Drug legalization is something I have come 180 on (or at least, 90 degrees).
Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc. ODs have more than doubled, and the shelters are half empty! They are not one more social program away from cleaning out the streets. I think the experiment has radically failed and I'm ready to say I was wrong.
While I don't want to go back to locking people in jail just for being addicts, cities still need to be a place that people actually want to live in. Revenue prospects for the city are becoming horrid and there is not a lot of runway to continue throwing money at the problem.
"Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc."
This is not even remotely true.
Everyone in the city, from the mayor [1] to the head of the largest services non-profit [2] has been yelling from the rooftops about the glacial slowness to effectively spend the allocated funding for drug treatment. Until just months ago, Multnomah County has been sitting on tens of millions of unspent funds,[3] and has been perpetually criticized for spending on harm reduction instead of treatment.[4] We actually closed the only local sobering center in 2020!
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.
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.
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.
The sad reality is that current forms of law enforcement aren't working when it comes to hard drugs and addiction. Putting people in prison for getting addicted to crack is not exactly going to make anyones lifes better. But it has also become quite obvious that you can't have free-range junkies shooting up in what is supposed to be the economic center of a city.
I suspect in a few decades forced rehab will become the norm, once you start smoking crack or shooting up in the street. It's pretty obvious for anyone with eyes that at a certain point, homelessness, mental health issues and most importantly drug addiction cannot be covered by "individual freedom" anymore if you want to have a working society.
Of course, having police beat up and arrest or otherwise forcefully move addicts from one place to another or into the prison industrial complex is not likely to work.
I think you can provide services (shelters, etc) AND crackdown with a view to cleaning the city for regular people (rather than just specifying taxpayers).
Absolutely agreed + the second you start shaming people for complaining about this you've lost the plot
People were getting ratfucked online for saying "I don't like watching people shit all over the sidewalk" - so you know what? They moved! Maybe out of Portland, maybe politically, but pretending that smoking fentanyl on the MAX is good and normal is just totally insane.
It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either
Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” that ends up being a nice trip for said undesirables
Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown?
I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away
For sure, you have productive members who can execute unlimited violence in the name of law, why not using them to displace the poor and ill away from the streets completely? Clean em up from scum eh. A brilliant idea of a mindful reactionist. The soviets did this by the way, and they were able to completely hide the problem, however they never understood that showing it boldly on the streets to all the "taxpayers" is the first step to solution
> Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc.
Huge sums were collected, but they haven't really been spent. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the first detox center built with M110 money only opened two months ago, and only has 16 beds: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-se-portl...
While this is true, there were a lot of programs that existed before M110, and part of the bill of goods that was sold with M110 was that it was going to make it easier for people to access existing resources without fear of law enforcement.
And again, literally written into M110 is the idea that treatment is supposed to be cheaper than incarceration. Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape, but the treatment programs are not looking terribly cheap or effective.
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?
Former Portland native here: it hasn’t worked. I was back just a year or two ago and 5th ave near the waterfront was overrun with homeless openly shooting up and accosting folks.
All the food carts across from the building where I used to work left, the Indian buffet restaurant closed, walking up around 10th near the Target to check out other restaurants I loved many I saw many barricaded former businesses.
The city used to be beautiful. It used to be vibrant and bustling with people and tourists and working professionals but when I was there last retracing my steps as if I was working and living there again it was not the Portland I remember. It’s disheartening.
That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental
Health problems. I’m not. I believe in helping people when they can’t help themselves. But allowing open drug use, camping in front of businesses, etc., doesn’t do much for said businesses and people to invest in your city leaving you with less tax revenue to help these very same folks with.
>That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not.
You probably should blame them. They let their personal problems collectively spiral out of control so badly that they became society's problem, and an entire city was degraded because of it. Blame can still be assigned to the pitiable.
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.
WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone.
It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time.
I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case since 2020.
If you want services, good luck. Feds extracted that money and feed it to cloud app companies to keep you all happy and you still aren’t.
Let’s keep giving Elon forever to fail to reach Mars and complain government experiments are failures right away.
Americans have a credibility problem. Work less and less but expect more and more because we have a lot of hallucinated wealth. Where do the real workers come from if everyone is doing office work? Now that other nations have matured after WW2 rebuild, how do we justify taking more for less output?
1945-2000s was a statistical anomaly. America needs to sober up.
I’ll add another inconvenient truth that I’ve realized. You can copy every law and policy that’s working so well in some other (Scandinavian) place and have it still fail horribly. That’s because it was never the laws that were working, but the society and culture as a whole. You can’t bring good laws to a place with a disintegrating social fabric and expect the same results.
Yes. Exactly same way that trying to transplant ideas like agile or microservices or testing driven development fails so miserably most of the time.
It is not that the ideas are wrong.
It is that they are not the correct moves for a team that is not ready for them.
I know it sounds like a silly parallel. But changing societies is hard, long, unique and not well understood process. It makes sense to try to learn from examples where it is much easier to gather some information.
When I come to meet a team that has trouble (I work as an advisor and help teams that have trouble), I am not coming with a library of good solutions BECAUSE IT IS FUCKING NOT WORKING. Time and time again, I am repairing after previous people who did just that -- they came with a solution thinking they know it all because it worked somewhere. More often than not they have observed something working, they learned elements they could easily understand and they tried to transplant and failed miserably.
So whether you are trying to fix a team or fix a homelessness problem, you have to come with an empty mind and willingness to relentlessly problem solve. And look at those other successful examples as examples to learn from but not necessarily duplicate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t want people locked in jail, but I do think that something akin to the Baker Act needs to be implemented. There are clearly many people who need help but are not willing to seek help themselves. It’s safe to say that they aren’t in control of their own actions and are a danger to everyone around them. It’s not compassion to simply let them rot on the street.
I 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.
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.
yeah cities are zones of massive economic importance, we can't keep penalizing the people who work there because some drug addicts won't abandon the corner they sleep on. its literally insane.
who are we prioritizing in this situation and why? i care more about the people who have their lives together, they deserve priority.
Portland has way more problems than just drug. I don't feel safe walking in downtown even during the day. Parking is a gamble whether or not you get your windows broken, almost a third of my friends had terrible experience when parking overnight in Portland, doesn't matter if it was a public park or in a hotel park.
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]
The problem isn’t drug legalization, the problem is the inability to deal with irresponsible drug users. Blanket drug bans unjustly punish responsible users, and enable selective enforcement based on the bias of those in power e.g. the police and we all know where that gets us.
If I want to pop some mdma and enjoy myself at a live show, or do shrooms and go hiking, or smoke some weed and relax in a hammock and listen to my favorite album, or do some speed and clean my house, or spend a weekend dozing off with some heroin, then I ought to be allowed.
If however I get into fights, puke and shit in public, nod off laying spread eagle across the sidewalk or in the doorway of a business that’s trying to open in the morning, trespass and steal anything that’s not nailed down, start completely unsafe and inappropriate fires, and menace innocent passerbys on thoroughfares - I should be stopped.
Drugs writ large are not the problem. Drugs are what you make of them. Users who cause problems should be dealt with. Users who don’t should be left unharassed. Drunken brawling? Straight to jail. Drunken hugging? Let people have fun.
Prohibition also failed horribly. We need a middle ground.
What about drug use as a privilege? If you’re living on the street, your litter is all over the street, and you never pay taxes, then you lose your privilege.
I thought we solved this with alcohol already. Can you drink? Yes. are you allowed to be shit faced drunk in the streets? No. Are there lounges to drink safely and responsibly? Yes.
Granted, it may be much harder to make a "drugs bar", but we can use comparable metrics to deem who is too unfit to independently do that stuff and if they need intervention.
They got all of the carrots sure, but there was no stick. The reason these programs have success elsewhere is that they give people the choice of prison or treatment.
Also, nowhere except the US just decided to legalize public drug use. In fact one of the goals of harm reduction programs in other places is to get the users out of public spaces.
If you are unwilling to lock people up—whether in jail or elsewhere—that’s the only opinion you get to have. Every other “rule” you propose is meaningless.
Right now the nyc transit system is on the pay what you wish system because the voters have decided they can’t bear to see people locked up for not paying. You can hem and haw, but that’s the consequence.
No, you’re right. Empathy doesn’t work with certain drug use (opiates, meth, crack etc.). They need to be forcibly put in rehab that is akin to jail until they’re clean for a while. It still shouldn’t be a felony on your record though because that effectively ends any chance of rebuilding your life if you do recover.
I don’t see why it has to be one way or the other: either no enforcement or sending kids caught with a joint to prison. For people who have clear drug problems, they need to go into rehab, voluntarily or not.
I voted for 110. I regret it now. An idea I have in my darker moments, which as I said in another comment here are becoming more frequent... Is that we should have single occupancy rooms where drugs are provided to people and they can get high as much as they want so long as they stay put there. As soon as they want to stop, support swoops in and gets them in a system. If they want to go back, they are free to do so.
That's a very American perspective. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more.
It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.
The US had far better economic growth then Europe in general. With much of Europe barley growing since early 2010.
Why do people no live in these areas? Why are there so many homeless in the first place.
With my personal experience of knowing so many addicts that have been in/out of various recovery programs, I'm totally at a loss. I too leaned libertarian with let people do the drugs they want, but that's back when I thought people were only doing things for recreation. I didn't have experience with true addicts until I was older. I've even played with liking the idea of a version of The Wire's Hamsterdam on the sole basis of the yo-yo lifestyle of recovery/relapse is just something that has no real answer.
Just giving a voice to those who do maintain responsible recreational use, because that crowd very much exists. It might go unnoticed since they usually don't die or screw up their lives because of it.
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On the flip side I've seen addiction become a much more devastating force in recent years and smart solutions are badly needed.
> I too leaned libertarian with let people do the drugs they want
... unless this harms other, isn't? Drug addicts are causing harm and are burden to society, so why libertarians support them?
In liberal philosophy, value of human life is infinite, thus all humans are equal, thus it's not allowed for someone to cause harm or abuse others. However, why we limit this to humans only? In my opinion, is a bacteria, virus, ideology, hate, chemicals, drugs, pollution, technical problems, climate change, ecology causes harm to humans, then it should be equal to harm done by a human directly.
Why it's illegal to shot someone, but legal to smoke weed near to someone, which leads to addiction and further death? IMHO, it's the same harm, but with extra steps.
Portland is not a good test case to decide on one specific policy. It's like testing a cold drug on a person with several cancers - the test can't show any improvement because everything else is so hopelessly broken. I mean, I'm sure their drug policy is broken too, but one should not conclude from this that in a sane city legalize could never work, because Portland is not a sane city.
Locking people up for being addicts is not the same as locking people up for using in the street.
What is wrong with this approach:
Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is.
If someone’s addiction has become unmanageable to the point where they are doing drugs on the street, it is a kindness and a necessity to take their agency away from them.
If someone is an addict but otherwise functions, it is none of anyone’s business.
> Doing drugs isn’t a crime, but all bad behavior associated with it is.
Exactly. I can't imagine somebody on weed would bother people that much.
But if you steal from people, leave your unclean syringes lying around, etc. you're a hazard to society and need to be dealt with. So we need to enable law enforcement to deal with that properly.
If you're drunk and belligerent, which happens a lot, you shouldn't be able to do that legally either.
So as long as you're not a menace to society, I don't see why you shouldn't have that freedom. But as soon as your freedom causes issues for others, it needs to be dealt with.
Maybe allowing meth, fentanyl, heroin and such is the problem. I would bet almost all the big problems are due to the users of these.
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!
They most certainly did not do everything. The Portuguese model works fairly well, but that requires arreatijng drug users and making them show up to court. They don't send people to prison for drug use but they still entangle them in the legal system.
I think you're completely correct in local terms for the interest of Portland. And personally I think this was a wholly predictable outcome.
However, isn't this a little bit like state gun control? Legislation and public services being wildly different across a border that anyone can cross at will creates border effects. Is it possible that Portland is attracting a ton of junkies from elsewhere?
Also this is another exhibit for my pet theory that progressive and idealistic politics are more effective at large scales whereas conservative and managerial politics are better suited to the local level of governance.
Does this analysis also consider the wide ranging massive impact of fentanyl and similar drugs that have skyrocketed drug overdose problems in all communities in the past five years?
Realistically speaking, homeless drug users don't want treatment or shelter; they want to be left alone to do drugs.
Most drug users don't want to get off drugs. That's why you need an intervention. No addict likes interventions either. You have to be really self disciplined to turn yourself into treatment.
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.
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.
I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland.
Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs.
Is there a measure for how this compares to places without social programs for drug addicts? This is a legitimate question, I don't know if they've done better or worse in the context of the failed war on drugs.
Because the country as a whole has been completely ravaged by opiate addiction. It's not just Portland and Seattle. West Virginia doesn't have anything like this, and it's just as badly afflicted. It may be less visible because it doesn't have the same population density.
I presently live in New York but I lived in Seattle in 2020. Open air drug use and homelessness in general is unquestionably a bigger problem in Seattle, despite NYC lacking some of the more progressive policies west coast cities have become so famous for. Anyone who's lived in both the east and west coast can attest to the difference, it's so stark that I find it funny people are still asking if broad coastal politics _might_ have something to do with it.
I think it's less a question of the amount of social programs and more about how aggressive the police are about public drug use and assaults by the homeless. Walk around cities in southwest Florida for example (Tampa, Naples etc.) and you'll feel pretty safe.
This is a curve that goes up but do the other curves go up more or less? Did places with different strategies perform better or worse, relatively speaking? I can sort of imagine that all the curves go up, given that we added a drug that is 50X stronger than heroin to the mix
Edit: to clarify, not trying to be an asshole, I have no idea what the answer is here, would be very interested to find out
The problems with acute fentanyl poisoning are somewhat separate from chronic methamphetamine addiction. Mexican drug cartels have been manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs such as Oxycodone and Xanax but substituting fentanyl for the active ingredient. They simply have bad quality control, so sometimes people who buy street drugs randomly end up with a fatal overdose. Especially if they haven't built up a tolerance.
Can always look at places that don't have drug problems like Singapore, Qatar or UAE. decriminalization. look at china who also had a crippling opiate problem with opium and it wasn't solve with decriminalization. Opoids have no place in society and there's no such thing as harm reduction when it comes to opioid use besides complete prohibition. I know 4 people who have died from opioid over doses, and just recently lost a former coworker last week. Fentantyl is a society destroyer and it's just getting worse.
Are those really good comparison countries though? To me, it seems like some of their basic views on rights are antithetical to those in the US, going way beyond how to deal with drug problems.
Harm reduction and rehab still only treats the symptom, not the cause. The cause is financial instability brought on by insecurity in housing, food access, etc. It's an issue of human dignity in the economic sphere that drives people to such depths, not recreation.
Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").
"We have to fix every single problem to prevent people from smoking meth in public."
No we don't. This wasn't a problem 10 years ago. This isn't a problem in much, much poorer countries. This isn't a problem in fucking Houston or Tampa or NYC or Boston.
I get that you want to overthrow Capitalism, but the rest of us want to live a normal life without junkies shitting on our stairs
I wonder if it attracted a 'type'. Because I know many people who have since moved to portland and they all have a type.
It could be that portland is taking a huge number of people that would otherwise be a drain elsewhere. Maybe we shouldnt consider this an outright failure, but look at some federal support.
Where I live (central Oregon), this is not the case. More than 80% of our homeless population are people that were born and raised here, and were priced out of housing and onto the streets due to housing prices skyrocketing to eyewatering levels. It has tripled in the last ten years, with a 1-br apartment going for under $600 in 2013 now going for $1700. The homelessness here is homegrown, not imported.
Portland is better housing-wise, but not by much. Considering how most people who are both homeless and on drugs were homeless first, then turned to drugs, I think this is a strong confounding factor. It's hard to saw what effect decriminalization has had on drug use when it's adjacent to a housing crisis that is manufacturing more homelessness and drug use all on its own.
Seattle's 2019 point in time counts says 84% local, 11% in-state, 4% came from out of state. San Francisco has similar numbers. Seattle excluded this data from their most recent report. Possibly because they out of state numbers have been going up, and it is harder to raise money and sympathy for non-local homeless? But even if you allow for that, it is huge majority local.
That is an oft repeated myth. A recent study by UCSF of California homelessness found that 90% of homeless Californians became homeless while already living in California, and 75% still live in the same county as they did when they became homeless [0]. Locals are approximately 90% of the problem.
I don’t think this is it. A lot of the unhoused in Seattle are locals or in state, and many of the out of state are from neighboring states such as Idaho or other West Coast states.
Rather I think the problem is that half assed decriminalization efforts simply aren’t enough and that drug overdose has become a much more severe issue because of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of fentanyl. What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts. In addition full legalization and regulated drug markets (preferably via pharmacies with a strict non-profit motive) wouldn’t hurt either.
What Seattle has done is basically just decriminalization without any of the support needed to go with it. Yes we support addicts and spend a lot of money on their care, however these are all suffering from austerity and are often just post-hoc measures (which often cost more in the long run).
Sadly they never fixed the supporting issues, low wages, inability of affordable housing at pace to keep up with growth. It’s like they just thought giving an aspirin was going to cure the flu.
This is basically just a moving the goalposts argument. The public was told that the policies would fix/help/address the problem. The public was conned into throwing literally billions of dollars at these policies and programs. And then after the programs fail, you can't just say "well of course it failed, we didn't do X and Y". If that's the case, we should never have spent billions of dollars on programs and policies that we knew would fail without X and Y.
How do you define “low wages”? Current minimum wage in Seattle is $18.69/hr, which is higher than the median wage in several US States and almost all of Europe. Cost of living is high but not that much higher than the more expensive parts of Europe.
There are legitimate causes for the blight in Seattle but lack of jobs and low wages aren’t one of them.
Nowhere in these comments have I see anybody take the position that decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated.
I have a close friend whose relative is a heroin addict. According to her, a lot of overdoses are due to almost no "heroin" actually being heroin, rather its fentanyl cut to varying degrees of strength. Not knowing what you're taking, and not knowing how strong it is, can lead to a lot of problems. If people knew what they were getting, and it was legal, you could have "functional addicts" that cause little or no societal harm. My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years. She held down a job, paid rent, paid taxes, etc. She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl.
Think of it this way: My drug of choice is tequila. When I buy a bottle of 80 proof tequila, I buy it from a state licensed store. I have confidence that its 40% alcohol, and that its safe to drink. It is sold by a reputable company with a brand reputation. What we have today with illegal or "decriminalized" drugs is the equivalent of people dying from drinking bathtub gin during prohibition.
>> decriminalization is not enough; drugs need to be legalized and regulated.
This has been an increasingly popular argument here in Portland since decriminalization. It's deployed, generally, in terms of re-criminalizing hard drugs until there's a well thought out framework for safe, regulated legalization.
While I agree in principle [edit: let's say I did agree, but my views on this subject have shifted radically since I voted in favor of decriminalization - and I'll admit I was naive and wrong], I think that while decriminalization without regulation is clearly catastrophic, legalization with regulation would also not be desirable so long as it's confined to one local city, county or state, in the midst of a nationwide fentanyl crisis. Portland simply does not have the capacity or infrastructure to accept further waves of addicts from all over the country who come here to live on the street. Legalization means more regulatory burden, more services for out of town addicts paid by a dwindling local tax base that's quickly being displaced and/or opting to leave.
To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide. In any case, Portland can't go it alone anymore.
And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.
> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.
Well yeah, when you have criminally-encouraged over prescription of highly addictive, fairly dangerous drugs, you’re going to create an addiction crisis, but the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs. Before the prescription crackdown and fentanyl prevalence, some people who got addicted turned to heroin, and some of those people ODed, but now nearly every addicted individual only has access to fentanyl-laced street opiates.
Methadone clinics are a decent example of how regulation helps this issue.
I agree. Any one city that gets out in front will be overwhelmed with a national population of addicts flocking to it. Legalization has to happen nationally.
Imagine if prohibition had ended just in Chicago. Chicago would have been overrun with alcoholics.
> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.
That is not what "legalized" means. It's still illegal to have opioids from anywhere other than your own prescription, which means that people without a prescription are basically on their own, have to get it through illegitimate means, and are all the way back to not knowing what they're getting.
If I wanted a supply of, say, LSD, I am not going to accept a doctor telling me how much I can have, when and where I can have it (as in current legalized psilocybin clinics). I want to buy some from the store, take it home, and enjoy it in my own, safe environment, with friends and people I can trust. Is that so hard to ask? It's not like it's any less safe than stuff like alcohol or tobacco, in fact there isn't even any known LD50 yet. The only risk is things being sold as LSD that aren't actually, which is basically the same scenario as the current opioid crisis.
> And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.
People couldn't just go to a store; trusted family advisors were overprescribing due to intentionally misleading advertising. The addiction crisis is what happens when insurance no longer covers the pills.
I thought the drug laws in question were, or rather had to be, enacted at the state level. Why does the issue seem to be most pronounced in Portland but not as significant in the rest of Oregon?
What would be different if the experiment was done on a national scale? It seems to me that you would still see the worst impacts confined to a few major cities. I would hypothesize that other factors come into play like lax enforcement/penalties for petty crime, availability of free support services, and general sentiment/tolerance of degeneracy (though it sounds like that is changing.)
Yes drugs should be legalized and regulated nationally just like Portugal did. But also we should absolutely unambiguously no excuses house and feed the homeless the end full stop we have plenty of money. It just needs to be redirected to doing something productive other than paying endless assemblies of bureaucrats competing with each other to virtue signal the loudest.
Because the reason people get hooked on to drugs is they have nothing better to do with their lives and they've run out of Hope but that runs straight into the effective altruist and effective acceleration as the gender here so it's not going to happen.
Heroin is very different from Tequila, so I don't think it's fair to compare them just because they are both "drugs".
Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.
> Heroin is very different from Tequila, so I don't think it's fair to compare them just because they are both "drugs".
Very true, alcohol is much worse by most metrics, both in terms of number of addicts, number of deaths/year [1][2] and general damage done to the body. [3][4]. (I'm not trying to be cynical, just stating facts.)
> Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.
There's no data on self-reported addiction, for obvious reasons, but there is data on overdoses: "Fatalities involving only heroin appear to form a minority of overdose occasions, the presence of other drugs (primarily central nervous system depressants such as alcohol and benzodiazepines) being commonly detected at autopsy." [5]
I've met good people addicted to heroin. They've been through more hell than the rest of us can ever understand, almost entirely because of those times when they couldn't access it. If I could press a button to forever ban them access to any opioid, I'd press that button; they'd get over it in a few months and thank me. But that's impossible. The second best option is to allow them access to a clean, low-cost, prescription of it for the rest of their life.
That heroin is illegal and prosecuted is going to massively skew the number of people who are likely ever try it or could develop a safe habit around it.
How valid the comparison is between Tequila and Heroine is irrelevant. What is relevant here is harm reduction for the addict. In both cases legalization result in harm reduction. Yes legalized and regulated heroine is still very harmful for an addict, but unregulated and illegal heroine has the potential to be way more harmful then a regulated legal one, potentially deadly. The same logic also applies to illegal and unregulated gin (just to a lesser extent).
Your argument is tired. There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict. Most don't quit after a 20 year on and off relationship with it. They die and usually cause mayhem in the process - to society, their loved ones, the healthcare system, law enforcement, etc. I'm dealing with a very serious addict in my life right now and how "clean" the drug is makes no difference. They steal and lie non-stop. They cause massive amounts of anxiety and stress to people who love them. They disappear for weeks on end and every time you get a text or call, you think its someone saying they're dead. They treat you like a monster if you don't want to engage with their BS anymore. They claim to want "help" but when push comes to shove, they want to be enabled. After many years of this, you realize that some people simply want to live this lifestyle. The war on drugs was extreme in one direction, and your suggestion, is in the other.
> There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict
I don't have time to really get into the weeds for this discussion, but I can at least do the weaker refutation of this very general claim by way of a counterexample. Professor Carl Hart is one such example that came up in a seminar on substance use disorder during my undergraduate program in integrative neuroscience. [0]
I'm sorry you're dealing with someone who does not have a functional, productive relationship with a substance. What you're describing is true of a lot of things though, not just "hardcore" drugs. If you've lived with or know a gambling/sex addict you know exactly what I'm referring to. How these things hijack our neurology is really complex and it unfortunately boils down to more than "avoid these high risk things". Not sure if you have access to academic journals, but public libraries often can provide access to reputable research on substance use disorder in humans, as well as actual experimentation in animal models such as mice. There are a lot of people whose incentives align with yours for tackling this problem, and the solutions they propose are worth a shot. Clearly the war on drugs has not worked and we agree on that at least. What are we going to try next?
There is a critical difference between heroin, and heroin laced with uknown amounts of a fentanyl analog. The adulterated stuff kills even first time people experimenting with drugs.
Joe Perry & Steven Tyler (Aerosmith's "Toxic Twins") are still here. Clapton lives. So does Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.
All those guys would be long dead if there had been fentanyl lacing back in the 70's.
> I'm dealing with a very serious addict in my life right now and how "clean" the drug is makes no difference. They steal and lie non-stop. They cause massive amounts of anxiety and stress to people who love them.
There are plenty of people who fit this description, and heroin isn't the root cause of their problem. It's just a symptom of a deeper problem. For every person like this, there's someone who dabbles with heroin/etc and still goes to work every day and has a healthy relationship with their family.
> According to her, a lot of overdoses are due to almost no "heroin" actually being heroin, rather its fentanyl cut to varying degrees of strength.
Anyone knows that who followed current events during the opiod epidemic and read some Wikipedia on it.
And actually, it's not just fentanyl, but fentanyl-like compounds that, even if controlled to the same concentration, have varying degrees of strength.
"The structural variations among fentanyl-related substances can impart profound pharmacological differences between these drugs, especially with respect to potency and efficacy"
You don't know which fentanyl analog is in that heroin dose, and how much of it.
In Portland and generally agree. And the people saying alcohol isn’t comparable should look at the stats - death from alcohol is a huge, but normalized and largely invisible issue.
Legalizing will reduce violence, reduce accidental overdoses and poisonings, and give the state regular contact points with users (to hopefully funnel them to assistance). Safe use sites would go some way towards hiding the problem if managed well.
Legalizing will not solve the problem of addiction. It will not solve overdoses (many overdoses are not caused by surprise differences in dose; people often overdose after relapse, or deliberately seek out stronger than usual supplies).
We have to accept that legalizing will solve some problems, but will likely keep killing at least some people.
Housing is another solution to hiding the problem. But housing just hides the drug use problem. It will probably also kill people - people who overdose on the sidewalk are more likely to be narcaned than people using alone.
Free housing + free drugs for opiate addicts would go a long ways towards solving the issue for everyone who isn’t an opiate addict, and probably cheaper than imprisoning or healing addicts.
I’d prefer treatment but the local officials have already proven incapable of that. The county is already very good at handing out needles, smoking kits, and boofing literature, so handing out fetty should be a very light lift administratively.
Housing plus making it legal to use in shared spaces is a good start. E.g some shelters in Seattle have a covered/seating location outside, in sight of the front desk, and residents are encouraged to use there instead of in their rooms so that they can be seen and cared for.
You should watch what is happening in British Colombia, Canada right now.
They have decriminalized possessing less than 2.5 grams of
- Opioids (such as heroin, morphine, and fentanyl)
- Crack and powder cocaine
- Methamphetamine (Meth)
- MDMA (Ecstasy)
It's a trial basis from Jan 31 2023 until Jan 31 2026, so we should get a good amount of data and evidence to see if this leads to better or worse outcomes for people and society as a whole.
Well a lot of reasons people turns to drugs in the USA is because doctors and pharmacists give them strong painkillers way to easily to begin with.
For instance oxycodone and many powerful painkillers are afaik not available as tablets in many countries, only given through IV's and injections in hospitals for serious enough conditions, or under serious constraints like palliative treatments. If you are recovering from an injury and are allowed to leave hospital, all what you should be allowed to take is paracetamol or ibuprofen for a limited time and that's it.
We shouldn't have to enter war against pain. Pain is not necessarily harmful, they are useful signals that can let people assess their recovery and physical state. Trying to avoid pain is trying to avoid reality. It is deemed to fail.
Nobody should take opiods painkillers for minor injuries and ailments, it just doesn't make sense.
to me it seems like you need a strongly enforced social norm that doesn't include all the worst bits of drug abuse (crime, public defecation, graffiti, other public nuisance/problem things) regardless of whether you legalize and regulate or make it extremely illegal. My preference would be for legalize and regulate and social order enforcement because it would cause a lot less misery but I don't see how this works if people are going to be allowed to leave needles everywhere, routinely vandalize and break into cars and buildings, etc. We should have never gotten rid of the enforcement aspect for the bad behavior when we we getting rid of the criminal aspect of the drug use.
Decriminalizing test kits that let you identify the presence of fentanyl in other drugs would be a great start - but those are instead illegal and classified as “paraphernalia”.
That law was already fixed in Portland (and the rest of Oregon). Test strips are still classified as paraphernalia, but there’s a carve out making them legal now.
The only time I've ever been on fentanyl was in a hospital, and the nurse described it to me as the "Michael Jackson drug". I actually enjoyed the gallows humor of the nurses, as I felt it brought down the tension in an otherwise serious environment.
Its very different, in that I can walk in off the street and buy alcohol. As far as I know, there is noplace I can legally buy fentanyl without a prescription.
Not all addictions are the same. Nicotine is extremely addictive but you will never have a total breakdown of your life which is essentially a guarantee with heroin, whether you get it legally or not. There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict (outside of extremely rare cases). Even if they received very pure heroin for free they would be dead within the next decade or two.
> She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl.
Under your system she would've never decided to get clean then? Also dying much earlier than she would've had to and probably adding a bunch of burden to the health system. People chastice cigarete smokers for much less.
I'm genuinely curious why you think she should get clean. I fail to see what sort of burden she'd put on the health care system. AFAIK, long term opoid use is less dangerous than cigarette smoking, and the highest danger is of falls.
(https://fpm.ac.uk/opioids-aware-clinical-use-opioids/long-te...)
That's when the user knows what they're taking..
I think the actual problem is people can’t seem to just use enough to stay functional. Given the legal opportunity to purchase heroin, most people will absolutely overdo it.
There are people with substance abuse problems and addictive behaviour that goes way beyond any particular drug. It's often a condition that needs treatment.
"Given the legal opportunity to purchase X, some people will absolutely overdo it." This goes for some ridiculous things like Pokemon cards or collectible shoes as well. Should we ban those?
I think this is a good point. I've never been high on opiates, but I've heard it described as "an orgasm over your whole body". How are you going to allow everyone that option and expect anyone _not_ to just check-out of reality, reduce all their other living expenses, and just live to get high?
One or way or another, none of us are getting out of this alive. Not sure where the religious conviction we must save all souls comes from or has any value.
> you could have "functional addicts" that cause little or no societal harm
Yeah, I don't know about that – plenty of "functional alcoholics" around, sure, but also plenty of not-so-functional alcoholics around, as well as the wife-and-kid-beater alcoholics.
Heroin is not alcohol and doesn't induce aggression in the same way, but it's also a lot more addictive, and especially at low wages getting your daily dose can be a challenge – so "junkies" will not be eliminated outright. I consider it an open question whether they will be reduced – it's very possible (perhaps even plausible), but I certainly wouldn't consider it a forgone conclusion.
> My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years.
Dick van Dyke was a chain-smoker until well in to his 70s and he's currently doing well at the age of 97.
These are the sort of things where you really need to look at overall effects and statistics, rather than individual cases.
Hard disagree. Decriminalizing drugs has skyrocketed schizophrenia and homelessness. Drugs should only be legalized in specific, medically necessary situations. Recreational use should be stigmatized and dealers should be handled as Duterte advocated.
The crime of the War on Drugs was that we had double standards, not that we had a War on Drugs.
This sounds like you're advocating a stance where anyone who shows up to a music festival with a bag of weed for their friends should be shot. That's a rather extreme position that seems much worse than the potential harms from the drug itself. Can you go into more detail?
> Recreational use should be stigmatized and dealers should be handled as Duterte advocated.
Are you arguing that no recreational or unsanctioned use of any banned substance should be tolerated?
For context:
- MDMA shows promise treating PTSD. Currently Schedule 1 - total ban
- Psilocybin and other psychedelics reportedly beneficial for end-of-life care, notably in the case of cancer patients. Currently Schedule 1 - total ban
- Marijuana is also still Schedule 1 at the federal level
Schedule 1 is normally also a ban on research but luckily we've seen some improvement in this area. Why? Because the illegal market still exists, and people __do__ discover genuine medical uses for currently banned substances
"Decriminalizing drugs caused the increase in homelessness" seems like a really strong assertion to make considering all the other things that have happened in this same time period.
I mean, I remember how things were before fentanyl came around (as an outside observer, not as a user) and heroin was a horrible, life-destroying drug addiction back then as well. And I think it was and is convincingly argued that it is much more addictive than alcohol.
Opioids keep the top spot of addictiveness. The second place firmly belongs to nicotine. It's way more addictive than. say, cocaine.
Why not ban nicotine, by the same logic as heroin?
The key difference is that nicotine is a mere stimulant, while heroin alters your perception, it literally changes the way you see good and bad, because it's the ultimate feel-good substance. I have zero qualms about legalizing LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, etc. Likely even cocaine. But legalization of opioids would require a lot of preliminary work, to somehow allow the addicts function in a socially compatible way when badly wanting a dose.
It must be noted that a physiological addiction to opiates does not form from a first dose, and not even from the first ten doses, so infrequent recreational use is possible, given a right psychological preparation. This is similar to alcohol.
It's my understanding that street drugs like Heroin were frequently cut to varying, sometimes unpredictable degrees prior to the introduction of fentanyl. So you could still easily misjudge your dose and OD due to the lack of any kind of consistency. Presumably this would also make it even harder to try to taper off the addiction gradually.
Surely we can solve this inability to regulate with even more regulation. Just one more regulation bro... trust me bro. Just a bit more power and money to the government bro. It's all gonna be great! Just give a little bit more in taxes, bro. It's going to be a utopia, you'll see!
Has there been any research into how to measure potency (of fentanyl) and cut it properly? Maybe we could keep the government out of it, and instead give information and supplies to measure the potency correctly? I've heard that one way OD's happen is the substance is not homogeneous, so they can consume half the bag fine, then one dose is super-charged and puts them into OD (because fent can be up to thousands of times stronger than a morphine equivalent). Maybe teach addicts how to dissolve their dope in a liquid and reconstitute it so it's homogeneous in potency? Addicts can be extremely cunning with their drive to get money for dope, so I dont see why they can't use that will power to their advantage. I wonder if they could also get a primitive CPAP machine to keep them breathing if they do OD? IIRC death comes from lack of breathing, not acute toxicity or anything.
Your post is a prime example of the classic engineering approach of efficiently solutioning the immediate technical problem without solving the actual root cause because it's too complex or messy. I mean, CPAP machines for drug addicts because street fentanyl is too potent and inconsistent?
> Has there been any research into how to measure potency (of fentanyl) and cut it properly?
Yes?
When you're having surgery and the anesthesiologist uses a mixture of fentanyl and propofol, such that you safely wake up, they aren't just guessing.
One problem is that what's out on the street isn't necessarily fentanyl in the first place, but any one of hundreds of fentanyl analogs, which all vary in potency. You have no idea whether what you're measuring is fentanyl.
If you "give information and supplies", how do you keep the government out of it? At the very least, the government has to decriminalize what you're doing. Then what; someone has to pay for it. What about liability? If someone dies and it turns out you gave them the supplies, you're liable.
Are many of them going to care? I imagine testing would be useful for pill-takers at festivals, but something that is a daily addiction dominating life seems a different case.
Considering that alcohol is, by far, the most dangerous drug and it's completely legal, I think there's something to be said for your point.
I gotta say though, it's sort of complicated when you're talking about legalizing things that are already legal as prescription drugs (like opiates and benzos). Alcohol is different because it doesn't really have any medical use outside of disinfecting things (it's fairly terrible as an anesthetic or as a tranquilizer), but there's something kind of weird about having former prescription drugs just be legal over the counter. How many people might bypass their doctor and start using strong opiates for pain that might not need it and end up in a bad spot?
I don't think you can go so far as like w/ alcohol where you just show an ID and buy whatever you want, but it does seem like there needs to be some way to ensure the product is safe. Maybe a compromise might be some sort of free testing kits, or something like narcan on hand in a safe space.
Sydney and a large number of other cities about the globe have injecting centres and decades of public reporting on crime, death, etc. in the vicinty of such centres.
They're an interesting middle ground - dedicated medical centres that allow users to inject with clean needles, test drugs for purity, and have narcan and crash carts available for complications.
You arrive, show ID, inject your drugs, chill for 20 minutes or so, and then leave.
The long term results are no increase in crime, reduction in death from overdose and dirty needle infections, HIV, etc, improvement in drug quality (now that the users can readily test quality there's more discernment in the market and a reduction in blatant over cutting bad mixes into the illegal supply).
Public drug use | shooting up is still illegal - this is reduced as there is a centre to go to, etc.
One other benefit is being able to easily and routinely survey drug users and adapt public policy to changing situations on the ground, early detection of changes in illegal supply, etc.
They cost money to run, they save money on reduction in public funds spent on the problems they reduce.
Alcohol is only more dangerous because so many more people use alcohol over hard drugs. When you look at the per capita rate, hard drugs kill more people.
It's really frustrating to see this headline. The officials decriminalized drugs, wiped their hands and backed off from any follow-up legislation to keep it working correctly. It reminds me a lot of the ACA. Officials got the bill passed and have collectively stopped making updates to the program to keep it healthy, but then constantly criticize its faults. American politics are sad in that it's hard to celebrate any victories when you know those victories are doomed to mismanagement anyway.
The 'officials' did not do that. The voters did, it was state ballot measure. They decriminalized Drugs, to encourage treatment. And moved quite a large percentage of taxes from Marajuana dispenseries to help pay for it. Then left the Oregon Health Authority in charge of distributing the money to build all these new treatment facilities. (Oregon is near the bottom in treatment centers per capita in the US).
The Oregon Health Authority then sat on that money for several years, bickering about procedures, policies, etc, and not a single dollar was sent out for several years after the law changed.
Treatment centers are finally starting to get open, years late. In the meantime, we spent years decriminalizing the drugs, while then guiding people into treatment, with no actual treatment available to them (and literally amassing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for it, before spending anything)
I still don't see how "Drugs should be decriminalized because taking drugs is a victimless crime" and "Society needs to sync a lot of resources in tackling drug abuse" are compatible positions to hold at the same time.
Either let people do drugs and let them worry about the consequences, or, if society is going to be on the hook for the consequences, don't. There is no feasible way to hold both positions at the same time.
It's a weird false dichotomy you've set up. I don't think it's fair or true to ascribe "drugs are harmless" as the generalization of the position, "drug use should not carry criminal penalties".
If I may try to thread this needle:
- drug use has serious consequences for users directly and for society
- imprisonment is not effective at curbing drug use in individuals or systemically, because illicit drugs will always be available, see prohibition for the strongest case here
- illicit drug trafficking increases other criminal elements like gang violence, petty theft, etc, incurring high costs on society
- it is believed that addressing the causes for hardcore drug use as a mental and physical health issue may actually reduce drug use
- that work may be expensive today, but is expected to become a net positive over time as drug use declines
The idea is literally investing to fix a problem properly, rather than slapping on ever more expensive band-aid solutions as the problem gets worse.
If you don't believe health care can reduce drug use, that may be a sound position to hold, but if you believe it is effective it is absolutely not at odds to both desire investment in it and to seek decriminalization.
There’s no contradiction here. It may or may not be bad policy, but it’s not a contradiction.
Nobody’s a victim when a kid falls and breaks an arm while skateboarding, but we have programs like CHIP to help kids have access to healthcare to get that arm treated, regardless.
If we made getting sick a crime, you could reasonably argue that it's a victimless crime, even if we choose to spend money to help people avoid getting sick and help them get better.
Perhaps they should have done the “follow-up legislation” before the decriminalization then?
I think the problem is quite the opposite from your diagnosis. There are no standards for legislation “success” or “failure”. Very few bills actually achieve their stated aims, and all the ones that don’t are kept on the books, then the results are blamed on under-budgeting, or partisan politics (which should be foreseeable if true).
I think the answer is a "follow up lawsuit." The administration had a duty to follow and implement the law as it was passed. They very clearly failed to do so, to the extent that I think it would be appropriate to begin a criminal investigation.
A rehabilitation program requires a very high level of trust from those seeking help, especially so if the program is trying to pull people off of the streets.
Re-criminalizing drug usage would make it difficult to convince people that they won't be arrested.
Admittedly, I don't know how this problem has been approached elsewhere and what was needed to actually improve things.
If decriminalization relies on a whole raft of practically infeasible (or very expensive) associated programs to make it work, is it really a viable strategy?
This embeds a lot of assumptions without offering any proof. The programs may or may not be too expensive to be practically feasible, but without supporting evidence there's nothing concrete to talk about.
We tried this cruel inhumane expensive policy for the decades called thew war on drugs and it was one of the worst failures in US history
The US has spent more than a trillion on the War on Drugs, we should use a fraction of that on housing and healthcare, instead of thinking about restarting the trillion dollar war on drugs
So what, we continue empowering our state-sponsored thugs to harass, detain, charge and imprison more and more people for the use of substances we've decided are too bad for them, while we continue selling cigarettes, alcohol, etc. to everyone else?
Decriminalization is the only ethical way to move forwards. For decades now we have abused our own populace and those of other countries to the point of parody in the name of this prohibition, and, shock of shocks, it has failed, just like prohibition did, with the added benefit of we have the documents from the Nixon administration who were quite ready to say, behind closed doors anyway, that the entire point from the start of the war on drugs was openly to fuck with hippies and black people at scale, and that was before the CIA was flooding ghettos across the country with drugs to find/launder money for their operations.
None of this has ever been about the fucking drugs, it has always been yet another cudgel wielded by the state to further it's own ends. IF we decide we need to regulate substances based on actual scientific documented evidence, not puritan sensibilities of sin and vice, then so be it and we can figure that out after the fact. But until then, the entire existing systemic infrastructure for it is frankly, poisoned. It is not fit for the task it is entrusted and should be destroyed.
But it doesn't. The troublemakers are a tiny percentage of the population. I guarantee the local cops know every single one of them. But there's no mechanism for diverting them from making trouble so here we are.
I think the average person (including myself) is just skeptical this is a problem worth having. A rube goldberg where everything has to go right.
It seems like the best case scenario is "We legalize drugs and then raise tax dollars and then use that money to fund programs so that people that are addicted aren't harmed too much in the long run" just seems not ideal.
I get the arguments for personal liberty, but we wouldn't allow other risky behavior that has a such huge societal cost.
Sorry to hear of your sense of frustration. Can you please elaborate on what you believe was “working correctly,” and the associated superior cost-benefit tradeoffs.
Until recently Portland had a shitty local government structure that voters recently approved to modernize.
Former city council members often railed against it; as a member they’d be assigned city bureaus (fire, police…) to basically manage day to day.
Former members complained they were so busy dealing with office work rather than understanding Portlands problems in the abstract and crafting legislation. Also the mayor was on the council and did the same job.
The hope is the new system (mayor and council are now separate entities, city manager oversees bureaus so mayor and council can focus on legislative matters).
Also I’d like to point out every city in the US is a raging dumpster fire of homeless, collusion, graft, fraud… Portland isn’t unique and it’s hardly as bad as say PA cities. America is a shithole country full of FOMO obsessed fast fashion clothes, food, gadgets, and media and gives zero fucks about setting that aside to clean itself up. Garbage in garbage out
As someone who used to represent drug addicts in a past career...
Drugs are illegal for a reason. Making drugs legal just makes the problem worse; the reasons most drugs are illegal is because of the many negative side effects they impose on users...and others.
Voluntary rehab and counseling don't work. Permissive policies don't work. There are literally thousands of shelters beds empty each night in LA, SF, and Portland because drug addicts would rather keep their drugs and paraphernalia than have a warm, safe space. The rare rich person who can control their habit or the consequences of their drug use because they've got a wealthy family to take care of them shouldn't be the basis for determining policy for the hundreds of people who can't.
Forced rehab works. Imprisonment works. Losing custody works. Some amount of externally-inflicted mental pain is necessary to overcome addiction to serious drugs like meth and cocaine because without it an addict will never develop the mental fortitude to stop using.
Imo the US (and most countries) really fucked up putting Marijuana down in the same tier as hard drugs.
I feel a lot of people think since Marijuana isn't that bad, neither are the others. Which leads to the number of people voting for these 'decriminalize all drugs' policies.
Doesn't help when you see people comparing Heroin to alcohol or nicotine as well...
Marijuana, like all psychoactive drugs, is known to trigger latent mental disorders, which is the primary reason it was made a controlled drug in the first place. It is also known to cause infertility in men and women due to the interaction between THC and various hormones.
It also has a number of other negative health effects (e.g., lung cancer, popcorn lung, asthma, etc.) if smoked as weed or vaped which are generally avoided if marijuana is consumed as an edible or liquid.
I lived in Portland before the decriminalization laws passed in 2020, and from my perspective, drugs were already effectively decriminalized for the in-your-face-homeless, which I think is the most obvious social problem that people in Portland are trying to fix. At least that is my view based on the very common observation of people doing hard drugs in public.
The people drugs weren't decriminalized for before 2020 were the mostly normal citizens. After all, if someone has a house or a job or a car, you can take that away from them by punishing them, and that is what the cops would do. But if someone is already sleeping on the street, is arresting them and having them spend a few nights in jail and then going back out the streets going to change anything?
A cop might walk right past a man smoking meth in the street, but if you get pulled over for a broken headlight, and the cops might call out drug sniffing dogs, find a small amount of heroin in your possession, and throw you in jail for months.
What if they spent more than a few nights in corrective housing? Actually drying out, and getting treatment? I get that you can't force someone to want to get better, but you can lock them away if they refuse and keep breaking the law. Right? The whole situation is horrible. I moved away from Portland around the turn of the century, and it's unrecognizable to me when I go back to visit family.
What if we...i don't know, actually helped people!?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until this country starts actually helping people.
* Quality drug treatment that is paid for by the state/federal level.
* Job training/retraining that is paid for at the state/federal level.
* Affordable, high quality education that helps people not get interested in, have time for, be so full of despair that they resort to these hard drugs.
* Quality, affordable, accessible mental health services IN ADVANCE of a crisis.
Locking people up or making drugs illegal will change nothing but cause there to be more pain.
This is the right answer and it is hopefully one people will converge on, although true to form it will be after trying everything else. Its super frustrating in a lot of cities right now because the current political environment seems to want to have a "stochastic junkie" if you will. When it comes to violence, disorder, theft and just generally refusing to be part of society in a non-harmful way all we get right now is a ton of verbiage about how addiction is a disease, these people can't be held responsible for the actions they've undertaken, they're serving their addiction, etc, etc, etc. And so then someone says "Well if they are completely incapable of conducting themselves rationally then we should probably step in and force them into treatment to remove the thing that is making them act this way." And of course a huge uproar comes in response from the same enablers "We can't force them into treatment! They have rights! We need to wait until they choose to enter treatment and they have to consciously take responsibility for completing the treatment."
And so we're caught in this terrible in-between with people who can't be held responsible for their actions, but who also can't have the state enforce care on them unless they ask for it, and regular citizens just trying to peacefully live their lives bear the brunt of it. Its a luxury belief whose costs are disproportionately borne by the lower income members of society which makes it even more galling to watch it masquerade as some sort of progressivism. Ultimately people are going to force politicians to make a choice. If these people aren't responsible then the state needs to step in until they can become responsible. If they have inalienable rights then they also have responsibilities that come with those rights and need to be punished for their misdeeds. The current path is not cutting it and the voting public is waking up to that.
The problem is that most addictions need years of treatment. Years and years :(
I work with people coming out of prison who have been clean for a decade and the first thing they do is go and score some meth or crack or whatever. After a decade without!
This sounds a little like treating a symptom so one can pretend they don't need to solve the actual problem, which is homelessness. Which you solve by providing housing, and a long term caretaker-supported program to help folks clean up, get good psychiatric help and therapy, another pass at the educational system, and then hopefully at the end of all that, a new shot at a normal life.
That costs a lot of money. Something that people who want to live in a city that's livable should probably be willing to collectively pay for. But don't.
Yeah, mandatory treatment is a touchy subject, and getting it funded is a task itself. I think we might see better results if we had a doctor advised period of mandatory treatment. Maybe 1-6 months based on the situation. Unfortunately I don't think such a thing is feasible in the US at the moment.
“When we push it back into the criminal system, it pushes people back into the shadows,” Ms. Hurst said. “People will die because of this.”
^ this quote from the article speaks plainly why it's dangerous to recriminalize. Agreed w/ your perspective on prior laws hurting disproportionately normal citizens who still had (some) property/livelihood to damage through arrest.
Not agreeing w/ the status quo in Portland, though - from friend's accounts it has become a tough place to walk around. I appreciate the fine line the government is trying to walk here. Hopefully they can accelerate some of the drug treatment options concurrently.
One common theme I've noticed with Progressive policy on the west coast is that well make the progressive amendments to our laws and policies, but we don't have the institutions to support those policies.
At least with Portugal, they have a stick in their policy that enforces treatment and medical attention if you're strung out and using on the street.
Also, Channel 5 did a great piece on the Safe Injection Site in SF. When talking to the "real ones", the safe site made all the difference in people's lives when it was available.
I think the difference is that drug use was at least kept out of nice/touristy parts of town.
There was lots of blatant drug use all over town, but you could expect to go to Powells or Pioneer Courthouse Square without seeing people smoking out of pieces of foil.
So while it was not a great or sustainable system to have police clear out good neighborhoods and force addicts into designated bad areas, having a city be equally unappealing to everyone is in the long run a lose-lose trade-off.
Oregon banned cops pulling people over for broken cars btw, a lot of the issues described in this thread are also because the locals here rightfully hate the police and have muzzled them.
There’s got to be some middle ground between locking up people for substance use disorder and allowing people to make public spaces unusable with their antisocial behavior.
In my mind it’s something like “drugs are legal but public drug use and public intoxication are strictly illegal.” It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.
>It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.
The problem is feeling like you owe it to addicts to provide them with a place to use. Privatize all the public spaces: parks, sidewalks, etc. Grant strong property rights to those spaces.
You can get all high and mighty about who deserves what, or you can actually solve the problem and give people housing for free (or throw them in jail.)
Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness?
Drug use is a mental health issue. People take things that make them feel good when they don’t feel good. They’re just self medicating and we need to start treating it as a symptom of an underlying issue rather than the issue itself. Same with the obesity epidemic. It’s not the what, it’s the why.
Yet.. there are people who take things to make them feel good when they already feel good.
Further.. the idea that someone is going to improve their situation in any other than the most short sighted terms by "self medicating" with something like Methamphetamine or Heroin is completely ridiculous. I am absolutely not comfortable standing by to see how that story plays out, I know exactly how it plays out, and it's completely inhumane to pretend that you don't either.
The term "self medicating" doesn't imply that it works, just that they're trying to address an underlying issue that isn't being sufficiently addressed by anything else. It's closer in concept to "coping mechanism" than it is to "prescribed medication".
Oregon shut down most of their mental health facilities in the 80's and early 90's. We literally have a federal judge letting charged criminals out free, becuase they have sat in jail for sometimes months before even being evaluated by the state hospital to see if they are competent/capable of defending themselves. They literally have 2 state hospitals for the entire state, and one of them is only 1/3 capacity, but they can't seem to staff it, and the other is well over 100% capactity, and forced to release people because of inhumane overcrowding. (and way understaffed, since it turns out people don't like to be beaten up by patients, with no help, protection, or training, for what is essentially entry level pay)
I'm sure I'm not alone in using drugs (alcohol, caffeine, pot) for many reasons other than to "make them feel good when they don't feel good". Which along with equating use with abuse is such a shallow, narrow minded and ignorant view of drugs.
Well, you have psychological and physiological addiction. Normal "happy" people get addicted all the time - we've seen that with prescription drugs. That's almost purely a physiological addiction.
But of course, those two are not mutually exclusive - you can have both forms of addiction, and they do often merge into one with many types of drugs. Even if you beat extremely physiologically addictive drugs, you can lust for the effects many years / decades later, because of how good they made you feel.
And as you become addicted, usually at the expensive of everything else in your life, depression will set in - which just amplifies the need to escape.
The big problem with homelessness, and those types of drug users, is that a solid chunk of them have underlying mental illnesses - which may have lead to the drug use (self medication), or came out after drug use. These are the type of patients that simply can't function on their own. If you give them a free apartment, they're not able to live there.
I don't think radical decriminalization is the root problem - but rather the utter lack of (mental) healthcare.
I would probably ask myself if substance abuse existed in communist countries, socialist countries, and so on. If it did, I might not be too eager to point the blame at capitalism.
In the Soviet Union, it was illegal not to work. They would have killed (not a high bar for them given their body count, so excuse the colloquialism) to have a camera watching every worker.
Now we have Amazon drivers and packers with cameras in their face every day, working themselves so hard that they have to piss into bottles - every motion, breath, and second tracked - and people are convinced this is freedom, that our system is freedom.
Readit News
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...
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Zurich did a great job, especially with the transformation of the infamous needle park.
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.
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.
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.
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
So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|
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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...
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.
E.g. what is the outcome of CA Proposition 2 that passed in 2018?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does not work where the "Deep State" is the enemy and grifters run for Congress to become Twitter trolls.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
Rules are good for a well lived life. My house has more rules than prisons.
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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.
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.
who are we prioritizing in this situation and why? i care more about the people who have their lives together, they deserve priority.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
---
On the flip side I've seen addiction become a much more devastating force in recent years and smart solutions are badly needed.
... 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
VS
Fentanyl. Opioid epidemics. Addition as business model.
See the chart: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
I'm worried that cannabis is less likely to be legalised elsewhere due to pharma drugs being so harmful.
Most drug users don't want to get off drugs. That's why you need an intervention. No addict likes interventions either. You have to be really self disciplined to turn yourself into treatment.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas
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Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs.
After several decades and many, many millions of dollars spent, the problem is, by every measure, absolutely the worst it's ever been. https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/safety-inju...
Because the country as a whole has been completely ravaged by opiate addiction. It's not just Portland and Seattle. West Virginia doesn't have anything like this, and it's just as badly afflicted. It may be less visible because it doesn't have the same population density.
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Edit: to clarify, not trying to be an asshole, I have no idea what the answer is here, would be very interested to find out
I realize it is a drug, but not sure if that’s even supposed to be in the drugs.
Is this really a story of drug dealers cutting the drugs that people wanted.. into a lethal concoction?
(Sorry I really don’t know, are users looking for fentanyl?)
Some people do drugs to feel like a god, others to escape god.
Jack the Bipper by Channel 5 was pretty solid. I'd recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLGRGZTk51w
https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapo...
Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").
No we don't. This wasn't a problem 10 years ago. This isn't a problem in much, much poorer countries. This isn't a problem in fucking Houston or Tampa or NYC or Boston.
I get that you want to overthrow Capitalism, but the rest of us want to live a normal life without junkies shitting on our stairs
It could be that portland is taking a huge number of people that would otherwise be a drain elsewhere. Maybe we shouldnt consider this an outright failure, but look at some federal support.
We’ll never know if any of these policies stood a chance due to the USA viewing the west coast as a dumping ground for homeless people.
Next time you’re passing by these people, ask them where they are from originally.
Locals are like 20% of the problem.
Portland is better housing-wise, but not by much. Considering how most people who are both homeless and on drugs were homeless first, then turned to drugs, I think this is a strong confounding factor. It's hard to saw what effect decriminalization has had on drug use when it's adjacent to a housing crisis that is manufacturing more homelessness and drug use all on its own.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211022190558/http://allhomekc....
[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/20/california-a...
Rather I think the problem is that half assed decriminalization efforts simply aren’t enough and that drug overdose has become a much more severe issue because of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of fentanyl. What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts. In addition full legalization and regulated drug markets (preferably via pharmacies with a strict non-profit motive) wouldn’t hurt either.
What Seattle has done is basically just decriminalization without any of the support needed to go with it. Yes we support addicts and spend a lot of money on their care, however these are all suffering from austerity and are often just post-hoc measures (which often cost more in the long run).
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There are legitimate causes for the blight in Seattle but lack of jobs and low wages aren’t one of them.
I have a close friend whose relative is a heroin addict. According to her, a lot of overdoses are due to almost no "heroin" actually being heroin, rather its fentanyl cut to varying degrees of strength. Not knowing what you're taking, and not knowing how strong it is, can lead to a lot of problems. If people knew what they were getting, and it was legal, you could have "functional addicts" that cause little or no societal harm. My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years. She held down a job, paid rent, paid taxes, etc. She decided to get clean only when she had a close brush with death thanks to fentanyl.
Think of it this way: My drug of choice is tequila. When I buy a bottle of 80 proof tequila, I buy it from a state licensed store. I have confidence that its 40% alcohol, and that its safe to drink. It is sold by a reputable company with a brand reputation. What we have today with illegal or "decriminalized" drugs is the equivalent of people dying from drinking bathtub gin during prohibition.
This has been an increasingly popular argument here in Portland since decriminalization. It's deployed, generally, in terms of re-criminalizing hard drugs until there's a well thought out framework for safe, regulated legalization.
While I agree in principle [edit: let's say I did agree, but my views on this subject have shifted radically since I voted in favor of decriminalization - and I'll admit I was naive and wrong], I think that while decriminalization without regulation is clearly catastrophic, legalization with regulation would also not be desirable so long as it's confined to one local city, county or state, in the midst of a nationwide fentanyl crisis. Portland simply does not have the capacity or infrastructure to accept further waves of addicts from all over the country who come here to live on the street. Legalization means more regulatory burden, more services for out of town addicts paid by a dwindling local tax base that's quickly being displaced and/or opting to leave.
To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide. In any case, Portland can't go it alone anymore.
And remember - we did have a long experiment with legally prescribed opioids, and their widespread availability contributed to the current addiction crisis.
I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.
Well yeah, when you have criminally-encouraged over prescription of highly addictive, fairly dangerous drugs, you’re going to create an addiction crisis, but the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs. Before the prescription crackdown and fentanyl prevalence, some people who got addicted turned to heroin, and some of those people ODed, but now nearly every addicted individual only has access to fentanyl-laced street opiates.
Methadone clinics are a decent example of how regulation helps this issue.
Imagine if prohibition had ended just in Chicago. Chicago would have been overrun with alcoholics.
That is not what "legalized" means. It's still illegal to have opioids from anywhere other than your own prescription, which means that people without a prescription are basically on their own, have to get it through illegitimate means, and are all the way back to not knowing what they're getting.
If I wanted a supply of, say, LSD, I am not going to accept a doctor telling me how much I can have, when and where I can have it (as in current legalized psilocybin clinics). I want to buy some from the store, take it home, and enjoy it in my own, safe environment, with friends and people I can trust. Is that so hard to ask? It's not like it's any less safe than stuff like alcohol or tobacco, in fact there isn't even any known LD50 yet. The only risk is things being sold as LSD that aren't actually, which is basically the same scenario as the current opioid crisis.
People couldn't just go to a store; trusted family advisors were overprescribing due to intentionally misleading advertising. The addiction crisis is what happens when insurance no longer covers the pills.
What would be different if the experiment was done on a national scale? It seems to me that you would still see the worst impacts confined to a few major cities. I would hypothesize that other factors come into play like lax enforcement/penalties for petty crime, availability of free support services, and general sentiment/tolerance of degeneracy (though it sounds like that is changing.)
Because the reason people get hooked on to drugs is they have nothing better to do with their lives and they've run out of Hope but that runs straight into the effective altruist and effective acceleration as the gender here so it's not going to happen.
Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.
Very true, alcohol is much worse by most metrics, both in terms of number of addicts, number of deaths/year [1][2] and general damage done to the body. [3][4]. (I'm not trying to be cynical, just stating facts.)
> Prior to fentanyl, what was the percentage of high functioning heroin addicts compared to people living on the street? I can't find any research on that question, and I'm somewhat skeptical that your friend is the norm.
There's no data on self-reported addiction, for obvious reasons, but there is data on overdoses: "Fatalities involving only heroin appear to form a minority of overdose occasions, the presence of other drugs (primarily central nervous system depressants such as alcohol and benzodiazepines) being commonly detected at autopsy." [5]
I've met good people addicted to heroin. They've been through more hell than the rest of us can ever understand, almost entirely because of those times when they couldn't access it. If I could press a button to forever ban them access to any opioid, I'd press that button; they'd get over it in a few months and thank me. But that's impossible. The second best option is to allow them access to a clean, low-cost, prescription of it for the rest of their life.
[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/ [2] https://drugabusestatistics.org/heroin-statistics/ [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002239... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7328574/ [5] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1360-0443....
I don't have time to really get into the weeds for this discussion, but I can at least do the weaker refutation of this very general claim by way of a counterexample. Professor Carl Hart is one such example that came up in a seminar on substance use disorder during my undergraduate program in integrative neuroscience. [0]
I'm sorry you're dealing with someone who does not have a functional, productive relationship with a substance. What you're describing is true of a lot of things though, not just "hardcore" drugs. If you've lived with or know a gambling/sex addict you know exactly what I'm referring to. How these things hijack our neurology is really complex and it unfortunately boils down to more than "avoid these high risk things". Not sure if you have access to academic journals, but public libraries often can provide access to reputable research on substance use disorder in humans, as well as actual experimentation in animal models such as mice. There are a lot of people whose incentives align with yours for tackling this problem, and the solutions they propose are worth a shot. Clearly the war on drugs has not worked and we agree on that at least. What are we going to try next?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/06/meet-carl-ha...
Joe Perry & Steven Tyler (Aerosmith's "Toxic Twins") are still here. Clapton lives. So does Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.
All those guys would be long dead if there had been fentanyl lacing back in the 70's.
There are plenty of people who fit this description, and heroin isn't the root cause of their problem. It's just a symptom of a deeper problem. For every person like this, there's someone who dabbles with heroin/etc and still goes to work every day and has a healthy relationship with their family.
Anyone knows that who followed current events during the opiod epidemic and read some Wikipedia on it.
And actually, it's not just fentanyl, but fentanyl-like compounds that, even if controlled to the same concentration, have varying degrees of strength.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fentanyl_analogues
"The structural variations among fentanyl-related substances can impart profound pharmacological differences between these drugs, especially with respect to potency and efficacy"
You don't know which fentanyl analog is in that heroin dose, and how much of it.
Astounding.
Legalizing will reduce violence, reduce accidental overdoses and poisonings, and give the state regular contact points with users (to hopefully funnel them to assistance). Safe use sites would go some way towards hiding the problem if managed well.
Legalizing will not solve the problem of addiction. It will not solve overdoses (many overdoses are not caused by surprise differences in dose; people often overdose after relapse, or deliberately seek out stronger than usual supplies).
We have to accept that legalizing will solve some problems, but will likely keep killing at least some people.
Housing is another solution to hiding the problem. But housing just hides the drug use problem. It will probably also kill people - people who overdose on the sidewalk are more likely to be narcaned than people using alone.
Free housing + free drugs for opiate addicts would go a long ways towards solving the issue for everyone who isn’t an opiate addict, and probably cheaper than imprisoning or healing addicts.
I’d prefer treatment but the local officials have already proven incapable of that. The county is already very good at handing out needles, smoking kits, and boofing literature, so handing out fetty should be a very light lift administratively.
They have decriminalized possessing less than 2.5 grams of
- Opioids (such as heroin, morphine, and fentanyl)
- Crack and powder cocaine
- Methamphetamine (Meth)
- MDMA (Ecstasy)
It's a trial basis from Jan 31 2023 until Jan 31 2026, so we should get a good amount of data and evidence to see if this leads to better or worse outcomes for people and society as a whole.
[1] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/overdose/decriminalizatio...
There was a lot of illegal OxyContin use but most of it was well regulated and under the control of doctors and pharmacists.
For instance oxycodone and many powerful painkillers are afaik not available as tablets in many countries, only given through IV's and injections in hospitals for serious enough conditions, or under serious constraints like palliative treatments. If you are recovering from an injury and are allowed to leave hospital, all what you should be allowed to take is paracetamol or ibuprofen for a limited time and that's it.
We shouldn't have to enter war against pain. Pain is not necessarily harmful, they are useful signals that can let people assess their recovery and physical state. Trying to avoid pain is trying to avoid reality. It is deemed to fail.
Nobody should take opiods painkillers for minor injuries and ailments, it just doesn't make sense.
https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Measures/Analy...
To most people 'fentanyl' == 'The Devil', and rightly so after so many deaths.
However it does still have legitimate medical use.
Sincerely, Portland Native
Under your system she would've never decided to get clean then? Also dying much earlier than she would've had to and probably adding a bunch of burden to the health system. People chastice cigarete smokers for much less.
1. Public drunkness is still a problem 2. Drunk driving still kills a lot of people. Legalization of alcohol doesn't help.
"Given the legal opportunity to purchase X, some people will absolutely overdo it." This goes for some ridiculous things like Pokemon cards or collectible shoes as well. Should we ban those?
Then they’re out of the way.
One or way or another, none of us are getting out of this alive. Not sure where the religious conviction we must save all souls comes from or has any value.
Yeah, I don't know about that – plenty of "functional alcoholics" around, sure, but also plenty of not-so-functional alcoholics around, as well as the wife-and-kid-beater alcoholics.
Heroin is not alcohol and doesn't induce aggression in the same way, but it's also a lot more addictive, and especially at low wages getting your daily dose can be a challenge – so "junkies" will not be eliminated outright. I consider it an open question whether they will be reduced – it's very possible (perhaps even plausible), but I certainly wouldn't consider it a forgone conclusion.
> My friend's relative was a functional addict on and off for 20 years.
Dick van Dyke was a chain-smoker until well in to his 70s and he's currently doing well at the age of 97.
These are the sort of things where you really need to look at overall effects and statistics, rather than individual cases.
The crime of the War on Drugs was that we had double standards, not that we had a War on Drugs.
(And if no to alcohol, then what about marijuana?)
Are you arguing that no recreational or unsanctioned use of any banned substance should be tolerated?
For context:
- MDMA shows promise treating PTSD. Currently Schedule 1 - total ban
- Psilocybin and other psychedelics reportedly beneficial for end-of-life care, notably in the case of cancer patients. Currently Schedule 1 - total ban
- Marijuana is also still Schedule 1 at the federal level
Schedule 1 is normally also a ban on research but luckily we've seen some improvement in this area. Why? Because the illegal market still exists, and people __do__ discover genuine medical uses for currently banned substances
That could just be a coincidence though - that increasing the price of homes caused people to stop being able to afford them.
Dead Comment
Why not ban nicotine, by the same logic as heroin?
The key difference is that nicotine is a mere stimulant, while heroin alters your perception, it literally changes the way you see good and bad, because it's the ultimate feel-good substance. I have zero qualms about legalizing LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, etc. Likely even cocaine. But legalization of opioids would require a lot of preliminary work, to somehow allow the addicts function in a socially compatible way when badly wanting a dose.
It must be noted that a physiological addiction to opiates does not form from a first dose, and not even from the first ten doses, so infrequent recreational use is possible, given a right psychological preparation. This is similar to alcohol.
Deleted Comment
Surely we can solve this inability to regulate with even more regulation. Just one more regulation bro... trust me bro. Just a bit more power and money to the government bro. It's all gonna be great! Just give a little bit more in taxes, bro. It's going to be a utopia, you'll see!
Dead Comment
Yes?
When you're having surgery and the anesthesiologist uses a mixture of fentanyl and propofol, such that you safely wake up, they aren't just guessing.
One problem is that what's out on the street isn't necessarily fentanyl in the first place, but any one of hundreds of fentanyl analogs, which all vary in potency. You have no idea whether what you're measuring is fentanyl.
If you "give information and supplies", how do you keep the government out of it? At the very least, the government has to decriminalize what you're doing. Then what; someone has to pay for it. What about liability? If someone dies and it turns out you gave them the supplies, you're liable.
I gotta say though, it's sort of complicated when you're talking about legalizing things that are already legal as prescription drugs (like opiates and benzos). Alcohol is different because it doesn't really have any medical use outside of disinfecting things (it's fairly terrible as an anesthetic or as a tranquilizer), but there's something kind of weird about having former prescription drugs just be legal over the counter. How many people might bypass their doctor and start using strong opiates for pain that might not need it and end up in a bad spot?
I don't think you can go so far as like w/ alcohol where you just show an ID and buy whatever you want, but it does seem like there needs to be some way to ensure the product is safe. Maybe a compromise might be some sort of free testing kits, or something like narcan on hand in a safe space.
They're an interesting middle ground - dedicated medical centres that allow users to inject with clean needles, test drugs for purity, and have narcan and crash carts available for complications.
You arrive, show ID, inject your drugs, chill for 20 minutes or so, and then leave.
The long term results are no increase in crime, reduction in death from overdose and dirty needle infections, HIV, etc, improvement in drug quality (now that the users can readily test quality there's more discernment in the market and a reduction in blatant over cutting bad mixes into the illegal supply).
Public drug use | shooting up is still illegal - this is reduced as there is a centre to go to, etc.
One other benefit is being able to easily and routinely survey drug users and adapt public policy to changing situations on the ground, early detection of changes in illegal supply, etc.
They cost money to run, they save money on reduction in public funds spent on the problems they reduce.
Another poster did the math here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608506
The Oregon Health Authority then sat on that money for several years, bickering about procedures, policies, etc, and not a single dollar was sent out for several years after the law changed.
Treatment centers are finally starting to get open, years late. In the meantime, we spent years decriminalizing the drugs, while then guiding people into treatment, with no actual treatment available to them (and literally amassing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for it, before spending anything)
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-se-portl...
Either let people do drugs and let them worry about the consequences, or, if society is going to be on the hook for the consequences, don't. There is no feasible way to hold both positions at the same time.
If I may try to thread this needle:
- drug use has serious consequences for users directly and for society
- imprisonment is not effective at curbing drug use in individuals or systemically, because illicit drugs will always be available, see prohibition for the strongest case here
- illicit drug trafficking increases other criminal elements like gang violence, petty theft, etc, incurring high costs on society
- it is believed that addressing the causes for hardcore drug use as a mental and physical health issue may actually reduce drug use
- that work may be expensive today, but is expected to become a net positive over time as drug use declines
The idea is literally investing to fix a problem properly, rather than slapping on ever more expensive band-aid solutions as the problem gets worse.
If you don't believe health care can reduce drug use, that may be a sound position to hold, but if you believe it is effective it is absolutely not at odds to both desire investment in it and to seek decriminalization.
Nobody’s a victim when a kid falls and breaks an arm while skateboarding, but we have programs like CHIP to help kids have access to healthcare to get that arm treated, regardless.
No, the voters decriminalized drugs with a constitutional amendment.
I think the problem is quite the opposite from your diagnosis. There are no standards for legislation “success” or “failure”. Very few bills actually achieve their stated aims, and all the ones that don’t are kept on the books, then the results are blamed on under-budgeting, or partisan politics (which should be foreseeable if true).
A rehabilitation program requires a very high level of trust from those seeking help, especially so if the program is trying to pull people off of the streets.
Re-criminalizing drug usage would make it difficult to convince people that they won't be arrested.
Admittedly, I don't know how this problem has been approached elsewhere and what was needed to actually improve things.
The US has spent more than a trillion on the War on Drugs, we should use a fraction of that on housing and healthcare, instead of thinking about restarting the trillion dollar war on drugs
Decriminalization is the only ethical way to move forwards. For decades now we have abused our own populace and those of other countries to the point of parody in the name of this prohibition, and, shock of shocks, it has failed, just like prohibition did, with the added benefit of we have the documents from the Nixon administration who were quite ready to say, behind closed doors anyway, that the entire point from the start of the war on drugs was openly to fuck with hippies and black people at scale, and that was before the CIA was flooding ghettos across the country with drugs to find/launder money for their operations.
None of this has ever been about the fucking drugs, it has always been yet another cudgel wielded by the state to further it's own ends. IF we decide we need to regulate substances based on actual scientific documented evidence, not puritan sensibilities of sin and vice, then so be it and we can figure that out after the fact. But until then, the entire existing systemic infrastructure for it is frankly, poisoned. It is not fit for the task it is entrusted and should be destroyed.
Burn it down, and start over.
It seems like the best case scenario is "We legalize drugs and then raise tax dollars and then use that money to fund programs so that people that are addicted aren't harmed too much in the long run" just seems not ideal.
I get the arguments for personal liberty, but we wouldn't allow other risky behavior that has a such huge societal cost.
Former city council members often railed against it; as a member they’d be assigned city bureaus (fire, police…) to basically manage day to day.
Former members complained they were so busy dealing with office work rather than understanding Portlands problems in the abstract and crafting legislation. Also the mayor was on the council and did the same job.
The hope is the new system (mayor and council are now separate entities, city manager oversees bureaus so mayor and council can focus on legislative matters).
Also I’d like to point out every city in the US is a raging dumpster fire of homeless, collusion, graft, fraud… Portland isn’t unique and it’s hardly as bad as say PA cities. America is a shithole country full of FOMO obsessed fast fashion clothes, food, gadgets, and media and gives zero fucks about setting that aside to clean itself up. Garbage in garbage out
Drugs are illegal for a reason. Making drugs legal just makes the problem worse; the reasons most drugs are illegal is because of the many negative side effects they impose on users...and others.
Voluntary rehab and counseling don't work. Permissive policies don't work. There are literally thousands of shelters beds empty each night in LA, SF, and Portland because drug addicts would rather keep their drugs and paraphernalia than have a warm, safe space. The rare rich person who can control their habit or the consequences of their drug use because they've got a wealthy family to take care of them shouldn't be the basis for determining policy for the hundreds of people who can't.
Forced rehab works. Imprisonment works. Losing custody works. Some amount of externally-inflicted mental pain is necessary to overcome addiction to serious drugs like meth and cocaine because without it an addict will never develop the mental fortitude to stop using.
I feel a lot of people think since Marijuana isn't that bad, neither are the others. Which leads to the number of people voting for these 'decriminalize all drugs' policies.
Doesn't help when you see people comparing Heroin to alcohol or nicotine as well...
It also has a number of other negative health effects (e.g., lung cancer, popcorn lung, asthma, etc.) if smoked as weed or vaped which are generally avoided if marijuana is consumed as an edible or liquid.
The people drugs weren't decriminalized for before 2020 were the mostly normal citizens. After all, if someone has a house or a job or a car, you can take that away from them by punishing them, and that is what the cops would do. But if someone is already sleeping on the street, is arresting them and having them spend a few nights in jail and then going back out the streets going to change anything?
A cop might walk right past a man smoking meth in the street, but if you get pulled over for a broken headlight, and the cops might call out drug sniffing dogs, find a small amount of heroin in your possession, and throw you in jail for months.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until this country starts actually helping people.
* Quality drug treatment that is paid for by the state/federal level.
* Job training/retraining that is paid for at the state/federal level.
* Affordable, high quality education that helps people not get interested in, have time for, be so full of despair that they resort to these hard drugs.
* Quality, affordable, accessible mental health services IN ADVANCE of a crisis.
Locking people up or making drugs illegal will change nothing but cause there to be more pain.
And so we're caught in this terrible in-between with people who can't be held responsible for their actions, but who also can't have the state enforce care on them unless they ask for it, and regular citizens just trying to peacefully live their lives bear the brunt of it. Its a luxury belief whose costs are disproportionately borne by the lower income members of society which makes it even more galling to watch it masquerade as some sort of progressivism. Ultimately people are going to force politicians to make a choice. If these people aren't responsible then the state needs to step in until they can become responsible. If they have inalienable rights then they also have responsibilities that come with those rights and need to be punished for their misdeeds. The current path is not cutting it and the voting public is waking up to that.
I work with people coming out of prison who have been clean for a decade and the first thing they do is go and score some meth or crack or whatever. After a decade without!
That costs a lot of money. Something that people who want to live in a city that's livable should probably be willing to collectively pay for. But don't.
^ this quote from the article speaks plainly why it's dangerous to recriminalize. Agreed w/ your perspective on prior laws hurting disproportionately normal citizens who still had (some) property/livelihood to damage through arrest.
Not agreeing w/ the status quo in Portland, though - from friend's accounts it has become a tough place to walk around. I appreciate the fine line the government is trying to walk here. Hopefully they can accelerate some of the drug treatment options concurrently.
At least with Portugal, they have a stick in their policy that enforces treatment and medical attention if you're strung out and using on the street.
Also, Channel 5 did a great piece on the Safe Injection Site in SF. When talking to the "real ones", the safe site made all the difference in people's lives when it was available.
There was lots of blatant drug use all over town, but you could expect to go to Powells or Pioneer Courthouse Square without seeing people smoking out of pieces of foil.
So while it was not a great or sustainable system to have police clear out good neighborhoods and force addicts into designated bad areas, having a city be equally unappealing to everyone is in the long run a lose-lose trade-off.
In my mind it’s something like “drugs are legal but public drug use and public intoxication are strictly illegal.” It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.
The problem is feeling like you owe it to addicts to provide them with a place to use. Privatize all the public spaces: parks, sidewalks, etc. Grant strong property rights to those spaces.
Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness?
Further.. the idea that someone is going to improve their situation in any other than the most short sighted terms by "self medicating" with something like Methamphetamine or Heroin is completely ridiculous. I am absolutely not comfortable standing by to see how that story plays out, I know exactly how it plays out, and it's completely inhumane to pretend that you don't either.
I'm sure I'm not alone in using drugs (alcohol, caffeine, pot) for many reasons other than to "make them feel good when they don't feel good". Which along with equating use with abuse is such a shallow, narrow minded and ignorant view of drugs.
But of course, those two are not mutually exclusive - you can have both forms of addiction, and they do often merge into one with many types of drugs. Even if you beat extremely physiologically addictive drugs, you can lust for the effects many years / decades later, because of how good they made you feel.
And as you become addicted, usually at the expensive of everything else in your life, depression will set in - which just amplifies the need to escape.
The big problem with homelessness, and those types of drug users, is that a solid chunk of them have underlying mental illnesses - which may have lead to the drug use (self medication), or came out after drug use. These are the type of patients that simply can't function on their own. If you give them a free apartment, they're not able to live there.
I don't think radical decriminalization is the root problem - but rather the utter lack of (mental) healthcare.
Now we have Amazon drivers and packers with cameras in their face every day, working themselves so hard that they have to piss into bottles - every motion, breath, and second tracked - and people are convinced this is freedom, that our system is freedom.
What a joke.
https://iea.org.uk/publications/socialism-the-failed-idea-th...