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.
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).
This is the classic approach of conservatives: throw wrenches in every part of a welfare system, then point to its failures to justify its dissolution. See: Medicare, public education, etc.
I live in Portland. Conservatives do not have anything to do with our city or the county of Multnomah. We haven't elected a conservative since the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_McCready. We're the second highest taxed city in the nation.
If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.
I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.
In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing, but for a better solution (the long term) it involves better education, welfare, health-care and social equality.
You can't try to fix one of these problems while ignoring the others. It won't work.
What American cities need more then public housing, is housing. Actual policies that increase housing stock and make it possible to live in these places without a car.
That is how you actually decrease total cost of living.
The US has been trending up, between housing and transportation, a huge amount of people spend well above 50% of their income on that, and poorer people even more.
Public housing can be part of this, but by itself it wont fix anything.
America doesn’t have an housing problem. America has a drug problem.
It’s time we stop deceiving the public.
Too bad the Housing Authority can't help smuggle houses over the border.
There are plenty of houses in America, it just happens so that most of them are in less desirable places.
I think nobody is entitled to live in any city. You and I are not entitled to live in Manhattan if we can't afford it, we are not entitled to live in Beverly Hills if we don't have the means for it, and likewise the homeless are not entitled to live where they cannot be housed.
Otherwise, I would like to apply for a supportive housing unit penthouse on 5th avenue please.
House prices suggest there's a gigantic housing market problem.
We can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.
[1] - https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...
What is conservative about Portland politicians and whom are you actually comparing them to?
IMO Portland already does every single one of the solutions that you recommend. It’s not working out for them well, in the same way it isn’t working out for Portugal or Amsterdam.
Maybe some drugs should be restricted and usage controlled. I’m pro legalization, but I would not support opium dens being as common as Starbucks.
Why do you say it's not working out in Portugal or Amsterdam? I frequently hear those two places cited as an example of where drug liberalisation has been a big success. Is that not true? I ask from ignorance.
The programme in Portugal requires people to check in with the authorities, seek treatment and move off the street corner. It by most accounts worked ok for a while, but downtown Lisbon started to look pretty bad recently, and I think they’ve been backpedaling a bit.
In Amsterdam, the drug tourism made the city hard to live in, and the authorities have largely cleaned it up now. Weed is a special case, but using anything else on the street will warrant a check-in from the cops.
I live in Lisbon and I don't see how "downtown Lisbon started to look pretty badly recently". Street drug users, seemingly mostly/wholly homeless, seem to be concentrated in an area I wouldn't call downtown. I don't really know what they do to keep it that way though. Also Porto seems to be an entirely different story from what I've seen there.
In any case, Portugal's strategy was supposed to be diverting funds from the narcotics police to rehabilitation efforts. But those funds have steadily eroded over the years with cost-cutting measures such as the merger of the autonomous drug agency into the main healthcare service. It's not too surprising if it is falling short of its initial success.
Another thing to consider is the inseparability of homelessness and drug abuse issues. It doesn't seem to be possible address one without the other, rising homelessness will inevitably bring more drug abuse. (Still I see fewer homeless people in downtown Lisbon than in Barcelona that won't even let you have a beer in the park).
Fair enough, my knowledge of the situation in Lisbon is mostly second hand from some friends there. When I visited them, there were definitely areas that were pretty dodgy in what seemed to me to be the downtown. Now, I’ve been to places that are actually dangerous, and I’ve never felt unsafe in Portugal, but I definitely did get accosted by a clammy, pale looking gentleman with a nervous tick who tried to steal my phone.
I don’t know about Portugal. But Amsterdam’s drug toleration (it’s still illegal mind you) happens against a background of pretty intense anti-drug culture. As that culture has become more permissive, drug policy has become more punitive: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/681551
As someone from the “rest of the world” I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I think this claim is based on a broad misunderstanding of, let’s be honest, Western European politics by people who’ve never voted in elections here.
I live in Switzerland, have lived or worked in the Netherlands, UK and Czechia. The liberal parts of the US are far to the left of any of those countries.
(Yes, healthcare is cheaper, except in Switzerland. It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but on questions related to drug use in the public square, I think you’d find it’s a lot less lenient here than you think.)
I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true
Hm, maybe? Public transport, for example, I very nice, I agree, but in fact it’s less affordable in most places than, say in New York. I’d much rather be poor in NYC than in Paris, London or Prague. At least in NYC, you don’t get charged more for commuting from a cheaper area, the city provides heat, there are community programs, etc.
Look up some actual political programs from major parties in Western Europe. You’ll be surprised.
I think most Americans have seen a sanitized version of Europe, just like most Europeans have seen the evening news version of America. Both of those ideas are caricatures.
You honestly think NYC is a good place to be poor? lol
I mean, "poor" might mean different things to different people. Call it working class? I'd rather commute from the Bronx for $2.90 than from Croydon (in many ways the Bronx of London) for, like, $7. I'd much rather get heating for free than pay, like, $5k in London.
If you're on the street, none of this helps you much, but across many metrics, I think NYC might legitimately be more affordable to live for the working class than London or Paris.
The way I see it, current European conservatism manifests as nationalism, anti immigration, anti Islam, and anti green policy. I looked at French and Dutch conservativd parties and that seems like a fair description. They’re still in support of government funded education, healthcare, labor organization, vast public transportation etc… those are all hot topics to American conservatives. American conservatives also have their own colors of nationalism and anti immigration stances, but I’m talking class issues, as opposed to social and culture issues. I don’t live in Europe and not a politics expert, so correct me if I’m wrong
You got this wrong: drug use generates homelessness. Most homeless in the US are drug addicts - many of them with serious health conditions partly induced by drug use - and that’s why they can’t hold a job or get a home.
In San Francisco when we give homes to drug addicts, the first thing they do is ripping the sink out to sell it and buy more drugs.
There is a serious drug epidemic that needs to be addressed simultaneously as we try to help the super-minority of legitimate homeless that are bad on their luck and need 2-3 months to find a new job and get back on their feet.
I always felt like I heard this was the opposite. That the drug addicts were the minority population, but the majority of the news stories. I feel like we both would benefit from statistics that prove either way. My feelings are generated from anecdotes I've heard over the years, and I would love to be proved wrong and change my mind. Do you know? I feel like so much of this discussion is fueled by strong feelings without data.
You're both sort of correct, but that also makes you both sort of wrong too.
Homeless is in part composed of three things (in Portland):
- Substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, etc)
- Mental health (coincides with the above!)
- Housing (which normally stabilizes, somewhat, both of the above!)
We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland, which makes the former two more visible and at times problematic.
More than half suffer substance abuse. Accounting for the fact that many of them would deny admitting to drug use when asked, this is probably a conservative number and the percentage is much higher. Also this is an US average, and it doesn't take into consideration "drug tourism" in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle where drug use is literally the main goal thanks to easy drug access, therefore the drug-related homelessness ratio in some places is much higher.
They also probably take into account both housed an unhoused homeless, with the nuance that unhoused homeless are more likely to be druggies and to refuse shelter. Therefore the percentage of homeless population we see every day in our streets (which is the subset of homeless more likely to affect our day-to-day lives) have very likely an higher percentage of drug use.
Finally, the US actually has another problem: we can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.
[0] https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
[1] https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...
Source? This reads like a Leftist talking point. I’d be interested in understanding who trained on you on this idea.
The Democratic party would be considered right of center to many Western European nations, but certainly not compared to "the rest of the world", and there's a growing chunk of U.S. politicians that are proper left of center as well.
Pretty much only on the issue of taxes. But the right-wing parties surging in popularity in Europe right now make Trump look like Jimmy Carter.
This is only true economically in arenas like taxes and government programs. Socially what country are you thinking of that is to the left of the American left?
In what way? Compared to almost everywhere on earth, American politicians are extremely xenophilic, extremely tolerant of sexual minorities, extremely feminist, more inclined towards individual freedoms in general and perhaps slightly more capitalist.
All of these things are different axes of politics that are correlated differently in different regions of the world.
Conservatism isn't the point, it's the specific tactics being used that they're highlighting. IIRC the same tactics were recommended in that WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" that still makes the rounds on the internet.
The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.
I disagree, falsely labeling things conservative is unproductive for the conversation of "what is going right or wrong in Portland, OR, USA". That's to say, context and the goals of discussion are important. We do a lot of committees out here, but most of them are with the aim of including a vast number of viewpoints. If your point is that we fancy ourselves the type of liberals that do everything but nothing well even to a dysfunctional degree then you and I might agree. If your point is to say there's some conservative operator out here speaking to struggles, empowerment, etc then I'd say you're off your rocker.
It's not a false label. Conservatives do in fact do this. It's kinda their thing. Look what Obamacare became once they got involved.
Nobody is saying conservatives have infiltrated the Portland political scene, only that we see similar failures in other contexts when initiatives are half-assed (on purpose). Similar circumstances-- not identical.
It is a false label when there are no conservatives in Portland's government. That yields to two things:
- This is just a common American tactic
- There are other, less nefarious, reasons this happens
Including conservatives in a context where they don't exist and shifting the goal posts outside of American politics on a whim is both entirely inappropriate and distracting if your goal is to discuss how Portland can be better. Nobody in Portland is sabotaging our committees is my point; at the very least they're not doing so intentionally.
What you do get here is what some people call "everything bagel style liberalism" where we do everything, but nothing particularly well, and there is really no North Star when it comes to ethos.
Taking that as an axiom; then what exactly would the plan be to make the welfare system work? Conservatives are frequently going to be in power, they represent about half the votes.
If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only real choice is to abandon the welfare system. Otherwise, the alternative is to abandon the welfare system spitefully in a way that doesn't achieve anything for anyone.
Technically, Republicans are not necessarily "half the votes", more like "a third of the votes" which are then joined by another 10-15% of "unfaithful" swing voters - whose opinions don't necessarily overlap 100% with core conservative principles.
Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms.
You can quickly judge the actual opinion of the overwhelming majority of voters on completely abolishing welfare provisions, when you mention a few magic words that happen to extend those provisions to "normies" (medicare etc).
"Unfaithful"
I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:
Vote for what?
They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.
What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.
And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.
It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.
The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:
A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy
Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...
Today I do not judge others for their votes.
Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.
And I do not blame or shame anyone either.
It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.
Calm down, it's just a technical term when talking about voter behaviour - the "faithfuls" being voters extremely unlikely to ever change their preference (regardless of what it is). It's a fact of life that many voters have "for life" preferences.
BTW: Indie voters are roughly 45 percent.
The two major parties share the partisan vote.
This means Republicans are actually a quarter of us along with Dems.
Party line voting is not the only game in town. Roughly half the nation wants to vote FOR something, not AGAINST "the bad guys"
The conservatives who run Portland and Oregon?
You will note of course that the rules and regulations around how to implement these things are always 'bipartisan' and meant to stir up as little backlash as possible. There's many opportunities to install bottlenecks and roadblocks in systems that end up shaping the entire way they function. To some extent it is progressives anticipating conservative backlash but there's plenty of lines in plenty of laws written into and insisted on by conservatives that have wide-ranging consequences.
Reductionist perspectives on how politics works always end up at this "one side is dominating the other" kind of narrative but it's never actually that way, both sides still have a lot of influence on the various specifics of the outcome.
Are you seriously attributing public sector bureaucratic dysfunction to some sort of subversive public sector conservative operatives, or vague regulatory poison pills that you cannot actually point to here?
It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.
Subversive public sector partisanship is a lot more believable than a homeless industrial complex, I'm glad you brought the two up together.
They mean not leftists enough, its a way to absolve themselves of any responsibility of the situation at hand, if only they were even more leftist.
This is just about the worst example you could have used for your theory. In this case there are thousands of people that could have just done a 1:1 copy of what they do in Switzerland, Portugal, Netherlands, Scandinavia etc. Instead they copied only the carrot (treatment and harm reduction). Then they didn't just not copy the stick (prison, consequences for missing treatment) they threw away all their sticks.
With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.
This reads like total denial. COVID was years ago. The city I’m in bounced back and was mostly normal late 2021. I also was interested in the outcome of Portland’s experiment. It has failed. The war on drugs is anti-liberty and I recognize its racist roots. But racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023. Again, denial and excuses. The war on drugs AND Portland’s experiment are BOTH failures. I welcome the next attempt at it.
Which city are you in? All of the major West Coast cities have not had downtown office occupancy return to pre-pandemic rates as far as I am aware.
I don't think lack of tech bros manning high cost corporate square footage is what is causing the homeless, crime, and addiction problems in West Coast cities. It seems more like bad policies to me. The time window to blame everything on covid is passing quickly
“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.”
It's always interesting when someone assumes that failed strategy X would have obviously worked if only had it been pursued even harder.. you might be right, but it seems like an odd assumption to make given the circumstance.
What circumstance? The clamor to use prison time as a solution to homelessness and drug use?
You know what thread we're in, right? You know what circumstances I'm referring to..
People generally don’t ask you to clarify if they know what you’re talking about.
That's interesting, cheers
Appropriate response.
Except as a rhetorical device which the above person is clearly using his request as...
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.
So this might be a problem specific to Portland. The government is structured to fail. Hopefully it changes.
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.
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
“ 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.
So, how and why are they "sitting on unspent funds"? Are there delays in building plans or legislature slowing stuff down?
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.
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).
So which do you prefer to tack on the end of that: "...except for the disabled" or "...and to hell with the disabled"? Both are widely used.
I have people with disabilities in my family so I know their realities up close - unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops.
My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a society that tends to look down on them either as limited (usually from the right) or as “must-be-kept-cotton-balled” (usually from the left).
They want to be seen as people, which is what they are.
Good. Now... why isn't an addiction a disability?
Because despite significant variance, resisting to the lure of addiction using willpower is much more effective than using willpower to reconnect one's spine.
If you examined that statement fully you'd realise how little sense it makes as an answer to the question.
One of the big issues with severe disability is the stupidly low cap on assets to qualify for social programs (SS, Medicaid). It was set in the 70s at $2000 and hasn't been changed since.
This keeps people with severe disabilities out of the workforce more than anything else.
Those limits -all of them should follow inflation. The 10,000 you can carry on a plane, the amount you can deposit without scrutiny, etc. all had reasonable limits when set, but things have changed since the ‘70s except those caps.
For the disability cap, it should simply be eliminated. What do I care if some millionaire kid gets SS and Medicare? They are likely paying for it in taxes (or should be).
I'd rather that than have someone lose healthcare because they saved $15k (1970 2k in today's money). Or worse, because Grandma left them an inheritance not knowing the impact that has on their heath coverage.
Severe disability does not go away after your bank account hits 2k.
Why the flamebait?
I think we can assume it's because I came on unnecessarily sarcastic. But he seems to have rolled back from "tangible contributions are the only thing", which is nice.
What about raising children?
is not a contribution by default?
That sounds very short sighted. You are preconditioned on all of your ancestors having kids. Everything you like, love, care about was created by someone who was first created by their parents. If not for those people there would be nothing.
Raising children is the greatest, riskiest, and costliest contribution to the world most of us can make. It should be respected.
HN is so bizarrely blood-and-soil sometimes.
I didn't ask my ancestors to screw, thanks. I mean, good for them, I guess? But I wish people would stop insinuating that having children is the pinnacle of human achievement, when, in fact, it's actually the bare minimum. I wish they would realize that not everyone needs to have children (the math alone simply doesn't work out on a finite planet...), and I wish they wouldn't cast aspersions on those of us who choose to live the way we do. How about we go after the people who had kids but shouldn't have, instead?
who will change your diapers when you need them again?
spoiler: if not your children, then someone else’s - the robots may not be sufficiently dexterous by that point.
it is fine to not want children. or to want them. to pretend either side is morally superior is rather foolish. practically speaking, you’re gonna need your diaper changed.
There is more to life than paying taxes
Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.
There is no option to opt-out of paying taxes and voluntarily live in the woods.
You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years.
These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.
You get collective benefit even if you live in the woods. You can’t opt-out because you don’t opt out of the benefit.
You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.
You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away.
Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
You can vote not to though.
The argument of getting something for the taxes you pay is made because people can vote away taxes.
But yes, it's a troubling argument, because once people start thinking that way they feel like they're owed something. Large swaths of the elderly and the infirm may not be paying taxes but are absolutely owed things that often cost money just because they're a fellow citizen and a member of our society.
Actually, I pay taxes because I have to.
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.
Stay at home parents would fall into this category. I think the unit is "family" if it's a family, and not "person".
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.
You can provide art and music to the community, either by strumming your guitar aggressively at passers-by or turning up your boom box to max volume so everyone can hear your shitty music. /s
I agree but also think it goes further than that. The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. Which is a separate discussion we could have, but I think it's especially disingenuous as a country still dealing with an opioid crisis. I know first hand people who went and paid for school, got jobs and healthcare, and became addicts. It literally happened to them (I chose that wording carefully) by being treated with over prescribed highly addictive substances.
The ones who are doing better have to actively make the decision every day to be "a productive member of society" and it's extremely difficult for them. Even though they may have been prone to addiction before their medications, this is still something that happened to them.
A lot of people like this exist though. Toronto has a huge problem where the homeless refuse to go to shelters because they don't want to be told they can't use drugs. So they make the conscious decision to opt out of society and stay on the street.
There is no way to get through to people like this. Even if they had their own place they'd probably OD before the end of the week with all their extra comfort and freedom they have. Some people can't be helped and that needs to be something people are more willing to accept.
As for your friends, popping opioids like candy is a poor decision even if your doctor is prescribing it to you. Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. The opioid crisis is not society's fault.
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.).
Noble savages?
Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest.
Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial.
Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a problem in that they risk their lives for no real benefit to anyone.
What should a city do when the people that pay taxes and keep the machine chugging along decide to leave because the city is becoming an unbearable mess?
It's an honest question. Social programs cost money, and the money comes from taxes.
I am generally in favor of drugs being legalized and drug addiction being treated as a healthcare policy concern instead of a criminal concern. But the experiment seems to fail more often than not.
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.
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.
It's simpler than that.
- cities are economic engines
- economic engines generate both wealth and tax revenue
- if you don't care for the economic engine, you lose your tax revenue
Everything the government does is built upon tax revenue.
Did they say “all there is to life is to pay taxes”? You’re reading what you want to read and shifting the conversation. There is a social contract that the majority of the population voted for you like it or not. That’s what society is. If you want to follow your own calendar, pay with your own money, not share your bread with the rest of the team, then don’t expect that team to pay for your needles, clean your poop, and also expect them to let you continue doing this indefinitely in the nicest parts of the town that was built with the shared bread of everyone else. The “contribution to society” we agreed on at a monetary level is taxes. We agreed on it so hard that if I don’t pay them I go to jail. Why should I be happy to use that for people who don’t want to be part of that system? What contribution to the greater society are hard drug users or homeless with mental issues without a recovery plan giving the society? Are they donating their time to clean up downtown? Trimming weeds? Walking old ladies across the street?
Why normalize this? The more permissive you get the less pressure there is on fixing it. I’m not saying jail like a thief or murderer would get, but why not make the decision for someone unable to do it themselves and enforce recovery?
"Taxpayers" is a word people use when they want to say "workers" without the baggage of sounding like a communist. I don't think it's so much about paying taxes.
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
My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.
And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit
Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.
Fixing the structural issues :). In a country where the minimum wage is 2x higher, where mental and physical health care is free, and where the real estate market is mostly controlled by private citizens rather than corporations, I seriously doubt homelessness would be an issue.
Tbh Portland didn’t really try to solve homelessness/poverty. Because it knows it can’t, at the city/county level. I mean, what would that even look like? The city taxes alone paying for a huge swath of free housing, at a time when middle class workers can barely afford to live here?
We need to come together as a country and civilization to solve this problem.
based on absolutely nothing other than platitudes
The question also presumes a fixed number of homeless, which is obviously not true looking at the explosion of them we've had over the past decade. You can meaningfully reduce the number of homeless by (a) building a lot more housing, including especially the lowest rung on the housing ladder (weekly/daily-pay SROs), and (b) simply not tolerating them. When you tolerate something, you get more of it.
Hmmm we should solve poverty by not tolerating it? I have many solutions to poverty, but to be honest, that’s never shown up on the list for me.
The US largely has solved poverty by not tolerating it. The poverty rate has never been lower.
It's absolutely easy. There is no faster way to kill a city. Drive away the people with money and businesses die, tax revenue plummets and it turns into an irrelevant backwater.
All this stuff costs money. It's always like this, "somebody" gotta go out there and solve these difficult problems. Nobody actually wants to be that somebody though. No one wants to step up and pay for it. If you try to make them pay, they leave.
The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stopping the drugs entering the country.
The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”. Just to pick one.
I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed, but I implore you to be more empathetic to their situation. I PROMISE you, homelessness is not fun, it does not feel good in any way, and no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint.
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.
You can't help a person if they don't want to be helped. At the very least you can remove them from the society to make it safe and maybe make the person rethink their life. By shielding a drug addict from the consequences of their wrong life choices you are preventing their potential rehabilitation, unless they've been lost completely, of course.
comment you are replying to said "forced rehab" - this is not sheltering people from the consequences of their actions, it's forcing them to accept them and change those actions.
Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a full body cast for a bit. The doctor in charge of him decided it was a good time to get him sober, so he spent a couple agonising weeks in a full body cast suffering through heroin withdrawal, and he's been clean since.
So your plan is to lock them into psychiatric wards. Then let them out and they will be productive members of society because that's how it worked for someone who can back from Vietnam once you heard.
When they get out they don't have a family or job or support system to go back to. They won't seek drugs to ease those pains again?
So you heard once that someone lost their entire family and support system because of a single inpatient stay?
I do feel like you somewhat misrepresented my comment.
I was clarifying the meaning of the previous comments.
FWIW, I did actually get locked up in a psych ward once, for reasons involving drug abuse, and while it was unpleasant, it probably did do me some good, although I did have a family and support system to go back to.
Furthermore, I'd like to point out that forcing someone to sober up does not mean that you don't help them in other ways, like providing them with a home and assigning someone to help them.
I think it's possible that just giving someone a home and a case worker if they're in the middle of an opiate addiction will not help them find a happy place in the world, and as such, supplementing such aid by using a bit of coercive force to help them kick some bad habits may, in the long run, leave them happier than otherwise.
finally, I apologise if I'm being too sensitive here, but perhaps you could make a slight effort to be a little nicer when conversating, honestly I did find your comment a bit hurtful.
The approach of giving an addict that is arrested on theft and other charges a choice of prison or treatment is used successfully (as successful as it can be) in many EU countries. Obviously this cannot work if nobody gets convicted for anything short of murder, the incentives don't work.
Unfortunately we have the police for dealing with violations, and when you have a (expensive) hammer everything starts to look like a nail. What I mean is, I agree with both viewpoints: something must be done (don't even bother saying taxpayers - the addicts don't have it easy either), and jail/beating is definitely not that thing. I know this was said already but seeing the actual situation I think it's worth repeating.
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).
More than a service, bring back the projects. Yes there were problems with them the last time around, but the problem we have now seems worse on all fronts.
...but you do need to move them somewhere else ...
So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|
Somewhere else could be a recovery facility, housing located in a cheaper area so it’s cheaper to run, not an active volcano or a small town downtown.
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.
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 :(
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.
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?
You solve homelessness directly by giving people housing.
Free housing paid for by people like me, and ideally others, who are more than happy to take what I make and give it to people who need it more than I do.
And you don’t need to be rich to do it. It’s a decision on how much money etc you actually need to be fulfilled.
If that takes a zombie proof bunker and multiple houses and first class flights and…and… then that’s on your head that you prefer to comfort yourself than take care of others.
Your thought process in commendable but years of this has made me cynical. No one wants to live in the same apartment complex as junkies. If you put them all together it turns into a crime filled cesspool. A hard drug addict is essentially toxic to any situation you drop them in. The solution is to forcibly treat them in rehab centers and then maybe follow up with free housing. This is followed up by drug testing for atleast a few years otherwise you lose your free housing. If the person relapses, the worst that can happen is they are back in forced rehab and at the very least are off the streets, out of sight and not bothering regular people.
You sound like you'd be shocked at how many high-functioning junkies live in most apartment complexes in most major cities. Upper-middle-class guys, holding down jobs - at least until a run of bad luck hits.
The functioning junkies obviously aren't the ones who "need" free housing. The junkies on the street are the ones who can't handle their shit and have alienated all of their friends and family who might otherwise help them. Nobody wants to live with them and they can't take care of themselves, and therefore they're on the street. And for these very reasons, nobody wants to share an apartment building with them.
Yes. And nobody can handle their shit 100% of the time, so this is really quite a lot of people one or two mistakes away from being on the street. Many of whom you ignorantly count as "clean" friends or neighbors.
How does America go through the whole fucking opioid crisis and still think that addiction is a personal moral failing endemic to some outgroup? It's a sickening view.
What percentage of Americans ever end up on the street? "Homeless" but couch surfing with friends or relatives doesn't count for this consideration because we're talking about people who lost that fallback (despite you chopping off that part when you quoted me.)
Because, despite what we Americans have claimed forever, America is actually an anarcho-capitalist wasteland of domination.
So if you can figure out how to dominate a group, you will win and you’ll be rewarded for it. This is why people come here. America is the last place where you can basically do whatever the fuck you want, and as long as you gain enough money and influence, you’ll be celebrated.
I mean Trump EMBODIED what I just described and he not only won the presidency, he has successfully created a cult that could actually ruin everything.
Where else but a lawless wasteland would produce that?
I can attest to part of this. I spent several months in a halfway house earlier this year for those coming out of prison. Putting (mostly) addicts together in one building was total and utter chaos. They all fed off each other. The few that were trying to stay sober and get employment had an insane challenge because everyone around them was using and stealing their stuff to sell for drugs. It was crazy.
It is also mind-blowing that you would release addicts with essentially zero support. They don't even get ID coming out of prison in Illinois, so they can't access any support services at all.
Again, I don't know what the solution is, but I know some things that don't work :(
I have to tell you that I have quite a bit of experience on this and a little bit of compassion and love goes along way.
Maybe talking to people one on one asking who they are how their day is, can you help them? Can you get them anything?
This time last year I helped a man named John stop sleeping outside by supporting him and giving him the moral and ethical support that he needed to reconnect with his family and he was off the streets and a couple of months. When we reconnected, he said that it was because of my outreach that he was able to have what he needed to reach back out to his family. It cost me 50 dollars in groceries/medical kit and about an hour of my time.
So it’s eminently possible, you can do it every single day that you go out into the world.
You simply choose not to.
Yes, and we can solve drug addiction directly by giving people drugs.
What is free housing? Free as in indefinitely free with no strings attached? Free utilities, free services, free food, perhaps free transportation? Free furniture, free healthcare, free drugs, free clothes, free HOA?
Do you think the violent addicts everyone complains about just need a house, and starting from day one they will become productive members of society?
The answer is a community that cares about this person and is going to invest in them. Period
That’s it that’s the solution.
Until every person on earth has a supportive loving community - which mathematically works out very easily - we’ll never solve these problems.
There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this. It’s also not biologically determined - fear and greed are not inherit in humans, those are all learned behaviors. I fear however it’s going to take generations to undo how much we have invested in domination based systems rather than partnership based structures.
You are so stuck in your bubble that can't even imagine that societies exist today without a massive homelessness problem. Societies that do not have a "supportive loving community" but that combine individual responsibility with strong social services.
Yes there is. What you and other "progressives" fail to acknowledge is that for every well meaning supportive and loving member of society there are two people who will use them and their resources endlessly until they drop dead. If your plan is to wait until we change human nature - then good luck.
Want to see a preview? Socialize with families of alcoholics, drug addicts, psychopaths, etc. Look how their "loving and supportive" families are destroyed by one person who abuses them with no end in sight.
Stop fantasizing about changing human nature. The future where we all meditate in peace like that advanced society in Fantastic Planet won't happen any time soon. The more likely future is that we will completely stagnate and fail to resolve any societal issues because we treat people like they are lost babies that just need a supportive and loving community to be found.
I wish you peace. Genuinely.
No, but they will probably start pooping at their house.
How can someone pushing themselves to the limit of heroin od have anything sustainable.
Kind of valid. In Portland "housing first" has been all the rage, but having lived with pretty severe addiction for some years, and spent lots of time around fellow addicts in considerably worse circumstances, it's pretty hard to imagine that a house on its own is some kind of solution. Especially when compared to a support network and high quality addiction treatment, medical care, and mental health services. In terms of sustainable recovery, the former is a luxury, while some combo of the latter are essential requirements. Of course, having all of them is by far the best.. man, addiction is a bitch.
"Housing first" isn't the belief that providing a house "on its own is some kind of solution". It's the belief and practice of not refusing to provide housing support until people meet certain criteria – which is often how governments approach the problem.
"We only help those who help themselves", etc.
You get people a safe place to sleep and then provide them with resources to become re-integrated into society, not the other way around.
If someone is very much not ready "to become re-integrated into society" then they can't be independently entrusted with a house (because they'll screw up life for others around them and the house itself with various asocial and illegal acts), that "safe place to sleep" has to be in an institution controlled by others with some enforced rules - until they become capable of following the rules on their own, which generally requires treating the addiction, and is the point when they can become re-integrated into society.
1. They can generally be "trusted" with a house. It's a house. You sleep there.
2. The idea they need constant monitoring comes from the same outdated approach that believes we shouldn't help people unless they deserve it and we can make sure they deserve it. That model has not proven effective and either reducing homelessness or reducing homelessness' external costs on society. It has proven even less effective at improving long term mental health and addiction issues.
3. We have not found a long-term solution to chronic mental health and addiction issues. No approach, yet, has shown outsized performance over any other. Housing First approaches, however, have shown an improvement in homelessness, medical services and criminality – which might be the best we can hope for.
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.
I tend to agree. But for the sake of fleshing it out,
Here's the rub: When you get to the point of needing free housing, you are usually more or less already at the, shal we say, 'mature' phase of your addiction where there is hardly an ounce of joy left to be had from it. The daily grind of figuring out how to get high is basically just your hellish normal, and the best rush you might get here and there in your average month is akin to eating a nice meal, having a good (but not great) conversation, or a satisfying workout.
Compared to good sex? Get out of here. That phase of drug use is long gone. If you want that back even for a fleeting moment you have to go through the hell of withdrawal first. Even doses that put you dangerously close to OD don't really reach that anymore unless you risk them after a period of abstinence (which is where most opiate addicts used to die, back before fentanyl was the norm).
However, with all that said, I'd argue a functional addict is better equipped to deal with the stuff you mention above better than a severe addict who is trying to get sober after years of active addiction. Obviously acute withdrawal is an absolute bastard, but so are the following months of post acute withdrawal (aka your brain and body re-learning how to function at a completely new level of physiology). If we were doing it right, sobriety would be a hard requirement up front, followed by a good deal of support during the transition back into housing.
True, it's much easier to get sober in stable housing. But you know what's even easier still? Continuing to use in a more comfortable and secure environment. Or worse yet, when free housing is still pretty scarce, using your pad as a commodity to score perks from your friends who are still homeless, or worse, using it as a safer and more secure place to stash and deal quantities of drugs to support your addiction directly. Anyone in active addiction will consider these possibilities the moment the lock is turned and they are alone in their new home (not all will act on it, of course). Housing yes, but probably not 'housing first.'
You don't take a patient with a gunshot wound and make sure they have a long term care bed to lie in comfortably while they bleed. You get their ass to the ER and fix the bleed before worrying about the long term stuff.
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.
Why did we stop?
Feels like a follow-on from the "white flight" phenomenon. The rich and/or influential (that is, middle-/upper-class, but Americans aren't used to thinking that way) people who set policy for a city no longer live or even spend any time downtown. They push for the policies they think are right, but there's no feedback mechanism to tell them what effect they're actually having.
This was part of the 'efficiency' drive. Many cities added or merged with lots of the subburbs. And then those subburbs control policy.
Torronto is a perfect example. It was merged into Greater Torronto, and those new areas are what led to Trumpist style Rob Ford being elected.
And its also zoning. Its always surprising to me how in the US people don't live in the cities. In Europe, the city center are very lived in. The downtown can't turn into a ghost town, even if everybody works from home.
> In Europe, the city center are very lived in
UK being an exception, sadly. Which is understandable, considering they basically invented the "suburb" concept and then exported it to the colonies.
I don't know about that, places like central London and Manchester are quite densly populated, at least by UK standards. And the UK only really got into suburbs after WW2, when huge swathes of the urban population were moved into garden cities.
> at least by UK standards
I live near Manchester, I know, but the city centre is still nowhere as dense (in terms of dwellings) as most towns and cities on the continent. It's changed for sure - lots of old warehouses and factories have turned into flats - but the city has clearly been built for business activity first and foremost. And as soon as you move to smaller towns, like Warrington, the number of people actually sleeping in the town centre falls immediately falls to almost zero. Brits just want to live in suburbia and in the countryside.
Why do I have to dig so far down into this thread before finding someone with an informed position based in actual history of cities? Everything else I'm seeing is coming from a standpoint that screams of a sheltered position separated from the realities of the city and a society that fails to provide a dignified existence for these people. I have seen no mention of the fact that america has the most homeless and undernourishment for any developed country, or three times as many empty homes as there are homeless. Or that we subsidize the lifestyle of these suburban dwellers by exhausting municipal budgets just repairing the sewer lines that serve neighborhoods that are 1/5th or less the density of the city. Just a long stream of "this looks bad, I don't like looking at it, we should just push the problem outward."
Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments, and it shouldn't be surprising that it is experiencing visible failures this early on, or an indictment of those policies.
Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?
If you really want to destroy a city, I can't think of a better way to do it than going down this path.
Well if an adult was found to be a nuisance and was unable to care for themselves, they would be put into the mental hospital. Unfortunately, due to some issues, those did not work out too well.
and then the US closed most of them and now issues can not work themselves out... anywhere else.
good or bad? not sure.
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.
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.
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.
I really doubt homeless people are good pet owners. Food scarcity, lack of medical care for your pets, etc, etc…
Pets don't really need medical care per se. There's a huge glut of unwanted dogs, so is it better to euthanize so many unwanted dogs right away, or would it be better to just allow some of them to live on the street with homeless people, and then be euthanized when they have medical problems (which usually takes years: pets are typically fairly healthy until they get older unless they get injured, much like humans)?
Yeah, no. Dogs owned by homeless people are literally the happiest dogs around: they get to spend all their time outside, by their owner's side. They have a clear purpose as a companion, and are cared for deeply.
It's the dogs that get left alone inside an apartment for 9 hours a day that are unhappy and neglected.
What does that have to do with anything? Being a bad pet owner doesn't make you a non-pet-owner.
I don't say this often, but you are absolutely wrong about this.
They'll often, if not always, prioritize their animals over themselves. They're no different from housed pet owners in that way.
24/7 companionship, with owners that don't leave all day for work...
Maybe instead of guess, go spend some time with people in transition or otherwise sleeping rough. You’ll probably learn a lot
A tent in a park, unless in the middle of a trail, doesn't inherently or necessarily make it less usable or less safe.
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.
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.
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.
In no small part because psychiatric hospitals were wildly, wildly abused. Basically you could lock people up indefinitely with no conviction of anything because someone said they’re a danger to themselves/society/whatever. Basically used like an on-shore Guantanamo.
Simple solution; require convictions. The problem wasn't with locking up junkies, the problems was doing it without due process.
Create laws against public drug use, then enforce them.
Set them up again but increase inspections and have maximum times you can keep a person there.
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.
You can probably make the same argument for someone with an alcohol DUI but we still deal with that issue severely. We need more of that here.
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
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.
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.
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.
As someone on the US East Coast - Boston and NYC are doing pretty fine. This is very much a specific cities problem, not an all cities problem.
Europe has much higher police officers per capita than the US.
Portland specifically has less police officers per capita than Haiti.
What about Paris? I think you can find as many European as American examples, but instead of junkies it is gangs making the cities unsafe.
But from what I know the police in Paris sometimes clear away the tent cities from the streets.
I don't buy this "WFH makes downtowns drug-ridden war zones" dichotomy. I've been to downtown Portland before Covid, and it was pretty repulsive, just like SF. Sure, it has deteriorated in both places since, but that was not pre-determined. WFH != war zone in downtown.
Your paraphrase is a strawman (melodramatic one at that). Nice job ripping it asunder to show us all how serious you are
Bucks are free, just print them. Wait, no, money are digital now, press a button and make money numbers.
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.
Most things have a genetic component. Blame doesn't disappear because someone was more predisposed towards something. For instance, men are generally more predisposed to violence than women. Any sane person would agree there is a likely a genetic component to this fact. But if a man beats his wife, we still can and should blame him, even if it were true that with different genetics he would not have beaten his wife. (or more realistically, with different genetics he would have likely never married the same woman.)
I think we are in agreement here. What I was responding to was your seemingly lack of interest in solutions only commenting about still being able to blame folks for decisions they made whereas I think if we are going to spend we should spend to take folks off the streets and get them help or further remove what is seen as a blight to an otherwise beautiful city.
The streets and parks and business fronts are not camping areas.
It sounds like we agree more than I originally understood. I do care about treatment, and despite what my comment might have suggested, I think blame should be wholly separate from punishment or remediation. I don't care particularly if we spend a lot of time blaming drug addicts, only if we get the streets cleaned up, and their lives improved.
+100 to this
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".
Respect is for humans. If you rot your brain until you begin to revert to primal instincts the state is under no obligation to accommodate you.
The state is accommodating us by dealing with such people, and we keep the state under control (lol) by not letting them get sloppy with even the worst among us.
That is, the state does in fact have certain obligations, regardless of any personal feelings one may have.
I think you accurately characterized a sizable portion of the electorate, not just in the US but in many Western countries. That still leaves me wondering what the social workers, homeless advocates, Mission workers etc were doing.
Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.
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.
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, I agree and that is what I said ..
"I think other people have a right to walk the streets undisturbed"
And when you ban public drug use and enforce it, you automatically remove all junkies from public spaces.
Depends on your definition of "use".
I can do a bunch of meth somewhere discreet, and then party on the streets without actively "using" drugs for hours - days even!
I think the legal definition is, if you have drugs in your blood, for which there are simple tests for.
And people bothering other people on the streets is not alright and should be stopped any way, drugs in their blood or not.
In one comment thread you've gone from "some people may need to be forced to accept treatment" to "anyone taking drugs on the street should be arrested" to "anyone doing anything that bothers anyone else in a public space, or who has done something in the recent past that bothers someone now near them, should be arrested."
"some people may need to be forced to accept treatment"
I did not say that, you probably confused my comment with someone else.
Like I said in another comment. There are lots of other ways to ban something in a area, than locking up.
Fine them and take their drugs would be a simple one.
Fine them? They don't have money, and won't pay. What do you do when they won't pay? Garnish their wages? Don't have any.
Take their drugs? Oh no. They'll just get more, eventually. It's not like they have a lifetime supply stashed away. They generally do the drugs shortly after getting them. They're unlikely to have any to take.
You act as if the police are complete morons and totally incompetent and haven't thought of any or tried any alternatives - anywhere in the world.
Yeah, they don't have much. So if you take what little they have, if they go bother people in the public, they will avoid those places. You just have to enforce it consequently. Most junkies don't want stress and just get high (and they hate having to let go of their next high). Only if you tolerate them in public spaces with 0 consequences - then they will stay with their drugs.
"You act as if the police are complete morons and totally incompetent and haven't thought of any or tried any alternatives - anywhere in the world"
That's the thing. Addicts on the streets in europe for example, are a rare thing. And I know many other places on the world, with no junkies on the streets either. And also with a way lower prisoner to population ratio. So maybe there are other ways, besides just jailing everyone. (Which is pretty expensive btw.)
This is because most of Europe has better social safety nets and didn't have an opioid crisis (also partly because of its safety nets), not because they "banned" anything. Drugs and active drug users are in the end still pretty easy to find in central areas in major cities if you look; and if the police do get involved you definitely go to jail.
"and if the police do get involved you definitely go to jail."
Have you been to europe? I was born and live here and have been to allmost every other EU state and people going to jail for drugs is allmost not existent to my knowledge - unless people are dealing big quantities. (Or doing other crimes while drugged, but then they go for the other crimes and not the drugs)
"Drugs and active drug users are in the end still pretty easy to find in central areas in major cities if you look"
You can also find many drunk people, if you go to the pubs - but I don't remember the last time, I saw junkies in the streets. Of course, seeing people who likely do drugs regular, sure, but minding their own buisness and going somewhere, not occuping the streets and scaring normal people, which I thought is what we are talking about here.
Check out this guy, he solved the whole war on drugs in an HN comment! "Don't arrest them, just ban it."
Total idiocy.
In the US, it's generally only possession (not use) that's a crime. The main exception is while operating a vehicle, which is just about the only time the police will do blood testing. Hospitals will do a tox screen if they're taken in for some medical reason, but it becomes exactly that: a medical issue, not a legal one.
When does James Bond live in a tent house?
The house at the beginning of No Time to Die is roughly a tent house like those in the Four Seasons in Chiang Rai.
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.
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.
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.
Man, even Friends of Trees! Literally planting trees for free got cancelled by Portland because of back-room nonsense:
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/11/portland-oregon-tree-...
Cairo wouldn’t comment on the complaints about her management style. Responding on her behalf, Parks and Recreation spokesperson Cherelle Jackson said the bureau wouldn’t comment on “rumors about a member of our team.” “Unfortunately, too many women in male-dominated industries like forestry face this behavior,” Jackson wrote in an email to OPB. “As a Bureau, we will uphold our values for equality and respect for women in the workplace. If you have evidence that is not based on hearsay, please feel free to share, and we may respond accordingly.”
That was really depressing to read. She nuked the program because of her ego and then let her black spokesperson blame it on race and gender instead of her own lies and deliberate mismanagement.
Most of this thread and politics in general are based around failures being the result of somebody else. There is 0 accountability or self responsibility.
Likewise, when people/groups fail today we want them fired or cancelled. This promotes the "blame someone else" as a self preservation tactic.
Exactly right. Hard not to see it as a shadowy system of back-scratches and kickbacks between mayors' offices and the folks who run the NGOs. It's remarkable how hard it is to hold NGOs accountable when they're using public funds.
Y'all don't want socialized medicine, this is what you get...
I got a glimpse into how various state support systems work in germany and the basic idea is, private companies get good money to take care of people - but they get nothing for actually helping them get out of the helpless state - they rather have incentive to keep them there, as then they still get money for them.
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.
Plenty of people on the streets want all kinds of help. They don't want shit programs with a million hoops and strings attached, nor do they want gross dilapidated shelters also with hoops and strings plus predators prowling around looking to steal their shit (or worse) while they sleep.
Also, while the whole rock bottom trope probably holds some truth for many people, when you make every story all about it you kind of lose the plot. If you try hard enough, you can look at just about anyone's life who has recovered from addiction and create a narrative based on an upward trend after the "worst" moment or period of their addiction. If they had two periods that were basically exactly as bad, you dig around until you find some trivial reason to label the second period as worse, and thus the "real bottom." If someone had their worst period of addiction many years before they actually got to a place where they could maintain sobriety long term it was just a long journey for them. Etc.
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.
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
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.
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 don't disagree with you, but I don't think that's the problem here necessarily. I admittedly don't know much about the attitudes of Portland's commission members.
I think more to the point the issue is that you can't legislate morality. Some people will break the law no matter how harsh the penalty, and some people will take advantage of permissiveness no matter how much you try to help. Some problems the government just can't fix.
Which congress trolls?
You are blaming Portland's currently fail[ed|ing] policies on federal congress members that have nothing to do with Portland?
I don' think this one is on the Republicans, a group that effectively doesn't exist in Portland politics.
This is a progressive failure
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.
Just find it humorous that in a programmer's forum everything can be wheeled back to microservices.
I don't. I mean I do a bit, but the main reason I find it unsurprising and actually logical is that it is easier to talk about stuff we do not know about in terms of things we already do.
A lot of us here have more experience in working or introducing microservices that shaping drug abuse policy. I would be surprised if there was one politician here who actually was responsible for dealing with the problem himself/herself.
There's often not even a serious analysis of the environmental, political, and socio-cultural factors behind and around these ideas to determine if they can even theoretically work on paper, even with very generous assumptions.
Let alone whether they can work in the real world.
In this case I don't think anyone in Portland or Oregon attempted such an analysis.
Scandinavia isn’t uniformly permissive with drugs. Sweden is quite anti-drug.
They might have actually been thinking of Portugal
Not sure they were necessarily referring to drug policy but rather the tendency in other western democracies to try to implement Scandinavian social policies in other countries, often with poor results. In the US, if you go to more than a couple of public meetings, you're bound to hear someone comment "Well, in Norway..." as justification for their support for a particular program or policy.
+1. This is the core issue.
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.
... 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.
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.
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).
COVID19 was leaked from "Vector" BSL4 lab in Russia. It's leaked, because first responders broke doors (to check for fire) and stole equipment from BSL4 lab without any protective equipment, then China special police, which was in same city for training with Russians, captured the virus and returned back to China. Then Russian official hide the fact of leaking and start of epidemic, deleted any evidence of that, which they found, except those copies which are in Wayback machine (they are unable to crack the archive so far), and started to blame China (at West), and West (at China and East).
Yes, this is not an one person fault. So what? 7 million died. Should we just ignore that?
In my country, it's illegal to smoke near to non-smokers, which helps to reduce spread of smoking. :-/
As someone who spent most of my life in Novosibirsk I was amused to see the Vector lab mentioned in this context. Some googling reveals that indeed there was an explosion in the facility in September 2019.
I still think that this theory is way too convoluted to be true (chinese secret police and stuff), but an entertaining read nevertheless. I wasn't aware of either the explosion or the covid leak allegations.
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.
Passive smoke leads to addiction. It's proven for tobacco. It's the mechanism of the propagation. After some hours of breathing small doses of tobacco smoke, people start to like tobacco smoke and want to smoke it too. Weed or tobacco is not important here.
I'm surprised to hear that-- got a cite?
My parents smoked when I was a child. The memory of being in the car with the windows up makes me anxious even though it's been probably 30 years since I've been in a car with a smoker. I experience acute irritation when exposed to anyone smoking, and much more widespread smoking is one of the major reasons I dislike visiting Europe. I know that I'm far from alone in feeling this way.
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.
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.
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.
We have different rules for drinking in public and public intoxication. I think this person is talking about public intoxication.
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.
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.
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.
How is that relevant to the naked twerking person at the top of the metro stairwell?
If everyone on the entire planet was addicted to meth and did it daily, but there was a single meth user who decided to twerk naked at the top of the metro stairwell and assault people, that one person should be imprisoned. Why you ask? Because every other person on the planet is (as you say) functional. Nobody cares if you decided to do drugs and then fall asleep at home while paying your bills (ie: functioning). People do care about naked twerking people at the top of metro stairwells who routinely assault passers-by.
That would be "lock up publicly problematic addicts" not "addicts" in general.
The aforementioned "functioning, respected and powerful people" are able to conceal or internalize the cost of their problems and aren't usually a problem for the public at large.
With that in mind, the problem is really just being persistently a public danger/nuisance. The only relevance of addiction to this is that addicts are frequently unresponsive to incentives that would be sufficient for non-addicts.
That viewpoint is both draconian and fiscally irresponsible
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.
I've seen plenty of people do nothing but drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, and complain, all day, every day, year after year.
You might argue that it's the alcohol doing the zombification but I posit that surely the tobacco also has something to do in this equation.
Cigarettes kill you slowly over decades, fentanyl can kill a first-time user with a single dose.
Moronic analogy.
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.
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.
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.
If you have competent police - than taking the drugs away is sort of a lackmus test. Meaning if they get violent - then they are a danger and further meassures are needed. So yes, jail (conventional or mental) is then the temporary solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We've tried nothing and we are all out of ideas"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas
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.
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.
it's not like we have room in the jails either, we still routinely release people due to lack of space
You’re probably discounting how much “everything” actually meant blank check subsidies for addicts, which obviously leads nowhere good.
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.
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.
So the Shelters are half full? That is higher success rate than most VC startups and cost a lot less too
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?