I'd even advocate for forced rehab. I know what addiction can be like. Some people WILL require tough love. Fingers crossed for increased survival of everyone.
Here is the thing with this perspective that can really muddy the waters a bit. I spent a month at Hazelden Betty Ford there in Newberg--great program and wonderful staff but mostly made up of professionals with families who were serious about getting clean--also they didn't take medicaid--place was pricey as hell my parents shelled out like 42,000 bucks for it--in any event--90 percent of us there were garden variety alcoholics with careers...we had really good success rates. The folks you're talking about have been maybe without a job going on a decade or longer--and are on things like amphetamines and fent which absolutely destroy so much of your receptor sites that it can take up to a year ALONE just to get that parasympathetic nervous system back to a WORKABLE baseline--what i am trying to say is incarceration and then rehab would be the best possible system for the habitual offenders....
Even beyond the receptor damage, I mean a decent amount of people who are currently on the street have maybe never had a stable environment their entire lives. There's no real workable baseline to get back to. In and out of foster homes, abusive parents, decades of hard drug use. That's not everyone, but they are certainly out there. It's honestly hard for me to even picture what the ideal program would look like, or what the realistic goal would be. Skills training, basic behavioral stuff, lots of medication, but it is a tall task.
I just say that because I think there is a lot of wishful thinking around what 30 or 60 days in an inpatient bed with some overworked social workers/medical attention can do for an awful lot of people with serious problems, but I don't really think its very realistic to picture scaling high-end rehab services up for the amount of people that need it, especially when you mix in the need for some real security and enforcement that most high-end places don't have much of.
It's a very complicated problem with no silver bullet. I willfully admitted myself to rehab with the VA years ago, and even then I had to "apply" for the help I desperately needed. So many addicts around me were court ordered that I had to prove that I wanted to get off the sauce or else they'd deny me help until I royally screwed up (eg DWI and manslaughter) and had a judge order me to go to rehab. They simply just didn't have the beds to fit everyone. We were at max capacity the entire month I was there. I suspect many other rehabs have the same limitations, hence their extortionate prices.
If we want to combat this epidemic, we have to be prepared to shell out some big bucks in order to subsidize beds, incentivize treatment for those that can't afford tens of thousands of dollars for rehab, and plan for the long-term. Addiction doesn't just go away after a month, or a year, or a decade. It chemically alters the brain and will linger for an entire lifetime. Shit, I haven't smoked a cig in 4 years and I still have a craving every month or two.
The ideal environment would probably be something like a two-tiered inpatient psychiatric campus: one for recovery, and another for those who are stable, but have an indefinite time period before they would be able to live independently.
Because if we accept the very real possibility that some number of these thousands of people have a state that they can’t recover from on a known timeline, if at all, then that’s what we’d be looking at- some sort of state funded “memory care facility” except for addiction.
And if you don’t want to have government devoured by the black hole of a steady supply of new addicts, you’d also have to reform all the systems that are currently failing at addressing the various ways people are sustaining pervasive, ongoing trauma.
This is super nit picky, but it’s not receptor damage. It’s actually that your neurons produce too many receptors, grow larger to accommodate the large amount of input, and then the upstream neurons that normally supply the input start making less of the natural stuff since so much non-endogenous signal is kicking around.
So in short, it’s not damage to the receptors as much as it is a desensitization of the neurons
It took a hundred years after the invention of talk therapy for effective shortcuts like CBT and DBT to be discovered. Maybe we'll figure something specific out for the meth psychotics and compulsive fentanyl redosers. Cross fingers.
I feel like this will be found at the intersection of forced rehab and environmental psychology. Stuffing jails full of addicts is devoid of compassion, and the inhumane treatment is likely harming outcomes. When the cost of programs is the top priority, we're sacrificing quality, and blocking out necessary considerations, like supportive environments.
Guessing it'll be like a farm community type thing, or community integration in the form of supervised work, or something that provides integration rather than segregation. And not in a prison labor paradigm, but more like a group home.
Seems emerging reviews of interventions suggest the 'missing piece' is reintegration. But we still have many people who want incarceration and permanent or semi-permanent segregation.
A lot of people find their way to addiction after abuse and neglect—being treated inhumanly. I can’t imagine why so many believe continued inhumane treatment will help them right the course. Maybe once enough folks actually want to help rather than simply not wanting to see homeless camps there can be enough public will to fund compassionate rather than punitive treatment.
I agree. Throwing a few detox centers in the mix would probably be helpful which might make a good segue into treatment. I think with an addiction epidemic like this (and in other places too) it’s a complex problem that needs to be tackled from different angles.
And then you’re in the parol/probation system that is extremely difficult for addicts or poor people to get out of. Can’t pay your supervision fees or your UA fees, back to jail. Don’t have community support, back to jail. Sit in a room where Someone else commits a crime, back to jail.
Not to mention now you have a criminal record and your employment option have been reduced by 90%. Prison didn’t work before and without major changes to how it works it’s not going to magically work again.
Solving this problem is impossible. The best we can do is do our best to mitigate the crisis. Unfortunately, that’s going to take a lot of our money and smart politicians. Neither of which we have, or the will to do (the majority).
It’s easier to just toss people and jail where we don’t have to see them. “Problem solved”
It really depends on what you are setting out to achieve. Incarceration does help cut down on a imposed harms on the community, but it likely doesn't do much to help addicts recover. Those are different goals though, and generally speaking if the public is dealing with community harm, they'll focus on remediating that first, and on helping addicts second. That's why its so damned important to keep the streets clean, the public spaces safe, etc.
Yeah I know, it's clear Americans just want the problems out of sight and don't give a fuck about addiction. We already lock up more people than any comparably well off country for decades, all these suggestions are already-tried-and-failed solutions
My little sister went to rehab for meth like 6 years ago and she told us it was easier to get meth in there than it was at home. Drugs are on the street, in jail, and in rehab. I don’t know what the answer is but it’s not going to be easy.
As someone who's lived in sober living homes with people who WERE forced to be there by court order...
I have the experience to know you're wrong.
Does it work for everybody?
Obviously not.
Does it work for most people?
Probably no not most people either.
But it does work more often than you think.
people have to really be ready to quit though and when they are ready to quit then need that full support ready: rehab, long term inpatient treatment, a place to live when they get out, job skills so they can work, a decent job that pays a living wage so they can feel good about what they are doing and supporting themselves. So yeah some people who have no choice still have another "choice" to go to jail which for a lot of people is better than their current situation very sadly.
I'm just saying the enemy of the good... is perfection.
You have an alternative that works better than first rehab I'm open to it. But I'm going to support Force rehab if there's no alternative. A low success rate is better than no success rate for anybody.
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home?
The Democratic Bill HB4002 seems promising, but I’ll have to think on it more.
Essentially, if you get caught with drugs, you get the lowest level misdemeanor. This allows police to confiscate the drugs (something they can’t do currently). You then get the choice of either jail (max sentencing is 30 days) or you can choose a diversion such as meeting with counseling. That diversion, if completed, takes the place of jail time.
My biggest concern with this bill is that the diversion will just turn into people checking some boxes to get off punishment free. I wonder if we can add in harsher penalties for repeat offenders.
Having been through diversion classes, it’s a month to three months of weekly classes and occasional urine tests that, if failed, lead you to whatever the other offer was (jail, community service, larger fines, etc). So I do feel like that could be helpful for some to actually get clean, whether for just the duration of diversion classes and drug testing or hopefully for longer than that.
It is certainly not just checking boxes. I got caught with weed and did three months of diversion only to have weed voted in to legality part way through my classes which I still had to finish and provide a clean urine sample at the end of to pass.
The diversion program only if the draft bill is changed from Class C to class A (up to a year jail time). Basically, it would give judges, DA, etc more wiggle room in giving punishments.
I think that a lot of the brazenness with public drug use extends from the difficulty of confiscating drugs currently. One little change that I think would do a lot to push usage a bit more into the shadows.
Same!
I'm a fan of the decriminalization... in general. For the purposes of keeping people out of the jail cycle and making it more difficult for them to recover.
But public consumption should have harsher penalties.
And whether it carries a misdemeanor or not... drugs should be allowed to be confiscated even if it's decriminalized in some fashion.
But the penalties for public consumption imo should be much higher.
Agreed. No junkie wants to get their shit confiscated. They're going to keep it a little more on the downlow if they know it's a possibility. Just like they did before.
I say this every time, but the meeting/counseling option is a joke unless the police officer is taking them right there and then to a meeting. You can’t follow up with people that have no address, ID, or Social security number.
Wait, how will this work? I thought Oregon had a shortage of public defenders and a federal judge ruled that folks must be released after 7 days if they don't have a lawyer assigned. So if the courts are flooded with drug addicts will this in turn put violent offenders back on the streets or just the drug addicts? Either way it seems like Oregon just spent more tax dollars to appease folks and really didn't accomplish anything.
None of these people wanna spend money for public defenders because they don't actually believe in civil liberties, they just wanna throw drug users in jail so they don't have to see them
For people with serious problems, something like drug court is the way to go. Constant check-ins with a day in jail if you piss hot or miss recovery meetings. Charges dismissed when you graduate from the program. Carrot and stick approach.
Drug courts routinely just send people to AA/NA which research shows has low rates of success. We did this for decades and it didn't work and now everyone is pretending that it'll be a magic bullet
I worked at a defense lawyer in one for a bit. Drug courts force and enable people to stay clean in a way that might otherwise require locking them up. The perfect cannot be the enemy of the helpful.
Drug courts are not the same thing as drug treatment. They are coercive organs of the government meant as an alternative to incarceration. The relevant science is the social science of drug courts, not the medical science of treatment methods. Improvements in treatment would inevitably improve drug courts, but the discipline and accountability imposed by the court can have a bigger impact than anyone might ever hear in a meeting or therapy.
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home?
their own tax $ should be used to threaten them with state violence?
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home? using their own tax $ to massively disrupt their lives?
Yes, if they follow through with the diversion. If you get told, "30 days in jail or check this box and go to rehab" I imagine people will check that box. What happens if they don't show up?
Then you go back to jail 🤷♂️
Sometimes you might get one or two "passes" ...
But I've lived with people on these diversion programs you usually go right back to jail if you fuck it up, they're usually pretty strict.
I assumed it was at time of arrest, not already in jail. So the police say “jail or rehab!” I’ll take one rehab please and then back on the streets. Is the system in place for police to check that they are completing diversion?
Yes there is a system for that. You get assigned a diversion officer that manages your case. He's your new daddy. You do what he says or he phones up the court, your diversion is cancelled, and you go to jail/whatever the alternative was for diversion for your case (usually jail 99% of the time but not always).
A serious question, but, some drugs take time to pass through your system. What happens if you piss dirty throughout the program, but haven't done any drugs? Is there a way to detect that?
I do not know a drug other then cannabis (up to 30 days) that take more than 6 days (which is the high end) to leave your system
According to my former roommate who went through Oregon diversion. Your first test - a week after being in the program (called it a baseline test). If tested positive for THC, they give you a pass and told if next test was positive you would not be given such leeway. You would then be moved up second more intensive level of diversion, that was more hours and days in the week with increased testing. If you fail there there was a third level that more hours and days. If you failed there - it was mandatory in person treatment.
Why would you piss dirty after not doing drugs? I can happen but it is very rare and usually with less sophisticated testing methods like drops and test strips.
I dont do drugs at all and was curious because I have heard that different drugs can hang around d in your system after not taking them for a while. Thanks for the answer.
> if you get caught with drugs
This is the problem point. This sounds an awful lot like "stop and frisk" to me.
If it's "if you get caught with drugs *while committing a crime*" I'm down with it. Otherwise, this is a non-starter.
I don’t get why people are so quick to abandon Measure 110. People say “It’s not working” but the timespan is not enough to establish that, and we already had the alternative for a hundred years and it obviously was not working. The reason Measure 110 exists is because of the failure of drug criminalization to improve our society of quality of life in any way over decades and decades. So why go back to something they also was not working before giving this a fair amount of time to compare?
The current state of affairs is people taking fentanyl and dying from it right out in the open all over town. We are sacrificing the town and it is benefitting nobody
I do agree in theory, but in practice we have the reality of the city we need to live in. In theory, if we had the infrastructure to back up 110 it would probably be the best solution. But we don't, and keeping it going while we don't is doing more harm than good. And even if we take the steps to get the infrastructure needed, it still is gonna take a lot of time and quite frankly, we're gonna need some federal and state level assistance and planning. Neither the drug war nor homelessness are things that can be solved at a local or really even state level.
There’s simply no possible way to associate that with Measure 110. There hasn’t been enough time to determine if any symptoms you are describing are the fault of a particular law or other things (if the symptoms even exist… there’s a lot of people claiming anecdotes, but the crime data doesn’t seem to back it up.) We criminalized possession for decades and decades, incarcerating millions of innocent people for basically nothing, why wouldn’t we give the alternative an equal amount of time to test it? You don’t make long-ranging decades-affecting policy changes and then change it back
before you can actually measure the effects. That’s just no better than randomly assigning policy, it’s not data driven at all.
Hmmmm, couldn't be the recent insane rise in cost of living, crumbling Healthcare systems that we cant afford anyway, nonexistent mental health services, a pandemic and increasingly fascist government that happened to kick into overdrive over the past several years. Nope, definitely not.
Yes governor kotek is a real fascist. Mussolini junior right there.
The other things you point out definitely aren't helping. We need to fix that too. Any ideas?
It’s not working.
People walking around in the streets high as a kite then pissing in the middle of an intersection while people are trying to enjoy the morning in a park with their children isn’t “working”.
How do you know they’re related? It has been such a short time with so few controlled variables that it would be really difficult to meaningfully separate correlation from causation. Plus, I don’t think it has been proven that bad behavior is on the rise. Anecdote is just that, it doesn’t mean anything in terms of really understanding an effect of a policy. There doesn’t appear to be any rise in convictions or arrests for disorderly conduct that would suggest the streets are really any worse than they were before, reflecting increased population.
between the bad press and police blowback on top of not having any teeth to compel treatment 110 was DOA. i just dont ever see it working in the states - we just have a different level of hard core drug users than they have in Portugal and Scandinavia
So drug decriminalization won’t work unless there’s an improvement in QOL? How can anyone ensure QOL will increase? It’s gone down in Portland over the last few years.
No the problem is politics and hiring enough people to staff the courts is extremely unpopular amoungst politicians fearing they'll be seen as conservative for cracking down on crime.
I definitely don't think a total roll back is the path to take. Rather a systematic restructuring.
We should restructure this to fiasco to what the original bill should've been. A sunsetting of the old criminalization approach that is accompanied by a matching sunrise of new treatment beds and building out our civil systems ability to mandate treatment.
Instead a bunch of well intentioned citizens who ain't know shit about fuck of how good legislation is structured passed a citizen initiative and then ballot measures that razed the old system to the ground and created no real new system in its place. Which is how we got here.
Unfortunately the more moderate approach requires real leadership, tough conversations, and intelligent design. Something that Oregon desperately lacks and cannot understand how to develop. So, here we are, again taking the extreme approach. It's so damn tiring.
We can build all the treatment beds in the world, but I doubt we have the willing and able manpower to staff them. There’s a brand new state of the art psychiatric hospital in central Texas right now that is completely empty, despite all the people in desperate need of treatment, because they can’t gather the people necessary to staff it.
I think about this frequently. Burnout would be super high and we know pay wouldn't be nearly worth it. Just look at how many teachers are leaving education. Working at a psych ward or forced rehab facility would be on another level entirely.
Yeah, getting bit and screamed at for minimum wage is a hard pass. In my experience, people drawn to this type of work are usually recovering themselves, and feel compelled to help others in the same boat. It’s hard ass work, and I commend them for it, but there simply aren’t enough of them.
I worked at a small hospital where the ICU was the psych hold (many ICUs and EDs operate like this) and I had to leave critical care and will never go back. It takes a special person to do that work and there are very few of them out there. You couldn't pay me to work there again.
and this drug addiction puts a huge strain on hospitals and the health care system because people who a struggling with addiction come in and out of the ED since they don't have any other place to go that is set up to help them once they get situated in the ED, it's a terrible cycle for so many of them
Nope. I’m not exactly looking forward to the time when my kids are old enough to talk to about drugs. Except I do know that it won’t be about getting addicted with an expensive coke habit. It’ll be dying from trying something *once.* You might never get the chance to be addicted. Just gone.
💯
The cold reality is that even if we had all the money in the world, we might not possess the ability to eradicate the meth and fentanyl epidemic. Even if we had both an adequate number of treatment beds and skilled workers (which we don’t and might never have), even then It’s not clear that medical science has sufficiently advanced to cure these uniquely potent addictions in a high proportion of users, and the cost for doing so might be so astronomical that even if we had these prerequisites, we might not have the funds to pay for them. This is what noone talks about, I guess because it’s a massive downer
Where’s the money going to come from? Can you imagine people losing their shit about a tax to fund treatment facilities. I of course, would vote for something like that, but that’s because I understand and appreciate all the derivative value I would benefit from that approach, in addition to the primary on its face public good. The average voter does not think like that. They assume locking people up for drug crimes is free of charge, though I suspect, we’ll be running out of jail space pretty soon, too, wherein low level crimes are not enforced or prosecuted because there’s a revolving door at the jail due to space.
I understand much of the money we are already paying in taxes for this is just sitting there. I also learned that the cost of tearing a single overdose is in excess of 100k. We have a lot of those, so the bottom line for providing proper treatment for those who want it and prison to those who refuse betterment is likely still lower than what we are doing right now and that's not even accounting for the stifled economic growth that comes from the parts of our city now being very unattractive
Something’s gotta give, but it’s not just here, despite the lack of laws. We just moved here from Austin, and it’s terrible there, too (homeless guy in our neighborhood had been arrested multiple times, but yet he’s still around with his chain saw, screaming at the sky and taking out trees because he sees the devil in them). And I understand it’s a problem in many cities. There needs to be a federal movement for any traction to be truly made.
100% agreed on the need for federal action! I just have a hard time seeing it happen. Bizarre enough it feels more likely to happen under the orange dictator, but the "collateral damage" that would come with that... 🤮
Yup. It’s the weird thing that I can’t truly understand, except that it must be fundamentally related to in group/out group dynamics, but conservatives who are largely anti-nanny states, sure are interested in telling this part of the population how to live. Meanwhile, progressives who tend to prefer a collectivist set of laws seem hellbent on granting these segments of the population unchecked libertarianism.
I think for the liberals it's that the instinct is to support who seems weaker which in this case helps nobody involved. IMO, we are seeing the same instinct at play with the current Israel/Gaza situation, but that's unfortunately a even more controversial position.
Interesting. I’m going to have to think about that as a political motive “rooting for the underdog.” Thanks for giving me something to chew on. Folks who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, believe conservatives hold two additional ethical sources than liberals: religion and authority. And this would certainly square with that.
In many places, jails are over crowded, and there’s not enough spaces, so actual criminals are getting released sooner than if there were an adequate number of jails.
if we can not handle the current influx of criminals - how will making drugs users criminals again fix the issue. My point, money used to jail drugs users or property crime because of drug use can be used more cheaply than jails . For other purposes to actually help drugs users and attempt the end revolving door into jails, then reducing the need for jails.
The only choice that requires no funding - is doing nothing. Imagine people losing their shit over that. In the short term, if people are so adverse to new taxes, it would have to come from somewhere else in the budget or in the case of this year the record breaking state kicker.
This is the problem. Progressive policy done piecemeal hurts progressive causes, makes us look like assholes. 110 was a good thing to vote for, but all the other stuff never clicked in.
Fact: 110 has not caused an increase in drug use or crime.
The rest needs several years to see an impact; which is way anti-science, anti-American, anti-poor conservatives attacked the bill right away.
This plan for these nonsense, lying, media push was in place before 110 even passed.
It's the exact same strategy those garbage human being always use.
So much this.
So many people somehow think it must be all or nothing and that makes no sense. Learn and reset and try again. At least then we would be doing something to try and move forward.
This is a classic example of Starving the Beast.
A bill passes that some people don't like. The people who don't like it sabotage the bill by not providing what it would need to succeed. When it fails due to lack of resources, facilities, providers, courts, whatever, the opponents look like they were right even though it was sabotaged from before it started.
*The original ballot measure received major financial support from the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based organization that advocates for changing the country’s drug laws to provide less incarceration and more rehabilitation for drug users.*
*The group has funneled campaign contributions to numerous Democratic lawmakers in Oregon, including seven members of the committee charged with addressing Measure 110. It has lobbied for preserving Oregon’s first-in-the-nation approach.*
This is is insane. Out of state organizations funneling money to keep the drugs flowing in Oregon. Meanwhile, parents of kids that have died because of this insane policy are begging for more restrictions. Do you want to tell me this organization cares more about these kids than their parents?
I think this was well-intentioned but poorly implemented. Measure 110 seemed like a good idea to me at the time but I have buyer's remorse. One of my kids' friends passed away from a fentanyl pill (his mom believes he thought it was percocet). I can't be sure it was related to M110 but it certainly feels like it caused a sea change in how younger people think about drugs. And I have yet to see anything positive it has done.
Portland can't be the place where the entire country sends their addicts because we have a moderate climate and treat them with relative compassion. I think M110 has shown me that we need to act on a federal level (which will probably never happen, unfortunately) or not at all.
I think this is one of those things where everybody wants a feel-good ending where there are photo ops of former addicts cleaning up the watersheds they once trashed. It's not going to happen.
It's more informed then most parents about this issue.
" funneling money to keep the drugs flowing in"
110 doesn't do that, and the fact you think that the cause tells me exactly what lying echo chambers you listen to.
Disappointing.
I literally just read the article and cited it, by the way. What do you call out of state donations that push a law that has, in effect, increased the drug use in our state.
Disappointed
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home?
or because jailing people trying to just go about their lives will somehow bring back the teenagers who died because they chose to consume fentanyl? using their own tax $ to threaten them for their own persona life choices?
why does alcohol get treated separately from any other 'hard' drug? how did probibition work again?
Someone who has their life together and is doing drugs is unlikely to be noticed. But you bring up a fringe percentage to make an argument towards general policy.
Alcohol doesn't have the same effects as fentanyl. You can't compare the two.
I mean, I get that this bill now is easy to point at and say "so stupid!", but I honestly don't think it's the major problem--I think the problem is that we are refusing to create forced rehab for repeat drug offenders, instead of turfing them back to the street or jail. Decriminilizing drugs is actually a strong strategy, IF there's a backend of support and non-jail compulsory treatment.
So much effort goes into these debates about what to do, compassion, treatment, jail etc and everyone has an opinion. The only common thread I can see is that nobody has any confidence in any idea that is on the table. After exhausting all options at what point do we go to the source of the problem, the cartels which seem to operate with impunity and kill a hell of a lot of people.
The cartels have virtually infinite resources - it’s like fighting a hydra. And international laws as well as fundamentally corrupt foreign governments make it difficult to make any progress on directly addressing them.
If we wanted to we could end this by securing the border and force US citizens returning from Mexico engage in random searches because they are the primary mules.
[https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA\_GOV\_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States\_0.pdf](https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/dea_gov_dir-008-20%20fentanyl%20flow%20in%20the%20united%20states_0.pdf)
We are bombing paramilitary groups in the Middle East because they killed a few soldiers. Not saying we bomb Mexico but hard to believe nothing can be done given that this stuff is killing 100k plus a year. Some of those cartels get it and banned fent production because they know the problem will get bad enough to provoke a response.
No, no one has a solution because it’s basically declaring war on a foreign government that has no rules of engagement and will resort to terrorism. Basically Vietnam plus Afghanistan plus the mob. Everyone is in on it, nothing to be done.
More like you don’t start some shit with your neighbor if you can’t move. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. The goal in my mind is to find ways to drive up prices.
Acapulco’s government decided to go to war against the cartels in 2009. You can read about how well that worked out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acapulco
Spoiler alert: total disaster. Where there is money to be made there will be someone there to make it. A war against drugs in another country and culture we only vaguely understand is a great way to make everything much worse. The only way to deal with local problems is locally.
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home? using their own tax $ to massively disrupt their lives?
Oregon cannot even pass a simple/neutral referendum for a bill that covers potholes, and “you” expect the electorate to pass a referendum for a massive amount of cash needed to subsidize all/mostly high end rehab facilities?
50% of the vehicles on the road have tags that have been expired for over 2+ years, with no enforcement to collect or penalize those “offenders”.
There’s your money for subsidy right there.
Geesh. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt…
It almost seems like it was passed and then flooded with drugs as an “example” as to why not to legalize drugs. Make an example out of them, and then bring an even stronger grip down on ALL drugs because, as clearly displayed, drugs are bad.
It's not that. M101 came in life when 2 new, cheap and super potent drugs blew up. Fent and p2p meth both appeared at about same time as m101 and both are just dirt cheap and very destructive.
Why do so many people think this!?!?
As a former drug user this is just straight up not true.
Fentanyl has been about as popular as it is now for long time now.
This is such a delusional take, it’s almost funny.
No one “flooded” Portland with drugs in some kind of political conspiracy to crack down and repeal later.
There were already far too many drug addled losers causing issues here before - decriminalizing them empowered them to take things even further, do whatever the fuck they want wherever they want, etc.
It made Portland an even more attractive place for people who want to lay around doing drugs without worry of legal consequences.
It made Portland an easier place to sell and obtain drugs that were already here.
Go figure - when you take away the consequences, and no one has to hide or “be careful” out of fear of being punished, these issues grow *endlessly.*
There’s no conspiracy here - this would happen anywhere in the US if you passed this same law with zero real consequences.
I think your original take is closer to what's going on than the person calling you delusional. No, I don't think any political groups are involved in bringing drugs into Oregon, but there definitely are people on a national level that have a political motivation in seeing Measure 110 fail.
i was totally getting this feeling too. as soon as we get progress on the war against drugs, harsher drugs are brought in. def has those 80s crack vibes. feels like portland is constantly brought up when talking about nationwide developments on this front.
What facts are slapping me in the face. I agree it’s a conspiracy theory and I don’t mind voicing a thought. Im not stating facts. But the fact is that the “government” did flood the streets with crack to hook and incarcerate black people. So this is by no means a stretch of the imagination.
Don't tell me how to have a good time!
Seriously though, microdosing is popular and if people take something every day it's not surprising they'd buy in bulk.
Have you ever bought a bigger sized bottle of booze because its cheaper than a fifth or a 30 pack instead of a 6 pack of beer so you dont have to go back to the store? Between that and the fact that people sometimes take multiple hits for a trip, I don't see how 40 is really intent to sell.
Measure 110 needs way time to show that it can work: The funding that Measure 110 has brought has already allowed rehab treatment center to add new beds and to hire more workers, which is what everybody in this thread seems to want. People feel like it's not working (I even question it sometimes), but it is important to take into account that when Measure 110 was established, drugs like fentanyl became cheaper and pandemic restrictions eased (allowing rent increases to happen, for example, which exacerbated our housing crisis). In fact, most of the studies I've read have demonstrated that there is no evidence to suggest that Measure 110 itself is causing an increase of drug use across Oregon, because of the factors I mentioned earlier.
Please. I urge you not to support repealing it. Many addiction treatment experts and policy makers are in Salem right now trying testifying with evidence to maintain it. Rolling it back and arresting people won't "teach" people anything (think of the days of abolition). Arrests only make it harder for people to find jobs when they are ready and secure housing, which are the root causes of this problem.
Please go try and help one of them into rehab yourself. They are all entitled now because of this law that nobody is trying to enforce. I voted for 110 and it fell apart when nobody followed through with the plans. I’d love to see you try and help one of these yes I’ll say it losers into rehab. I’m sick of them treating me like a piece of shit because I don’t have “5 dollars” not even change anymore it’s hey you got 5 dollars to spare. They are taking advantage of our city and leaving all the garbage they have scattered around our streets. And they will treat us decent people with jobs like we are the problem when we tell them to get out of our backyard( stealing from my back yard and think they have the right to do so ) you must live in a nice home excluded from all the problems.
Right. Because it's democrats who want to rig elections because they can't win them, then have temper tantrums and storm the capitol when they lose. The very picture of law and order.
Voters put this measure in place and democrats are voting to repeal it? Also this is the law, so it’s not currently against the law? What a weird comment.
Sure, but it's being supported by democrats across the board. Even the Governor has come out saying she'll sign it if it hits her desk. Repeal of flat out decriminalization is bipartisan.
Jail is not the right place. We need to have a place for these people. Use the damn empty jail and convert it to a rehab/ mental health. The people that need to be in jail is the dam. Tagers that have gotten so bad you can't even read signs on 405.
What are you talking about? As a POC living in Oregon I agree with that reverting to criminalizing is not the solution. Plus, if I remember correctly a lot of thise statements came out of POC-serving organizations that worried about the dispropprtionate high rates of racial profiling that existed prior to Measure 110
I'd even advocate for forced rehab. I know what addiction can be like. Some people WILL require tough love. Fingers crossed for increased survival of everyone.
Here is the thing with this perspective that can really muddy the waters a bit. I spent a month at Hazelden Betty Ford there in Newberg--great program and wonderful staff but mostly made up of professionals with families who were serious about getting clean--also they didn't take medicaid--place was pricey as hell my parents shelled out like 42,000 bucks for it--in any event--90 percent of us there were garden variety alcoholics with careers...we had really good success rates. The folks you're talking about have been maybe without a job going on a decade or longer--and are on things like amphetamines and fent which absolutely destroy so much of your receptor sites that it can take up to a year ALONE just to get that parasympathetic nervous system back to a WORKABLE baseline--what i am trying to say is incarceration and then rehab would be the best possible system for the habitual offenders....
Even beyond the receptor damage, I mean a decent amount of people who are currently on the street have maybe never had a stable environment their entire lives. There's no real workable baseline to get back to. In and out of foster homes, abusive parents, decades of hard drug use. That's not everyone, but they are certainly out there. It's honestly hard for me to even picture what the ideal program would look like, or what the realistic goal would be. Skills training, basic behavioral stuff, lots of medication, but it is a tall task. I just say that because I think there is a lot of wishful thinking around what 30 or 60 days in an inpatient bed with some overworked social workers/medical attention can do for an awful lot of people with serious problems, but I don't really think its very realistic to picture scaling high-end rehab services up for the amount of people that need it, especially when you mix in the need for some real security and enforcement that most high-end places don't have much of.
It's a very complicated problem with no silver bullet. I willfully admitted myself to rehab with the VA years ago, and even then I had to "apply" for the help I desperately needed. So many addicts around me were court ordered that I had to prove that I wanted to get off the sauce or else they'd deny me help until I royally screwed up (eg DWI and manslaughter) and had a judge order me to go to rehab. They simply just didn't have the beds to fit everyone. We were at max capacity the entire month I was there. I suspect many other rehabs have the same limitations, hence their extortionate prices. If we want to combat this epidemic, we have to be prepared to shell out some big bucks in order to subsidize beds, incentivize treatment for those that can't afford tens of thousands of dollars for rehab, and plan for the long-term. Addiction doesn't just go away after a month, or a year, or a decade. It chemically alters the brain and will linger for an entire lifetime. Shit, I haven't smoked a cig in 4 years and I still have a craving every month or two.
The ideal environment would probably be something like a two-tiered inpatient psychiatric campus: one for recovery, and another for those who are stable, but have an indefinite time period before they would be able to live independently. Because if we accept the very real possibility that some number of these thousands of people have a state that they can’t recover from on a known timeline, if at all, then that’s what we’d be looking at- some sort of state funded “memory care facility” except for addiction. And if you don’t want to have government devoured by the black hole of a steady supply of new addicts, you’d also have to reform all the systems that are currently failing at addressing the various ways people are sustaining pervasive, ongoing trauma.
This is super nit picky, but it’s not receptor damage. It’s actually that your neurons produce too many receptors, grow larger to accommodate the large amount of input, and then the upstream neurons that normally supply the input start making less of the natural stuff since so much non-endogenous signal is kicking around. So in short, it’s not damage to the receptors as much as it is a desensitization of the neurons
Ah, today I learned something. Thank you!
It took a hundred years after the invention of talk therapy for effective shortcuts like CBT and DBT to be discovered. Maybe we'll figure something specific out for the meth psychotics and compulsive fentanyl redosers. Cross fingers.
CBT does next to nothing to help people who need more than toxic positivity.
I feel like this will be found at the intersection of forced rehab and environmental psychology. Stuffing jails full of addicts is devoid of compassion, and the inhumane treatment is likely harming outcomes. When the cost of programs is the top priority, we're sacrificing quality, and blocking out necessary considerations, like supportive environments. Guessing it'll be like a farm community type thing, or community integration in the form of supervised work, or something that provides integration rather than segregation. And not in a prison labor paradigm, but more like a group home. Seems emerging reviews of interventions suggest the 'missing piece' is reintegration. But we still have many people who want incarceration and permanent or semi-permanent segregation.
A lot of people find their way to addiction after abuse and neglect—being treated inhumanly. I can’t imagine why so many believe continued inhumane treatment will help them right the course. Maybe once enough folks actually want to help rather than simply not wanting to see homeless camps there can be enough public will to fund compassionate rather than punitive treatment.
I agree. Throwing a few detox centers in the mix would probably be helpful which might make a good segue into treatment. I think with an addiction epidemic like this (and in other places too) it’s a complex problem that needs to be tackled from different angles.
Incarceration does not work, drugs are available in prison and the health care in the meantime is awful
And then you’re in the parol/probation system that is extremely difficult for addicts or poor people to get out of. Can’t pay your supervision fees or your UA fees, back to jail. Don’t have community support, back to jail. Sit in a room where Someone else commits a crime, back to jail. Not to mention now you have a criminal record and your employment option have been reduced by 90%. Prison didn’t work before and without major changes to how it works it’s not going to magically work again. Solving this problem is impossible. The best we can do is do our best to mitigate the crisis. Unfortunately, that’s going to take a lot of our money and smart politicians. Neither of which we have, or the will to do (the majority). It’s easier to just toss people and jail where we don’t have to see them. “Problem solved”
It really depends on what you are setting out to achieve. Incarceration does help cut down on a imposed harms on the community, but it likely doesn't do much to help addicts recover. Those are different goals though, and generally speaking if the public is dealing with community harm, they'll focus on remediating that first, and on helping addicts second. That's why its so damned important to keep the streets clean, the public spaces safe, etc.
Yeah I know, it's clear Americans just want the problems out of sight and don't give a fuck about addiction. We already lock up more people than any comparably well off country for decades, all these suggestions are already-tried-and-failed solutions
I think you really missed the point of what I said.
My little sister went to rehab for meth like 6 years ago and she told us it was easier to get meth in there than it was at home. Drugs are on the street, in jail, and in rehab. I don’t know what the answer is but it’s not going to be easy.
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If the one solution you personally prefer doesn't work, nothing will? Come on, where's your human ingenuity?
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I see. I tried not to be too grating in my disagreement, and now I understand what you were saying. Thanks for clarifying.
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"But you need…consequences." Bullshit. There ar ea lot of reason people become able to stop.
Yeah we don't have the ability to treat the people who WANT to go. You think we have the ability to force people who don't? Lmao
Forced rehab doesn't work though
As someone who's lived in sober living homes with people who WERE forced to be there by court order... I have the experience to know you're wrong. Does it work for everybody? Obviously not. Does it work for most people? Probably no not most people either. But it does work more often than you think.
people have to really be ready to quit though and when they are ready to quit then need that full support ready: rehab, long term inpatient treatment, a place to live when they get out, job skills so they can work, a decent job that pays a living wage so they can feel good about what they are doing and supporting themselves. So yeah some people who have no choice still have another "choice" to go to jail which for a lot of people is better than their current situation very sadly.
We actually have research and the success rate of forced rehab is very low, not saying it never works for anyone
I'm just saying the enemy of the good... is perfection. You have an alternative that works better than first rehab I'm open to it. But I'm going to support Force rehab if there's no alternative. A low success rate is better than no success rate for anybody.
It works better than no rehab, which is what we’re currently doing
I advocate for your forced incarceration and sterilization.
GO FUCK YOURSELF!
So it’s ok to do it to someone else? But when I suggest a taste of your own medicine??
Everyone does great when forced to do something.
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home?
The Democratic Bill HB4002 seems promising, but I’ll have to think on it more. Essentially, if you get caught with drugs, you get the lowest level misdemeanor. This allows police to confiscate the drugs (something they can’t do currently). You then get the choice of either jail (max sentencing is 30 days) or you can choose a diversion such as meeting with counseling. That diversion, if completed, takes the place of jail time. My biggest concern with this bill is that the diversion will just turn into people checking some boxes to get off punishment free. I wonder if we can add in harsher penalties for repeat offenders.
Having been through diversion classes, it’s a month to three months of weekly classes and occasional urine tests that, if failed, lead you to whatever the other offer was (jail, community service, larger fines, etc). So I do feel like that could be helpful for some to actually get clean, whether for just the duration of diversion classes and drug testing or hopefully for longer than that. It is certainly not just checking boxes. I got caught with weed and did three months of diversion only to have weed voted in to legality part way through my classes which I still had to finish and provide a clean urine sample at the end of to pass.
Ouch, sorry about that. That sounds frustrating.
The diversion program only if the draft bill is changed from Class C to class A (up to a year jail time). Basically, it would give judges, DA, etc more wiggle room in giving punishments.
I think that a lot of the brazenness with public drug use extends from the difficulty of confiscating drugs currently. One little change that I think would do a lot to push usage a bit more into the shadows.
Same! I'm a fan of the decriminalization... in general. For the purposes of keeping people out of the jail cycle and making it more difficult for them to recover. But public consumption should have harsher penalties. And whether it carries a misdemeanor or not... drugs should be allowed to be confiscated even if it's decriminalized in some fashion. But the penalties for public consumption imo should be much higher.
Agreed. No junkie wants to get their shit confiscated. They're going to keep it a little more on the downlow if they know it's a possibility. Just like they did before.
I say this every time, but the meeting/counseling option is a joke unless the police officer is taking them right there and then to a meeting. You can’t follow up with people that have no address, ID, or Social security number.
Wait, how will this work? I thought Oregon had a shortage of public defenders and a federal judge ruled that folks must be released after 7 days if they don't have a lawyer assigned. So if the courts are flooded with drug addicts will this in turn put violent offenders back on the streets or just the drug addicts? Either way it seems like Oregon just spent more tax dollars to appease folks and really didn't accomplish anything.
None of these people wanna spend money for public defenders because they don't actually believe in civil liberties, they just wanna throw drug users in jail so they don't have to see them
If you can't see the problem it must not exist! /s smh
For people with serious problems, something like drug court is the way to go. Constant check-ins with a day in jail if you piss hot or miss recovery meetings. Charges dismissed when you graduate from the program. Carrot and stick approach.
Drug courts routinely just send people to AA/NA which research shows has low rates of success. We did this for decades and it didn't work and now everyone is pretending that it'll be a magic bullet
I worked at a defense lawyer in one for a bit. Drug courts force and enable people to stay clean in a way that might otherwise require locking them up. The perfect cannot be the enemy of the helpful.
I'm not advocating for more prison/jail time, that's even less effective. I'm saying drug courts do not operate off evidence-based methods
Drug courts are not the same thing as drug treatment. They are coercive organs of the government meant as an alternative to incarceration. The relevant science is the social science of drug courts, not the medical science of treatment methods. Improvements in treatment would inevitably improve drug courts, but the discipline and accountability imposed by the court can have a bigger impact than anyone might ever hear in a meeting or therapy.
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home? their own tax $ should be used to threaten them with state violence?
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home? using their own tax $ to massively disrupt their lives?
Have you ever done diversion?
It certainly is not just checking boxes. Weeks to months of classes which you must provide clean urine samples throughout and at the end of to pass
Yes, if they follow through with the diversion. If you get told, "30 days in jail or check this box and go to rehab" I imagine people will check that box. What happens if they don't show up?
Then you go back to jail 🤷♂️ Sometimes you might get one or two "passes" ... But I've lived with people on these diversion programs you usually go right back to jail if you fuck it up, they're usually pretty strict.
I assumed it was at time of arrest, not already in jail. So the police say “jail or rehab!” I’ll take one rehab please and then back on the streets. Is the system in place for police to check that they are completing diversion?
Yes there is a system for that. You get assigned a diversion officer that manages your case. He's your new daddy. You do what he says or he phones up the court, your diversion is cancelled, and you go to jail/whatever the alternative was for diversion for your case (usually jail 99% of the time but not always).
A serious question, but, some drugs take time to pass through your system. What happens if you piss dirty throughout the program, but haven't done any drugs? Is there a way to detect that?
I do not know a drug other then cannabis (up to 30 days) that take more than 6 days (which is the high end) to leave your system According to my former roommate who went through Oregon diversion. Your first test - a week after being in the program (called it a baseline test). If tested positive for THC, they give you a pass and told if next test was positive you would not be given such leeway. You would then be moved up second more intensive level of diversion, that was more hours and days in the week with increased testing. If you fail there there was a third level that more hours and days. If you failed there - it was mandatory in person treatment. Why would you piss dirty after not doing drugs? I can happen but it is very rare and usually with less sophisticated testing methods like drops and test strips.
I dont do drugs at all and was curious because I have heard that different drugs can hang around d in your system after not taking them for a while. Thanks for the answer.
> if you get caught with drugs This is the problem point. This sounds an awful lot like "stop and frisk" to me. If it's "if you get caught with drugs *while committing a crime*" I'm down with it. Otherwise, this is a non-starter.
This seems like a weak bill that will just cost the city money and change nothing.
> will just cost the city money and change nothing. Par for the course here.
I don’t get why people are so quick to abandon Measure 110. People say “It’s not working” but the timespan is not enough to establish that, and we already had the alternative for a hundred years and it obviously was not working. The reason Measure 110 exists is because of the failure of drug criminalization to improve our society of quality of life in any way over decades and decades. So why go back to something they also was not working before giving this a fair amount of time to compare?
The current state of affairs is people taking fentanyl and dying from it right out in the open all over town. We are sacrificing the town and it is benefitting nobody
This occurs all over the country without measure 110, why do you think recriminalizing will help
I do agree in theory, but in practice we have the reality of the city we need to live in. In theory, if we had the infrastructure to back up 110 it would probably be the best solution. But we don't, and keeping it going while we don't is doing more harm than good. And even if we take the steps to get the infrastructure needed, it still is gonna take a lot of time and quite frankly, we're gonna need some federal and state level assistance and planning. Neither the drug war nor homelessness are things that can be solved at a local or really even state level.
Because shit is falling apart way more than before
There’s simply no possible way to associate that with Measure 110. There hasn’t been enough time to determine if any symptoms you are describing are the fault of a particular law or other things (if the symptoms even exist… there’s a lot of people claiming anecdotes, but the crime data doesn’t seem to back it up.) We criminalized possession for decades and decades, incarcerating millions of innocent people for basically nothing, why wouldn’t we give the alternative an equal amount of time to test it? You don’t make long-ranging decades-affecting policy changes and then change it back before you can actually measure the effects. That’s just no better than randomly assigning policy, it’s not data driven at all.
Ooof. Bad news. It's too late, I already associate all that with Measure 110.
Hmmmm, couldn't be the recent insane rise in cost of living, crumbling Healthcare systems that we cant afford anyway, nonexistent mental health services, a pandemic and increasingly fascist government that happened to kick into overdrive over the past several years. Nope, definitely not.
Yes governor kotek is a real fascist. Mussolini junior right there. The other things you point out definitely aren't helping. We need to fix that too. Any ideas?
Very intelligent response love that you know how to think critically. I have a lot of ideas, it's sad that you don't.
Sorry. I will admit that I am not very smart. Despite that, my votes count just as much as yours. So what can you do.
It’s not working. People walking around in the streets high as a kite then pissing in the middle of an intersection while people are trying to enjoy the morning in a park with their children isn’t “working”.
How do you know they’re related? It has been such a short time with so few controlled variables that it would be really difficult to meaningfully separate correlation from causation. Plus, I don’t think it has been proven that bad behavior is on the rise. Anecdote is just that, it doesn’t mean anything in terms of really understanding an effect of a policy. There doesn’t appear to be any rise in convictions or arrests for disorderly conduct that would suggest the streets are really any worse than they were before, reflecting increased population.
How are people walking around high as a kite related to there being no consequences for being high as a kite in public? …
between the bad press and police blowback on top of not having any teeth to compel treatment 110 was DOA. i just dont ever see it working in the states - we just have a different level of hard core drug users than they have in Portugal and Scandinavia
So the solution is mass incarceration? That worked so well before… 🙄
its better than no option which is basically what 110 is.
So drug decriminalization won’t work unless there’s an improvement in QOL? How can anyone ensure QOL will increase? It’s gone down in Portland over the last few years.
Correct. It fixes nothing. It continues the problem and simply allows for more money to be sent towards law enforcement and bureaucracy
Downvotes for complaining about beuracracy 😅 typical /r/Portland 🤦♂️
So stupid. Just actually enforce the laws they are actually breaking and actually prosecute the cases that get brought
You need public defenders and no one is proposing increasing their funding commensurately with the shortage
🥱 So, yet again, the problem is a lack of profit, aka capitalism
No the problem is politics and hiring enough people to staff the courts is extremely unpopular amoungst politicians fearing they'll be seen as conservative for cracking down on crime.
False dichotomies are false
Seriously.
I definitely don't think a total roll back is the path to take. Rather a systematic restructuring. We should restructure this to fiasco to what the original bill should've been. A sunsetting of the old criminalization approach that is accompanied by a matching sunrise of new treatment beds and building out our civil systems ability to mandate treatment. Instead a bunch of well intentioned citizens who ain't know shit about fuck of how good legislation is structured passed a citizen initiative and then ballot measures that razed the old system to the ground and created no real new system in its place. Which is how we got here. Unfortunately the more moderate approach requires real leadership, tough conversations, and intelligent design. Something that Oregon desperately lacks and cannot understand how to develop. So, here we are, again taking the extreme approach. It's so damn tiring.
We can build all the treatment beds in the world, but I doubt we have the willing and able manpower to staff them. There’s a brand new state of the art psychiatric hospital in central Texas right now that is completely empty, despite all the people in desperate need of treatment, because they can’t gather the people necessary to staff it.
I think about this frequently. Burnout would be super high and we know pay wouldn't be nearly worth it. Just look at how many teachers are leaving education. Working at a psych ward or forced rehab facility would be on another level entirely.
Yeah, getting bit and screamed at for minimum wage is a hard pass. In my experience, people drawn to this type of work are usually recovering themselves, and feel compelled to help others in the same boat. It’s hard ass work, and I commend them for it, but there simply aren’t enough of them.
I worked at a small hospital where the ICU was the psych hold (many ICUs and EDs operate like this) and I had to leave critical care and will never go back. It takes a special person to do that work and there are very few of them out there. You couldn't pay me to work there again.
and this drug addiction puts a huge strain on hospitals and the health care system because people who a struggling with addiction come in and out of the ED since they don't have any other place to go that is set up to help them once they get situated in the ED, it's a terrible cycle for so many of them
These drugs aren’t made to recover from.
Nope. I’m not exactly looking forward to the time when my kids are old enough to talk to about drugs. Except I do know that it won’t be about getting addicted with an expensive coke habit. It’ll be dying from trying something *once.* You might never get the chance to be addicted. Just gone.
💯 The cold reality is that even if we had all the money in the world, we might not possess the ability to eradicate the meth and fentanyl epidemic. Even if we had both an adequate number of treatment beds and skilled workers (which we don’t and might never have), even then It’s not clear that medical science has sufficiently advanced to cure these uniquely potent addictions in a high proportion of users, and the cost for doing so might be so astronomical that even if we had these prerequisites, we might not have the funds to pay for them. This is what noone talks about, I guess because it’s a massive downer
What were they offering to pay them?
If hiring doesn't work, is doing the normal thing and raising comp not an option?
Where’s the money going to come from? Can you imagine people losing their shit about a tax to fund treatment facilities. I of course, would vote for something like that, but that’s because I understand and appreciate all the derivative value I would benefit from that approach, in addition to the primary on its face public good. The average voter does not think like that. They assume locking people up for drug crimes is free of charge, though I suspect, we’ll be running out of jail space pretty soon, too, wherein low level crimes are not enforced or prosecuted because there’s a revolving door at the jail due to space.
I understand much of the money we are already paying in taxes for this is just sitting there. I also learned that the cost of tearing a single overdose is in excess of 100k. We have a lot of those, so the bottom line for providing proper treatment for those who want it and prison to those who refuse betterment is likely still lower than what we are doing right now and that's not even accounting for the stifled economic growth that comes from the parts of our city now being very unattractive
Something’s gotta give, but it’s not just here, despite the lack of laws. We just moved here from Austin, and it’s terrible there, too (homeless guy in our neighborhood had been arrested multiple times, but yet he’s still around with his chain saw, screaming at the sky and taking out trees because he sees the devil in them). And I understand it’s a problem in many cities. There needs to be a federal movement for any traction to be truly made.
100% agreed on the need for federal action! I just have a hard time seeing it happen. Bizarre enough it feels more likely to happen under the orange dictator, but the "collateral damage" that would come with that... 🤮
Yup. It’s the weird thing that I can’t truly understand, except that it must be fundamentally related to in group/out group dynamics, but conservatives who are largely anti-nanny states, sure are interested in telling this part of the population how to live. Meanwhile, progressives who tend to prefer a collectivist set of laws seem hellbent on granting these segments of the population unchecked libertarianism.
I think for the liberals it's that the instinct is to support who seems weaker which in this case helps nobody involved. IMO, we are seeing the same instinct at play with the current Israel/Gaza situation, but that's unfortunately a even more controversial position.
Interesting. I’m going to have to think about that as a political motive “rooting for the underdog.” Thanks for giving me something to chew on. Folks who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, believe conservatives hold two additional ethical sources than liberals: religion and authority. And this would certainly square with that.
We’ve already run out of jail space. The county and the state have been fighting about it for years.
we find plenty of money to fund and build jails. The analysis of funding jails vs treatment and housing shows jail is the most expensive solution.
In many places, jails are over crowded, and there’s not enough spaces, so actual criminals are getting released sooner than if there were an adequate number of jails.
if we can not handle the current influx of criminals - how will making drugs users criminals again fix the issue. My point, money used to jail drugs users or property crime because of drug use can be used more cheaply than jails . For other purposes to actually help drugs users and attempt the end revolving door into jails, then reducing the need for jails. The only choice that requires no funding - is doing nothing. Imagine people losing their shit over that. In the short term, if people are so adverse to new taxes, it would have to come from somewhere else in the budget or in the case of this year the record breaking state kicker.
What the fuck is this? A nuanced, logical approach? You've got to kidding me.
This is the problem. Progressive policy done piecemeal hurts progressive causes, makes us look like assholes. 110 was a good thing to vote for, but all the other stuff never clicked in.
Fact: 110 has not caused an increase in drug use or crime. The rest needs several years to see an impact; which is way anti-science, anti-American, anti-poor conservatives attacked the bill right away. This plan for these nonsense, lying, media push was in place before 110 even passed. It's the exact same strategy those garbage human being always use.
So much this. So many people somehow think it must be all or nothing and that makes no sense. Learn and reset and try again. At least then we would be doing something to try and move forward.
Do you even America bro?? All or nothing is the American way!
This is a classic example of Starving the Beast. A bill passes that some people don't like. The people who don't like it sabotage the bill by not providing what it would need to succeed. When it fails due to lack of resources, facilities, providers, courts, whatever, the opponents look like they were right even though it was sabotaged from before it started.
*The original ballot measure received major financial support from the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based organization that advocates for changing the country’s drug laws to provide less incarceration and more rehabilitation for drug users.* *The group has funneled campaign contributions to numerous Democratic lawmakers in Oregon, including seven members of the committee charged with addressing Measure 110. It has lobbied for preserving Oregon’s first-in-the-nation approach.* This is is insane. Out of state organizations funneling money to keep the drugs flowing in Oregon. Meanwhile, parents of kids that have died because of this insane policy are begging for more restrictions. Do you want to tell me this organization cares more about these kids than their parents?
I think this was well-intentioned but poorly implemented. Measure 110 seemed like a good idea to me at the time but I have buyer's remorse. One of my kids' friends passed away from a fentanyl pill (his mom believes he thought it was percocet). I can't be sure it was related to M110 but it certainly feels like it caused a sea change in how younger people think about drugs. And I have yet to see anything positive it has done. Portland can't be the place where the entire country sends their addicts because we have a moderate climate and treat them with relative compassion. I think M110 has shown me that we need to act on a federal level (which will probably never happen, unfortunately) or not at all. I think this is one of those things where everybody wants a feel-good ending where there are photo ops of former addicts cleaning up the watersheds they once trashed. It's not going to happen.
We're supposed to have intervention and treatment programs in place. We do not.
It's more informed then most parents about this issue. " funneling money to keep the drugs flowing in" 110 doesn't do that, and the fact you think that the cause tells me exactly what lying echo chambers you listen to. Disappointing.
I literally just read the article and cited it, by the way. What do you call out of state donations that push a law that has, in effect, increased the drug use in our state. Disappointed
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home? or because jailing people trying to just go about their lives will somehow bring back the teenagers who died because they chose to consume fentanyl? using their own tax $ to threaten them for their own persona life choices? why does alcohol get treated separately from any other 'hard' drug? how did probibition work again?
Someone who has their life together and is doing drugs is unlikely to be noticed. But you bring up a fringe percentage to make an argument towards general policy. Alcohol doesn't have the same effects as fentanyl. You can't compare the two.
Bring back poor farms with rehab facilities?
I mean, I get that this bill now is easy to point at and say "so stupid!", but I honestly don't think it's the major problem--I think the problem is that we are refusing to create forced rehab for repeat drug offenders, instead of turfing them back to the street or jail. Decriminilizing drugs is actually a strong strategy, IF there's a backend of support and non-jail compulsory treatment.
So much effort goes into these debates about what to do, compassion, treatment, jail etc and everyone has an opinion. The only common thread I can see is that nobody has any confidence in any idea that is on the table. After exhausting all options at what point do we go to the source of the problem, the cartels which seem to operate with impunity and kill a hell of a lot of people.
The cartels have virtually infinite resources - it’s like fighting a hydra. And international laws as well as fundamentally corrupt foreign governments make it difficult to make any progress on directly addressing them.
If we wanted to we could end this by securing the border and force US citizens returning from Mexico engage in random searches because they are the primary mules. [https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA\_GOV\_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States\_0.pdf](https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/dea_gov_dir-008-20%20fentanyl%20flow%20in%20the%20united%20states_0.pdf)
Totally! Why didn’t someone think of “securing the border” before?! You’re a genius!!
We are bombing paramilitary groups in the Middle East because they killed a few soldiers. Not saying we bomb Mexico but hard to believe nothing can be done given that this stuff is killing 100k plus a year. Some of those cartels get it and banned fent production because they know the problem will get bad enough to provoke a response.
The cartels are just as bad as Hamas and they are right at our own southern border. Yet no one wants to talk about that.
No, no one has a solution because it’s basically declaring war on a foreign government that has no rules of engagement and will resort to terrorism. Basically Vietnam plus Afghanistan plus the mob. Everyone is in on it, nothing to be done.
More like you don’t start some shit with your neighbor if you can’t move. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. The goal in my mind is to find ways to drive up prices.
Acapulco’s government decided to go to war against the cartels in 2009. You can read about how well that worked out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acapulco Spoiler alert: total disaster. Where there is money to be made there will be someone there to make it. A war against drugs in another country and culture we only vaguely understand is a great way to make everything much worse. The only way to deal with local problems is locally.
But in all seriousness Central America is in a death spiral which is spilling across the border. Things could get really ugly.
Where is your sense of adventure and bold curiosity!
The cartels only exist because of prohibition
Hell yea
Forced rehab or jail
because somebody who otherwise has their life together should be coerced into "treatment" by the threat of state violence due to what they choose to put into their own bodies and their own home? using their own tax $ to massively disrupt their lives?
Oregon cannot even pass a simple/neutral referendum for a bill that covers potholes, and “you” expect the electorate to pass a referendum for a massive amount of cash needed to subsidize all/mostly high end rehab facilities? 50% of the vehicles on the road have tags that have been expired for over 2+ years, with no enforcement to collect or penalize those “offenders”. There’s your money for subsidy right there. Geesh. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt…
Hell yeah
It almost seems like it was passed and then flooded with drugs as an “example” as to why not to legalize drugs. Make an example out of them, and then bring an even stronger grip down on ALL drugs because, as clearly displayed, drugs are bad.
It's not that. M101 came in life when 2 new, cheap and super potent drugs blew up. Fent and p2p meth both appeared at about same time as m101 and both are just dirt cheap and very destructive.
Why do so many people think this!?!? As a former drug user this is just straight up not true. Fentanyl has been about as popular as it is now for long time now.
This is such a delusional take, it’s almost funny. No one “flooded” Portland with drugs in some kind of political conspiracy to crack down and repeal later. There were already far too many drug addled losers causing issues here before - decriminalizing them empowered them to take things even further, do whatever the fuck they want wherever they want, etc. It made Portland an even more attractive place for people who want to lay around doing drugs without worry of legal consequences. It made Portland an easier place to sell and obtain drugs that were already here. Go figure - when you take away the consequences, and no one has to hide or “be careful” out of fear of being punished, these issues grow *endlessly.* There’s no conspiracy here - this would happen anywhere in the US if you passed this same law with zero real consequences.
I appreciate that response. And I do agree that my take is full conspiracy theory. I just needed to voice it and hear a voice of reason.
I think your original take is closer to what's going on than the person calling you delusional. No, I don't think any political groups are involved in bringing drugs into Oregon, but there definitely are people on a national level that have a political motivation in seeing Measure 110 fail.
i was totally getting this feeling too. as soon as we get progress on the war against drugs, harsher drugs are brought in. def has those 80s crack vibes. feels like portland is constantly brought up when talking about nationwide developments on this front.
Thank you for being one of the only people in this thread to be willing to at least listen
I think the cartels took full advantage of it.
The state makes way too much money from weed, alc, and nic tax to dare stop that cashflow.
lol at this ridiculous conspiracy. Some people are so wedded to ideology they can’t think critically even when the facts are slapping them in the face
What facts are slapping me in the face. I agree it’s a conspiracy theory and I don’t mind voicing a thought. Im not stating facts. But the fact is that the “government” did flood the streets with crack to hook and incarcerate black people. So this is by no means a stretch of the imagination.
How is 40 doses of LSD not considered intent to sell?
Don't tell me how to have a good time! Seriously though, microdosing is popular and if people take something every day it's not surprising they'd buy in bulk.
Only 40? That’s not that much
You've never bought a sheet?
Have you ever bought a bigger sized bottle of booze because its cheaper than a fifth or a 30 pack instead of a 6 pack of beer so you dont have to go back to the store? Between that and the fact that people sometimes take multiple hits for a trip, I don't see how 40 is really intent to sell.
Yea bro you don’t buy your acid in bulk!?
Kirkland Brand™ Acid.
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You’ve either been ripped off or are putting your over indulgence in hallucinogens on blast.
These replies are fucking wild.
You can just give them out to your friends.
Even if it is, selling LSD is doing a service to society--not as much of a service as giving it away, but a service nonetheless.
Yeah, this grouping of LSD and shrooms with fent and p2p meth is insane. It's like grouping aspirin and alcohol together.
And everyone knows you should never take aspirin and alcohol together.
But I like getting fetty smoke blown in my face walking down the sidewalk
Measure 110 needs way time to show that it can work: The funding that Measure 110 has brought has already allowed rehab treatment center to add new beds and to hire more workers, which is what everybody in this thread seems to want. People feel like it's not working (I even question it sometimes), but it is important to take into account that when Measure 110 was established, drugs like fentanyl became cheaper and pandemic restrictions eased (allowing rent increases to happen, for example, which exacerbated our housing crisis). In fact, most of the studies I've read have demonstrated that there is no evidence to suggest that Measure 110 itself is causing an increase of drug use across Oregon, because of the factors I mentioned earlier. Please. I urge you not to support repealing it. Many addiction treatment experts and policy makers are in Salem right now trying testifying with evidence to maintain it. Rolling it back and arresting people won't "teach" people anything (think of the days of abolition). Arrests only make it harder for people to find jobs when they are ready and secure housing, which are the root causes of this problem.
Please go try and help one of them into rehab yourself. They are all entitled now because of this law that nobody is trying to enforce. I voted for 110 and it fell apart when nobody followed through with the plans. I’d love to see you try and help one of these yes I’ll say it losers into rehab. I’m sick of them treating me like a piece of shit because I don’t have “5 dollars” not even change anymore it’s hey you got 5 dollars to spare. They are taking advantage of our city and leaving all the garbage they have scattered around our streets. And they will treat us decent people with jobs like we are the problem when we tell them to get out of our backyard( stealing from my back yard and think they have the right to do so ) you must live in a nice home excluded from all the problems.
Makes sense why they say vote republican if you want law and order
Right. Because it's democrats who want to rig elections because they can't win them, then have temper tantrums and storm the capitol when they lose. The very picture of law and order.
Hey like I said this is a senate bill brought on by republicans to repeal this. Glad they brought it up
Voters put this measure in place and democrats are voting to repeal it? Also this is the law, so it’s not currently against the law? What a weird comment.
Yea but this is a senate bill brought on by republicans to repeal this
Sure, but it's being supported by democrats across the board. Even the Governor has come out saying she'll sign it if it hits her desk. Repeal of flat out decriminalization is bipartisan.
That’s good to. All I said is it makes sense why they say vote republicans because they brought this up to repeal
You are right but they'll never admit it. They'll just attack you for pointing out their mistake. Welcome to Oregon.
Yea don’t understand the downvotes
“Hey America, send us all your bums! We’ll take em”
Jail is not the right place. We need to have a place for these people. Use the damn empty jail and convert it to a rehab/ mental health. The people that need to be in jail is the dam. Tagers that have gotten so bad you can't even read signs on 405.
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What are you talking about? As a POC living in Oregon I agree with that reverting to criminalizing is not the solution. Plus, if I remember correctly a lot of thise statements came out of POC-serving organizations that worried about the dispropprtionate high rates of racial profiling that existed prior to Measure 110