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Social Portland recriminalizes drugs after failed 2020 experiment.

I agree with @My Spot some countries go way too far on punishing mules.

Forget who breaks what rule, if you're ever found to have made 6 or 7 figures or more from an illicit trade, the punishments should be extremely severe. Influence > involvement.

If you've made a couple of hundred quid/bucks, you're clearly not the actual problem.

You can extend that rule beyond drugs, too.
 
Problem was having decriminalization and wasting resources trying to make it safe for the dregs. Had you just a designated area where they were confined to, and let the ever increasing potency of the drugs eventually kill them off; would have saved money and rid the city of a lot of dregs.

Hamsterdam would have worked better without that stupid church rev convincing Bunny the dregs needed social services to ensure their health.
 
Too many societies aren't tackling things that overly drive people to substance abuse -- poor family structures, poor institutions, low virtue. If mental health issues are going way up (in b4 "we just detect it better"), why wouldn't substance abuse issues?

The country is at 20% plus requiring mental health treatment, and 16% taking meds.

God knows the amount of people with issues that refuse or can't afford professional treatment and slide into substance abuse.

Who knows if the "decriminalization" is failing, or society is failing worse.
 
The problem is you cannot just decriminalize drugs without offering social services and places where addicts can go for help. Also mental health and drug treatment in this country is terrible. I went into a drug and mental health rehab in 2007 and was at this place for only 5 days when my insurance refused to continue covering it saying I was cured or something to that effect. I left the place. I was going through heroin withdrawals as well and the next day I copped and got high again. I rationalized that even when reaching out for help they tell me to fuck off.

12 years clean now from it and all other opiates.

We should be having recovering addicts, mental health experts, and the like be advising how the government and the police should be handling drug addicts, addiction, and the scheduling of drugs. Marijuana should not be a scheduled one drug at all. In my opinion it should be legalized like alcohol. I also think we should legalize the personal usage of psychedelics such as DMT, LSD, Psychedelic Mushrooms, Mescaline, and I could keep going on.
 
If it worked for Portugal(whatever working in Portugal means) then it’s based on the general behavior and culture of that society.

Politicians here thinks making something like it is in another country by law means that it automatically becomes like the other country.


If we do soft sentencing and give cushy prison conditions like Scandinavian countries then we’ll have their low recidivism rates and better rehabilitation(don’t know if that’s still true about them post open borders). No. It’s not that simple.

If we legalize all drugs then it will just be like Portugal or Uruguay where nobody is getting rolled up for simple possession and it affects nobody. Not that simple either.

We have different problems. I tend to support efforts to decriminalize drugs but in America open hard drug use typically goes hand and hand with other criminal and violent behavior and without question exacerbates it. So I understand why they backed down.
 
In the legalization scenario, the government gets into the production/sales business for cocaine, heroine, fentanyl, etc.; otherwise the "sellers" would continue to do business with cartels/street dealers, and therefore you have most of the same problems as decriminalization or criminalizing. I don't see a feasible way to do decriminalization or legalization in the US. I think that is downward spiral material.
help me understand this. If we haven’t seen this with weed, why would we see it with other drugs?

(Also the government was pretty good at selling cocaine in the 80s. Just sayin)
 
I live in Portland, SE area.
I drive down Powell every morning to the 205 and there are Zombies everywhere at 5:30 A.M.


Keep Portland weird.
Aay, I lived out that way for years. Bought a house in Vancouver bc it was cheaper though.
Good, maybe this will help clean up the shit hole that is Salem. Portland needs to be burned down and start anew.
Nothing can safe Salem. If you don’t like Portland then stay out, ya mook.
 
If it worked for Portugal(whatever working in Portugal means) then it’s based on the general behavior and culture of that society.

Politicians here thinks making something like it is in another country by law means that it automatically becomes like the other country.


If we do soft sentencing and give cushy prison conditions like Scandinavian countries then we’ll have their low recidivism rates and better rehabilitation(don’t know if that’s still true about them post open borders). No. It’s not that simple.

If we legalize all drugs then it will just be like Portugal or Uruguay where nobody is getting rolled up for simple possession and it affects nobody. Not that simple either.

We have different problems. I tend to support efforts to decriminalize drugs but in America open hard drug use typically goes hand and hand with other criminal and violent behavior and without question exacerbates it. So I understand why they backed down.

Exactly.

British politicians tried extending pub drinking hours, in the belief it would lead to a, "cafe culture" like France, where people take a glass of wine with lunch. In fact, it just led to an increase in Brits getting smashed out of their head at all hours. British drinking culture is very different to that of France.
 
I live in Portland, SE area.
I drive down Powell every morning to the 205 and there are Zombies everywhere at 5:30 A.M.


Keep Portland weird.

There's a good reason the TV show Grimm was set in Portland. ;)
 
Another Liberal experiment that was so predictably doomed to fail that just had to be run, to make sure it was a horrible idea.

Can't wait until New York runs the mother of all bad left wing experiments later this year. I wonder what the results will be...
 
If you don't police yourself, someone else will...
 
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I've been to Oregon recently, and this was the last thing townships in their rural areas needed. There are so many rundown towns with dilapidated swaths of residential areas, broken trailers and machinery rotting the yards, that have become glorified meth dens.

In my youth I favored these types of reforms, but older and wiser, I understand they are doomed to fail unless we implement an overhaul of our pharmaceutical industry and its modes of delivery. This is going to prove as disastrous to the state as a whole as the cockeyed homeless policies have proven to Portland's downtown business area.
My thoughts on this have become:
The similar abject failure of the California legal marijuana industry is testament to this. Furthermore, it was legal painkillers that exploded the demand on which these illegal drug markets prey and flourish: exacerbating an epidemic that only became an epidemic because of legal drugs.

Unfettered legalization is probably the worst of all strategies for containing drug use. The only drugs it is acceptable to legalize are:
  1. Those which don't cause the user an unacceptable level of harm, and for which we don't mind if everyone regularly used them (ex. 86% of American adults testify they regularly use alcohol; we don't care if people use it, we simply seek to mollify its destructive abuse).
  2. Those of which the direct manufacture cannot realistically be controlled because the limiting substrate is omnipresent and the expertise required to make them is obtainable by the least of laymen (i.e. alcohol which requires nothing but a carbohydrate, a container, and time to make)
  3. Those which don't create users who radically disrupt those in society who don't use the drug (i.e. doesn't matter how cheap you make crack or meth; tweakers will always use more than they can afford, will always avoid rehabilitation or regulation of their habit, and will always exploit others to perpetuate this habit).

Also, we did have one previous thread that touched on this topic:
How Oregon turned on its own trailblazing drug law: ‘Not the utopia we were promised’ (Feb-2024)
and
Oregon rolls back decriminalization of drug possession (Mar-2024)
 
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It would seem the problem is how powerful the drugs being abused now are. Fentanyl, crack and meth are infinitely more harmful to the user than weed, alcohol, and powder cocaine. Even compared to heroine, fent is in a whole new league.

Criminalization without rehabilitation (including mental health) will be as effective as the previous experiment was.
 
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A simple look at Portland’s crime statistics debunks the assumption that it was at all related to the decriminalization or recriminalization of drugs.

It looks more like it had almost zero effect on crime. I’m sure overdoses were higher. That’s why the decriminalization of drugs is supposed to be just one part of the overall strategy. You’re also supposed to provide treatment to those who are addicts. But because we do not have national healthcare, addicts can’t afford such treatment.

This is just more conservative conflation of two to things that happened, which they insist must have a cause-effect relationship only because it serves their narrative.
 
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