• Lovely. This is not an anti-drug ordinance. Most people have private places to use their drugs. This is an anti-homeless ordinance. All the fucking liberals (progressive and conservative alike) in all states and all cities love those. When they can’t outright simply criminalize the fact of being unhoused, they criminalize all the behaviours which being unhoused requires, or encourages because you simply don’t have a house in which to do everything people do in life.

    So just like criminalizing crack cocaine orders of magnitude more than powder cocaine contributed heavily to systemic racism, this move has a very definite classist and racist purpose.

    •  ffmike   ( @ffmike@beehaw.org ) 
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      81 year ago

      Not too surprising. This is the same city that recently made it illegal to camp between 8AM and 8PM, effectively outlawing being homeless with possessions (and probably violating federal court rulings).

      • Yeah. Though it should be noted that that is becoming a common and popular way for politicians to try to get around the Boise decision. A city near me in California (extremely “progressive”, by the way) just did the same thing, and another is planning to. Fucking barf.

        There are literally “expert” advisors who go around to cities and teach them how to be as efficiently cruel to unhoused people as possible: lots of raids (“sweeps”) of tent villages, denying services or making them available very selectively and with minimal access, etc.

    • i don’t know that this is “conservatives taking over” so much as Portland’s extremely large number of honest-to-god shitlibs demonstrating their selective commitment to human rights and treating people equally

  •  ffmike   ( @ffmike@beehaw.org ) 
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    41 year ago

    A few more details in the Oregonian make it even more clear that this is not an anti-drug ordinance. The tipoff is that they’re adding it to an existing public alcohol consumption ordinance, so selective enforcement is clearly the name of the game.

    Also it appears that the county sheriff and the DA are not necessarily on board with this approach.

  • I haven’t been there in over a decade other than a short family visit like 5 years ago. By my understanding, Portland decriminalized drug use a few years ago and the result was that homeless drug users started pouring in from all over the country because they weren’t going to get harassed. So lots of drugged out people all over the city, with all the baggage that comes with it. It seems Portland might be looking for ways to reign it in.

    • By my understanding, Portland decriminalized drug use a few years ago and the result was that homeless drug users started pouring in from all over the country because they weren’t going to get harassed. So lots of drugged out people all over the city, with all the baggage that comes with it. It seems Portland might be looking for ways to reign it in.

      “by my understanding” have you considered supplementing your understanding with literally any evidence before confidently asserting the fakest, /r/ThatHappened sounding understanding of the city of Portland humanly possible. this is on the level of conservatives who think the city was taken over by Antifa supersoldiers and burned to the ground every week in 2020