It is state sponsored euthanasia……there is no safe way to use fentanyl. Oregon should prohibit the use of these drugs in public and absolutely not provide the implements of destruction to users. Such wrong-headed policy, masked in compassion……”harm reduction” is an Orwellian phrase.
Thank you, Thomas! This is powerful information that policymakers can use to stop the distribution of needles. Let’s hope the County begins the process by passing a first step in limiting their distribution around schools (thank you to neighborhood activist, Michelle Mila, and others for working to get this law passed — First reading before the Multnomah County Commissioners is May 21). Next: City Hall!
Needle distribution, harm reduction is a sham. Advocates for harm reduction are wearing blinders and support out dated research for what's happening on our neighborhood sidewalks. Advocates of needle distribution are not reasonable, common sense people. Hence the fight for needle distribution in front of schools. Because of advocates attitude on harm reduction, the drug addicted are enabled and coddled and our city is going to implode. Harm reduction is a sham and once again the ordinary citizens of Portland are scammed.
Meghan Moyer and Shannon Singleton would be a first good bet. They are the least likely to be in favor of curbing the "rights" of the drug addicts in favor of the taxpaying, common citizenry.
They are both supportive, however Moyer at the 5/7 county meeting made it clear she didn’t want to include preschools in the 1000ft buffer zone and she didn’t want the DA’s input. When doesnt want to “criminalize” paraphernalia handouts. Julia-Brim Edwards sponsored this ordinance and was unapologetically standing up for kids and families, so she doesn’t need any convincing.
And once again an ordinary citizen of Portland is traumatically injured by a car jacking drug crazed homeless druggie on Monday at the airport.
"Pedraza told police he had been up for five days at the time of the carjacking and was trying to get straight."
Harm reduction at its finest.
Also on Monday, a 14 year old boy was found dead on the east esplanade from a suspected overdose of fentanyl.
Detective Jordan Zaitz with PPB's Narcotics and Organized Crime Unit said they are ultimately looking to charge whoever supplied Owings the narcotics.
What if the "harm reduction" crew supplied the foil, pipe, straw, needle etc...so the teen could engage in drug activity...will they be held accountable?? Again, harm reduction at its finest.
Thanks, Dr. Dodson, for sharing the data! If I were an alcoholic, would I be given an empty bottle so I could cross the street and purchase moonshine that would destroy my liver?
"Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive." Theodore Roosevelt.
“When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.” George Carlin
In its current state "harm reduction" is in danger of becoming progressive fascism.
Dr. Dodson writes well and thinks straight. But he misses the essential problem: this is not a matter of public policy (or even aesthetics) but one of religion.
The bright-eyed young folks handing out the goodies are seized with a fervor that replaces the vacuum left by secularism with faith. Like other religions, faith depends on accepting ideas that might look borderline insane and are beyond any rational test. The harder to justify with logic, the more tightly the adherents cling to dogma.
This is the root problem of most Portland issues; they cannot be approached rationally but must be argued on "feelings" (each unique to the feeler) and "lived experience" and all of the various substitutes for reason and evidence.
This is an excellent comment Richard. I have also experienced this feverish intensity when trying to talk with the harm reduction crowd and with DSA members at gatherings and at City Hall meetings. They seem to lack the willingness to listen and are immediately dismissive. It seems as cultish as the MAGA crowd. There seems to be no place for common sense and centrist viewpoints.
An associate touched on this problem in the context of a certain city council member's obsession with outlawing foie gras. Here are their thoughts, which are equally applicable to harm reduction zealots.
This touches on something that goes well beyond foie gras and gets at a genuine pathology in progressive urban politics.
The foie gras thing itself.
It is, in the context of Portland's actual governance crisis, almost perfectly emblematic. The city has a $160 million budget gap, a homelessness crisis that is getting worse by the county's own measurement, a housing authority that spent public money on Hawaii conferences while apartments sat vacant, a string of failed senior appointments costing taxpayers seven figures in severance, and a new governance structure that nobody fully understands yet. And someone with a council seat and a staff and a salary paid by Portland taxpayers is spending political capital and public time on duck liver.
The choice of priority is not random or naive. It reflects something specific about a certain kind of political actor — the DSA-adjacent urban progressive for whom politics is primarily a vehicle for moral expression rather than governance. Banning foie gras is attractive precisely because it is legible as a moral statement, requires no difficult tradeoffs, offends the right people, and produces a clean win that can be communicated in a sentence. Actually fixing the housing authority requires years of unglamorous institutional work, produces enemies rather than applause, and is nearly impossible to communicate simply. The rational political actor in that environment chooses the duck.
The protest behavior.
What you're describing outside the restaurants is something the legal and philosophical literature on civil disobedience and protest actually has useful things to say about, though practitioners of this particular variety of activism would reject the framing.
The classical justification for disruptive protest — going back to Thoreau, King, Gandhi — rests on a specific moral architecture. The disruption is proportionate to the injustice being protested. The protesters accept legal consequences as part of the moral statement. The target of the disruption is the party responsible for the injustice. And the method chosen is the minimum necessary to make the injustice visible to a public that would otherwise ignore it.
None of those conditions obtain here. Restaurant diners did not produce the conditions of foie gras production. The disruption is wildly disproportionate to any reasonable accounting of the harm being protested — duck liver production, whatever one thinks of it, does not occupy the same moral universe as the injustices that historically justified serious civil disobedience. The protesters almost certainly do not accept legal consequences; they rely on the political reluctance of progressive city governments to enforce laws against them. And the harm to bystanders — people trying to have dinner, neighboring businesses, people on the street who find themselves in the middle of a confrontation they did not seek — is treated as irrelevant or actively deserved because proximity to a targeted restaurant is itself read as moral contamination.
The rights question.
There is a genuine First Amendment dimension here that deserves honest treatment. Protest on public sidewalks is constitutionally protected activity, and the protection rightly extends to protest that is annoying, loud, and uncomfortable for bystanders. That protection is important and should not be casually eroded.
But constitutional protection is not the same as moral justification, and the conflation of the two is itself a feature of this political style. The fact that you have a right to do something does not mean doing it is right, proportionate, or respectful of others' equal standing as members of the community. The diner trying to have a quiet dinner, the neighboring shop owner losing business, the elderly person who finds aggressive confrontation genuinely frightening — these people have interests too, and a political movement that systematically discounts those interests in favor of its own expressive priorities is not actually operating from a serious ethical framework regardless of how much ethical language it uses.
The deeper political problem.
What connects the foie gras council member to the restaurant protesters to the broader Portland governance crisis is a specific failure mode of progressive urban politics: the substitution of moral expressiveness for governance competence as the primary criterion for political legitimacy.
In this framework, what matters is not whether you can manage a housing authority, close a budget gap, or reform executive employment practices — it's whether your stated values are correct and your commitment to them is visible and uncompromising. The council member pursuing the foie gras ban is performing political identity, not governing. The protesters outside the restaurant are performing moral seriousness, not engaging in the kind of political action that actually changes systems.
The people who suffer the consequences are, characteristically, not the people the performers claim to be acting for. The unhoused person who needs a functioning housing authority doesn't benefit from the foie gras ban. The taxpayer funding the severance payments doesn't benefit from the restaurant protest. The front-line agency worker who has been furloughed while watching senior officials depart with six-figure checks doesn't benefit from any of it.
The zeal problem.
Your word "crusaders" is exactly right and historically resonant in ways worth unpacking. Crusading zeal — the absolute conviction that one's cause is so morally urgent that normal considerations of proportion, courtesy, and respect for others simply don't apply — is genuinely dangerous independent of the cause it attaches to. It is dangerous because it eliminates the internal governor that would otherwise constrain behavior. It is dangerous because it self-reinforces — the more disruptive the protest, the more certain the protester becomes of their own moral seriousness, because only someone truly committed would be willing to behave this way. And it is dangerous because it is essentially immune to external feedback, since any criticism from outside the movement is automatically read as evidence of the critic's moral corruption rather than as information worth processing.
The specific variety you're describing — urban progressive single-issue zeal applied to animal welfare or environmental causes — has an additional feature worth naming. It tends to attract people whose own lives are relatively insulated from serious material deprivation and who therefore have the luxury of treating politics primarily as a vehicle for moral identity rather than as a practical mechanism for improving the conditions of people who are actually suffering. The aggressive protester outside the restaurant almost certainly does not live in a Home Forward building or depend on the city's 911 system or worry much about the $160 million budget gap.
That insulation is not a moral crime, but it produces a political style that is, at its worst, the self-indulgence of the comfortable dressed up as the urgency of the oppressed — which is its own kind of category error, and one that Portland's political culture has been unusually tolerant of for a very long time.
I asked a wise and learned associate what Portland and Multnomah County have been doing wrong in responding to the interrelated crises of unsheltered homelessness and untreated mental illness. This is the reply:
The central problem, in the eyes of many critics—including a growing number of moderates and even former progressives in Portland—is that Portland and Multnomah County have spent years treating a crisis of severe behavioral dysfunction primarily as a crisis of housing scarcity and social compassion.
Housing matters enormously. But a man screaming at invisible figures while bent over from fentanyl intoxication is not merely lacking rent money.
Several recurring failures stand out.
1. Refusal to distinguish between categories of homelessness
For years, political rhetoric often blurred together:
* families priced out of housing,
* temporarily homeless workers,
* nonviolent shelter users,
* chronically addicted street populations,
* and severely psychotic individuals.
Those populations require radically different interventions.
A large share of visible unsheltered homelessness in Portland now involves people with:
* profound addiction,
* untreated psychosis,
* traumatic brain injury,
* cognitive impairment,
* or long-term behavioral instability.
Yet the policy language often remained organized around concepts like:
* “housing first,”
* “client choice,”
* “harm reduction,”
* and “service resistance.”
Those approaches can work reasonably well for some populations. They are far less successful with people incapable of sustained self-management.
2. Excessive aversion to coercion
Portland and Multnomah County became deeply uncomfortable with using coercive authority:
* involuntary commitment,
* mandated treatment,
* camping enforcement,
* public drug enforcement,
* psychiatric holds,
* or even consistent behavioral expectations in shelters.
The moral impulse behind this was understandable:
* fear of criminalizing poverty,
* awareness of historical abuses,
* distrust of policing,
* skepticism about institutions.
But in practice, the system often left severely impaired people exactly where they were:
* psychotic on sidewalks,
* addicted in tents,
* medically deteriorating,
* repeatedly overdosing,
* cycling through emergency systems.
A functioning society usually requires some mechanism for intervening when people are too impaired to care for themselves safely.
3. Bureaucratic fragmentation and ideological management culture
At the same time, critics argue that much of the governing culture became highly performative and ideological:
* extensive process,
* evolving terminology,
* equity frameworks,
* stakeholder consultation,
* symbolic politics,
* and reluctance to acknowledge obvious disorder for fear of stigmatization.
Meanwhile, ordinary residents experienced:
* open-air fentanyl use,
* encampment fires,
* public mental collapse,
* vandalism,
* intimidation,
* and degraded civic space.
Many Portlanders came to feel that elite discourse and street reality had separated completely.
4. Failure to build secure treatment infrastructure
Even when officials now want stronger intervention, Oregon lacks enough:
* secure psychiatric beds,
* long-term residential treatment,
* forensic capacity,
* detox facilities,
* staffed behavioral housing,
* and transitional institutions.
So police, hospitals, and outreach workers often encounter the same individuals repeatedly with nowhere appropriate to place them.
This creates the maddening sense of endless circulation without resolution.
5. Confusing tolerance with compassion
This may be the deepest cultural criticism.
Portland developed a civic ethos that often treated visible disorder as evidence of moral sensitivity:
* tolerance became virtue,
* enforcement became suspect,
* expectations themselves became controversial.
But many residents increasingly concluded that allowing people to slowly disintegrate in public was not humane at all.
One reason political attitudes have shifted so sharply in Portland over the past several years is that many people now believe the city confused:
* nonjudgmentalism with mercy,
* passivity with kindness,
* and abandonment with autonomy.
That does not mean every punitive proposal is wise. Heavy-handed policing alone cannot solve addiction or psychosis. But neither can a model built largely around voluntary compliance among people whose conditions often destroy judgment itself.
I read comments like this, so insightful and spot on in regards to what is happening in Portland and Multnomah County and have a fantasy that the Ollie Parks of the world will run for and win office or have strong positions of authority/influence in Portland and Multnomah County. Thanks Ollie! Now throw your hat in the ring!
I could not agree more. As a former intravenous drug user (sober since 2018!) and an executive in the homeless/addiction field, I can tell you that needle distribution is an outdated practice that only prolongs use for those of us who struggle with addiction. There are better ways to meet people where they are, without leaving them there with a bag of fresh needles, only lacking the drug dealer who is surely nearby.
Minimizing the spread of HIV and other diseases was once a valid harm reduction argument, despite the huge advances in medical treatment for these diseases. However, fentanyl has changed the game entirely. There is no effective harm reduction when it comes to fentanyl. And don't even get me started on carfentanil! We have not even seen the effects play out of this newer drug (new to recreational users anyway) that is hitting out streets.
It is time to get serious about access to treatment through outreach and central intake facilities throughout the city. In addition, law enforcement is going to need a culture shift here in Portland. Police officers have the ability to play a HUGE role in getting people into treatment in other counties. 75% of the men and women in our residential recover program(s) came through the criminal justice system outside Multnomah County.
Again, it is time for a culture shift in our own backyard, and it starts with our County Chair election in November!
How is it that local and state government do not seem to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time on this issue? Let us have sympathy for the addicted and sometimes mentally ill homeless and help them but, at the same time, not let ourselves be victimized by their anti-social behavior by aiding and abetting it.
It is state sponsored euthanasia……there is no safe way to use fentanyl. Oregon should prohibit the use of these drugs in public and absolutely not provide the implements of destruction to users. Such wrong-headed policy, masked in compassion……”harm reduction” is an Orwellian phrase.
But it's "Oregon Values™" according to our Governor and everyone else who has bought the kool-aid.
Also, in the area of public health issues.
Oregon ranks between 9th and 10th in the Country for Syphilis !
Thank you, Thomas! This is powerful information that policymakers can use to stop the distribution of needles. Let’s hope the County begins the process by passing a first step in limiting their distribution around schools (thank you to neighborhood activist, Michelle Mila, and others for working to get this law passed — First reading before the Multnomah County Commissioners is May 21). Next: City Hall!
Needle distribution, harm reduction is a sham. Advocates for harm reduction are wearing blinders and support out dated research for what's happening on our neighborhood sidewalks. Advocates of needle distribution are not reasonable, common sense people. Hence the fight for needle distribution in front of schools. Because of advocates attitude on harm reduction, the drug addicted are enabled and coddled and our city is going to implode. Harm reduction is a sham and once again the ordinary citizens of Portland are scammed.
What can we do? Who should we contact?
Meghan Moyer and Shannon Singleton would be a first good bet. They are the least likely to be in favor of curbing the "rights" of the drug addicts in favor of the taxpaying, common citizenry.
They are both supportive, however Moyer at the 5/7 county meeting made it clear she didn’t want to include preschools in the 1000ft buffer zone and she didn’t want the DA’s input. When doesnt want to “criminalize” paraphernalia handouts. Julia-Brim Edwards sponsored this ordinance and was unapologetically standing up for kids and families, so she doesn’t need any convincing.
And once again an ordinary citizen of Portland is traumatically injured by a car jacking drug crazed homeless druggie on Monday at the airport.
"Pedraza told police he had been up for five days at the time of the carjacking and was trying to get straight."
Harm reduction at its finest.
Also on Monday, a 14 year old boy was found dead on the east esplanade from a suspected overdose of fentanyl.
Detective Jordan Zaitz with PPB's Narcotics and Organized Crime Unit said they are ultimately looking to charge whoever supplied Owings the narcotics.
What if the "harm reduction" crew supplied the foil, pipe, straw, needle etc...so the teen could engage in drug activity...will they be held accountable?? Again, harm reduction at its finest.
Thanks, Dr. Dodson, for sharing the data! If I were an alcoholic, would I be given an empty bottle so I could cross the street and purchase moonshine that would destroy my liver?
"Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive." Theodore Roosevelt.
“When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.” George Carlin
In its current state "harm reduction" is in danger of becoming progressive fascism.
Finally. A voice of common sense. Thanks, doc. Spot on.
Also:
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/11/01/the-formulation-of-meth-has-changed-it-may-be-contributing-to-this-countrys-mental-health-crisis/
Dr. Dodson writes well and thinks straight. But he misses the essential problem: this is not a matter of public policy (or even aesthetics) but one of religion.
The bright-eyed young folks handing out the goodies are seized with a fervor that replaces the vacuum left by secularism with faith. Like other religions, faith depends on accepting ideas that might look borderline insane and are beyond any rational test. The harder to justify with logic, the more tightly the adherents cling to dogma.
This is the root problem of most Portland issues; they cannot be approached rationally but must be argued on "feelings" (each unique to the feeler) and "lived experience" and all of the various substitutes for reason and evidence.
Let us, therefore, pray. All will be well.
This is an excellent comment Richard. I have also experienced this feverish intensity when trying to talk with the harm reduction crowd and with DSA members at gatherings and at City Hall meetings. They seem to lack the willingness to listen and are immediately dismissive. It seems as cultish as the MAGA crowd. There seems to be no place for common sense and centrist viewpoints.
An associate touched on this problem in the context of a certain city council member's obsession with outlawing foie gras. Here are their thoughts, which are equally applicable to harm reduction zealots.
=============================================================
This touches on something that goes well beyond foie gras and gets at a genuine pathology in progressive urban politics.
The foie gras thing itself.
It is, in the context of Portland's actual governance crisis, almost perfectly emblematic. The city has a $160 million budget gap, a homelessness crisis that is getting worse by the county's own measurement, a housing authority that spent public money on Hawaii conferences while apartments sat vacant, a string of failed senior appointments costing taxpayers seven figures in severance, and a new governance structure that nobody fully understands yet. And someone with a council seat and a staff and a salary paid by Portland taxpayers is spending political capital and public time on duck liver.
The choice of priority is not random or naive. It reflects something specific about a certain kind of political actor — the DSA-adjacent urban progressive for whom politics is primarily a vehicle for moral expression rather than governance. Banning foie gras is attractive precisely because it is legible as a moral statement, requires no difficult tradeoffs, offends the right people, and produces a clean win that can be communicated in a sentence. Actually fixing the housing authority requires years of unglamorous institutional work, produces enemies rather than applause, and is nearly impossible to communicate simply. The rational political actor in that environment chooses the duck.
The protest behavior.
What you're describing outside the restaurants is something the legal and philosophical literature on civil disobedience and protest actually has useful things to say about, though practitioners of this particular variety of activism would reject the framing.
The classical justification for disruptive protest — going back to Thoreau, King, Gandhi — rests on a specific moral architecture. The disruption is proportionate to the injustice being protested. The protesters accept legal consequences as part of the moral statement. The target of the disruption is the party responsible for the injustice. And the method chosen is the minimum necessary to make the injustice visible to a public that would otherwise ignore it.
None of those conditions obtain here. Restaurant diners did not produce the conditions of foie gras production. The disruption is wildly disproportionate to any reasonable accounting of the harm being protested — duck liver production, whatever one thinks of it, does not occupy the same moral universe as the injustices that historically justified serious civil disobedience. The protesters almost certainly do not accept legal consequences; they rely on the political reluctance of progressive city governments to enforce laws against them. And the harm to bystanders — people trying to have dinner, neighboring businesses, people on the street who find themselves in the middle of a confrontation they did not seek — is treated as irrelevant or actively deserved because proximity to a targeted restaurant is itself read as moral contamination.
The rights question.
There is a genuine First Amendment dimension here that deserves honest treatment. Protest on public sidewalks is constitutionally protected activity, and the protection rightly extends to protest that is annoying, loud, and uncomfortable for bystanders. That protection is important and should not be casually eroded.
But constitutional protection is not the same as moral justification, and the conflation of the two is itself a feature of this political style. The fact that you have a right to do something does not mean doing it is right, proportionate, or respectful of others' equal standing as members of the community. The diner trying to have a quiet dinner, the neighboring shop owner losing business, the elderly person who finds aggressive confrontation genuinely frightening — these people have interests too, and a political movement that systematically discounts those interests in favor of its own expressive priorities is not actually operating from a serious ethical framework regardless of how much ethical language it uses.
The deeper political problem.
What connects the foie gras council member to the restaurant protesters to the broader Portland governance crisis is a specific failure mode of progressive urban politics: the substitution of moral expressiveness for governance competence as the primary criterion for political legitimacy.
In this framework, what matters is not whether you can manage a housing authority, close a budget gap, or reform executive employment practices — it's whether your stated values are correct and your commitment to them is visible and uncompromising. The council member pursuing the foie gras ban is performing political identity, not governing. The protesters outside the restaurant are performing moral seriousness, not engaging in the kind of political action that actually changes systems.
The people who suffer the consequences are, characteristically, not the people the performers claim to be acting for. The unhoused person who needs a functioning housing authority doesn't benefit from the foie gras ban. The taxpayer funding the severance payments doesn't benefit from the restaurant protest. The front-line agency worker who has been furloughed while watching senior officials depart with six-figure checks doesn't benefit from any of it.
The zeal problem.
Your word "crusaders" is exactly right and historically resonant in ways worth unpacking. Crusading zeal — the absolute conviction that one's cause is so morally urgent that normal considerations of proportion, courtesy, and respect for others simply don't apply — is genuinely dangerous independent of the cause it attaches to. It is dangerous because it eliminates the internal governor that would otherwise constrain behavior. It is dangerous because it self-reinforces — the more disruptive the protest, the more certain the protester becomes of their own moral seriousness, because only someone truly committed would be willing to behave this way. And it is dangerous because it is essentially immune to external feedback, since any criticism from outside the movement is automatically read as evidence of the critic's moral corruption rather than as information worth processing.
The specific variety you're describing — urban progressive single-issue zeal applied to animal welfare or environmental causes — has an additional feature worth naming. It tends to attract people whose own lives are relatively insulated from serious material deprivation and who therefore have the luxury of treating politics primarily as a vehicle for moral identity rather than as a practical mechanism for improving the conditions of people who are actually suffering. The aggressive protester outside the restaurant almost certainly does not live in a Home Forward building or depend on the city's 911 system or worry much about the $160 million budget gap.
That insulation is not a moral crime, but it produces a political style that is, at its worst, the self-indulgence of the comfortable dressed up as the urgency of the oppressed — which is its own kind of category error, and one that Portland's political culture has been unusually tolerant of for a very long time.
This is amazing.
An extraordinary piece of political analysis. Thank you. I wish more people could read this and more importantly, understand it.
Thank you. Agreed.
I asked a wise and learned associate what Portland and Multnomah County have been doing wrong in responding to the interrelated crises of unsheltered homelessness and untreated mental illness. This is the reply:
====================================================================
The central problem, in the eyes of many critics—including a growing number of moderates and even former progressives in Portland—is that Portland and Multnomah County have spent years treating a crisis of severe behavioral dysfunction primarily as a crisis of housing scarcity and social compassion.
Housing matters enormously. But a man screaming at invisible figures while bent over from fentanyl intoxication is not merely lacking rent money.
Several recurring failures stand out.
1. Refusal to distinguish between categories of homelessness
For years, political rhetoric often blurred together:
* families priced out of housing,
* temporarily homeless workers,
* nonviolent shelter users,
* chronically addicted street populations,
* and severely psychotic individuals.
Those populations require radically different interventions.
A large share of visible unsheltered homelessness in Portland now involves people with:
* profound addiction,
* untreated psychosis,
* traumatic brain injury,
* cognitive impairment,
* or long-term behavioral instability.
Yet the policy language often remained organized around concepts like:
* “housing first,”
* “client choice,”
* “harm reduction,”
* and “service resistance.”
Those approaches can work reasonably well for some populations. They are far less successful with people incapable of sustained self-management.
2. Excessive aversion to coercion
Portland and Multnomah County became deeply uncomfortable with using coercive authority:
* involuntary commitment,
* mandated treatment,
* camping enforcement,
* public drug enforcement,
* psychiatric holds,
* or even consistent behavioral expectations in shelters.
The moral impulse behind this was understandable:
* fear of criminalizing poverty,
* awareness of historical abuses,
* distrust of policing,
* skepticism about institutions.
But in practice, the system often left severely impaired people exactly where they were:
* psychotic on sidewalks,
* addicted in tents,
* medically deteriorating,
* repeatedly overdosing,
* cycling through emergency systems.
A functioning society usually requires some mechanism for intervening when people are too impaired to care for themselves safely.
3. Bureaucratic fragmentation and ideological management culture
Portland governance is notoriously fragmented:
* the city,
* the county,
* Metro,
* nonprofits,
* state agencies,
* hospitals,
* outreach contractors,
* behavioral health systems,
* and housing authorities
all overlap.
Responsibility becomes diffuse. Accountability becomes elusive.
At the same time, critics argue that much of the governing culture became highly performative and ideological:
* extensive process,
* evolving terminology,
* equity frameworks,
* stakeholder consultation,
* symbolic politics,
* and reluctance to acknowledge obvious disorder for fear of stigmatization.
Meanwhile, ordinary residents experienced:
* open-air fentanyl use,
* encampment fires,
* public mental collapse,
* vandalism,
* intimidation,
* and degraded civic space.
Many Portlanders came to feel that elite discourse and street reality had separated completely.
4. Failure to build secure treatment infrastructure
Even when officials now want stronger intervention, Oregon lacks enough:
* secure psychiatric beds,
* long-term residential treatment,
* forensic capacity,
* detox facilities,
* staffed behavioral housing,
* and transitional institutions.
So police, hospitals, and outreach workers often encounter the same individuals repeatedly with nowhere appropriate to place them.
This creates the maddening sense of endless circulation without resolution.
5. Confusing tolerance with compassion
This may be the deepest cultural criticism.
Portland developed a civic ethos that often treated visible disorder as evidence of moral sensitivity:
* tolerance became virtue,
* enforcement became suspect,
* expectations themselves became controversial.
But many residents increasingly concluded that allowing people to slowly disintegrate in public was not humane at all.
One reason political attitudes have shifted so sharply in Portland over the past several years is that many people now believe the city confused:
* nonjudgmentalism with mercy,
* passivity with kindness,
* and abandonment with autonomy.
That does not mean every punitive proposal is wise. Heavy-handed policing alone cannot solve addiction or psychosis. But neither can a model built largely around voluntary compliance among people whose conditions often destroy judgment itself.
Ollie:
Your two comments are the most insightful and eloquent statement of Portland's political problem I have read. Thank you!
I read comments like this, so insightful and spot on in regards to what is happening in Portland and Multnomah County and have a fantasy that the Ollie Parks of the world will run for and win office or have strong positions of authority/influence in Portland and Multnomah County. Thanks Ollie! Now throw your hat in the ring!
Aww, shucks! Alas, politics is not my forte.
I could not agree more. As a former intravenous drug user (sober since 2018!) and an executive in the homeless/addiction field, I can tell you that needle distribution is an outdated practice that only prolongs use for those of us who struggle with addiction. There are better ways to meet people where they are, without leaving them there with a bag of fresh needles, only lacking the drug dealer who is surely nearby.
Minimizing the spread of HIV and other diseases was once a valid harm reduction argument, despite the huge advances in medical treatment for these diseases. However, fentanyl has changed the game entirely. There is no effective harm reduction when it comes to fentanyl. And don't even get me started on carfentanil! We have not even seen the effects play out of this newer drug (new to recreational users anyway) that is hitting out streets.
It is time to get serious about access to treatment through outreach and central intake facilities throughout the city. In addition, law enforcement is going to need a culture shift here in Portland. Police officers have the ability to play a HUGE role in getting people into treatment in other counties. 75% of the men and women in our residential recover program(s) came through the criminal justice system outside Multnomah County.
Again, it is time for a culture shift in our own backyard, and it starts with our County Chair election in November!
How is it that local and state government do not seem to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time on this issue? Let us have sympathy for the addicted and sometimes mentally ill homeless and help them but, at the same time, not let ourselves be victimized by their anti-social behavior by aiding and abetting it.