Politics

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.

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.

Yeah this is just another way to fuck over homeless people disguised as a war on drugs (which is also not a good look).

Conservatives taking over.

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.