. In my victim support group I met so many people - innocent people - permanently injured & disfigured like me, or raped, or psychologically destroyed by meth users who had been allowed to live in tents in their neighborhoods and use hard drugs undisturbed until it was too late.

It's easy to treat this like a philosophical topic when you've had the privilege not to pay any personal price. For some of us it's more than an argument on the internet. If you think we should allow people to sell/buy/use meth please have the courage to attend a support group for victims of violent crimes. I doubt you'd claim a moral high ground for decriminalization to the faces of victims like me who have had our lives destroyed by meth users.

I'm severely visually impaired. I walk and use public transit. Currently in the pacific northwest. My quality of life has decreased so much since covid and when these policies came into effect. I tripped over someone asleep on the train floor and they lost their shit. I was really scared. One of dozens of instances. And the cities in general must become less walkable to avoid crime. Fences around apartments that mean less sidewalk access, store entrances near transit that close early, and people camping on the sidewalk that block access.

At this moment, it feels society cares less about me and others who want to use public services than the addicts.

It's been an especially hard couple of months here in Portland. I've traveled around, hoping to find a new place to live. But all the big US cities with good transit suffer the same issues. At best, I wish I could move to another country I could live in and feel I had a sense of agency, if anyone would have me. But at this point I'm feeling like it's time to give up.

I'm a Canadian who travelled to Seattle recently and I found that city legitimately scary downtown. The addicts were unstable and violent like nothing I'd ever seen, even in some of the worst parts of our country.

Walking through downtown Seattle at night with a suitcase trying to find my hotel is the first time in my life I thought I was about to be attacked or robbed, but thankfully I only had stuff thrown at me by the junkies.

This aspect of the discussion truly baffles me. It's like there's noone but the drug users to consider. Oh, do the addicts get enough treatment? Ah, they want to camp next to a school because they find more 'shelter' from the rain there? No problemo!

Aren't tax-paying citizens allowed to demand that they be able to walk into a train station that doesn't smell like urine and fecal matter?

I don't think this particular issue has actually been debated on the internet all that much because I haven't seen it come up that much; the obvious solution is to draw a parallel to alcohol. It is illegal to be drunk and driving. Similarly it can be illegal to be high on something exotic and out in public. As hot takes go that seems fairly cool.

The issue with drug criminalisation is that people get arrested who weren't going to hurt anyone, weren't any threat to themselves, haven't done anything objectionable and nevertheless were risking prison. The wins on that front should be preserved.

Stay strapped. Sorry to be harsh, but it’s not policies that keep you and yours safe. You need to protect you and yours and government policies aren’t going to protect you from hard drug users. Sorry you had a terrible experience but since ancient times people have weapons to defend against any enemy.

Were they ever caught? This seems like assault (and battery?) all already illegal.

Your problem doesn’t seem to be drugs but (probably) the defacto police work stoppage? That’s the problem in the Bay Area atleast [1]

https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/police-staffing-crisis-san-...

I actually don't think we should decriminalize. Just legalize it and let people get pure product at dirt cheap prices.

There's no reason to fund crime (drug dealers/organized crime), maim and kill users, push users into poverty, and generate and push the externalizes of drug use onto the rest of society. This is the choice we have made and continue to make a society under a prohibitionist regime, decriminalization or not.

I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We have quite bad drug abuse issues as well.

I have helped a group that rescued several people (I believe most with drug addiction) from the streets[1]. What they do, and several other groups, and also government institutes do, is offer voluntary recovery programs that are legitimately very good. You can go there and they'll take care of you, including professional psychologist/psychiatrist support (and medicine to help get off drugs); in the main institution we're working with[2], former homeless and former drug dependents help directly in welcoming people. I'm not sure that's the whole solution to the drug problem, but I think it's part of the solution -- getting out in the streets, offering help to the homeless and addicts, and if they want, taking them somewhere that'll offer shelter and recovery from addiction. [3]

There's one rule in those places: you can't go in with drugs with you. Of course, if the person becomes too violent then they might not be able to deal with them either.

Please, go out there and help (while staying safe too, preferably in a group) -- or help institutions that do this kind of work (like we say, everyone can play a role, be it in a kitchen, on the streets, or with donations). I think it's groups like this that keep things from falling apart.

There are many people on the streets for whom drugs are just a quick escape mechanism, and have economic issues, mental health issues, or health issues (or all together), and a compassionate community/institutions that helps everyone recover is what really is needed I think.

Pretending they don't exist or as a friend calls "shuffling them around" doesn't work.

[1] Our group offers a meal once a week (Sunday nights, where they have difficulty finding something to eat), and we offer taking them off the streets. It's incredible what genuinely caring about people will do: I've seen people cry when you hand them a plate of food.

[2] It's this one: https://www.missaobelem.org/; This one is state funded and excellent as well: https://hub.spdmafiliadas.org.br/ (called HUB)

[3] Other important parts being, educating people about the tragedy of drug abuse, and providing community and support so they don't resort to drugs, and also preventing selling.

>So much sympathy for drug users and business owners, but what about the private citizens who get victimized by these drug users?

That doesn't score virtue points in hipster society.

A core element of the problem is that Americans are vehemently opposed to involuntary long term psychiatric treatment. Long term, in this context, meaning anything longer than 72 hours or so.

So there’s a push to decriminalize because the alternative is jailing non violent drug offenders. This is counterproductive in many ways and keeps them in cycles that enable addiction like preventing gainful employment, increasing access to network of people that can provide hard drugs, increase hopelessness and worthlessness, increase likelihood of violent behavior, etc.

A better system would be to decriminalize with the alternative of connecting people with serious and persistent mental health issues to significant inpatient mental health supports. Not someone that smokes pot or drops acid every once and a while, but the people like you describe that abuse hard drugs like methamphetamine or fentanyl to the point that they become homeless and frequently experience psychosis. Programs that provide housing, counseling, rehab, etc. but again most people vehemently oppose this for various reasons. Distrust of psychiatry, refusal to fund government programs, a libertarian belief that a person should be able to let themselves self destruct even if it destroys the community around them, etc

So here we are

Yeah...it's all fine and good until you get slapped in the face by reality.

What happened to the people who assaulted you? Were they fully prosecuted?

Thank you for your bravery in putting your statement out there.

[removed]

That's terrible. I'm glad that never happens in places with harsher policies.

“Enabled to descend into meth addiction”

Sorry this happened to you but every human has the god given right to use whatever substances they please and no government can tell them otherwise.

Perhaps your anger should be focused at the government officials and local policies for allowing these people to live in tents on public property and use drugs in public.

Drugs are for people with jobs to enjoy.

I'm sorry for your experience, but consider this: in central and south America, drug cartels are murdering and beating people every day. I think it would be an understatement to say there are more beatings and murders being dealt by drug cartels than meth-induced psychos.

Why do drug cartels thrive? Simple: because drugs are illegal in the USA. By legalizing drugs, we would bankrupt them.

Do you have some stats to back up the implied claim that homeless drug users significantly raise assault rates? Portland is a very safe city AFAIK.

Either way It’s less about “we should let people sell meth” and “we should let people sell meth if the only other option is just jailing them” IMO. obviously no one wants to see or be homeless drug addicts taking up public space. But we don’t really have a ton of options without systemic change

A counter-point: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...

> And in Portugal, no distinction is made between “hard” or “soft” drugs, or whether consumption happens in private or public. What matters is whether the relationship to drugs is healthy or not.

Interesting.

Of course Portugal has a stronger social safety net, indeed stronger social fabric (though sometimes it feels a bit too strong)

Out of curiosity, are you Portuguese or do you live there?

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.

I'm from Portland. And, recently moved to Florida. This issue feels a lot less cut and dried than people make it out.

One thing I've noticed in Florida is that there are no public spaces. Every park has explicit hours, where it is illegal to be there after 10 pm. And, there are blue lives matters signs everywhere, so I'm sure that the police round up anyone who doesn't comply.

Also, Florida has a low prison population rate, only 900 per 100k. Low when you compare it to other states that is. Northern states are much lower, like Oregon at 550. Taking 40,000 people off the street is one way to solve homelessness.

I bet there are lots of people in Florida who live cheaply away from any population centers because of the police presence and to avoid imprisonment. Those people probably would be homeless on the West Coast.

There was an extremely high people case in Portland recently where a man attacked two young black men on the train. His name is Adrian Cummings. Supposedly he was let out of jail in Oregon and that's indicative of a failure of the criminal justice system because he should have been in jail long before that assault.

But he's a Floridian. He had a lengthy criminal record before reaching Oregon and his drug addiction didn't start in Oregon. The transformation of his face over a short period due to drug addiction is crazy to see in his mug shots.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2017/03/07/deputies-man-chok...

How the hell did this guy get to Oregon? I doubt he was a drug tourist. Makes you wonder.

Drug use is illegal. Assault is illegal. Robbery is illegal. Rape is illegal.

Enforce the laws.

My car was broken into in San Francisco, robbed in broad daylight. The police told me to just turn it in to my insurance.

Who pays insurance? We do.

So I got robbed and you all who pay for insurance got robbed.

I wonder why.

It's getting to a point where addicts have more rights than law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. This has to stop.

ITT: lots of people who seriously believe (or pretend they believe) that you can fix a deep and complex social problem as drug use, in 3 years, with a couple of laws.

The war on drugs is three-generations old; it will take at least a generation after abandoning it to see good results. Of course there will be mistakes on the way (and allowing brazen drug use in public spaces is probably one of those - a lot of stuff that is absolutely fine to do in private is not allowed on the streets). That doesn't mean you throw away the baby with the bathwater.

http://web.archive.org/web/20231211210126/https://www.nytime...

The police in Portland usually won't even show up when people call from stores being (nonviolently) stolen from. How would they suddenly have the bandwidth (and/or will) to enforce this?

I have no more sympathy left for drug users after my wife was attacked in daylight in downtown Portland on the way to work. Enablement is not compassion.

I'm a Portland native, born and raised.

It was great up through the early 90s, and then turned into an absolutely bonkers shithole run by people too dumb and too extremist to be considered even progressive (I support many progressive polices and causes fwiw).

I basically was ran out of my own town when the politicians, police, and moonbat locals – many of whom were not born there – started thinking of Portland as some sort of weird test bed, layering on all kinds of experimental policies and governance. It hollowed out the downtown area, made it nigh on impossible to start a business, and made everything bonkers expensive.

I'm sad to say I had no choice but to leave. All of these decisions left very little opportunity to build a career (many of the businesses left) own a house (NIMBY 'urban planning' made housing unattainable) and of course the streets became as gross as the Mission in SFO.

It's like the worst of the Hippy Boomers were able to enact all of their worst policies in one small town and now it's a microcosm of their weird blend of laissez-faire social policies mixed with maximcally-extractive taxation and fiscal policies.

https://archive.is/IwMPY

Doesn’t Portland have a housing affordability problem? Why was the answer to “people are using drugs in public because they can’t afford a place to do it in private” to legalize public use? I swear we’ll do anything to address the consequences of lack of housing except actually build enough houses.

I'd be interested to hear from people in large European cities and whether public drug use and homelessness are as big of an issue there as they are here.

I've only been to a handful of European cities, and none seem to struggle with either to the extent we see in larger cities in the US.

Public drug use is something that I've never seen in Bavaria. Altough you'll be able to find it if you know where to look.

Seriously though, leftist cities like Berlin have the same problems as the US, although on a much smaller scale. It's what D. Trump would call an shithole. Bavaria is clean, because we enforce a restrictive drug policy.

As for homeless, we've got some, but they're voluntarily so. The shelters don't accept alcohol, drugs nor dogs. They gather far away from any business/residintial area. (In my local town, under a bridge between a river and an animal shelter.)

After any period of repression there's a rebound effect, it happened after the prohibition of alcohol was rescinded too. Unfortunately, the insane 'war on drugs' has created much harder and more dangerous substances than alcohol.

Doesn't the sale need to be legal to remove the criminal element from the entire thing?

The problem will be that we already know the cycle of

illegal drug use->jail->out of jail with worse stuff

is not working..

What would work better....

illegal drug use->modified jail sentence for non violent offenders to be in ail-designed-rehab

I say modified in that successful completion of rehab steps gets parts of sentence modified...

But at the same time we need to address the legal drug problem that lead to 50% of this problem in the first place....stats show huge amount of people who got addicted to legal opoids before their illegal drug use...yes it is actually 50% in places in the US....

And saying something failed because of under usage is not actually saying it failed but saying incentives to use it are not aligned.

The problem is fentanyl. It is cheaper than dirt and can be laced into almost anything. A lethal dose is easy to administer. Fentanyl is also extremely addictive.

You can't decriminalize or legalize hard drug use without first tackling the reason people use drugs. Otherwise they'll just end up in downtown again, shooting up in public.

And you can't ban public drug use unless you want to build a lot of new jails.

So the answer is to put all drug users into one place, like The Wire. It'll be the nastiest place on earth, but at least all other places will be prettier.

What happens if we stop all the drug-related services? Stop the free needles and foil and pipes, and ban public drug use.

Does anyone want to try that experiment?

I’m not sure how well it will work but NYC is experimenting with supervised consumption centers. The goal is twofold: Reduce overdose deaths by having trained medics on hand and convince users to enroll in rehabilitation programs.

How the fuck was "public drug use" not already illegal?

What is this "potent new methamphetamine"? Mainstream outlets keep parroting this line, but I have yet to see any convincing chemistry.

To answer my own question, the phenylacetone process is cheaper, simpler, and produces higher purity (~90% from 80%) product.

Smells like drugwar propaganda.

P2P meth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylacetone

1. Drug use and the fallout was infitesimal compared to what it is after it was widely culturally promoted and approved of. Neither has alcohol abuse been supplanted.

2. Drug addicts (which especially includes pot users) will argue for maximum legalization until everyone is blue in the face, and despite any counter argument. Such is the nature of addiction.

At some point, people need to be again ignored for the social good. Drug use legalization advocates will always remain, but they will be less with time.

Keyword _public_

And I'm here for it (as a Portland resident). My sympathy for the homeless/addicted population here has gone to basically 0.

Criminalizing drug addiction is wrong, but letting drug addicts proliferate and live in squalor with no consequences is even worse. The pendulum has swung so far to the left, and now everyone is suffering. It really makes me wonder what these drug proliferation activists are thinking. Do they really think that seeing people lying on the sidewalks in their own feces is freedom or a good thing?

What a diaster of a response. The war on drugs was deadly failure that we should never try again.

It was a failure because it wasn’t enforced uniformly, not because it existed. We need a new War on Drugs, but crack and cocaine should have equivalent (harsh) penalties.

Try to invite Xi Zhinpin, he cleaned San Francisco streets in just a few days.

How about doing something about the graffiti? The city is such an eye sore.

Banning public drug use will simply criminalize the actions of the poor and vulnerable. Rich people can continue to hoover up kilos of coke in their gated enclaves. Where is a person living on the street supposed to go to enjoy their completely legal cannabis product?

So we only care about either the rich or the destitute? How about the vast majority of people in between those poles who don’t want to be harassed by crazed meth heads or walk their kids past a forest of fent zombies?

Crazy how people think there is a viable solution other than strict intolerance of public drug use. The mental gymnastics are gold medal worthy.

(Also, I know quite a few rich people and none of them do coke. They’re problem is booze and food-just like everyone else in America)

It seems trying to solve the homeless drug addiction crisis is putting the cart before the horse. Why are there so many homeless drug users in the first place? Any real solution for the problem would be to prevent people from ending up like this.

If you fall out of the rat race in the US you are screwed. No job, no insurance, no health care, no house, no car followed by homelessness and drug use. After all that it would take an insane amount of effort to get you back up to the ladder.

I know socialism is the big scary word in the US, but socialist European countries mostly prevent people from falling down the ladder that far and fast and the amount of homeless and drug use is significantly lower over here.

> If you fall out of the rat race in the US you are screwed. No job, no insurance, no health care, no house, no car followed by homelessness and drug use. After all that it would take an insane amount of effort to get you back up to the ladder.

This isn't true at all. The US has a good social safety net, just like European countries. San Francisco in particular has free, universal healthcare, rent assistance programs, eviction protection programs, public transportation, pretty much everything you mentioned.

The problem is if you're a nuisance to your neighbors (i.e., smoking drugs indoors, which my downstairs neighbor decided to start doing during 2020), you will be kicked out if you don't own your place (and you don't have an HOA). At which point, you can go to a shelter (of which there are many in SF), but if you refuse to do that, well…

The US is a very young country, with a burn it down and see what happens culture. A frontier state.

It is amazing to watch the speed run of recreating basic civilization from first principles. Why do laws exist? Why do we need traffic signals?

You think I am joking?

Portland disbanded traffic law enforcement! After quite a lot of traffic deaths, mostly minorities they tried to protect, they just reinstated traffic cops. More black people were killed by this decision than by cops in Portland...

Source: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/05/09/portland-oregon-polic...

"Portland has experienced record levels of traffic fatalities in the years since Lovell emptied the traffic division. In 2021, 63 people died in traffic-related deaths in Portland — the highest number in at least three decades. Portland matched that count in 2022."

https://www.koin.com/news/pbot-to-address-street-safety-as-c...

"Multnomah County Public Health Manager Brendon Haggerty said. “The third reason this is especially alarming for public health is that we see racial disparities.”

He added, “in Multnomah County, the death rate from traffic crashes among the Black population is about twice the rate of the non-Hispanic, white population.”

>The US is a very young country, with a burn it down and see what happens culture.

The United States as a nation-state is older than almost all of European nation-states, barring a few. It is one of the few nation-states that has continually existed since its foundation, without interruption.

Germany for example was unified in 1871. Were there 'Germans' (who spoke the language) before then? Sure. Germany? No. Neither Prussia nor Austria is the German nation-state. The modern German state was recreated after WW2 in 1940s. France is on its god knows what number of Republic now after Kingdom-Republic-Empire-Republic revolutions etc (although I'll grant that 'France' as a singular 'country' is older than the US). Italy was unified well later. The dutchy of Poland is not the modern Poland, etc.

It is one of the oldest(among the other very few) continually existing nation-states still alive today.

Very young courtry but most successful in the last 200 years What do you mean by young? Roman Empire young? Relative terms like young/old when applied to a country that’s a melting of all others let’s me believe you’re not an American or have studied American history in depth.

I find it astonishing that nobody has the common sense to consider that the nature of this epidemic is uniquely American, and thus learn from the plenty of developed nations that don't have this problem.

You will barely find any find meth or fentanyl in Western Europe. You won't have zombie blocks nor would they ever be tolerated at this scale. The absurd amount of deaths would trigger urgent and decisive actions.

Nor would frequent petty crimes be tolerated. In the Dutch city that I live, there were imminent threats of looting during the lockdown curfew days. Vast crowds of local men, including the local football hooligans, formed a spontaneous army awaiting the looters.

They would not allow their town to be trashed. Everybody stood for the integrity of their community: citizens, police, businesses. Public disorder is not tolerated, not at a large scale anyway.

The attitude to just let it spiral out of control is anything but "progressive". You have a right to public order, clean cities, consistency in applying justice, it's the basis of a functioning society.

> I find it astonishing that nobody has the common sense to consider that the nature of this epidemic is uniquely American, and thus learn from the plenty of developed nations that don't have this problem.

FYI, most American cities aren't like this.

The article describes Portland for a reason: They're one of a small number of cities that experimenting with decriminalization (combined, theoretically, with treatment programs) under the theory that it would improve the situation. It has not improved the situation.

I think you might be viewing America through the lens of whatever stories make the news headlines, which is an aggregate of all the worst situations in the country. It's not representative of the entire country.

The US has about 200X more land than the Netherlands. It's huge and more diverse than you might be used to if you're imagining it as a parallel to where you lived.

Hmm go to North Korea and let me know about their drug use and violent crime; internet arm chair comments like these just show how out of touch most people on HN are

The root cause in both instances isn't drugs and so infinite spending or (de)criminalization won't matter. The core issue is hope. In the absence of work for the abled and care for the disabled and housing, there isn't much hope and so crimes, habits, and deaths of despair take hold. Without holistic and comprehensive betterment of people who feel ignored and cheated, there isn't much for this growing sector of society to look forward to. It should be no wonder why many people are so desperate and put faith in a lying, vindictive con artist like Trump.

This assessment contradicts all evidence we have on the homelessness in the US. Unemployment rate is very low in the US, shelters are very often half-empty. Drug-addicts and homeless people refuse help (unless it's cash or free drugs).

The idea that we just need to invest more and more into this extremely corrupt industry has no merit.

I have come to the conclusion that lots of humans have a religion-shaped hole in their psyche. It is far better to fill it with a stable, local, hope-giving religion.

Hymns are a better opiate of the masses than fentanyl.

Do you have any evidence for this?

Singapore has no drug problems. You might think what they do is extreme but it works.

That's not entirely true. Singapore definitely has very few drug problems, but there are still drugs (and violent addicts). Drug arrests make the news at least once a month.

To be clear, I'm 100% behind Singapore's drug laws. Not having to deal with psychotic methheads is my #1 thing about this place (compared with Australia).

But I do wonder if their laws would work elsewhere (i.e. some place that's not a tiny island with a culturally conservative population).

Murdering people does make them go away yes.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38607244.

Well what they do is:

- Have a government who owns almost all the land, and provide subsidized housing to over 75% of the citizens.

- Provides universal healthcare, again subsidized through the government

- And forces quotas for all ethnicities to ensure everyone is equally represented everywhere.

So I guess we could try it Singapore's way, but Republicans keep saying it's a bad idea.

For drug dealers, I would argue it's not nearly extreme enough.

This discourse is so tiresome. There are low crime jurisdictions on this planet that do not have drug epidemics. We know what policies work. They're not pretty, but they're effective. Harden your heart and implement them, or live with the consequences.

Effective at what? The whole reason Portland tried something different is that the last 50 years have proven drugs laws to be largely ineffective at preventing drug abuse and its related issues. Clearly this style of decriminalizing has also proven ineffective, but it’s not like we had a working system before.

Ok, but have they tried - checks notes - more programs maybe? :-/

I would absolutely not be surprised if there was an intense "information shaping" activity on this post.

The same people who loudly signal their progressive bona fides won't hesitate to silently vote with their feet if they feel unsafe.

Criminalization works, even without sniffing dogs and modern surveillance, when the crime is also a sin. See Islam. To this day I know no relative or close friend of mine who ever drank any alcohol, nor one which used any drugs.

But ofc this is the unthinkable for West. Downvote, pass.

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.

> To this day I know no relative or close friend of mine who ever drank any alcohol, nor one which used any drugs.

That's pretty normal for even some secular (non religious) Americans of European ancestry and their friend groups, I (as one) observe. We were far more interested in sports so that booze would be an interruption in ... sports, for example. I do not know how common that is.

> But ofc this is the unthinkable for West.

No, it's not. (See above.) The thing is that "westerners" that match your friend groups definitely exist with their own matching westerner friend groups, which i guess is a happy surprise. it might be we're not obvious though, to your point.

The word you're looking for is shame.

I'm not sure the benefits of increased shame in society is worth the danger of allowing radical Islam or Christianity to flourish in a free society.

Of course, there are wonderful atheists and non-Abrhamic believing people in the world, and there is Hamas and ISIS.

I'd rather live in Portland than Tehran.

Confident delivery, but very naive perspective

Ah yes, no member of any religious group has ever committed a sin.

Forcing people into your religion is highly unethical in my moral framework. Even though it's criminalized here in the west we still see people finding ways to do it.

You'd need a paradigm that permitted sins, comrade. You're speaking a language they literally can't hear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com