I would be profoundly interested to know the “intersectionality” (a favorite SJW term) between PPOP and Antifa. Similar tactics, similar behavior, similar mindset to all outward appearances.
The phrase Michelle Milla reached for was "quiet enjoyment." It's a term of art, the covenant every homeowner and tenant is supposed to be able to count on, the baseline promise that your home is a place you actually get to live in. She used it to describe the thing that has been taken from her on Northwest 19th Avenue. Sit with that for a second: a Portland woman now has to invoke property law to describe the modest ambition of walking home without a masked crowd chasing her block to block.
Here is what a decade of harm-reduction absolutism has produced on that stretch of Northwest. A resident bought a house. She organized her neighbors, filmed what she saw, invited elected officials to come look with their own eyes, and asked, through every proper channel, in the way civics is supposed to work, that the Friday paraphernalia handouts move away from the grade school and the park. What she got back was fifteen masked people boxing her in on the sidewalk, taunting her by name, and waiting at her gate to wish her a good night's sleep. And when the police escort finally peeled off, the man who greeted the unmasked crew afterward with hugs and high-fives was not some street kid. He was a senior scientist with a big federal contractor and a Harvard line on his résumé, the registered owner of the van, the epidemiologist who would show up weeks later to lecture the County Commission that any link between the syringe operation and the syringes in the gutter was "spurious."
Somewhere in the last ten years, this movement quietly decided that the person with rights on that sidewalk was not Milla. It was the person she was being told to tolerate. That is the inversion at the center of all of this, and it is worth naming plainly, because the movement's own literature names it for us. Portland People's Outreach Project's stated creed is that everyone has the right to put whatever they choose into their body without social judgment or sanction. Read that again. Not without arrest, without judgment. The demand is not merely legal tolerance; it is that the rest of us surrender the right to think that a man dying by degrees on a public sidewalk, in front of children walking to school, is a tragedy rather than a lifestyle. Those of us who have watched what addiction actually does to a person, or done the work of climbing out of it, are told our moral reaction to it is the thing that needs correcting.
Grant the entire public-health case for the sake of argument. Grant that syringe access reduces the transmission of HIV and hepatitis C; the evidence for that is real and I won't pretend otherwise. None of it, not one study, not one saved life, requires siting the tables a few hundred feet from Metropolitan Learning Center. None of it requires opposing a 1,000-foot school buffer as "arbitrary." None of it requires that when a neighbor documents used needles at the entrance to a rec center, the credentialed answer is that the litter would be less dangerous if only we drove the disease rates down first. That is not public health. That is a pirate operation that has accepted that children will encounter the needles and is offering, as consolation, that the needles will be cleaner. The most damning verdict on that logic didn't come from a NIMBY. It came from Commissioner Meghan Moyer, a harm-reduction supporter whose own child went to MLC, who called the pretense that a distribution site does nothing to draw open drug use exactly what it is: naive to the point of insult.
That is the tell. When even your allies on the commission have to publicly correct you, you are no longer running a health program. You are running an ideology, and the neighborhood is the lab.
The residents of Stadiumhood are not anti-poor, and they are not anti-recovery. They are the opposite. Milla did the patient, unglamorous, deeply civic thing, the meetings, the vigils, the requests for compromise, and was met with what she accurately calls violent intent. The nurse who testified against the group, herself in recovery, was cornered outside the boardroom and called a liar to her face on a county security camera. These are not the tactics of people trying to keep the vulnerable alive. They are the tactics of people who have decided their neighbors are the enemy, and who have found, in the language of compassion, a permission structure for cruelty.
Portland spent a decade being told that asking for a livable block made you the villain of the story. A lot of us are done accepting the casting. You can care about the man on the sidewalk and still believe the woman who lives there is entitled to the quiet enjoyment of her own front gate. The movement that can no longer tell those two things apart has lost the plot, and it should stop being surprised that the neighborhood noticed.
I spent months on this story, and you captured the essence of it and presented a powerful call for course correction an hour after I posted it. My hat is off to you. You're going to put AI out of business.
Drug users are sick people. We each have empathy for anyone who has lost their way and has chosen a drug path to ease their pain (albeit putting them on a dangerous path). The choices made by Multnomah County, Portland City Council, and the State of Oregon to condone, if not encourage needle exchange seemed humane, but those who forecast the crisis we now experience, were also humane; they realized that assisting the fallen should be corrective care and not support for the drug habit. Those individuals who accosted Milla and Nurse G (sorry I forgot how to spell her name) were thugs; anyone assisting them is also a thug. They should be punished for their actions. Enough drugs already. Libertarian thinking is great if taken in full measure to include accountablity. We want our streets back. We want our neighborhoods back. We want drugs removed without any evidence. Government needs to protect its people: THE MAJORITY NOT THE MINORITY.
Excuse me. But since when are we compelled to use Orwellian never never land speech? The term “ harm reduction “ to describe the distribution of syringes to facilitate the injection of harmful, deadly substances is as absurd as the evil assertion that this will cause less HIV in children who happen to be stuck with the needles left lying on the ground. By the sinister logic of “harm reduction “ , the government should just let Mr. Gilbert and his team of thugs distribute ketamine, fentanyl , meth and heroin. I suspect that it gives such people a special thrill to see bodies lifeless on our sidewalks.
Driving home from work recently, and while stopped at the light on 27th and Hawthorne, I looked to my right and saw what appeared to be a dead body.....a man laying motionless on the sidewalk. As I was just about to get out and check on him, two high school students with back packs walking on that sidewalk simply stepped over the body and kept walking. Remind me again what "harm reduction" means......
Thanks for writing this up Alan. Thank you to Michelle for not letting these entitled trustifarians silence you and being relentless.
I had no idea he was an Ivy League rich kid with a Federal contract, but that fits the bill for your average Portland activist. He’s a pathetic toxic man who derives a sense of pleasure from trying to intimidate women.
His logic is twisted, inverted and outdated. The National Harm Reduction Coalition states that “the very real danger and tragedy that comes from substance use should not be ignored.” And yet, Gilbert seems to take issue with that as well.
Mr. Gilbert should have as much empathy for the law abiding citizens trying to live peacefully in the neighborhoods where addicts go to exchange needles as he does for the addicts.
Thank you for your reporting. This is multiple levels of disturbing.
I would be profoundly interested to know the “intersectionality” (a favorite SJW term) between PPOP and Antifa. Similar tactics, similar behavior, similar mindset to all outward appearances.
Thanks for outing this idiot so the rest of us know who he is. I wonder how much drug paraphernalia he hands out around his own house?
Quiet Enjoyment
The phrase Michelle Milla reached for was "quiet enjoyment." It's a term of art, the covenant every homeowner and tenant is supposed to be able to count on, the baseline promise that your home is a place you actually get to live in. She used it to describe the thing that has been taken from her on Northwest 19th Avenue. Sit with that for a second: a Portland woman now has to invoke property law to describe the modest ambition of walking home without a masked crowd chasing her block to block.
Here is what a decade of harm-reduction absolutism has produced on that stretch of Northwest. A resident bought a house. She organized her neighbors, filmed what she saw, invited elected officials to come look with their own eyes, and asked, through every proper channel, in the way civics is supposed to work, that the Friday paraphernalia handouts move away from the grade school and the park. What she got back was fifteen masked people boxing her in on the sidewalk, taunting her by name, and waiting at her gate to wish her a good night's sleep. And when the police escort finally peeled off, the man who greeted the unmasked crew afterward with hugs and high-fives was not some street kid. He was a senior scientist with a big federal contractor and a Harvard line on his résumé, the registered owner of the van, the epidemiologist who would show up weeks later to lecture the County Commission that any link between the syringe operation and the syringes in the gutter was "spurious."
Somewhere in the last ten years, this movement quietly decided that the person with rights on that sidewalk was not Milla. It was the person she was being told to tolerate. That is the inversion at the center of all of this, and it is worth naming plainly, because the movement's own literature names it for us. Portland People's Outreach Project's stated creed is that everyone has the right to put whatever they choose into their body without social judgment or sanction. Read that again. Not without arrest, without judgment. The demand is not merely legal tolerance; it is that the rest of us surrender the right to think that a man dying by degrees on a public sidewalk, in front of children walking to school, is a tragedy rather than a lifestyle. Those of us who have watched what addiction actually does to a person, or done the work of climbing out of it, are told our moral reaction to it is the thing that needs correcting.
Grant the entire public-health case for the sake of argument. Grant that syringe access reduces the transmission of HIV and hepatitis C; the evidence for that is real and I won't pretend otherwise. None of it, not one study, not one saved life, requires siting the tables a few hundred feet from Metropolitan Learning Center. None of it requires opposing a 1,000-foot school buffer as "arbitrary." None of it requires that when a neighbor documents used needles at the entrance to a rec center, the credentialed answer is that the litter would be less dangerous if only we drove the disease rates down first. That is not public health. That is a pirate operation that has accepted that children will encounter the needles and is offering, as consolation, that the needles will be cleaner. The most damning verdict on that logic didn't come from a NIMBY. It came from Commissioner Meghan Moyer, a harm-reduction supporter whose own child went to MLC, who called the pretense that a distribution site does nothing to draw open drug use exactly what it is: naive to the point of insult.
That is the tell. When even your allies on the commission have to publicly correct you, you are no longer running a health program. You are running an ideology, and the neighborhood is the lab.
The residents of Stadiumhood are not anti-poor, and they are not anti-recovery. They are the opposite. Milla did the patient, unglamorous, deeply civic thing, the meetings, the vigils, the requests for compromise, and was met with what she accurately calls violent intent. The nurse who testified against the group, herself in recovery, was cornered outside the boardroom and called a liar to her face on a county security camera. These are not the tactics of people trying to keep the vulnerable alive. They are the tactics of people who have decided their neighbors are the enemy, and who have found, in the language of compassion, a permission structure for cruelty.
Portland spent a decade being told that asking for a livable block made you the villain of the story. A lot of us are done accepting the casting. You can care about the man on the sidewalk and still believe the woman who lives there is entitled to the quiet enjoyment of her own front gate. The movement that can no longer tell those two things apart has lost the plot, and it should stop being surprised that the neighborhood noticed.
I spent months on this story, and you captured the essence of it and presented a powerful call for course correction an hour after I posted it. My hat is off to you. You're going to put AI out of business.
Perfectly stated. Thank you.
Thanks to Michelle for persevering through the tough times and helping get the Safe Schools Ordinance passed in Multnomah County.
Drug users are sick people. We each have empathy for anyone who has lost their way and has chosen a drug path to ease their pain (albeit putting them on a dangerous path). The choices made by Multnomah County, Portland City Council, and the State of Oregon to condone, if not encourage needle exchange seemed humane, but those who forecast the crisis we now experience, were also humane; they realized that assisting the fallen should be corrective care and not support for the drug habit. Those individuals who accosted Milla and Nurse G (sorry I forgot how to spell her name) were thugs; anyone assisting them is also a thug. They should be punished for their actions. Enough drugs already. Libertarian thinking is great if taken in full measure to include accountablity. We want our streets back. We want our neighborhoods back. We want drugs removed without any evidence. Government needs to protect its people: THE MAJORITY NOT THE MINORITY.
Oh my goodness. Thank you for this excellent report.
Excuse me. But since when are we compelled to use Orwellian never never land speech? The term “ harm reduction “ to describe the distribution of syringes to facilitate the injection of harmful, deadly substances is as absurd as the evil assertion that this will cause less HIV in children who happen to be stuck with the needles left lying on the ground. By the sinister logic of “harm reduction “ , the government should just let Mr. Gilbert and his team of thugs distribute ketamine, fentanyl , meth and heroin. I suspect that it gives such people a special thrill to see bodies lifeless on our sidewalks.
Driving home from work recently, and while stopped at the light on 27th and Hawthorne, I looked to my right and saw what appeared to be a dead body.....a man laying motionless on the sidewalk. As I was just about to get out and check on him, two high school students with back packs walking on that sidewalk simply stepped over the body and kept walking. Remind me again what "harm reduction" means......
The way to have less drug paraphernalia as street litter is to have LESS drug paraphernalia in circulation. Stop enabling addicts.
Thanks for writing this up Alan. Thank you to Michelle for not letting these entitled trustifarians silence you and being relentless.
I had no idea he was an Ivy League rich kid with a Federal contract, but that fits the bill for your average Portland activist. He’s a pathetic toxic man who derives a sense of pleasure from trying to intimidate women.
His logic is twisted, inverted and outdated. The National Harm Reduction Coalition states that “the very real danger and tragedy that comes from substance use should not be ignored.” And yet, Gilbert seems to take issue with that as well.
Mr. Gilbert should have as much empathy for the law abiding citizens trying to live peacefully in the neighborhoods where addicts go to exchange needles as he does for the addicts.