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To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use (nytimes.com)
374 points by mikhael on Dec 11, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 1069 comments



Drug legalization is something I have come 180 on (or at least, 90 degrees).

Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc. ODs have more than doubled, and the shelters are half empty! They are not one more social program away from cleaning out the streets. I think the experiment has radically failed and I'm ready to say I was wrong.

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


   "Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc."
This is not even remotely true.

Everyone in the city, from the mayor [1] to the head of the largest services non-profit [2] has been yelling from the rooftops about the glacial slowness to effectively spend the allocated funding for drug treatment. Until just months ago, Multnomah County has been sitting on tens of millions of unspent funds,[3] and has been perpetually criticized for spending on harm reduction instead of treatment.[4] We actually closed the only local sobering center in 2020!

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

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

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

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


Right, but the plan has still failed. If all the key players are on board and you can't even begin to implement the plan, then it was a bad plan, and the people who developed it had little comprehension of reality. We should not attempt this elsewhere.


No, actually we should be trying to fix the stupid mistakes that were made in implementation of the plan, not roll it back and keep on fighting an equally moronic, ineffective, and racist War on Drugs elsewhere.

The best available evidence is that decriminalization essentially had no effect on overdose deaths (https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/03/ballot-measure-110-di...). It was going to go up no matter what because of the nature of fentanyl. The only thing the failure of Measure 110 has demonstrably done is waste taxpayer funds and give businesses in downtown an excuse for why they are failing (when in reality it has more to do with the death of downtown for purely economic reasons post-COVID, just like other major West Coast cities).


This reads like total denial. COVID was years ago. The city I’m in bounced back and was mostly normal late 2021. I also was interested in the outcome of Portland’s experiment. It has failed. The war on drugs is anti-liberty and I recognize its racist roots. But racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023. Again, denial and excuses. The war on drugs AND Portland’s experiment are BOTH failures. I welcome the next attempt at it.


Which city are you in? All of the major West Coast cities have not had downtown office occupancy return to pre-pandemic rates as far as I am aware.


Not the original commenter, but I took the response regarding bounced back to refer to retail commerce, not office occupancy. I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.


> I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.

Remote work was already growing, COVID just accelerated a societal change already in progress. Without COVID, we probably would have eventually ended up in the same place as we are now, it just would have taken longer.

And even years before COVID, I think the US was already ahead of many other countries in this transition. I remember my first business trip to the US in early 2008, I went to Oracle’s office in Orlando, it was near-deserted-I asked where everyone was, I was told “they’re all working from home”. Whereas, back in Australia (Oracle included), there was still a very strong culture of “if I can’t see you at your desk then you aren’t working”. Or similarly, even back then many of the US Oracle executives had remote EAs - remote EAs were not much of a thing in Australia at that time


>racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023.

Maybe in some places that might be true, but people are still in jail from the past.


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


I don't think lack of tech bros manning high cost corporate square footage is what is causing the homeless, crime, and addiction problems in West Coast cities. It seems more like bad policies to me. The time window to blame everything on covid is passing quickly


This is the classic approach of conservatives: throw wrenches in every part of a welfare system, then point to its failures to justify its dissolution. See: Medicare, public education, etc.


This is just about the worst example you could have used for your theory. In this case there are thousands of people that could have just done a 1:1 copy of what they do in Switzerland, Portugal, Netherlands, Scandinavia etc. Instead they copied only the carrot (treatment and harm reduction). Then they didn't just not copy the stick (prison, consequences for missing treatment) they threw away all their sticks.

With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.


I'm curious why you think there are much fewer homeless in conservative cities (like Provo, Jacksonville, even Orange County)? Is it because everything is backwards? The progressive cities are actually conservative, and the conservative cities are actually progressive?


Because if you're homeless, you totally want to stay somewhere with no social programs. Here in California, our Medicaid insurance is infinitely better than any private insurance. Why would you stay somewhere where you get zero help? I. E. Zero Medicaid expansion in conservative states


Which leads to lovely little details like the reason the SF poop map exists: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

I’ll pass, thanks.


People have feet and can move between cities...

They're pushed out, either through police violence or a complete lack of viable social support systems. There's many ways to discourage folks from sticking around through ad hoc policies without putting it explicitly into law, or else to simply not mandate the kind of support that other cities have.


Right, but I'm asking if Portland is secretly run by conservatives, why does it have a different outcome? i.e., why doesn't Portland discourage folks from sticking around?


Conservatives don't "secretly run" anything and to insinuate that that's what I'm saying is to misinterpret my comments. So the premise of the question is false from the outset.

Conservatives (and the threat of conservative backlash) can nonetheless meaningfully influence the shape of institutional policies that hinder the stated goals of the organization, municipal government or otherwise. It's not at "tyranny of the minority" levels in many cases but that doesn't mean they're completely shut out.

Intention matters little when it comes to outcomes -- this is the credo of the consequentialist. It's about the material facts as regards what specific elements of specific policies promote or discourage this or that outcome. Deft policymakers can find sneaky leverage points that are only obvious in retrospect as having been a significant influence on the outcome vis a vis the stated goals of the policy in the first place, and it would be naive to assume that large political organizations (parties, PACs, etc.) on both sides don't develop and hire talent to provide exactly this kind of service. It's a battle of shadow consultancies just as much as it is a battle between ideologically-motivated parties, even though you are only exposed to the dramas of the latter in news media.


Yes — the political opposition is functioning exactly like it should.


If Portland is secretly run by conservatives that want to prove that high minded liberal ideas for dealing with the unhoused and drug addicts, they're doing a very good job!


I live in Portland. Conservatives do not have anything to do with our city or the county of Multnomah. We haven't elected a conservative since the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_McCready. We're the second highest taxed city in the nation.

If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.


I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.

In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing, but for a better solution (the long term) it involves better education, welfare, health-care and social equality.

You can't try to fix one of these problems while ignoring the others. It won't work.


> “ compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.”

As someone from the “rest of the world” I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I think this claim is based on a broad misunderstanding of, let’s be honest, Western European politics by people who’ve never voted in elections here.

I live in Switzerland, have lived or worked in the Netherlands, UK and Czechia. The liberal parts of the US are far to the left of any of those countries.

(Yes, healthcare is cheaper, except in Switzerland. It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but on questions related to drug use in the public square, I think you’d find it’s a lot less lenient here than you think.)


I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true


Hm, maybe? Public transport, for example, I very nice, I agree, but in fact it’s less affordable in most places than, say in New York. I’d much rather be poor in NYC than in Paris, London or Prague. At least in NYC, you don’t get charged more for commuting from a cheaper area, the city provides heat, there are community programs, etc.

Look up some actual political programs from major parties in Western Europe. You’ll be surprised.

I think most Americans have seen a sanitized version of Europe, just like most Europeans have seen the evening news version of America. Both of those ideas are caricatures.


The way I see it, current European conservatism manifests as nationalism, anti immigration, anti Islam, and anti green policy. I looked at French and Dutch conservativd parties and that seems like a fair description. They’re still in support of government funded education, healthcare, labor organization, vast public transportation etc… those are all hot topics to American conservatives. American conservatives also have their own colors of nationalism and anti immigration stances, but I’m talking class issues, as opposed to social and culture issues. I don’t live in Europe and not a politics expert, so correct me if I’m wrong


Well, we started talking about drug policy. If you would like to do a comparison between American and European right across a range of issues, then I will subscribe to your newsletter :)

But at any rate, I think European healthcare systems either cost as much as the US (e.g. in Switzerland), end up being two-tier public/private (Czechia), or are near collapse (the NHS).

Union density is higher in the US than in France. French unions make a lot of noise, but don't represent that many people. Unions in many other countries are not very powerful (and the mainstream right is generally opposed to them).

I think there's a way these things are presented for the outside world, that doesn't always match the reality on the ground. I also think there is a tendency for people to pick the example out of a group of 28 countries that best supports their argument in the moment: Swedish unions, Swiss trains and French retirement, as it were.


You honestly think NYC is a good place to be poor? lol


I mean, "poor" might mean different things to different people. Call it working class? I'd rather commute from the Bronx for $2.90 than from Croydon (in many ways the Bronx of London) for, like, $7. I'd much rather get heating for free than pay, like, $5k in London.

If you're on the street, none of this helps you much, but across many metrics, I think NYC might legitimately be more affordable to live for the working class than London or Paris.


i don't know enough to comment on the cost of "normal" living, but think about what happens in NYC the moment you get laid off or, even worse, get sick. I think at that point Paris starts becoming a lot more attractive if you're working class..


> I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true

Australia is way ahead of the US at privatising public transport. Selling off public assets into private hands is a much bigger thing in the UK and Australia than the US. Some Australian states are now even privatising government services such as motor vehicle registration, driver licensing and land title registration. The UK and Australia also have a much bigger culture of commercialising government IP as opposed to the US culture of putting it in the public domain. People always think of the US as more capitalist, but I think these are examples of ways in which the US is less capitalist. Some of these Australian initiatives are almost bordering on anarcho-capitalism (sans the competition part). And they aren’t necessarily the work of “conservatives” - the decision to partially privatise the motor vehicle registry in the State of Victoria was undertaken by the Andrews government, [0] which is arguably the most left-leaning of Australian state governments, in charge of Australia’s most left-leaning state

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-01/victorian-government-...


The OP was talking about politicians and at least for politicians on a national level that is certainly true. Look up any of the many political compass/categorisation sites and you will find the Democrats economic, defence, education... policies typically to the right of the major conservative party in European countries (CDU, French republicans, moderaterna in Sweden...).

Now with social/drug policies it's typically more complicated, and there are vast differences between European countries as well (e.g. Sweden is extremely restrictive for drugs and even the major left parties don't push for changes).

The overall point still stands though. Now among the population there is much greater variety, but this is one of the issues with the US two party system, significant portions of views in the electorate are not represented.


A very American definition of "conservative" is being used when people say that. The converse statement, "other countries' politicians are in general much more liberal", probably makes more intuitive sense, again using a strictly Western definition of "liberal" (Enlightenment, post-revolutionary France, etc.).


What is conservative about Portland politicians and whom are you actually comparing them to?

IMO Portland already does every single one of the solutions that you recommend. It’s not working out for them well, in the same way it isn’t working out for Portugal or Amsterdam.

Maybe some drugs should be restricted and usage controlled. I’m pro legalization, but I would not support opium dens being as common as Starbucks.


Why do you say it's not working out in Portugal or Amsterdam? I frequently hear those two places cited as an example of where drug liberalisation has been a big success. Is that not true? I ask from ignorance.


The programme in Portugal requires people to check in with the authorities, seek treatment and move off the street corner. It by most accounts worked ok for a while, but downtown Lisbon started to look pretty bad recently, and I think they’ve been backpedaling a bit.

In Amsterdam, the drug tourism made the city hard to live in, and the authorities have largely cleaned it up now. Weed is a special case, but using anything else on the street will warrant a check-in from the cops.


I live in Lisbon and I don't see how "downtown Lisbon started to look pretty badly recently". Street drug users, seemingly mostly/wholly homeless, seem to be concentrated in an area I wouldn't call downtown. I don't really know what they do to keep it that way though. Also Porto seems to be an entirely different story from what I've seen there.

In any case, Portugal's strategy was supposed to be diverting funds from the narcotics police to rehabilitation efforts. But those funds have steadily eroded over the years with cost-cutting measures such as the merger of the autonomous drug agency into the main healthcare service. It's not too surprising if it is falling short of its initial success.

Another thing to consider is the inseparability of homelessness and drug abuse issues. It doesn't seem to be possible address one without the other, rising homelessness will inevitably bring more drug abuse. (Still I see fewer homeless people in downtown Lisbon than in Barcelona that won't even let you have a beer in the park).


Fair enough, my knowledge of the situation in Lisbon is mostly second hand from some friends there. When I visited them, there were definitely areas that were pretty dodgy in what seemed to me to be the downtown. Now, I’ve been to places that are actually dangerous, and I’ve never felt unsafe in Portugal, but I definitely did get accosted by a clammy, pale looking gentleman with a nervous tick who tried to steal my phone.


It's only dodgy compared to Ponta Delgada or the well groomed areas of London, which are well groomed thanks to immigrant labour. Pickpockets and annoying sodium bicarbonate or basilic 'drug dealers' are quite common in Lisbon, but then evey major tourist destination has pickpockets. The novelty in Lisbon is the fake drug dealers. I don't know about drugs as I haven't seen any needles or addicts or even stoners on the street.


I don’t know about Portugal. But Amsterdam’s drug toleration (it’s still illegal mind you) happens against a background of pretty intense anti-drug culture. As that culture has become more permissive, drug policy has become more punitive: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/681551


You got this wrong: drug use generates homelessness. Most homeless in the US are drug addicts - many of them with serious health conditions partly induced by drug use - and that’s why they can’t hold a job or get a home.

In San Francisco when we give homes to drug addicts, the first thing they do is ripping the sink out to sell it and buy more drugs.

There is a serious drug epidemic that needs to be addressed simultaneously as we try to help the super-minority of legitimate homeless that are bad on their luck and need 2-3 months to find a new job and get back on their feet.


I always felt like I heard this was the opposite. That the drug addicts were the minority population, but the majority of the news stories. I feel like we both would benefit from statistics that prove either way. My feelings are generated from anecdotes I've heard over the years, and I would love to be proved wrong and change my mind. Do you know? I feel like so much of this discussion is fueled by strong feelings without data.


Have you ever personally known someone addicted to hard drugs? I've known several. They can't continue living in a house or apartment with other non addicted people. They would steal literally everything to sell for drugs. Losing their housing is something that happens to every drug addict. Of course their use escalates from there, but it's an early milestone common to all.


Have you ever known someone addicted to hard drugs? What gets them started on it before the transition into homelessness? Safe bet is on the scenario that they're in a stressful, economically insecure situation (including insecurely housed), but still housed, when they begin diving deeper into the drug habit.


Your first question is answered in my original post. I grew up in an affluent community where almost nobody was economically insecure. The typical heroin addict was a high school kid with rich parents. Their parents would eventually cut them off financially and kick them out of the house after all the expensive rehabs failed. They'd usually drop out of high school and spend their time panhandling around touristy areas and then go to the projects to buy and use drugs. If they were a girl, prostitution was pretty likely at this phase as well. Many people I went to school with followed this pattern. Most are dead now, some in and out of jail and still bumming around.


Then your anecdotal cases are not generalizable to the wider public and I'm not sure why you're acting as if your experience is comparable to what's being discussed in this thread. "Affluent" is a relative term, by definition, referring to only a couple percent at most of the population.


You literally asked for anecdotal data, then discount it.


> Teens who are from well-off family face a risk of drug and alcohol addiction that is higher than the national average.

https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wea...


> In 2022, there are approximately 582,462 people affected by long-term homelessness in the United States. The US homeless population is increasing yearly, particularly in younger age ranges. Tragically, homelessness and substance abuse go hand in hand. The National Coalition for the Homeless has found that 55% of homeless people are alcohol dependent, and 25% reported being dependent on other harmful substances.[0]

More than half suffer substance abuse. Accounting for the fact that many of them would deny admitting to drug use when asked, this is probably a conservative number and the percentage is much higher. Also this is an US average, and it doesn't take into consideration "drug tourism" in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle where drug use is literally the main goal thanks to easy drug access, therefore the drug-related homelessness ratio in some places is much higher.

They also probably take into account both housed an unhoused homeless, with the nuance that unhoused homeless are more likely to be druggies and to refuse shelter. Therefore the percentage of homeless population we see every day in our streets (which is the subset of homeless more likely to affect our day-to-day lives) have very likely an higher percentage of drug use.

Finally, the US actually has another problem: we can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.

[0] https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/

[1] https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...


You're both sort of correct, but that also makes you both sort of wrong too.

Homeless is in part composed of three things (in Portland):

- Substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, etc)

- Mental health (coincides with the above!)

- Housing (which normally stabilizes, somewhat, both of the above!)

We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland, which makes the former two more visible and at times problematic.


The elephant is the room is that drug addicts are present in large number, they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate, to themselves and to the community.

For as long as we keep ignoring this, we are stuck in nuances.

These people don't want to get better, so we need to mandate treatment (and give them one of the many available supportive housing units after accepting treatment) or - if they refuse treatment - relocate them where they cause no harm other than themselves. Might as well call it a "government-assisted suicide" campus, because this is what it already is in every major American city nowadays. Today, we are literally letting them die on our streets.

Nobody in modern public discourse is complaining about homeless in the context of a regular Joe bad on his luck, who after a while - with dignity and hard work - goes back to a stable life. We should give our all to him and homeless like him.


> they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate

You are right, on average they cannot maintain housing, which is why I said "subsidized" - which ensures they don't become homeless (aka publicly visible).

> We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland

What that doesn't solve is the substance abuse, which is a mental health problem. If your intent is to solve both then you need to spend on mental healthcare and subsidized single unit housing. If you just want them off the street and concentrated to certain areas (eg: where I live in Portland) then you just need subsidized housing.


There is more to being able to maintain housing than paying rent. Are you also going to subsidize cleaning and maintenance staff to scrub and rebuild the apartment every time they deliberately destroy it? If you kick them out for smearing everything in feces or tearing all the copper out of the walls or stopping up all the drains and flooding the unit because the drugs made them think this was a good idea, then you haven't solved the homeless problem. You've just made another homeless shelter which they won't stay in because it has rules they won't or can't follow.

They need to be housed in something like a prison or a psychiatric hospital, after being convicted with due process.


> I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.

Source? This reads like a Leftist talking point. I’d be interested in understanding who trained on you on this idea.


The Democratic party would be considered right of center to many Western European nations, but certainly not compared to "the rest of the world", and there's a growing chunk of U.S. politicians that are proper left of center as well.


In Seattle, local elections are a contest between Socialists and Democrats. The former may not have much presence on the state or federal levels, but to say they don't exist in city politics is incorrect.

Also, the reason they can't succeed much beyond a few lefty cities is because they can't stop saying insanely stupid shit, like the suggestion that Boeing workers should seize Boeing factories and use them to make city buses instead of airplanes. Most of America doesn't go in for this kind of nonsense. This is a real example btw: https://www.kiro7.com/news/seattle-city-councilmember-elect-...


What American cities need more then public housing, is housing. Actual policies that increase housing stock and make it possible to live in these places without a car.

That is how you actually decrease total cost of living.

The US has been trending up, between housing and transportation, a huge amount of people spend well above 50% of their income on that, and poorer people even more.

Public housing can be part of this, but by itself it wont fix anything.


America doesn’t have an housing problem. America has a drug problem.

It’s time we stop deceiving the public.


House prices suggest there's a gigantic housing market problem.


We can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.

[1] - https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...


Too bad the Housing Authority can't help smuggle houses over the border.


There are plenty of houses in America, it just happens so that most of them are in less desirable places.


I think nobody is entitled to live in any city. You and I are not entitled to live in Manhattan if we can't afford it, we are not entitled to live in Beverly Hills if we don't have the means for it, and likewise the homeless are not entitled to live where they cannot be housed.

Otherwise, I would like to apply for a supportive housing unit penthouse on 5th avenue please.


What a useless argument against a position no one is taking! Please participate in the conversation happening here, not some fantasy straw man. Comments like this are less than useless.


You must be new on the topic :) Let me accelerate this conversation for you:

1) Someone says we need housing.

2) I say: great, let's build it!

3) Someone says: but cities are not building enough housing, we need to invest more.

4) I say: great, let's build it anywhere in the US, where it is cheaper too. Population density in the US is very low.

5) Someone says: not like that! Homeless want to live in places like San Francisco, you can't relocate them.

6) I say: nobody can choose to live where they want if they don't have the means for it. <- WE ARE HERE.


You need to learn some manners and some basic critical thinking skills. You don't get to dictate where we are in a conversation.

To build housing "anywhere in the US" you have to build all the infrastructure that makes it make sense to move people there. This country hasn't built a new city in ages, it just keeps expanding metro areas into sub- and exurbs. Are you also going to fund hospitals? Groceries? Building supply stores? A car for everyone? All the devices and supplies for heating and cooling in adverse environmental conditions? How do you think that's going to make sense financially compared to providing services and housing where people are and where they already have human-scale support systems (friends and family)? And good luck bringing together the different governments at different scales to avoid scope creep, budget bloat, and general coordination problems. You're being so myopic and naive that your smarminess and vitriol toward those you consider undeserving is not even funny, just pitiful. People aren't bits in a machine, you can't just move them effortlessly to new locations.


> You don't get to dictate where we are in a conversation.

> you can't just move them effortlessly to new locations.

Turns out we are exactly where I said we would be in this conversation.

We can allocate the homeless to numerous other existing towns without having to build new cities, and most importantly without having to build expensive shelters in places where land is already very expensive, like the coasts.

Where they have friends and family is irrelevant because nobody is entitled to live where they want, unless their families host them. I have friends in Paris that doesn't mean I can demand a flat there. Plus many of them are drug tourists that are from out of town, and those also happen to be the most dangerous ones.

With that said the small minority of homeless that are genuinely looking forward to being re-integrated into society must be given treatment, housing and support. This is a small minority, unfortunately.


That is a common argument. If you spend time arguing with people about housing costs, houses in less desirable areas often turn out not to count for various reasons.

It makes a lot more sense to talk about how to support cheaper communities and migrate people to them than it does to bring down housing costs in expensive areas where the locals are fighting back against bringing in new people.


Mostly because you have to bring people to those places and upgrade the infrastructure to support them there. Do the math yourself if you're unconvinced.

People in cheaper locations also fight back! Why is that location cheap and why do those people live there? Precisely because the density is so low and the community likes it the way it is. An influx of recently homeless people would be a huge disruption and no one would be happy with the change. Would you want to manage that situation? THINK!


Let's call this what it is: a pithy, meaningless, shameful, ideologically motivated, antisocial comment.


This is only true economically in arenas like taxes and government programs. Socially what country are you thinking of that is to the left of the American left?


Please stop voting to steal my money for more social program waste.

I already have to pay a 1% tax on all household earnings above $200k. Before haters hate, please realize I'm already paying 10% to the state on all earned income. Plus the federal rates.

Oregon has consistently mismanaged funds. Giving them more money won't fix anything. They don't know how to spend it.

I'm tired of keeping zero income until the end of April. Especially when all I have to show for it is constant homeless drug addicts. Lwt the private sector handle it or enforce no camping laws and sober folks up in a cell or ship them away, or just give them all fet lined drugs to permasolve the issue.


>I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative

In what way? Compared to almost everywhere on earth, American politicians are extremely xenophilic, extremely tolerant of sexual minorities, extremely feminist, more inclined towards individual freedoms in general and perhaps slightly more capitalist.

All of these things are different axes of politics that are correlated differently in different regions of the world.


> I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative

Pretty much only on the issue of taxes. But the right-wing parties surging in popularity in Europe right now make Trump look like Jimmy Carter.


Conservatism isn't the point, it's the specific tactics being used that they're highlighting. IIRC the same tactics were recommended in that WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" that still makes the rounds on the internet.

The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.


I disagree, falsely labeling things conservative is unproductive for the conversation of "what is going right or wrong in Portland, OR, USA". That's to say, context and the goals of discussion are important. We do a lot of committees out here, but most of them are with the aim of including a vast number of viewpoints. If your point is that we fancy ourselves the type of liberals that do everything but nothing well even to a dysfunctional degree then you and I might agree. If your point is to say there's some conservative operator out here speaking to struggles, empowerment, etc then I'd say you're off your rocker.


It's not a false label. Conservatives do in fact do this. It's kinda their thing. Look what Obamacare became once they got involved.

Nobody is saying conservatives have infiltrated the Portland political scene, only that we see similar failures in other contexts when initiatives are half-assed (on purpose). Similar circumstances-- not identical.


It is a false label when there are no conservatives in Portland's government. That yields to two things:

- This is just a common American tactic

- There are other, less nefarious, reasons this happens

Including conservatives in a context where they don't exist and shifting the goal posts outside of American politics on a whim is both entirely inappropriate and distracting if your goal is to discuss how Portland can be better. Nobody in Portland is sabotaging our committees is my point; at the very least they're not doing so intentionally.

What you do get here is what some people call "everything bagel style liberalism" where we do everything, but nothing particularly well, and there is really no North Star when it comes to ethos.


Small-c conservative is a label that is not necessarily aligned with any political party. If I wanted to say (big-R) Republican I would have. Does that help you understand the argument better?


No. There are no conservatives in Portland's government. There have not been for a long time. There has been no one right of the Oregon Democratic party and a good chunk, if not most, have been left of that in recent times. It's part of why I moved here. The issue was not my understanding, the issue is people who cannot fathom that there are problems here outside of conservatism.


She wasn’t elected, although if Goldschmidt’s crimes had been public knowledge she probably would have been.


The conservatives who run Portland and Oregon?


They mean not leftists enough, its a way to absolve themselves of any responsibility of the situation at hand, if only they were even more leftist.


You will note of course that the rules and regulations around how to implement these things are always 'bipartisan' and meant to stir up as little backlash as possible. There's many opportunities to install bottlenecks and roadblocks in systems that end up shaping the entire way they function. To some extent it is progressives anticipating conservative backlash but there's plenty of lines in plenty of laws written into and insisted on by conservatives that have wide-ranging consequences.

Reductionist perspectives on how politics works always end up at this "one side is dominating the other" kind of narrative but it's never actually that way, both sides still have a lot of influence on the various specifics of the outcome.


Are you seriously attributing public sector bureaucratic dysfunction to some sort of subversive public sector conservative operatives, or vague regulatory poison pills that you cannot actually point to here?

It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.


Subversive public sector partisanship is a lot more believable than a homeless industrial complex, I'm glad you brought the two up together.


Taking that as an axiom; then what exactly would the plan be to make the welfare system work? Conservatives are frequently going to be in power, they represent about half the votes.

If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only real choice is to abandon the welfare system. Otherwise, the alternative is to abandon the welfare system spitefully in a way that doesn't achieve anything for anyone.


Technically, Republicans are not necessarily "half the votes", more like "a third of the votes" which are then joined by another 10-15% of "unfaithful" swing voters - whose opinions don't necessarily overlap 100% with core conservative principles.

Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms.

You can quickly judge the actual opinion of the overwhelming majority of voters on completely abolishing welfare provisions, when you mention a few magic words that happen to extend those provisions to "normies" (medicare etc).


BTW: Indie voters are roughly 45 percent.

The two major parties share the partisan vote.

This means Republicans are actually a quarter of us along with Dems.

Party line voting is not the only game in town. Roughly half the nation wants to vote FOR something, not AGAINST "the bad guys"


BTW: Indie voters typically strongly align on one or other side of the partisan divide despite their self-assigned labels. The nature of the two-party system is it binarizes the entire discourse and ends up reproducing the bipartisan dynamics by restricting and chopping up the Overton window according to the two major lines of thought. For more true independence you'll need proportional representation and multiple parties. The problem would (does) still exist but across a wider spectrum of opinion.


Indeed. Significant numbers of indies will no-vote and cite what we are discussing here as part of why too.


"Unfaithful"

I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:

Vote for what?

They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.

What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.

And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.

It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.

The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:

A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy

Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...

Today I do not judge others for their votes.

Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.

And I do not blame or shame anyone either.

It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.


Calm down, it's just a technical term when talking about voter behaviour - the "faithfuls" being voters extremely unlikely to ever change their preference (regardless of what it is). It's a fact of life that many voters have "for life" preferences.


I was calm. Just doing a bit of framing in the hope of improving an otherwise solid discussion.

The optics on that term warrant the framing for reasons already given.

Sidenote: one of the most difficult aspects of threaded text dialog is a very high degree of intent ambiguity is ever present. Same goes for overall emotional perception.

Because of this, I avoid personal judgment and very frequently avoid the top responses to "things one may feel compelled to respond to", which are righteous indignation and subject change.

Much better to assume a friendly dialog, give benefit of the doubt and see where it all may lead.

If nothing else, flat out asking about other people state is often better than declaring it out of hand.


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


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


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


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


It's always interesting when someone assumes that failed strategy X would have obviously worked if only had it been pursued even harder.. you might be right, but it seems like an odd assumption to make given the circumstance.


It's always interesting when something doesn't work immediately and someone just wants to go back to the shit system everyone hated before because it personally bothered them less.


What circumstance? The clamor to use prison time as a solution to homelessness and drug use?


You know what thread we're in, right? You know what circumstances I'm referring to..


People generally don’t ask you to clarify if they know what you’re talking about.


That's interesting, cheers


Appropriate response.


Except as a rhetorical device which the above person is clearly using his request as...


Yes, but you appear not to understand my response.


You think the policy failed because of that supposed clamor? That's an interesting idea: even when your policy is enacted, it's the fault of the policy that wasn't.


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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


Be cautious about applying lessons across significantly different culture.

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

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


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


the quote is missing what happened after the Platzpitz and later the older Letten train station were cleared: heroin use was decriminalised - not legalised - but only in controlled locations under supervision from medical staff and social workers. It seems that solution helped in multiple ways: - no people using heroin on the streets - no overdoses - drug users became less criminal because they didn't need as much money to finance their use - the medicalisation of heroin use made it less appealing to new users by removing the rebellious aspect


The first priority should be cleaning up the cities for the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Absolutely do not let drug addicts overwhelm your downtown cores and make them terrible. You don't need to lock them up indefinitely, but you do need to move them somewhere else where they won't have hugely negative effects on the city and its populace. It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either, while it will make life for everyone else substantially better -- and we should be prioritizing the welfare of the productive members of society who actually pay to make all of it possible. Right now way too many cities have lost the plot by being too permissive of violations of the social contract, and everyone suffers as a result.


I hate the messaging of “for the actual taxpayers” phrase even if I agree mostly with the sentiment.

There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.


There is more to life than paying taxes

Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.


Actually, I pay taxes because I have to.


Same reason as death.


There is no option to opt-out of paying taxes and voluntarily live in the woods.

You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years.

These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.


You get collective benefit even if you live in the woods. You can’t opt-out because you don’t opt out of the benefit.

You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.

You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away.

Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.


>You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.

No, you can't. You have to renounce your US Citizenship to stop paying taxes in the US, no matter where you live. Renouncing requires acquiring citizenship in a new country, which isn't that easy: just ask anyone who's tried to naturalize in the US.

>Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.

You're not really a part of the society if you don't live there, but if you're a US Citizen, you're still required to pay both federal and state taxes, even if you've never lived in the US in the first place.


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

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


Renouncing isn't hard for most people, except Americans who have to pay thousands of dollars in fees. Acquiring the new citizenship is what's hard; most decent countries don't just hand that out.


The point is that of course you have to find citizenship in another country before renouncing your only other citizenship, otherwise you'd have no citizenship.


> You have to pay taxes.

You can vote not to though.

The argument of getting something for the taxes you pay is made because people can vote away taxes.

But yes, it's a troubling argument, because once people start thinking that way they feel like they're owed something. Large swaths of the elderly and the infirm may not be paying taxes but are absolutely owed things that often cost money just because they're a fellow citizen and a member of our society.


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

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

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

But taxation comes first (as an obligation).


What about raising children?


is not a contribution by default?


That sounds very short sighted. You are preconditioned on all of your ancestors having kids. Everything you like, love, care about was created by someone who was first created by their parents. If not for those people there would be nothing.

Raising children is the greatest, riskiest, and costliest contribution to the world most of us can make. It should be respected.


HN is so bizarrely blood-and-soil sometimes.

I didn't ask my ancestors to screw, thanks. I mean, good for them, I guess? But I wish people would stop insinuating that having children is the pinnacle of human achievement, when, in fact, it's actually the bare minimum. I wish they would realize that not everyone needs to have children (the math alone simply doesn't work out on a finite planet...), and I wish they wouldn't cast aspersions on those of us who choose to live the way we do. How about we go after the people who had kids but shouldn't have, instead?


The black and white question is - would you rather be dead? To the extent that your life is valuable, enjoyable, and meaningful - none of that joy/value/meaning would exist if your ancestors "didn't screw."

This is a real question, not a rhetorical one, and its answer is subjective to your values and experience. If your answer is something akin to "I am indifferent to whether I exist or not" then your entire argument is logically sound. On the flip side if you attach value to what you have and are, then it logically follows that if you have the chance to "ask your ancestors to screw" - you would.

As for "casting aspersions" and "going after" - that's not what I am doing here. You do you. The more interesting question is - which should society value and which should someone emulate based on their own values. That again goes back to the question I asked. If a view is contingent on someone feeling "meh" about their own existence, it's not a very appealing perspective.


> On the flip side if you attach value to what you have and are, then it logically follows that if you have the chance to "ask your ancestors to screw" - you would.

Why does that follow?


who will change your diapers when you need them again?

spoiler: if not your children, then someone else’s - the robots may not be sufficiently dexterous by that point.

it is fine to not want children. or to want them. to pretend either side is morally superior is rather foolish. practically speaking, you’re gonna need your diaper changed.


So which do you prefer to tack on the end of that: "...except for the disabled" or "...and to hell with the disabled"? Both are widely used.


I have people with disabilities in my family so I know their realities up close - unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops.

My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a society that tends to look down on them either as limited (usually from the right) or as “must-be-kept-cotton-balled” (usually from the left).

They want to be seen as people, which is what they are.


One of the big issues with severe disability is the stupidly low cap on assets to qualify for social programs (SS, Medicaid). It was set in the 70s at $2000 and hasn't been changed since.

This keeps people with severe disabilities out of the workforce more than anything else.


Those limits -all of them should follow inflation. The 10,000 you can carry on a plane, the amount you can deposit without scrutiny, etc. all had reasonable limits when set, but things have changed since the ‘70s except those caps.


For the disability cap, it should simply be eliminated. What do I care if some millionaire kid gets SS and Medicare? They are likely paying for it in taxes (or should be).

I'd rather that than have someone lose healthcare because they saved $15k (1970 2k in today's money). Or worse, because Grandma left them an inheritance not knowing the impact that has on their heath coverage.

Severe disability does not go away after your bank account hits 2k.


>unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops.

Why the flamebait?


Just that at least in my country (not US), the left is slowly encroaching into a daily dictatorship on how to run our lives - and that includes regulations which might seem rosy to the general population but really hurt the people with disabilities. They don’t understand them, nor their families, nor care to listen and understand - they just legislate to show their audience that “they care”. And that includes photo ops and empty promises every four years.

“Zing! dang! Thank you madam! Your money is on the dresser. See you in four years when is reflection time”


I think we can assume it's because I came on unnecessarily sarcastic. But he seems to have rolled back from "tangible contributions are the only thing", which is nice.


It’s a sensitive topic. Too much coffee. Who knows…


Good. Now... why isn't an addiction a disability?


Because despite significant variance, resisting to the lure of addiction using willpower is much more effective than using willpower to reconnect one's spine.


If you examined that statement fully you'd realise how little sense it makes as an answer to the question.


> There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.

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


We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers.

Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).


> Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate?

Noble savages?

Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest.

Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial.

Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a problem in that they risk their lives for no real benefit to anyone.


> Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers[...]

This seems like a strange conception of addiction, unless we aren't seriously comparing mountain climbing with heroin. If we are then I wonder what utility the classification of addiction is actually supposed to provide to us.


If an argument is conceivable, there is always at least one HNer who will feel compelled to make it.


Drug addicts are victims of a very civilizational pathology, so more like the opposite of savages. I was more getting at whatever good they might do (?) in their own very informal societies—societies that most people either shy away from or are oblivious to, so it’s very difficult for most people to know whatever pro-social activities they do.


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

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


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

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


You can provide art and music to the community, either by strumming your guitar aggressively at passers-by or turning up your boom box to max volume so everyone can hear your shitty music. /s


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

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


> I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society

Stay at home parents would fall into this category. I think the unit is "family" if it's a family, and not "person".


Did they say “all there is to life is to pay taxes”? You’re reading what you want to read and shifting the conversation. There is a social contract that the majority of the population voted for you like it or not. That’s what society is. If you want to follow your own calendar, pay with your own money, not share your bread with the rest of the team, then don’t expect that team to pay for your needles, clean your poop, and also expect them to let you continue doing this indefinitely in the nicest parts of the town that was built with the shared bread of everyone else. The “contribution to society” we agreed on at a monetary level is taxes. We agreed on it so hard that if I don’t pay them I go to jail. Why should I be happy to use that for people who don’t want to be part of that system? What contribution to the greater society are hard drug users or homeless with mental issues without a recovery plan giving the society? Are they donating their time to clean up downtown? Trimming weeds? Walking old ladies across the street?

Why normalize this? The more permissive you get the less pressure there is on fixing it. I’m not saying jail like a thief or murderer would get, but why not make the decision for someone unable to do it themselves and enforce recovery?


What should a city do when the people that pay taxes and keep the machine chugging along decide to leave because the city is becoming an unbearable mess?

It's an honest question. Social programs cost money, and the money comes from taxes.

I am generally in favor of drugs being legalized and drug addiction being treated as a healthcare policy concern instead of a criminal concern. But the experiment seems to fail more often than not.


"Taxpayers" is a word people use when they want to say "workers" without the baggage of sounding like a communist. I don't think it's so much about paying taxes.


It's simpler than that.

- cities are economic engines

- economic engines generate both wealth and tax revenue

- if you don't care for the economic engine, you lose your tax revenue

Everything the government does is built upon tax revenue.


I agree but also think it goes further than that. The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. Which is a separate discussion we could have, but I think it's especially disingenuous as a country still dealing with an opioid crisis. I know first hand people who went and paid for school, got jobs and healthcare, and became addicts. It literally happened to them (I chose that wording carefully) by being treated with over prescribed highly addictive substances.

The ones who are doing better have to actively make the decision every day to be "a productive member of society" and it's extremely difficult for them. Even though they may have been prone to addiction before their medications, this is still something that happened to them.


> The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society.

A lot of people like this exist though. Toronto has a huge problem where the homeless refuse to go to shelters because they don't want to be told they can't use drugs. So they make the conscious decision to opt out of society and stay on the street.

There is no way to get through to people like this. Even if they had their own place they'd probably OD before the end of the week with all their extra comfort and freedom they have. Some people can't be helped and that needs to be something people are more willing to accept.

As for your friends, popping opioids like candy is a poor decision even if your doctor is prescribing it to you. Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. The opioid crisis is not society's fault.


> Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions.

Rarely I'll state something so strongly - this is true at face value but in the context you meant it is so fundamentally wrong it borders insanity.

The entire reason we have regulation and reputation-based systems in place (like diplomas from accredited universities, or the bar, etc.) is to allow the individual to delegate decisions to specialists. That is why practicing medicine without appropriate training is a crime (in most/all countries I know of).

Do you also want me to get out of my car and do some quick analysis of the structural integrity of every bridge I'm going to cross? Or are you goin to blame me if the bridge collapses and kills me?

Again, back to the case at hand - the whole purpose of having medical professionals is to follow their advice.

If they are prescribing you poison the solution is obviously to prosecute them through the judicial system, not undoying every trust-based system that makes complex professions in society even remotely possible/functional


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

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

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


You can't help a person if they don't want to be helped. At the very least you can remove them from the society to make it safe and maybe make the person rethink their life. By shielding a drug addict from the consequences of their wrong life choices you are preventing their potential rehabilitation, unless they've been lost completely, of course.


comment you are replying to said "forced rehab" - this is not sheltering people from the consequences of their actions, it's forcing them to accept them and change those actions.

Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a full body cast for a bit. The doctor in charge of him decided it was a good time to get him sober, so he spent a couple agonising weeks in a full body cast suffering through heroin withdrawal, and he's been clean since.


So your plan is to lock them into psychiatric wards. Then let them out and they will be productive members of society because that's how it worked for someone who can back from Vietnam once you heard.

When they get out they don't have a family or job or support system to go back to. They won't seek drugs to ease those pains again?


I do feel like you somewhat misrepresented my comment.

I was clarifying the meaning of the previous comments.

FWIW, I did actually get locked up in a psych ward once, for reasons involving drug abuse, and while it was unpleasant, it probably did do me some good, although I did have a family and support system to go back to.

Furthermore, I'd like to point out that forcing someone to sober up does not mean that you don't help them in other ways, like providing them with a home and assigning someone to help them.

I think it's possible that just giving someone a home and a case worker if they're in the middle of an opiate addiction will not help them find a happy place in the world, and as such, supplementing such aid by using a bit of coercive force to help them kick some bad habits may, in the long run, leave them happier than otherwise.

finally, I apologise if I'm being too sensitive here, but perhaps you could make a slight effort to be a little nicer when conversating, honestly I did find your comment a bit hurtful.


So you heard once that someone lost their entire family and support system because of a single inpatient stay?


The approach of giving an addict that is arrested on theft and other charges a choice of prison or treatment is used successfully (as successful as it can be) in many EU countries. Obviously this cannot work if nobody gets convicted for anything short of murder, the incentives don't work.


Unfortunately we have the police for dealing with violations, and when you have a (expensive) hammer everything starts to look like a nail. What I mean is, I agree with both viewpoints: something must be done (don't even bother saying taxpayers - the addicts don't have it easy either), and jail/beating is definitely not that thing. I know this was said already but seeing the actual situation I think it's worth repeating.


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


More than a service, bring back the projects. Yes there were problems with them the last time around, but the problem we have now seems worse on all fronts.


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


> What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like?

My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.


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

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

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


The question also presumes a fixed number of homeless, which is obviously not true looking at the explosion of them we've had over the past decade. You can meaningfully reduce the number of homeless by (a) building a lot more housing, including especially the lowest rung on the housing ladder (weekly/daily-pay SROs), and (b) simply not tolerating them. When you tolerate something, you get more of it.


Hmmm we should solve poverty by not tolerating it? I have many solutions to poverty, but to be honest, that’s never shown up on the list for me.


The US largely has solved poverty by not tolerating it. The poverty rate has never been lower.


I appreciate the optimism, always, but I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Kinda like the people obsessed with FBI crime statistics (tho obviously you’re arguing in good faith, so not nearly as objectionable).

The poor in the US might be less likely to starve now than they were in 1933, but I really think the narrative that the US has been “solving” anything about poverty to be incredibly inaccurate. Some indicators (obviously an impossible point to prove either way):

Poverty is the 4th greatest cause of U.S. deaths - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/17/poverty-4th-greates...

Deaths of Despair are up - https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...

For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

58% of Americans have no savings - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-are-l...

And last but not least: this article ;)

Edit: WAY more importantly I thought about this claim more and maybe I’m giving it too much credit. Are you saying that the people in the Great Depression just didn’t have a good enough work ethic, but now we’ve scared people into having a good work ethic? Cause I don’t think that lines up with my experience in our society or knowledge of our history at all. IMO


Poverty isnt a synonym for sad or unable to save. The US has far less people living in poverty than ever before. Obviously weve got a long way to go but removing the worst living conditions people historically faced is a big accomplishment.


All very true! I should clarify: I’m objecting to the user above attributing that to US policies or culture. The general trend in the developed world away from abject poverty is fantastic and something to be thankful for. I guess I don’t have proof that trend isn’t globally based in “not tolerating poverty” where that’s implied to mean hardline/law-n-order type stances (AFAICT?), but that seems to clash with other countries more compassionate/socialist policies.


Another issue here is not making a distinction between poverty, and people who are near unable function within the system due to drug abuse or mental issues. These are different issues to solve. If you are unable to work due to disability, but otherwise functional in the modern world, then you can work your way through the path to getting back on your feet. What percentage of these people of the homeless? My guess is that the larger problem are those who are on the street due to drugs or mental issues. I don't know what it's like to be on Fentanyl, but some of the people in videos I have found don't seem to be in a state where they're thinking about a place to live.


And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit


Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.


Fixing the structural issues :). In a country where the minimum wage is 2x higher, where mental and physical health care is free, and where the real estate market is mostly controlled by private citizens rather than corporations, I seriously doubt homelessness would be an issue.

Tbh Portland didn’t really try to solve homelessness/poverty. Because it knows it can’t, at the city/county level. I mean, what would that even look like? The city taxes alone paying for a huge swath of free housing, at a time when middle class workers can barely afford to live here?

We need to come together as a country and civilization to solve this problem.


>I seriously doubt homelessness would be an issue.

based on absolutely nothing other than platitudes


> 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

The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stopping the drugs entering the country.


The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”. Just to pick one.

I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed, but I implore you to be more empathetic to their situation. I PROMISE you, homelessness is not fun, it does not feel good in any way, and no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint.


> The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”.

This is not a structure. It's a situation.

> I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed

No - the only assumption is yours you're making here. No one is saying that.

> no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint

No one said they would.


  This is not a structure. It's a situation.
Sorry, I was unclear: I was trying to highlight the fact that this situation is far, far less common in other countries, namely those with single-payer healthcare. That seems like pretty solid evidence that it’s a structural issue, not just… idk, circumstance? Chance?

Otherwise sorry I misinterpreted you —- guess I’ll spend more time reading next time!


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


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

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


Somewhere else could be a recovery facility, housing located in a cheaper area so it’s cheaper to run, not an active volcano or a small town downtown.


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

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


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

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


> Perhaps it's due to really bad red tape

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


Man, even Friends of Trees! Literally planting trees for free got cancelled by Portland because of back-room nonsense:

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/11/portland-oregon-tree-...


Cairo wouldn’t comment on the complaints about her management style. Responding on her behalf, Parks and Recreation spokesperson Cherelle Jackson said the bureau wouldn’t comment on “rumors about a member of our team.” “Unfortunately, too many women in male-dominated industries like forestry face this behavior,” Jackson wrote in an email to OPB. “As a Bureau, we will uphold our values for equality and respect for women in the workplace. If you have evidence that is not based on hearsay, please feel free to share, and we may respond accordingly.”

That was really depressing to read. She nuked the program because of her ego and then let her black spokesperson blame it on race and gender instead of her own lies and deliberate mismanagement.


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

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


I got a glimpse into how various state support systems work in germany and the basic idea is, private companies get good money to take care of people - but they get nothing for actually helping them get out of the helpless state - they rather have incentive to keep them there, as then they still get money for them.


Exactly right. Hard not to see it as a shadowy system of back-scratches and kickbacks between mayors' offices and the folks who run the NGOs. It's remarkable how hard it is to hold NGOs accountable when they're using public funds.


Y'all don't want socialized medicine, this is what you get...


There's two problems with these programs.

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

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

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

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


[flagged]


TLC told me to keep doing more of what is failing in Portland and San Francisco.


Plenty of people on the streets want all kinds of help. They don't want shit programs with a million hoops and strings attached, nor do they want gross dilapidated shelters also with hoops and strings plus predators prowling around looking to steal their shit (or worse) while they sleep.

Also, while the whole rock bottom trope probably holds some truth for many people, when you make every story all about it you kind of lose the plot. If you try hard enough, you can look at just about anyone's life who has recovered from addiction and create a narrative based on an upward trend after the "worst" moment or period of their addiction. If they had two periods that were basically exactly as bad, you dig around until you find some trivial reason to label the second period as worse, and thus the "real bottom." If someone had their worst period of addiction many years before they actually got to a place where they could maintain sobriety long term it was just a long journey for them. Etc.


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


Addiction and the like has a genetic component. Also we, as a society, voted to stop investing in services like mental institutions or publicly available and affordable healthcare... so yeah sure blame the victims: they at one point had their faculities but now some are so far addicted they don't act as you or I would expect but in service of their addictions or afflictions.


Most things have a genetic component. Blame doesn't disappear because someone was more predisposed towards something. For instance, men are generally more predisposed to violence than women. Any sane person would agree there is a likely a genetic component to this fact. But if a man beats his wife, we still can and should blame him, even if it were true that with different genetics he would not have beaten his wife. (or more realistically, with different genetics he would have likely never married the same woman.)


I think we are in agreement here. What I was responding to was your seemingly lack of interest in solutions only commenting about still being able to blame folks for decisions they made whereas I think if we are going to spend we should spend to take folks off the streets and get them help or further remove what is seen as a blight to an otherwise beautiful city.

The streets and parks and business fronts are not camping areas.


It sounds like we agree more than I originally understood. I do care about treatment, and despite what my comment might have suggested, I think blame should be wholly separate from punishment or remediation. I don't care particularly if we spend a lot of time blaming drug addicts, only if we get the streets cleaned up, and their lives improved.


+100 to this


I really don't know where American ""progressives"" (they're sociopaths imo) got the idea that harm reduction and decriminalization involves just letting people rot (and shoot up) in the streets and just releasing people on no bail. That is not done in any of the places these people use as positive examples of the policy working.

This happened on such a scale that I can't help but wonder if the results as seen in Portland, Vancouver, Sf ... were the intention.


In my experience, they're inexperienced with the world and of a background where problems like these are only hypothetical, and therefore very black and white. It's easy to get behind the feel-good answer if you know nothing about the problem other than a Vox explainer you read 5 minutes ago. They don't know what real harm reduction actually looks like, because that would take more than hitting Like and Share.

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

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

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

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


I think you accurately characterized a sizable portion of the electorate, not just in the US but in many Western countries. That still leaves me wondering what the social workers, homeless advocates, Mission workers etc were doing.

Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.


I think people in western countries have been a victim of our own successes, where we enjoy such a prosperous (relative to most of history) life that we now unwittingly afford the luxury of forgetting how raw human behavior actually works.

People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.

I worry that we will need to return to widespread suffering just to relearn the same things we knew only a free short generations ago.


Respect is for humans. If you rot your brain until you begin to revert to primal instincts the state is under no obligation to accommodate you.


The state is accommodating us by dealing with such people, and we keep the state under control (lol) by not letting them get sloppy with even the worst among us.

That is, the state does in fact have certain obligations, regardless of any personal feelings one may have.


WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone.

It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time.

I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case since 2020.

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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


As someone on the US East Coast - Boston and NYC are doing pretty fine. This is very much a specific cities problem, not an all cities problem.


Europe has much higher police officers per capita than the US.

Portland specifically has less police officers per capita than Haiti.


What about Paris? I think you can find as many European as American examples, but instead of junkies it is gangs making the cities unsafe.

But from what I know the police in Paris sometimes clear away the tent cities from the streets.


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


I’ll add another inconvenient truth that I’ve realized. You can copy every law and policy that’s working so well in some other (Scandinavian) place and have it still fail horribly. That’s because it was never the laws that were working, but the society and culture as a whole. You can’t bring good laws to a place with a disintegrating social fabric and expect the same results.


Yes. Exactly same way that trying to transplant ideas like agile or microservices or testing driven development fails so miserably most of the time.

It is not that the ideas are wrong.

It is that they are not the correct moves for a team that is not ready for them.

I know it sounds like a silly parallel. But changing societies is hard, long, unique and not well understood process. It makes sense to try to learn from examples where it is much easier to gather some information.

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

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


Just find it humorous that in a programmer's forum everything can be wheeled back to microservices.


I don't. I mean I do a bit, but the main reason I find it unsurprising and actually logical is that it is easier to talk about stuff we do not know about in terms of things we already do.

A lot of us here have more experience in working or introducing microservices that shaping drug abuse policy. I would be surprised if there was one politician here who actually was responsible for dealing with the problem himself/herself.


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

Let alone whether they can work in the real world.

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


But if we spend enough money, we can successful transplant peaceful democracy to Afghanistan, right?

Maybe like $2 trillion over a decade?


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


Not sure they were necessarily referring to drug policy but rather the tendency in other western democracies to try to implement Scandinavian social policies in other countries, often with poor results. In the US, if you go to more than a couple of public meetings, you're bound to hear someone comment "Well, in Norway..." as justification for their support for a particular program or policy.


They might have actually been thinking of Portugal


+1. This is the core issue.


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

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


I don' think this one is on the Republicans, a group that effectively doesn't exist in Portland politics.

This is a progressive failure


I don't disagree with you, but I don't think that's the problem here necessarily. I admittedly don't know much about the attitudes of Portland's commission members.

I think more to the point the issue is that you can't legislate morality. Some people will break the law no matter how harsh the penalty, and some people will take advantage of permissiveness no matter how much you try to help. Some problems the government just can't fix.


Which congress trolls?

You are blaming Portland's currently fail[ed|ing] policies on federal congress members that have nothing to do with Portland?


I appreciate your sharing and open mindedness.

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

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

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

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


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


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


also by the milder climate.


This is such a hard problem to solve. I work with drug and alcohol addicts regularly and addiction is such a damned nightmare.

And every homeless person hates shelters. They have way more rules than prisons and all of the drama.

I don't know what the solutions are :(


The fact that shelters have "drama" and "rules" is not a compelling reason for someone to make a home in an area that is intended for public use, and render it unusable and unsafe for others.

Is this really a hard problem to solve? I can certainly buy the argument that criminalizing homelessness doesn't make sense when the "criminal" has no other options. But if someone has a viable option for not living on the street, I'm considerably less sympathetic given the downsides to everyone else involved.


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

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


I really doubt homeless people are good pet owners. Food scarcity, lack of medical care for your pets, etc, etc…


This is obviously a baseless and naive comment, and I'm glad others have stepped in to call it out. This whole thread is filled with noise like this.

The fact that there are so many strong opinions from people who demonstrate an embarrassingly low understanding of the situation is one of the reasons the problem is so hard to solve in the first place.


Maybe instead of guess, go spend some time with people in transition or otherwise sleeping rough. You’ll probably learn a lot


They'll often, if not always, prioritize their animals over themselves. They're no different from housed pet owners in that way.


What does that have to do with anything? Being a bad pet owner doesn't make you a non-pet-owner.


Not always, but it certainly can. Many animal control departments consider leaving a dog outside 24/7 to be neglect/cruelty and will take that dog from you.


Funny that our standards for animal safety are higher than those for humans.


We only have a standard for animals because humans are deemed their stewards. US citizens are their own stewards and most would cry foul if there was some standard that governed what weather they were allowed to go out in and/or for how long.


I don't say this often, but you are absolutely wrong about this.


24/7 companionship, with owners that don't leave all day for work...


Pets don't really need medical care per se. There's a huge glut of unwanted dogs, so is it better to euthanize so many unwanted dogs right away, or would it be better to just allow some of them to live on the street with homeless people, and then be euthanized when they have medical problems (which usually takes years: pets are typically fairly healthy until they get older unless they get injured, much like humans)?


Yeah, no. Dogs owned by homeless people are literally the happiest dogs around: they get to spend all their time outside, by their owner's side. They have a clear purpose as a companion, and are cared for deeply.

It's the dogs that get left alone inside an apartment for 9 hours a day that are unhappy and neglected.


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


i felt similarly until i actually ended up homeless and had to deal with shelters. they are shockingly non-viable and since most close early in the day, getting a bed for the night and getting employment so you can stop being homeless end up as mutually exclusive propositions.


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

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


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

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


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


Why did we stop?


Feels like a follow-on from the "white flight" phenomenon. The rich and/or influential (that is, middle-/upper-class, but Americans aren't used to thinking that way) people who set policy for a city no longer live or even spend any time downtown. They push for the policies they think are right, but there's no feedback mechanism to tell them what effect they're actually having.


Why do I have to dig so far down into this thread before finding someone with an informed position based in actual history of cities? Everything else I'm seeing is coming from a standpoint that screams of a sheltered position separated from the realities of the city and a society that fails to provide a dignified existence for these people. I have seen no mention of the fact that america has the most homeless and undernourishment for any developed country, or three times as many empty homes as there are homeless. Or that we subsidize the lifestyle of these suburban dwellers by exhausting municipal budgets just repairing the sewer lines that serve neighborhoods that are 1/5th or less the density of the city. Just a long stream of "this looks bad, I don't like looking at it, we should just push the problem outward."

Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments, and it shouldn't be surprising that it is experiencing visible failures this early on, or an indictment of those policies.


> Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments

Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?

If you really want to destroy a city, I can't think of a better way to do it than going down this path.


> Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?

I mean, it sounds like what you have now is worse. If your city is going to have an underclass either way, a formal shanty town seems less bad than a homeless encampment.


This was part of the 'efficiency' drive. Many cities added or merged with lots of the subburbs. And then those subburbs control policy.

Torronto is a perfect example. It was merged into Greater Torronto, and those new areas are what led to Trumpist style Rob Ford being elected.

And its also zoning. Its always surprising to me how in the US people don't live in the cities. In Europe, the city center are very lived in. The downtown can't turn into a ghost town, even if everybody works from home.


> In Europe, the city center are very lived in

UK being an exception, sadly. Which is understandable, considering they basically invented the "suburb" concept and then exported it to the colonies.


I don't know about that, places like central London and Manchester are quite densly populated, at least by UK standards. And the UK only really got into suburbs after WW2, when huge swathes of the urban population were moved into garden cities.


> at least by UK standards

I live near Manchester, I know, but the city centre is still nowhere as dense (in terms of dwellings) as most towns and cities on the continent. It's changed for sure - lots of old warehouses and factories have turned into flats - but the city has clearly been built for business activity first and foremost. And as soon as you move to smaller towns, like Warrington, the number of people actually sleeping in the immediate town centre falls to almost zero. Brits just want to live in suburbia and in the countryside.


Well if an adult was found to be a nuisance and was unable to care for themselves, they would be put into the mental hospital. Unfortunately, due to some issues, those did not work out too well.


and then the US closed most of them and now issues can not work themselves out... anywhere else.

good or bad? not sure.


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


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


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

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


You can probably make the same argument for someone with an alcohol DUI but we still deal with that issue severely. We need more of that here.


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


In no small part because psychiatric hospitals were wildly, wildly abused. Basically you could lock people up indefinitely with no conviction of anything because someone said they’re a danger to themselves/society/whatever. Basically used like an on-shore Guantanamo.


Simple solution; require convictions. The problem wasn't with locking up junkies, the problems was doing it without due process.

Create laws against public drug use, then enforce them.


Set them up again but increase inspections and have maximum times you can keep a person there.


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


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

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

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


I tend to agree. But for the sake of fleshing it out,

> I want to live for free too and not have to work and do drugs whenever I want.

Here's the rub: When you get to the point of needing free housing, you are usually more or less already at the, shal we say, 'mature' phase of your addiction where there is hardly an ounce of joy left to be had from it. The daily grind of figuring out how to get high is basically just your hellish normal, and the best rush you might get here and there in your average month is akin to eating a nice meal, having a good (but not great) conversation, or a satisfying workout.

Compared to good sex? Get out of here. That phase of drug use is long gone. If you want that back even for a fleeting moment you have to go through the hell of withdrawal first. Even doses that put you dangerously close to OD don't really reach that anymore unless you risk them after a period of abstinence (which is where most opiate addicts used to die, back before fentanyl was the norm).

However, with all that said, I'd argue a functional addict is better equipped to deal with the stuff you mention above better than a severe addict who is trying to get sober after years of active addiction. Obviously acute withdrawal is an absolute bastard, but so are the following months of post acute withdrawal (aka your brain and body re-learning how to function at a completely new level of physiology). If we were doing it right, sobriety would be a hard requirement up front, followed by a good deal of support during the transition back into housing.

True, it's much easier to get sober in stable housing. But you know what's even easier still? Continuing to use in a more comfortable and secure environment. Or worse yet, when free housing is still pretty scarce, using your pad as a commodity to score perks from your friends who are still homeless, or worse, using it as a safer and more secure place to stash and deal quantities of drugs to support your addiction directly. Anyone in active addiction will consider these possibilities the moment the lock is turned and they are alone in their new home (not all will act on it, of course). Housing yes, but probably not 'housing first.'

You don't take a patient with a gunshot wound and make sure they have a long term care bed to lie in comfortably while they bleed. You get their ass to the ER and fix the bleed before worrying about the long term stuff.


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


Kind of valid. In Portland "housing first" has been all the rage, but having lived with pretty severe addiction for some years, and spent lots of time around fellow addicts in considerably worse circumstances, it's pretty hard to imagine that a house on its own is some kind of solution. Especially when compared to a support network and high quality addiction treatment, medical care, and mental health services. In terms of sustainable recovery, the former is a luxury, while some combo of the latter are essential requirements. Of course, having all of them is by far the best.. man, addiction is a bitch.


"Housing first" isn't the belief that providing a house "on its own is some kind of solution". It's the belief and practice of not refusing to provide housing support until people meet certain criteria – which is often how governments approach the problem.

"We only help those who help themselves", etc.

You get people a safe place to sleep and then provide them with resources to become re-integrated into society, not the other way around.


If someone is very much not ready "to become re-integrated into society" then they can't be independently entrusted with a house (because they'll screw up life for others around them and the house itself with various asocial and illegal acts), that "safe place to sleep" has to be in an institution controlled by others with some enforced rules - until they become capable of following the rules on their own, which generally requires treating the addiction, and is the point when they can become re-integrated into society.


1. They can generally be "trusted" with a house. It's a house. You sleep there.

2. The idea they need constant monitoring comes from the same outdated approach that believes we shouldn't help people unless they deserve it and we can make sure they deserve it. That model has not proven effective and either reducing homelessness or reducing homelessness' external costs on society. It has proven even less effective at improving long term mental health and addiction issues.

3. We have not found a long-term solution to chronic mental health and addiction issues. No approach, yet, has shown outsized performance over any other. Housing First approaches, however, have shown an improvement in homelessness, medical services and criminality – which might be the best we can hope for.


An addict will tear a house apart to sell the electrical wire and possibly plumbing for scrap at a recycling center, rendering it a fire safety hazard to the rest of the neighborhood.


And a non-addict could leave the stove on. People do dumb shit. Keep in mind most "housing first" initiatives don't literally provide "homes". It's usually apartments.


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How? Why? It seems like a reasonable question to me, so maybe I'm prejudiced too. That's entirely possible. What's the prejudice? How do I stop? Why is this a bad question? Does it have an answer?


The stereotype here is that every drug user is pushing themselves to the limit of od.


Maybe some are, maybe some aren't. But it seems likely that the ones in the worst condition that need the most help probably skewed towards out of control. And they will probably be hardest to help. I'm in favor of helping those that need help that can be helped. But that will probably come with rules. There are comments all over this thread that shelters are under-utilized because of these rules. I don't know what the answer is.


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


You solve homelessness directly by giving people housing.

Free housing paid for by people like me, and ideally others, who are more than happy to take what I make and give it to people who need it more than I do.

And you don’t need to be rich to do it. It’s a decision on how much money etc you actually need to be fulfilled.

If that takes a zombie proof bunker and multiple houses and first class flights and…and… then that’s on your head that you prefer to comfort yourself than take care of others.


Your thought process in commendable but years of this has made me cynical. No one wants to live in the same apartment complex as junkies. If you put them all together it turns into a crime filled cesspool. A hard drug addict is essentially toxic to any situation you drop them in. The solution is to forcibly treat them in rehab centers and then maybe follow up with free housing. This is followed up by drug testing for atleast a few years otherwise you lose your free housing. If the person relapses, the worst that can happen is they are back in forced rehab and at the very least are off the streets, out of sight and not bothering regular people.


I can attest to part of this. I spent several months in a halfway house earlier this year for those coming out of prison. Putting (mostly) addicts together in one building was total and utter chaos. They all fed off each other. The few that were trying to stay sober and get employment had an insane challenge because everyone around them was using and stealing their stuff to sell for drugs. It was crazy.

It is also mind-blowing that you would release addicts with essentially zero support. They don't even get ID coming out of prison in Illinois, so they can't access any support services at all.

Again, I don't know what the solution is, but I know some things that don't work :(


I have to tell you that I have quite a bit of experience on this and a little bit of compassion and love goes along way.

Maybe talking to people one on one asking who they are how their day is, can you help them? Can you get them anything?

This time last year I helped a man named John stop sleeping outside by supporting him and giving him the moral and ethical support that he needed to reconnect with his family and he was off the streets and a couple of months. When we reconnected, he said that it was because of my outreach that he was able to have what he needed to reach back out to his family. It cost me 50 dollars in groceries/medical kit and about an hour of my time.

So it’s eminently possible, you can do it every single day that you go out into the world.

You simply choose not to.


> No one wants to live in the same apartment complex as junkies.

You sound like you'd be shocked at how many high-functioning junkies live in most apartment complexes in most major cities. Upper-middle-class guys, holding down jobs - at least until a run of bad luck hits.


The functioning junkies obviously aren't the ones who "need" free housing. The junkies on the street are the ones who can't handle their shit and have alienated all of their friends and family who might otherwise help them. Nobody wants to live with them and they can't take care of themselves, and therefore they're on the street. And for these very reasons, nobody wants to share an apartment building with them.


> The junkies on the street are the ones who can't handle their shit

Yes. And nobody can handle their shit 100% of the time, so this is really quite a lot of people one or two mistakes away from being on the street. Many of whom you ignorantly count as "clean" friends or neighbors.

How does America go through the whole fucking opioid crisis and still think that addiction is a personal moral failing endemic to some outgroup? It's a sickening view.


What percentage of Americans ever end up on the street? "Homeless" but couch surfing with friends or relatives doesn't count for this consideration because we're talking about people who lost that fallback (despite you chopping off that part when you quoted me.)


Because, despite what we Americans have claimed forever, America is actually an anarcho-capitalist wasteland of domination.

So if you can figure out how to dominate a group, you will win and you’ll be rewarded for it. This is why people come here. America is the last place where you can basically do whatever the fuck you want, and as long as you gain enough money and influence, you’ll be celebrated.

I mean Trump EMBODIED what I just described and he not only won the presidency, he has successfully created a cult that could actually ruin everything.

Where else but a lawless wasteland would produce that?


Yes, and we can solve drug addiction directly by giving people drugs.

What is free housing? Free as in indefinitely free with no strings attached? Free utilities, free services, free food, perhaps free transportation? Free furniture, free healthcare, free drugs, free clothes, free HOA?

Do you think the violent addicts everyone complains about just need a house, and starting from day one they will become productive members of society?


The answer is a community that cares about this person and is going to invest in them. Period

That’s it that’s the solution.

Until every person on earth has a supportive loving community - which mathematically works out very easily - we’ll never solve these problems.

There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this. It’s also not biologically determined - fear and greed are not inherit in humans, those are all learned behaviors. I fear however it’s going to take generations to undo how much we have invested in domination based systems rather than partnership based structures.


You are so stuck in your bubble that can't even imagine that societies exist today without a massive homelessness problem. Societies that do not have a "supportive loving community" but that combine individual responsibility with strong social services.

> There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this

Yes there is. What you and other "progressives" fail to acknowledge is that for every well meaning supportive and loving member of society there are two people who will use them and their resources endlessly until they drop dead. If your plan is to wait until we change human nature - then good luck.

Want to see a preview? Socialize with families of alcoholics, drug addicts, psychopaths, etc. Look how their "loving and supportive" families are destroyed by one person who abuses them with no end in sight.

Stop fantasizing about changing human nature. The future where we all meditate in peace like that advanced society in Fantastic Planet won't happen any time soon. The more likely future is that we will completely stagnate and fail to resolve any societal issues because we treat people like they are lost babies that just need a supportive and loving community to be found.


I wish you peace. Genuinely.


I appreciate it, thank you.


No, but they will probably start pooping at their house.


> They have way more rules than prisons a

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


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


In my house, guests are required to remove their shoes before entering. Also coasters must be used for beverages.


Jail and Admin manual is 383 pages long: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/jail-adm...

Can you even come up with 383 annoying things you require your guests to comply with... let alone 383 PAGES.


We appreciate you


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We tried this cruel inhumane policy for the decades called thew war on drugs and it was one of the worst failures in US history


Singapore has been successful so clearly we’re doing it wrong and focusing on the wrong things.


Ooh, is it the Bill of Rights!?


The Bill of Rights doesn't say anything about not locking up junkies. You just have to give them due process.


Singapore doesn’t just lock people up…


In many American states and the federal level, we execute murderers. The Bill of Rights plainly permits this. Executing drug dealers isn't over the line either if we consider the number of people killed by drugs and the drug trade, and if we make a regular habit of it.

As for flogging people, this is arguably less cruel than imprisonment and is a good option for the sort of criminals the public doesn't need to be protected from (not suitable for violent criminals who will likely reoffend.) It doesn't keep people away from their families for years, let's them stay current in their job training, etc. It is nevertheless a strong deterrent but it does less damage to the rest of society.

Singapore gets results and most of their policies don't violate the letter of Bill of Rights except in a purely subjective sense, but most people in America aren't ready to give real progressive reform serious consideration.


Just curious if you'd include alcohol in that list? What about prescription pain-killers? Just curious where you draw the line on what's criminal, and what's not.

Personally, I'd rather criminalize the negative behavior, rather than the drugs themselves. Like DUI laws, for example.


This is slightly smarter. I have zero issues with people being addicted to whatever they want, so long as it doesn't negatively affect others. You do fentanyl in the privacy of your own home, then go to work in the morning? Cool.


> Personally, I'd rather criminalize the negative behavior, rather than the drugs themselves. Like DUI laws, for example.

How do you punish a homeless drug addict living on the streets with no assets or income?


Well that's the rub ain't it? Punishment, at its root, is just a method for control. The more brutal the punishment, the more fear is created, and fearful people will then obey commands (laws).

It's such an infantile mindset, I'm frankly surprised it has stuck around this long.

We all just want to live, and enjoy the fruits of our lives, our friends, our families, our work. When a social break happens due to anti-evolutionary behavior, that situation needs to be corrected. Threat of punishment never needs to come into it.


It is a hard problem to solve. Criminalizing drugs and throwing addicts in jail doesn't resolve the problem.


...apart from in every country that does this and doesn't have lots of addicts?

It is quite strange because you go almost anywhere else in the world...no addicts, no-one uses drugs, they find it strange that anyone would use drugs...go to the US, you not only have drug addicts but a whole industry dedicated to offering very knowledgeable-sounding opinions about what should work...it never is explained why the drug problem in the US is so out of control with so many people who know what "should" work.

The only places where I have ever been that have had lots of drug addicts have been places that have tried to decriminalize (for some reason, almost always with help from the police who just want this stuff off their books altogether).


AFAIK there are drug addicts all over the world, including in the Middle East and Philippines where drug addicts are met with severe punishments. The problem is IMO more the availability of drugs vs the potential punishments people face. People are willing to take risks to do drugs. Unless a government completely controls everyone's private life there remains an ability to evade detection and take drugs while telling oneself that one will not be caught.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/middleeast/saudi-drug-capital...


It's not a total solution, but a jailed addict isn't breaking into your car, robbing people at knifepoint, or resorting to prostitution to fund their habit. And they should have much more limited in access to drugs.

To help the addicts and reduce reoffending, what we probably need is better jails that are less a punishment and more an enforced rehab program with high-quality mental health support. And then a better path from jail back into society.

But that's expensive.


Hell, why not just summarily execute them. No more homeless problem!


Sounds like you’re volunteering to take them in. Good for you.


I don’t see how his comment implied that. Perhaps you can explain?


P is a sarcastic rejoinder to the GP with approximate intent of: don't put down others' solutions without a solution of your own / don't minimize others'[0] suffering because you don't have skin in the game.

[0]That of people victimized by the homeless/addicts.


I'd think that but GP sounds just as sarcastic to me.


I don’t like having my own very not-homeless and not drug addict family members for extended stay…

Not wanting houseguests doesn’t somehow mean we aren’t collectively smart enough to figure out which levers need some tweaking to mitigate drug addiction and housing issues.


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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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

I'm not entitled to it.

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


Yeah, I agree and that is what I said ..

"I think other people have a right to walk the streets undisturbed"

And when you ban public drug use and enforce it, you automatically remove all junkies from public spaces.


> And when you ban public drug use and enforce it, you automatically remove all junkies from public spaces.

Depends on your definition of "use".

I can do a bunch of meth somewhere discreet, and then party on the streets without actively "using" drugs for hours - days even!


I think the legal definition is, if you have drugs in your blood, for which there are simple tests for.

And people bothering other people on the streets is not alright and should be stopped any way, drugs in their blood or not.


In the US, it's generally only possession (not use) that's a crime. The main exception is while operating a vehicle, which is just about the only time the police will do blood testing. Hospitals will do a tox screen if they're taken in for some medical reason, but it becomes exactly that: a medical issue, not a legal one.


In one comment thread you've gone from "some people may need to be forced to accept treatment" to "anyone taking drugs on the street should be arrested" to "anyone doing anything that bothers anyone else in a public space, or who has done something in the recent past that bothers someone now near them, should be arrested."


"some people may need to be forced to accept treatment"

I did not say that, you probably confused my comment with someone else.


Like I said in another comment. There are lots of other ways to ban something in a area, than locking up.

Fine them and take their drugs would be a simple one.


Fine them? They don't have money, and won't pay. What do you do when they won't pay? Garnish their wages? Don't have any.

Take their drugs? Oh no. They'll just get more, eventually. It's not like they have a lifetime supply stashed away. They generally do the drugs shortly after getting them. They're unlikely to have any to take.

You act as if the police are complete morons and totally incompetent and haven't thought of any or tried any alternatives - anywhere in the world.


Yeah, they don't have much. So if you take what little they have, if they go bother people in the public, they will avoid those places. You just have to enforce it consequently. Most junkies don't want stress and just get high (and they hate having to let go of their next high). Only if you tolerate them in public spaces with 0 consequences - then they will stay with their drugs.

"You act as if the police are complete morons and totally incompetent and haven't thought of any or tried any alternatives - anywhere in the world"

That's the thing. Addicts on the streets in europe for example, are a rare thing. And I know many other places on the world, with no junkies on the streets either. And also with a way lower prisoner to population ratio. So maybe there are other ways, besides just jailing everyone. (Which is pretty expensive btw.)


> Addicts on the streets in europe for example, are a rare thing.

This is because most of Europe has better social safety nets and didn't have an opioid crisis (also partly because of its safety nets), not because they "banned" anything. Drugs and active drug users are in the end still pretty easy to find in central areas in major cities if you look; and if the police do get involved you definitely go to jail.


"and if the police do get involved you definitely go to jail."

Have you been to europe? I was born and live here and have been to allmost every other EU state and people going to jail for drugs is allmost not existent to my knowledge - unless people are dealing big quantities. (Or doing other crimes while drugged, but then they go for the other crimes and not the drugs)

"Drugs and active drug users are in the end still pretty easy to find in central areas in major cities if you look"

You can also find many drunk people, if you go to the pubs - but I don't remember the last time, I saw junkies in the streets. Of course, seeing people who likely do drugs regular, sure, but minding their own buisness and going somewhere, not occuping the streets and scaring normal people, which I thought is what we are talking about here.


Check out this guy, he solved the whole war on drugs in an HN comment! "Don't arrest them, just ban it."

Total idiocy.


absolutely not that's what they do in Zero Tolerance places like the Gulf States


When does James Bond live in a tent house?


The house at the beginning of No Time to Die is roughly a tent house like those in the Four Seasons in Chiang Rai.


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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


Prohibition also failed horribly. We need a middle ground.

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


We have different rules for drinking in public and public intoxication. I think this person is talking about public intoxication.


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


> Portland did everything! [...]

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


If you have competent police - than taking the drugs away is sort of a lackmus test. Meaning if they get violent - then they are a danger and further meassures are needed. So yes, jail (conventional or mental) is then the temporary solution.


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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

---

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


> is COVID really any one person's fault, even if we narrow it down to a specific patient 0?

COVID19 was leaked from "Vector" BSL4 lab in Russia. It's leaked, because first responders broke doors (to check for fire) and stole equipment from BSL4 lab without any protective equipment, then China special police, which was in same city for training with Russians, captured the virus and returned back to China. Then Russian official hide the fact of leaking and start of epidemic, deleted any evidence of that, which they found, except those copies which are in Wayback machine (they are unable to crack the archive so far), and started to blame China (at West), and West (at China and East).

Yes, this is not an one person fault. So what? 7 million died. Should we just ignore that?

> You're usually not punished for the smoke but for violating the ruls of the premise to not smoke.

In my country, it's illegal to smoke near to non-smokers, which helps to reduce spread of smoking. :-/


As someone who spent most of my life in Novosibirsk I was amused to see the Vector lab mentioned in this context. Some googling reveals that indeed there was an explosion in the facility in September 2019.

I still think that this theory is way too convoluted to be true (chinese secret police and stuff), but an entertaining read nevertheless. I wasn't aware of either the explosion or the covid leak allegations.


> (chinese secret police and stuff),

As typical Russian, you started with FUD. Luckily for us, these news are stored to the archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20191011162034/https://www.nsktv....


What nonsense is this? Smoking weed next to someone does not lead to addiction. Every place that I am familiar with some form of legalized marijuana consumption says you can't do it just any old place you feel like. So this is also just more BS being spread. You have a very misconstrued understanding of something, and now you're calling it libertarianism.


Passive smoke leads to addiction. It's proven for tobacco. It's the mechanism of the propagation. After some hours of breathing small doses of tobacco smoke, people start to like tobacco smoke and want to smoke it too. Weed or tobacco is not important here.


I'm surprised to hear that-- got a cite?

My parents smoked when I was a child. The memory of being in the car with the windows up makes me anxious even though it's been probably 30 years since I've been in a car with a smoker. I experience acute irritation when exposed to anyone smoking, and much more widespread smoking is one of the major reasons I dislike visiting Europe. I know that I'm far from alone in feeling this way.


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

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

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


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

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


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


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


How is that relevant to the naked twerking person at the top of the metro stairwell?

If everyone on the entire planet was addicted to meth and did it daily, but there was a single meth user who decided to twerk naked at the top of the metro stairwell and assault people, that one person should be imprisoned. Why you ask? Because every other person on the planet is (as you say) functional. Nobody cares if you decided to do drugs and then fall asleep at home while paying your bills (ie: functioning). People do care about naked twerking people at the top of metro stairwells who routinely assault passers-by.


That would be "lock up publicly problematic addicts" not "addicts" in general.

The aforementioned "functioning, respected and powerful people" are able to conceal or internalize the cost of their problems and aren't usually a problem for the public at large.

With that in mind, the problem is really just being persistently a public danger/nuisance. The only relevance of addiction to this is that addicts are frequently unresponsive to incentives that would be sufficient for non-addicts.


That viewpoint is both draconian and fiscally irresponsible


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


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


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

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


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


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

What is wrong with this approach:

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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


No.

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

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

Source: I live in Portland very near Downtown.


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


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

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

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


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

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.


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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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


I've seen plenty of people do nothing but drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, and complain, all day, every day, year after year.

You might argue that it's the alcohol doing the zombification but I posit that surely the tobacco also has something to do in this equation.


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

Moronic analogy.


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

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


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


I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland.

Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs.

After several decades and many, many millions of dollars spent, the problem is, by every measure, absolutely the worst it's ever been. https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/safety-inju...


Is there a measure for how this compares to places without social programs for drug addicts? This is a legitimate question, I don't know if they've done better or worse in the context of the failed war on drugs.

Because the country as a whole has been completely ravaged by opiate addiction. It's not just Portland and Seattle. West Virginia doesn't have anything like this, and it's just as badly afflicted. It may be less visible because it doesn't have the same population density.


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.


My question isn't about how visible drug addiction is but any actual metrics that can compare actual drug addiction rates and prevalence between places with decriminalization and those without.

Because just some cursory googling suggests that these cities do have less incidence of drug addiction/use per capita. But I don't really know how accurate that info is, and anecdata doesn't count.


I live in Seattle and recently visited NYC. It was shocking how much cleaner it was, at least the neighborhoods I spent time in. I expected at least similar levels but I saw nothing like Seattle's public drug use and mental health crises on the streets.


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


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

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

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

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


Some are, some aren't.

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


I subscribe to the channel 5 Patreon, and it has been shocking in its coverage of all the stuff.

Absolutely phenomenal journalism that nobody is paying attention to unfortunately


It’s not mainstream but nearly everyone in my circle is a fan of Andrew since his AGNB days


he's got millions of subscribers on youtube!


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.

https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/


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.


What are you reffering to wrt Singapore? They have stricter laws than China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapo...


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.


Japan,Taiwan and south Korea as more examples. Japan has life sentences for opioid distribution/sale. Taiwan has mandatory 3 year sentencing simple possession of class 1 drugs (Opioids). South Korea also has very strict sentencing laws for opioid possession and usage ranging from 1 to 3 years. Most of laws were influenced by the Opium wars 100 years ago.


So you're basically advocating for widespread rollback of civil rights, based on the examples you chose?


You don’t have a right to theft. Let’s go back to punishing crime.


"punishing crime" is a frankly insulting understatement of the way countries like Singapore or the UAE treat accused criminals. Not to mention the list of things that count as crimes there. I mean if you're that angry about shoplifters or homeless people doing drugs on the street, okay, but don't be dishonest about what these role model countries actually do


Solving the drug problem in US through decriminalization and harm reduction programs is an effective as solving gun violence through the same means.


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").


It's the other way around. They've lost their jobs and their homes -- and their friends -- and their families, because of drugs.


Undoubtedly that can be the cause in some cases, but there are counterexamples. Like West Virginia which has a bad opioid addiction problem yet relatively low homeless rate. What does appear highly correlated is homeless rates vs. cost of housing to income ratios. Find a city with a real estate bubble, and you'll likely find a large tent city too.


Drugs did not cause rents in Seattle to triple over the last 15 years


It goes both ways.


"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'm not really a revolutionary about it, but those living "normal" lives are far from normal if they aren't stressed about the day-to-day.

It would be nice if life wasn't so stressful all the time for so many people. Look at all the wild drivers, the lack of camaraderie in basic everyday life interactions, you can point to all manner of social ills and if you empathize with those who are struggling to get by -- which is most people according to every statistic released in the last 6 years about it -- you would easily make the connection between worrying about not having a bed and enough food and the kinds of shitty behavior people end up enacting.

Those cities don't have a problem with homelessness because their cities either suck to live outside in the winter or suck to live outside in the summer.

You'll also note the high proportions allocated to police in every city budget (NYC cops get something like $5 billion per year!). The difference between some cities and others is primarily the level of controls they put on police re: homeless people because of progressive policies. The cities with hardline positions look better because the homeless are pushed out, not because the homeless find homes there.


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

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


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

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

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

Locals are like 20% of the problem.


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.


Not sure if they still do, but Eugene used to buy you a one-way bus ticket to Portland or Salem and some food vouchers if you claimed to have family there. They didn’t really verify.


Agreed. This suggests to me that homelessness and drug use may be orthogonal problems.

If you triple my rent over the next 10 years, without raising my income, then I'm gonna be homeless. No drug use necessary, batteries included, no assembly required.


Do you know that the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary, right? And raising it is mostly up to you. Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse


> the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary

Yes, I am aware

> raising it is mostly up to you

The rent? Or the salary?

> Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse

Like I said, 3xrent creates a homeless me, no drugs involved


Maybe raising it is "up to you", but it's up to you within the context of an existing economy, not a vacuum. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already..."


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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211022190558/http://allhomekc....


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.

[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/20/california-a...


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).


Yes, for Seattle a key issue is there is hardly any supporting services available for the mass of people who need it. There are just a lot of people needing services. Seattle also has a huge shortage of mental health treatment professionals. You can't just start working with one of them, you have to wait for months on a waiting list. There's not nearly housing at night.

So you have fentanyl, not much housing, not much treatment, not enough hospital space. People get addicted, at least some move here when addicted and then they are stuck.

It's also not just a seattle problem. Alaska has also been struggling with lots of deaths from drug abuse or overdose. Wasilla - https://alaskapublic.org/2023/04/10/troopers-warn-of-lethal-..., Anchorage - https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2023/07/27/anchora...


> 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

How many productive members of society does it take to support each drug addict? Should there be any calculation, or should we say "whatever it takes"?


"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. "


So “old book says so”?


As well as old bronze lady:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”


Yes, whatever it takes. A society which doesn’t take care of their sick is a failed society. Seattle is the richest city in one of the richest state of the richest country in the world. If we wanted to we could easily take care of anyone that needed it.


At some point we have to say it takes too much. If it takes 20 college-educated social workers, medical professionals, etc. just to enable one junkie to eek out a miserable existence doing drugs and sleeping on the street, it's too much. Their lifestyle is untenable. On some level, we have to accept that one can fuck up one's own life, and fuck it up so badly that others can't fix or maintain it for you.


Sure, it's a cost benefit analysis.

More realistically smaller total staff than 20 dealt with 3,800 addicts in an 18 month trial a decade and a half ago with benefits to the community (reduced expenses from deaths, overdoses, central record keeping, etc) that were considered worthwhile to keep such centres going until the present day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608095

FINAL REPORT OF THE EVALUATION OF THE SYDNEY MEDICALLY SUPERVISED INJECTING CENTRE

https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/5706/1/MSIC_final_evaluation_...

might be of interest to some.


West coast should bus them back then.


Correlation, causation, etc.


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


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.


Cities primarily need affordable and low income housing. If you're trying to deal with your demons sleeping under a bridge, you're going to get warped. The social safety nets in this country are so inadequate, so when people fall, they fall hard.


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.


Americans have no idea how high the cost of living is in Europe relative to wages.

Median sale price in Seattle is $560/square foot, which is almost exactly $6000/square meter. With minimum wage at $18.69/hr, that's 320 hours of minimum wage work per square meter.

For comparison, average price per square meter in Paris is over 10 000 EUR ($10 700), whereas the minimum wage is 11.50 EUR, giving you a ratio of 870 hours of min wage work per square meter, almost 3 times more expensive.

When you compare them by median household income, Seattle is around $110k/year, which is $55/hour, giving 110 hours/square meter for median family. In Paris, for comparison, median household income is 44k EUR/year, which is 22 EUR/hour, resulting in 454 hours/square meter, which is 4 times more expensive than in Seattle for median family, even worse than for minimum wage.

These were before-tax figures, and doing after tax makes the situation even more lopsided: US tax system is much more progressive than European, and so taxes for median and below are extremely low compared to Europe. At Seattle minimum wage, the effective tax rate is around 15%, whereas in France, at minimum wage you're still paying 25% in income tax. To top it off, in France, the VAT is 20%, compared to 10% in Seattle.

You can do the same calculation for most of Europe, and you'll find the same: pretty much all large metros in Europe are almost universally less affordable than most expensive metros in US, including NYC and SF.


Not sure if Paris vs. Seattle is a good comparison. The former is the crown jewel of France and a historic world-class city. The latter is one of the smaller cities on America's West Coast and is fairly unremarkable.

If anything, I'm stunned that the price for square foot in Paris is only 180% of that in Seattle.


Not to take anything away from your post but Seattle has roughly half the GDP of Paris with less than a third of the population. The past is the past, if you wanted to place a bet on the future, I wouldn’t take Paris over Seattle. Seattle isn’t just tech, it is one of the major deepwater ports on the Pacific Rim and with a famously diversified industry. It is still on the upward part of its trajectory.

Seattle is not a cosmopolitan global city, this is true, but Paris wishes it had Seattle’s economic dynamism by almost any measure. Like many European cities, its status is the accumulated capital of a prior era that is not being replenished at replacement rate. I have my qualms about Seattle but European cities are largely worse when looking forward.


> The former is the crown jewel of France and a historic world-class city.

How is this relevant to my point, which is that in Paris (and most of major European metros), the prices-to-incomes ratio is much worse than in Seattle, and pretty much anywhere in US? In what way it is a crown jewel, if, by US standards, 3/4th of the population barely makes the ends meet?


Prices per square meter:

Marseille: 4300 EUR

Birmingham: 3000 GBP

Bremen: 3000 EUR

Liege: 3000 EUR

Antwerp: 2500 EUR

València: 2200 EUR

Poznan: 2000 EUR

These are all major, but not the biggest, cities in their respective country. I'm not saying they are representative (for what, anyway). You'll find major cities that are much more expensive (eg Munich) or cheaper.

As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:

https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/france/individual/taxes-on-pers...

https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/taxes-on-per...


OK, let's do some of them, say Poznan (because I'm most familiar with it). It's hard to find median household income figures in Poznan, but you can find that average individual income in it is 22000 EUR/year, and average household income typically is something like 150% of average individual income, so let's take average household income in Poznan to be 33k EUR/year, or 16.5 EUR/hour. This gives us 120 hours/square meter, which is comparable to Seattle.

However, this becomes much worse if you look at after-tax situation. In Poland, at this pay range, your effective tax rate is 27%, whereas in Seattle it's 16%, and you have to then apply 23% VAT to your purchases, compared to 10% sales tax in Seattle.

> As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:

What specifically does it disagree about? It is well known that the effective tax rate on lower half of the population is much lower in US than in almost all of Europe, as my example comparison between US and Poland or France shows. In Europe, the middle class pays the bulk of the tax burden, whereas in US, taxation is much more progressive, and it is the wealthy who pay most of the tax.


Perhaps the high minimum wage is the reason people are on the streets instead of working in low-paying jobs.


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.


"To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide."

I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.


This happens all the time and is in practical use one of the best justifications for regulation.

There must be a more specific term for it I’m forgetting, but it is essentially the tragedy of the commons.

There are many things that are good for society where if one business did them, that business would lose market share or cease to exist, but it is in the public interest that the specific thing be done. Regulation is the proven answer there.

In this case the primary difference is we are talking about regulating cities instead of companies.


I think this is closer to my point, which was that some ideas can only work at scale. That doesn't mean they will work at scale. But having them fail small doesn't prove or disprove anything.

So you come up with a federated database model for your company with 30 employees, and find yourself in dev hell and wasting resources on an expansion that could have been solved with a slightly larger monolith. That means you chose the wrong tool for the local job. It doesn't mean the other tool couldn't be effective for a larger job.


I feel like this is a roundabout form of the Prisoner's Dilemma.


Are the results that bad? Or are the results exactly the same but more visible (i.e. homeless addicts are not just being hidden below the concrete of highway interexchange instead of being able to live in the city center)?


Yes, they are that bad.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s, a time and place when homelessness was rampant, but your typical homeless person was a slow-to-move 50 year old wino, not a psychotic 20 year old on fentanyl and meth. Leaving aside the difference in the drugs, I think it's worse because: We do have, and have had a lot of people living in underpasses in Portland for the last 30 years. Most of those people are unfortunate locals who fell through the cracks, not the new crop who just showed up from Florida. Underpasses are full, and have been full, for decades. Many of us have tried to help. The increased visibility is a sign of two things: (1) overflow, and (2) much more dangerous chemicals.

For instance, you wouldn't find this kind of thing happening ten years ago: https://www.koin.com/news/portland/eight-overdosed-on-fentan...


"This content is not available in your country/region."

I could only read the title but from what I can come up these people would have overdosed, the only difference with public drug use is they die in front of everyone. What I am concerned is it should actually trigger a response towards helping addicts get access to safer drugs, and finding a way for them to stay functionnal and harmless in our society. Instead people want to try to hide the problem under the carpet but it will not work either.


while I understand the hesitation, there are many solutions that only make sense at scale.


> 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.


>> Methadone clinics are a decent example

Sure, they can help, but wouldn't you say that's treating the symptoms rather than the disease?

>> the actual deaths happening now are due to the unavailability of those same prescription drugs

But you just said the initial reason was "criminally-encouraged over prescription". How do you not trace the deaths now all the way back to that? The thing about opioids is that you develop tolerance. I guess if those people were still getting higher and higher prescribed doses, they would never need to dip into illegal markets where their drugs might be contaminated with fentanyl. But it's hard for me to cut off the search for a root cause of deaths at this latest unavailability. The root cause is the over-prescription in the first place.

Stigmatization serves a role. I'm a smoker - but I know anti-smokers will agree with me, that stigmatizing my behavior prevents more people from starting to do something terrible to their health.

And if that's true, then legalization would be a root cause of the next wave of deaths. It's the addiction that kills; the erstwhile lack of good drugs is just the way it happens to kill some people.


What’s the disease? Is it the body’s down-regulation of opioid receptors? If so, then you’re right. But if it also includes the impact of an active opioid addiction on one’s lifestyle, methadone clinics help treat that, which in turn makes it much easier to address the former.

I think for practical purposes, it’s most helpful to ascribe it to a recent and controllable factor. Otherwise, you could say that the “no medical benefit” scheduling of cannabis also contributed. Restricting medical pain management options to (with a few exceptions) just opioids when there was an unexplored (medically) class of less addictive, less destructive, physiologically safe medicine, definitely didn’t curb the opioid issue.

I agree that stigmatization is a good thing, but if all tobacco products got taken off shelves overnight, people wouldn’t stop smoking, they’d just have to buy on an unregulated (unsafe) market. Not saying that current regulation is perfect, but at least it can be controlled, which allows the market to move in (hopefully) the right way.

> The thing about opioids is that you develop tolerance.

This isn’t really unique to opioids, and I picture the legalization/regulation being discussed in this thread as more along the lines of existing cannabis programs, though obviously stricter in whatever necessary dimensions.

> It's the addiction that kills

Not necessarily, now at least. Lifestyle, maybe, but plenty of people now are overdosing on fentanyl from just experimenting, not even necessarily with opioids. And yes it is dumb to experiment with unknown street narcotics, but I’d be surprised if you took your first sip of alcohol when you were 21, and it’s the same principle of doing something that feels forbidden (and will make you feel good). And, if it were during prohibition, that sip could have had methanol in it. Now it can’t because of legalization and regulation.


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'd say the addiction crisis started when people got addicted. The attendant economic and social crisis then got worse as legal pills became less available. But whether someone gets addicted by way of an overprescribing doctor or by way of picking a bottle of laudinum off the shelf at a liquor store, that person is probably going to become addicted. The question is whether that means they'll have to go looking for potentially dangerous street drugs.


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.)


It's really, really bad in Eugene, Oregon. And Salem is a mess too. But the Portland metro is by an order of magnitude more populous. It's also desperately underfunded, and it's got a situation in which the populace mostly hates the police, and the police feel the same way back. (Which led to an amazing announcement during early Covid, when people were being assaulted and houses broken into all over the city):

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/portland...

This effect hasn't worn off. And the combination of lawlessness and drug availability in Portland has led to a massive influx of people from every other part of the country that has less tolerance for a combination of open drug use + antisocial behavior. I don't think support services even register as part of the draw. There are no cops here and drugs are everywhere, it's open season on people who own property (still), or just anyone walking down the street with $10 in his pocket.

It's a separate subject whether the Portland police are essentially allowing this because (a) they're pissed off at the DA who won't prosecute anyone they arrest and (b) they're pissed off at the denizens and (c) they can't even hire anyone from Portland itself, since Portlanders hate the police so much. All those are basically true, and they're holding the city hostage by not doing their job.

But this is why it doesn't work on a local level. If half the junkies in Idaho weren't robbing people here to buy fentanyl, they'd have to rob people in Boise. White America did not give a fuck about the effects of street drugs on their loved ones when only Black Americans were enduring the crack epidemic. They only started to care once it affected their neighbors and their kids. Shipping those all off to the one place in the country that allows reckless abuse and has no enforcement is a way of washing their hands of their problems and blaming "liberal cities" like ours.


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.


>> just like Portugal did

Portugal arrests and jails people for dealing drugs, as well as for public displays of disorder.[0]

>> Police take the person to a police station and weigh the drugs. If the weight exceeds amounts specified for personal use, then the person is charged and tried as a drug trafficker and can receive prison sentences of 1–14 years. Otherwise, the next day, the person appears at the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction for an interview by a psychologist or social worker. Next comes an appearance before a three-person panel that will provide guidance about how to stop drug use.

This is the stick which accompanies the carrot. The trouble with decriminalization in Portland is that there's no stick. Sure - make drugs legal, I don't care what people do with their bodies! But make sure they don't become a menace.

Housing the homeless is really a separate topic. I'm all for making sure that no one in this country is ever homeless. The drug culture, however, in Portland is comprised mostly of able young men and women under the age of 30. They're willfully homeless because they've given up the idea of having a life, in favor of the drugs they're on.

You say there are no excuses about housing and feeding the homeless. But facts on the ground are: There is a highly visible group of people who are choosing to be homeless, robbing people and serving their own addiction, and (1) people who are actually homeless not by their own fault are the first victims of this, and (2) the general population here who are extremely caring are absolutely sick of it. The backlash is inevitable, and no amount of moralizing will change that.

I don't believe in "effective altruism" or "acceleration" - I think a 4-day work week or a universal basic income is a recipe for disaster. People need to feel a purpose. Hell, even dogs and horses need a purpose, or they get depressed. Accommodating their worst impulses is worse than doing nothing at all.

[0] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...


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.

[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....


Those stats aren't per capita. That page says 902,000 Americans use heroin annual and 14,000 die. That is a 1.55% fatality rate. And that is strictly overdoses. Any death to which heroin contributed but isn't an overdose isn't counted.

141,000 Americans die from the effects of alcohol each year. That would include factors such as increased heart attacks, etc. It is not merely looking at deaths from delerium tremens or the like.

Nonetheless, 177 million Americans[1] use alcohol annually. That is a 0.079% fatality rate.

So, the [direct + indirect] deaths from alcohol are 19.6x smaller per user than the direct deaths from heroin. I would wager if you included indirect effects, the difference is 100x or more against heroin.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...


The per capita number only matter if you believe that legalization would increase the number of heroin addicts. There is no reason to believe that, and any legalization effort should be done to prevent that as much as possible.

I know drug consumption usually go up when legalized, but a regulated heroin market would ideally be under very strict regulation, much stricter then alcohol or weed. It would most likely involve getting a prescription and buying it at a pharmacy. There would probably be strict no advertising and no branding. As well as a strict non-profit requirements for makers and distributes.


>Very true, alcohol is much worse by most metrics

>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.

How can you say both of these things? People who try to act like alcohol is worse than Heroin do more harm than good, but you even seem to understand it is worse with your last paragraph.

Of the hundreds of millions of users of alcohol, surely we don't even have to look up a study to find that the percentage of people who "been through more hell than the rest of us can ever understand, almost entirely because of those times when they couldn't access it" is less than Heroin.


> The second best option is to allow them access to a clean, low-cost, prescription of it for the rest of their life

Meaning after a few times of someone finding black market heroin, they can prove addiction - and then get it for low cost on the taxpayers dime, indefinitely and forever. Even better, the heroin addicts with less restraint about only using their supply will know who to beat and steal from to get more.

I'm not saying addicts are inherently bad people. I am saying heroin users are unlikely to have the self-control to stick to their prescribed amount, every day for the rest of their lives. We all have bad days and need something to make them suck less.


> 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.)

Is this true per capita?


Not per capita, per user of the mentioned substance. And the answer is no, not even close. Ridiculous argument.


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).


And legalized heroin has the potential to create more addicts who would be subjected to the harm of addiction, and their friends and families would be subjected to the harms of seeing their loved ones addicted.


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?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/06/meet-carl-ha...


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.


That's a little bit like the football-betting-sequence fallacy -- if I send a thousand letters out, with 50% predicting team A wins and 50% predicting team B wins, and do so successively for 10 weeks, at the end of the 10 weeks a small number of people will have gotten my letters "correctly predicting" the football outcome 10 times in a row. But of course, I didn't know anything about the games.

You can name a few of the richest people ever to do drugs who haven't died -- but how many have? And how many people without resources to pull them back from consequences of an overdose have died versus have used long-term and lived?

(For the record, I think I'm not really on the other side of the larger argument here, but I don't think your argument here is a convincing one.)


Quick Google says that 20 to 30% of people that try the drug get addicted. So most won't. The worst cases probably just stick out.


I may be wrong, but I thought we were discussing how many regularly-heroin-using people die early, not how many people try heroin once and subsequently become addicted.


Oh I interpreted the thread to be talking about heroine use in general. Could go either way I guess, there's a lot of comments at this point.

Though ime most users don't die. Which is why I support legalization. What I watched happened with my drug phase and others, it was mostly a phase and people just needed time, support and patience to get through to other side. There might be extreme examples ruining it for all, but I saw a lot of people stop after some serious use.

Unfortunately some die because of the policy we have like a few people I knew personally. All uncessarry.


> but how many have

Oh, plenty!


> 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.


Plenty of gamblers and alcoholics fit that description, too.


Neither of you are posting sources, so you're both just talking about your opinions.


The source is my personal experience dealing with individuals involved in addiction. No amount of "experts" claiming we need to legalize hardcore drugs is going to change my opinion, thats for sure.


So you're not even interested in hearing people that actually have done research, you're just going to run with your assumptions?

That's a rather emotional place to make an argument, in my opinion.


>you're just going to run with your assumptions?

They're not assumptions if they are his/her lived experiences.


They're assumptions based on anecdotes.


Well, it was an opinion based upon direct observation. To be fair, that’s a foundational aspect of the research you suggested.


I'll hear the research, but it won't change my mind. I just want them to stop because its killing them. They aren't young. Every time they use is a major rolling of the dice. Many an ER visits have occurred. I don't really care if the drug is legal or not. Same would go with alcohol if that was the poison of choice. And yes, it is an emotional place to make an argument, because its personal, not some stranger you read about on the 4th page of the Tuesday paper OD'ing (which probably isn't even news anymore).


This is the fallacy of scientism. You don't have to do a peer-reviewed research paper to see the truth. Firsthand observation is still the primary way we know the truth. Research depends on observations, not the other way around.


> According to her, a lot of overdoses are due to almost no "heroin" actually being heroin, rather its fentanyl cut to varying degrees of strength.

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

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

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

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

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


> more than 1400 compounds from [the fentanyl analogue] family have been described

Astounding.


It’s a lot, but not a crazy amount. Chemistry scales combinatorically, so if you find a single nitrogen to put a little e.g. acidic group on you’ve got yourself a couple of hundred possible substituents, many of which may have a similar effect on the body.


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.

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


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

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


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.

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Measures/Analy...


Oh, nice. Effective August 2023.


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


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.


I thought propofol was the "Michael Jackson drug", not fentanyl.


That's even funnier because fentanyl is the Prince drug, not MJ's


Wasn't that Propofol, a sedative?


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.


Indeed! I think the point is that "legalization" and "regulation" can take pretty different forms, not necessarily the for of the substance being generally available.


This needs to be part of the conversation.

To most people 'fentanyl' == 'The Devil', and rightly so after so many deaths.

However it does still have legitimate medical use.


Not the stuff coming in from Mexico and China.


But heroin is not. In gp comment, they are trying to get heroin and getting fentanyl instead.


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


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

Sincerely, Portland Native


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

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


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..


Because the few people I knew in real life that did it died and all the people I know that didn't do it are still alive. One of them was a single mom and left a 12 year old alone.

If you ask that guy who is today an adult, I can tell you he doesn't have second thoughts and would probably punch you in the face if you told him that heroine had no bad effects.


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

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


History shows that making it illegal didn't work either.


When it comes to dangerous drugs, nothing "works". We have to choose the least-bad policies.

A lot of people, including me, thought the war on drugs was pretty much the worst policy position. Now I'm seeing that there are (perhaps) worse policies. We need to be quantitative and nuanced, not speak in sweeping characterizations.


To paraphrase an unknown Marine drill Sergeant: "Everyone either needs the carrot or the stick, it's my job to figure out which".


Right. The reason the prohibition failed was because it was not very nuanced. Whatever is done needs to be done in a controlled, nuanced way.


The fact that _drunk driving_ is illegal reduces it dramatically.


Execution matters. See Singapore.


Its definitely interesting how some places are outright banning tobacco sales, and other places are decriminalizing hard drugs.


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?


When Bayer created heroin and brought it to market in the late 19th century, is this what happened? I don't know for sure, but I've never read about that having been a problem when it was available over the counter from a reputable brand.

Surely some people became addicted to it (not that different from alcohol, nicotine, fatty sweets, or various prescription drugs), but it didn't destroy society.


The 21st century opioid crisis that’s being unraveled right now with the Sacklers and Purdue pharma would tell a different story. Of course it wasn’t over the counter.

One thing that’s missing in a lot of these discussions is strength and education. What strength was the Bayer drugs vs things available today, and how well informed was the average person that this was a product they could access recreationally.


150 years ago was very different. If you didn't do useful work, you and your family could be in serious and immediate risk.

Now there's more of a safety net (money, foster care, and ambulances/ERs) which is largely good, but provides more opportunity to enable addicts.


> I've never been high on opiates, but I've heard it described as "an orgasm over your whole body".

1) Not everybody reacts that way.

I've only ever been given high-end opioids when in extreme pain, but I hate the sensation.

My brain feels like it's encased in concrete. A higher dose simply puts me to sleep.

2) What gives you the right to tell people to not do something pleasurable?

Really. Many people have rough lives. We should help them find joy somewhat safely rather than shunt them into the dark.


> 2) What gives you the right to tell people to not do something pleasurable?

this is a really good question and I had to think about it a lot. I think if all other variables were equal, I would have no problem with people doing something pleasurable. In contrast to say, a strict religious fanatic who vociferously preaches against wanking or rock music.

However, I think we can both agree that opiate withdrawals are not pleasurable, nor is the change in an addict's personality when they start putting drugs high and above everything else in life. I think we can also agree that there is a continuity between "pleasurable" and "not pleasurable", and opiates give the user so much pleasure that pales in comparison to anything else. Enough to substantially change their personality, for at least the ones who are susceptible to it (as you pointed out, not everyone becomes instantly addicted). So that's where my case for prohibition comes from.

There's the whole "Rat Park Experiment" that I think deserves a mention. Whether the experiment itself has been debunked (I can't remember) is irrelevant. I think it's worth asking the same question of Portland: is there opportunity here? Can someone get an entry-level job and be happy? If not, why? This is a liberal, government-micromanaged city. Why are things so dismal that people are choosing not to work? (If you wonder why I'm suddenly making this a partisan issue, it's because (1) the government has their hands on all the controls so obviously they could fix things, and (2) people are suggesting regulation of dope, so if the gov can't regulate a simple local economy, why would we think they can suddenly be the new dope dealer?). Why don't they double down on their taxes and fees and manipulate the city such that an entry-level, full-time employee at Dollar General or Taco Bell can rent his own apartment, raise a family with their spouse, have healthcare, own a car, have a vacation, and a 401k? The reason is because the far left doesn't actually represent the people. They'd rather distract everyone with gender pronouns and anti-racism red-herrings while their own citizens check-out of the late-stage capitalist hellscape their government created for them.


> for at least the ones who are susceptible to it (as you pointed out, not everyone becomes instantly addicted).

And, see, this is the crux. You are banning something for everyone even though only a smaller number seem to be susceptible.

The problem is that this applies to a whole bunch of things: porn, gambling, alcohol, etc. Why heroin and not alcohol which, in many ways, is much worse than heroin?

I agree that the base problem is that life sucks for many people, and we need to fix that. However, that problem is going to be slow in fixing, and we need interim, probably sub-optimal solutions in the meantime.


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


I had some opium tea when I was in Egypt and let me tell you, it was so cheap, and it felt so good that I would absolutely do it every day if I had the chance.


So?

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.


Even if one ascribes to this nihilist POV, it isn't an answer. We see the negative effects on communities, families, and people around addicts. Even if you don't care that people are destroying themselves, when they take out the surrounding area it is a problem we share.


Yeah and humans have seen it for centuries and failed to stop it

Who is to say any progress we make won’t be undid by another pandemic we cannot predict, or some nutter launching the nukes

We have political agents hell bent on war and subjugating undesirables, rather than pushback against them let’s focus on some people who don’t want to live?

Why not ask Oceangate how the war against physics is going. It will always win and erode any social progress we think we made


> failed to stop it

I don't think that's the goal. The goal is to attempt to reduce harm of something that removes freedom. Try asking a drug addict if they want to keep taking drugs. I suspect you'll be surprised at the answer. Stopping drugs would be like achieving abstinence as the primary form of contraceptive. Both are impossible because they work on the same soup of chemicals, but one has evolved with some form of continuation in mind. The other is a direct injection, orders of magnitude stronger, that just fucks up all the machinery of the brain.


Well we all better stop flying and driving if we’re set out to reduce human suffering.

But hey the toxic mess we leave for the future to suffer through won’t be our problem so shrug

This is the most disingenuous and self righteous thread I’ve ever been involved with. Traditional catechisms and stubbornness will win out against physical reality. RBG fans I guess.


> Well we all better stop flying and driving if we’re set out to reduce human suffering.

If the car has doors your can't unlock, and the plane forced you to fly or you die from withdrawals, both of which follow you around you're whole life honking their horns begging you to get back in, even if you do manage to stop, then your analogy could make sense.

Do you have any experience with addiction?

Having experience with the pain it causes, and not liking the idea of more families being ripped apart/abandoned due to a few milligrams, isn't self righteous as much as sympathetic. I think there's some compromise between complete freedom and "this thing completely removes freedom, so maybe it's a bad idea".


Yes, yes I do have family history with addiction

Both times my family wished for euthanization options rather than watch family rot

But patronizing high minds said no; in our society they must suffer until they die

Americans have spent so much time huffing toxic positivity whippets.

All the high minded worship and praise of the economy, tech, feeding notions of American exceptionalism has led us to believe we really can do anything

But we all can’t live forever and have no guarantee the future won’t just screw it all up again

Physics rules, not human philosophy. Reality itself is the root of our misery. There’s no eradicating suffering without eliminating humans; we cannot violate physics and the physical word fosters suffering. Erosion and entropy of all structure.

This forum is sounding way too religious. Thought it was science nerdy when I signed up but it’s just typical “America great!”


You don’t have to watch others rot just because they are alive - you are choosing to stay alive to do so, and can change your mind at any time without imposing on anyone else’s rights.


You seem to argue for ultimate freedom for others as some abstract goal while ignoring how you take from others by existing

You generate waste and increase costs by reducing resources for others

You get in the way of others free agency due to management of your mess

Just by existing you impose yourself on others. Stop pretending physical reality doesn’t apply to you an vacuous political poetry about rights waves away externalized burdens your elder self will foist on the next generation to preserve your perception of rights at the cost of them to perceive what they value for themselves

I’ve been in pain from surgery multiple times, it’s awful. You’d leave dying people in pain to suffer through it versus violate spoken tradition of the dead. Our own experiences mean nothing to you, just adherence to philosophy.


> Well we all better stop flying and driving if we’re set out to reduce human suffering.

No, we're better off regulating safety, setting increasingly strict pollution and mileage standards, and continuing to update laws to eliminate behaviors such as DUI or texting to continue to have those freedoms while limiting externalities.


Humans have absolutely stopped it in places with draconian laws. The use of heroin in Singapore, other parts of south east Asia and parts of the Middle East is essentially zero because they give traffickers the death penalty and jail the few users for a very long time. If you can truly secure your borders and you can’t grow poppy in your country there will be no heroin.


By that logic, we should remove any suicide prevention or other mental health support as well. Allowing, even encouraging, people to suffer when the very nature of their disease destroys their agency should be repugnant to everyone. Religion is a red herring here.


You won’t be saying the same thing when it’s your kid that’s “out of the way”. Making heroin easily accessible means someone that does it a handful of times is truly hooked. Your life is essentially a struggle from that point out.


> Then they’re out of the way.

What are your thoughts on the death penalty in Singapore?


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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