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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Some people do drugs to feel like a god, others to escape god.

Jack the Bipper by Channel 5 was pretty solid. I'd recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLGRGZTk51w

Absolutely phenomenal journalism that nobody is paying attention to unfortunately

https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/

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

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

Locals are like 20% of the problem.

Portland is better housing-wise, but not by much. Considering how most people who are both homeless and on drugs were homeless first, then turned to drugs, I think this is a strong confounding factor. It's hard to saw what effect decriminalization has had on drug use when it's adjacent to a housing crisis that is manufacturing more homelessness and drug use all on its own.

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.

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20211022190558/http://allhomekc....

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).

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...

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"?

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.

“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!”

[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/20/california-a...

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

Caveat: unemployment statistics don't count people who aren't seeking work. Which chronically homeless and/or drug addicted people usually do not.

> The unemployment rate measures the share of workers in the labor force who do not currently have a job but are actively looking for work. People who have not looked for work in the past four weeks are not included in this measure.

https://www.epi.org/newsroom/useful_definitions/

Basically what unemployment rate tells us is that USA has enough jobs for people who want to work. It says nothing about people who have given up looking.

That's a fair point. If people are not seeking work but claim benefits indefinitely, doesn't this require a different solution than blaming the society and expecting taxpayers to take care of that?

https://www.kqed.org/news/11668623/why-do-thousands-of-l-a-s...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/san-f...

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/top-stories/story/2020-...

> wages are the lowest they have been in decades

This is an endless argument. Why can't a person with 0 skills rent an apartment in San Francisco? Some wages are very low. If you can't afford rent in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, move to a cheaper place, don't become homeless in SF.

Do you want me to solve this for you? Here you go:

- Find a job in Wallmart in Fresno (if you insist on staying in CA): https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/0619201885FE-cashier-fro... (Cashier, $16-$26 an hour)

- Find a cheap rental in Fresno: e.g. this studio is $800 https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/719-W-Hammond-Ave-Fresno-...

- Sign up for free health insurance: https://www.coveredca.com/

Most people are born and raised in the same city or area their whole lives. The adult illiteracy rate is 20% and less than 40% get any kind of 4 year degree. Options are limited. People will cling to hope and the life (and community!) they know, until they're broke and lost their job... and at that point, they straight up can't move to Fresno and start that Walmart job. Walmart wouldn't hire them without a local place to live, and cheap Fresno landlords wouldn't rent to someone without a local job. Neither Walmart nor the landlord has an incentive to change, they're doing just fine exploiting the local Fresno populace.

Low-skill/low-pay life situations are a completely different reality than what well-off knowledge workers know.

Respectfully, you misplace the responsibility. When people go through a rough breakup, we don't call for the person experiencing attachment anxiety to be housed with their ex just because it would make things easier for one party at least temporarily. Life is full of hard moments and challenging choices. The fact that something is hard doesn't mean giving up is the healthiest path that the society should encourage.

Talk to people who work in social services. The fact is, visibly homeless (street homeless, most often addicted people) are in this situation not because they have tried everything else and have no choices. They don't seek employment and often refuse help. They are not part of a community (unless you consider other homeless people they randomly ended up living close to their true community).

As usual, the discussion about homeless is kind of pointless without clarifying which segment we are talking about. Homeless families with children, disabled non-addicts, etc are not someone I include in this discussion, and I never see them living on the street.

> Do you want me to solve this for you? Here you go:

As if your list was anything close to a viable solution for someone already homeless and addicted.

With this post, you're right - it is absolutely more complex. There are absolutely families on the street, they're just more likely in cars or squatting rather than assaulting people.

Beds can be located in places that lock people out of employment or introduce them to toxic elements... and becoming unhoused by itself causes mental health issues in a society which does nothing but stigmatize that from birth to adulthood.

Even within treatment, skilled help is chronically burned out and mediocre help is worse than a rubber duck.

There's a need for structural reform, from policing through sentencing and voluntary/mandatory rehabilitation, as well as public education. Not to mention real estate bottlenecks that drive up prices for everone from low-income odd-job workers, to the city police force, to building new institutional facilities, to staffing social services.

To add an independent voice, here's ChatGPT responding to "summarize this article in one paragraph", for each article you linked to:

> https://www.kqed.org/news/11668623/why-do-thousands-of-l-a-s...

The article discusses the significant problem of empty beds in Los Angeles County's homeless shelters, despite a large homeless population. Investigations reveal safety and sanitation issues in many shelters, such as bedbugs, rats, foul odors, and lax medical care. Half of the LAHSA shelters had 78 percent utilization. Homeless individuals cite issues like theft, harassment, and violence within shelters, prompting some to prefer living on the streets. There's no unified oversight system, and the is much room for improvement to ensure humane conditions in shelters.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/san-f...

Approximately 7,800 homeless people in San Francisco, 2,100 have been approved for subsidized housing, yet challenges persist in moving them indoors. The city cites issues such as a shortage of case managers, complicated paperwork, and resistance from the homeless to certain unit conditions. Although efforts have been made to address the problem, including a $62 million investment in case managers, the average wait time has increased to five months, a significant delay considering the program's annual budget of $356 million. The article calls for an in-depth audit of the permanent supportive housing program and urgent action to house homeless individuals promptly.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/top-stories/story/2020-...

The article discusses California's Project Roomkey initiative, launched by Governor Gavin Newsom in April 2020 to lease 15,000 hotel rooms for homeless individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the program's progress has been slow, with only about half of the rooms occupied over a month into its implementation. Challenges include delays in preparing rooms for occupancy, a shortage of service providers, and difficulties in transitioning residents into permanent housing. While some counties, like Sacramento, have seen relative success, others, such as San Diego and Orange County, struggle to fill leased rooms. The initiative, funded by FEMA, targets homeless individuals aged 65 or older and those with health conditions susceptible to COVID-19, but the article raises concerns about the overall effectiveness and limited coverage of the program in addressing the state's homelessness crisis.

E.g. we have invested $62M in case managers to handle 2100 approved cases? With the program's annual budget being $365M? This shows a ridiculous level of bloat and corruption. Do we need to spend $30K per case, considering that this doesn't cover the shelter expense?

I am not opposed helping people in need, I am opposed the idea that we just need to spend more money. And then next year a little bit more. More taxes, more case managers, more street cleaning teams, more safe injection sites. None of that is solving homelessness, all of that is contributing to making the homeless industry bigger.

* show up

* not be high or drunk when showing up

* adhere to a schedule

* read

* follow instructions

* not cuss out his boss or customers

* count money

* not steal money

* operate a computerized cash register

A large number of homeless probably could not do these things.

Shelters have a lot of restrictions that keep swaths of homeless out. For instance most don't allow animals or carts. If you're homeless and don't want to abandon those you're stuck on the street. There might be reasons for restrictions but they exist and homeless are excluded from shelters because of them.

Hymns are a better opiate of the masses than fentanyl.

This is the same approach as we are seeing in the "far left" bubble in the context of this issue: street drug addicts have no responsibilities and agency, the society has to accommodate their every whim, including ignoring all illegal activities they are engaged in.

Until we acknowledge that benefits come with responsibilities we are not going to solve this.

That's not an issue that America has to solve (i.e. the government or the society). It's an individual need that every individual is responsible for.

You shouldn't be surprised then when vast amounts of people fail to fill a hole that for the vast majority of human history was filled for them.

I honestly believe most people simply aren't capable of making their on meaning or purpose out of nothing.

Being told as a child that if you take drugs you will go to hell is not a meaningful alternative. Not for incredibly complex thinking beings that we are.

Submitting to Jesus, being a part of the "right" religious group is not a benefit to the human race as a whole. It's poison, promoted by power hungry maniacs.

Social programs, education, keeping corporations in check - these are meaningful alternatives to the idea that we need to bring Jesus back to control the population.

Indifference is worse than extreme atheism or fundamentalism because those two options are actually concerned about others

The indifferent person could care less whether you believe or don't, it's your own "individual responsibility", they owe nothing to you and you owe nothing to them

Widespread indifference will bring about the slow dismantlement of society

I've really only witnessed such open drug abuse in countries with strong Christian influence, e.g. the US and Latin America. Might be worth investigating why widespread debilitating drug abuse stems from that background.

Finding purpose and our place in the world is our individual responsibility. Don't confuse it with the lies of eternal heaven at the cost of total submission in this life that your religion is promoting.

I think religion is declining because people are discovering there are many ways to perform self-discovery and practice fulfillment.

The only aspect of religion that has been beneficial to modern society is providing a social venue for others to interact. This can be achieved by building stronger neighborhoods and encouraging the development of more welcoming social venues -- something that I think is the cure to America's loneliness epidemic.

Let's suppose this were true. If, as you say, it's all about purpose and meaning, then we would expect that although everyone's conception of these things is different, it would still provide the same benefit. However, this is not what we find. Markers of purpose and meaning (such as suicide rate, depression, etc) are getting worse, not better.

So we're forced to come to terms with a few possible conclusions, none of which are very good for your point of view. Either the systems people are coming up with are insufficient to achieve the same goals or people are not coming up with their own system and are left to flounder.

> This can be achieved by building stronger neighborhoods and encouraging the development of more welcoming social venues -- something that I think is the cure to America's loneliness epidemic.

How is Europe doing on these indicators? Or anywhere else?

Can something be simultaneously true and patronizing?

Just looking at how humans in general behave worldwide, I'd say that yes, people are really quite stupid.

Surely there is another way? Stronger families, philosophy, sports, education? Humanism over religion - the only truly universal approach.

If it's a binary choice of opiate addiction vs. religious practice, sure. But for many, the hole that some fill with religion is filled with other sorts of meaning-giving practices. Not to take away from the comfort, stability and hope that religious affiliation provides for many; but for others the source of connection to the transcendent and to contributing to concerns beyond oneself comes in different forms.

I increasingly believe the same and I don't believe the vast majority are capable of filling it on their own in a healthy way, but there are a lot of other social factors at play too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_God

I find one of the biggest losses, especially in dense cities, is that the churches and community orgs there often lack local, long-term ties to said communities. Also, there are a number of religious institutions in big cities that are sometimes open only on (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday depending on their beliefs) and don't provide as much closeness and synomie for people as rural religious institutions do.

I wouldn't recommend that all things must attempt to recapture the 1950's apartheid and social conservativism in all regards, but a crucial linchpin of a functional society appears to be missing. It is not necessarily religion or faith, but it includes a lack of love for, and trust of, others where America went from community-individual balanced to hyperindividualism with a dysfunctional social safety net.

I don't think you can avoid this. If you bring back religion, you necessarily have to accept apartheid and social conservatism. The two go hand-in-hand.

Religion probably worked well for bonding communities back when communities were small and homogeneous and had little contact with the outside world. But in an era of global travel and communications, it doesn't work: we have to have huge wars to decide whose religion is the correct one. Just look at what's going on with Israel lately. Different religions can't peacefully co-exist, so devastating wars are necessary to maintain order.

Religion has been more impactful in spreading knowledge and connecting cultures around the world than the printing press, radio and the internet combined. Religion for a long time was the only contact with the outside world. Christianity today is more or less the culture and knowledge from thousands of years and countless different tribes and cultures, fused into one piece. Spread worldwide by preaching, manuscripts, monks, monasteries and by the sword. Compared to most ideologies that only spread by the sword, ancient and modern.

The default human condition is to spread by breeding among your own people, and exterminate other people. Sometimes just the men and the boy children, to breed with the women. Sometimes by exterminating everybody and even eating them. Cannibalism and human sacrifice was the default human condition for tens of thousands of years, or maybe even for millions of years, before the light came to man.

Thinking that religion is only war and oppression is like thinking math is only for calculating artillery. It's a limited perspective.

Consider video games as the opiate instead. At least they don't fuck up your health and you might come out with stronger problem solving skills.

There are legitimate causes for the blight in Seattle but lack of jobs and low wages aren’t one of them.

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.

If anything, I'm stunned that the price for square foot in Paris is only 180% of that in Seattle.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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

No we don't. This wasn't a problem 10 years ago. This isn't a problem in much, much poorer countries. This isn't a problem in fucking Houston or Tampa or NYC or Boston.

I get that you want to overthrow Capitalism, but the rest of us want to live a normal life without junkies shitting on our stairs

It 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.

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

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.

Once again, I'm not endorsing or condoning this, just trying to show you how they conceptualize their form of justice.

I often hear “Had a wife in kids in Baltimore, Jack. I went out for a ride and I never went back” from “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen in my head when I think about mid-life discontent. That and “Office Space”; it seems to be the rule that we experience it rather than the exception.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

- Provides universal healthcare, again subsidized through the government

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

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

- Have extreme penalties for drug offenses.

- Have highly effective surveillance and law enforcement.

I guess we can all find what we want in Singapore: an effective police state winning the war on drugs, or an effective welfare state.

Maybe stop cherry picking the parts that you like and pretending like they're the parts that worked?

https://www.unodc.org/pdf/report_2000-09-21_1.pdf

https://www.unodc.org/pdf/trends2003_www_E.pdf

https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR_2008_eng_we...

https://www.unodc.org/res/wdr2022/MS/WDR22_Booklet_3.pdf

Yes, this is not a hypothetical. Are you under the impression that people don't want to move there?

Do you feel that the Canadian government should be tortured and put to death for legalizing marijuana?

Do you feel the same for Singapore where smoking tobacco is legal?

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

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

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.

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).

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

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?

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.

Why does that follow?

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.

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.

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

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

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

Why the flamebait?

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Noble savages?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

- 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.

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.

  It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either

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

I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away

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

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

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

based on absolutely nothing other than platitudes

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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”

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

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

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

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...

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

It’s time we stop deceiving the public.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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).

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"

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.

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.

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’ll pass, thanks.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The fact is they've been spending a record amount.

In 2017, they spent $48 million to address the homeless crisis.

By 2021 they were spending more than double at $117 million.

https://katu.com/news/following-the-money/how-much-money-has...

The problem isn't "we didn't waste even more money faster".

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 :(

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

good or bad? not sure.

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

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

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

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.

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

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 :(

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Create laws against public drug use, then enforce them.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

>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).

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. :-/

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.

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....

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.

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

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

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

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

Source: I live in Portland very near Downtown.

Why? These people are ruining kids lives and making people not want to live in dense cities, making the climate crisis worse. The benefit we get with them ODing on the street in the name of civil rights is easily overshadowed by the benefit of making cities attractive, dense urban areas liveable, and preventing the ODs by having these individuals receive medical care in jail.

Jail seems like the most compassionate, utilitarian option and also the one to suit the tastes of more conservatively minded people. It should be a bipartisan consensus.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moronic analogy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It 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.

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

Portland specifically has less police officers per capita than Haiti.

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.

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

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.

"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".

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Depends on your definition of "use".

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Total idiocy.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is wrong with this approach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Maybe like $2 trillion over a decade?

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

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.

This is a progressive failure

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.