Democrat-Run Utopia of Portland Declares Fentanyl State of Emergency
Now state legislators are rethinking the 2020 drug decriminalization law…due to the unintended consequences they are now experiencing.
City officials in the Democratic-run Utopia that is Portland, Oregon, have declared a state of emergency for the downtown area in a desperate bid to address the ongoing fentanyl crisis.
“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said in a statement.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is between 50 and 100 times more potent than morphine, and is a main driver of the United States’ ongoing opioid epidemic.
According to the Oregon Health Authority, the state experienced more opioid overdose visits to emergency departments and urgent care centers last year compared to previous years, while the Portland Police Department’s Bureau of Narcotics and Organized Crime Unit saw a 75% increase in notifications of overdose deaths in 2023 over a year prior.
As a reminder, Oregon became the first state in the country to decriminalize the possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, in 2020.
They chose…poorly.
City officials are organizing an approach utilizing emergency response procedures, including designating an incident commander. The responders will review the results in 3 months.
Mike Myers, the director of Portland’s Community Safety Division, will head the city’s command team. Nathan Reynolds, deputy policy chief at the state’s Office of Resilience and Emergency Management, will be the state’s incident commander.
The effort also extends the Portland Police Bureau’s partnership with Oregon State Police to jointly patrol downtown streets for fentanyl sales. It additionally kicks off information campaigns centered on drug use prevention and recovery programs across the region. The county will expand outreach and training on how to administer Narcan, an overdose-reversal drug.
The program doesn’t establish any goals to measure success. Kotek said the next 90 days will provide a road map for the next steps.
…Opioid deaths in Oregon more than tripled from 280, before the de-criminalization of drugs was voted in, to 955 in 2022.
Oregon passed the first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine, and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment, with 58% of the vote in 2020. Now, state legislators are rethinking the 2020 decriminalization law…due to the unintended consequences they are now experiencing.
Democratic lawmakers in Oregon on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping new bill that would undo a key part of the state’s first-in-the-nation drug decriminalization law, a recognition that public opinion has soured on the measure amid rampant public drug use during the fentanyl crisis.
The bill would recriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs as a low-level misdemeanor, enabling police to confiscate them and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks, its authors said. It also aims to make it easier to prosecute dealers, to access addiction treatment medication, and to obtain and keep housing without facing discrimination for using that medication.
“It’s the compromise path, but also the best policy that we can come up with to make sure that we are continuing to keep communities safe and save lives,” state Sen. Kate Lieber, a Portland Democrat, told The Associated Press.
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Comments
Isn’t this problem likely to be self correcting in a fairly short time? Some people cannot be salvaged. Is there any sign that Portland wants to cleanup the mess?
No, it’s a deadly embrace. The same people who embrace “freedom” to take drugs also insist the government be responsible for the “right to healthcare” of the people who abuse them. Just like you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state but the combination will bury you, you can decriminalize all drugs or you can offer free medical care to all, but the combination will bury you.
To learn more, simply drive through the city, in surface streets. Better yet, hop on a bus. If you survive, it only takes two letters to spell the answer to your question.
Open borders biden, americans keep dying, the cartel is smiling.
“The band got dropped and that aint funny cuz we’re all hooked on drugs and out of money.” Todd Snider, notable libtard from Raleigh Hills/Beaverton (by where that Boeing plane dropped its plug yonder the Nike Campus)
Right about now- bus your trash to Portland.
One way to look at this at a National level is to view the multinational corporations operating in China and Mexico as a sort of East India Company. They ain’t directly shipping the fentanyl or cocaine or human trafficking… but they are in bed with those who do, at least indirectly. Just as the East India Company wasn’t directly shipping Opium to China but through ‘independent merchants’. That fig leaf allowed the Company and the Crown to pretend their hands were clean. Not a perfect analogy but there are some very intriguing parallels.
you. get what you vote for…
Something has occurred to me when thinking about how the 2024 General Election might unfold. That is, “Mail-In” balloting and “Ballot Harvesting” successfully employed by the Democrats is so: 2020.
I expect the Biden Administration and their progressive handlers to declare an executive order for emergency implementation in 2024 of smartphone balloting.
Like anyone with a brain couldn’t see this coming from miles away.
Yeah, who knew decriminalization would lead to such consequences? I mean, we anti-drug legalizers knew, but no one wants to listen to those busybodies.
Experience is the cruelest of masters. That’s why I always favor giving these overeducated idiots what they want.
Portland is scrod. The government has enough Leftists that they are not going to recriminalize drugs in any serious way. And even if they did, the cops there know that the prosecutors will not prosecute. It is going to be an interesting show. Bring your own popcorn.
Subotai Bahadur
The rest of Oregon could care less. On my escape from Wa I made headway the first night and stayed just north of Portland. There’s a really convenient Safeway there to gas up. The evidence of zombie culture was all over the place. If I hadn’t been going on 4 hrs of sleep for 3 nights in a row I would have powered through to La Grande, but it was either stay there or die in a car wreck.
By the time I got eastward of the falls- evidence of zombies faded pretty hard- granted I’m just going off of gas and sip stops. Also note half of Oregon wants to cede from the state, so there’s that.
So they are going to make it a misdemeanor so the cops can confiscate the drugs. Want to bet robberies and theft go up. I mean you take away the drugs but do not put them in jail what does anyone think will happen? They will do something to make money for more drugs. And since that something is definitely not a legal job since they are way to strung out for that it will be something that increases crime in the city.
Nobody believes these consequences were unintended.
No… many leftists really are just that stupid.
Boy am I embarrassed. I thought the emergency is Portland was running out of fentanyl.
Boy am I embarrassed. I thought the emergency is Portland was running out of fentanyl.
Why is this called an unintended consequence? The Soviet Union made vodka plentiful and cheap with the intended consequences of a stoned populace unable to muster and organize a revolution against the Kremlin. Today we import millions of people illiterate in their own language while legalizing narcotics. I would say the consequences are not only intended but crucial to the Obama plan for the Transformation of America, which has been ongoing for the last ten years..
“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said in a statement.
They ain’t seen nothing yet. There are drugs in the illegal drug pipeline that make Fentanyl look like a walk in the park. Nitazene (and all its derivatives) for instance, which can be up to 20X stronger than fentanyl and 80 to 100X as potent as morphine. That’s some real nasty stuff that’s now showing up in the illegal drugs and authorities precious Narcan® may or may not work saving the lives of those that OD on these synthetic opioids – depends on there nitazene derivative ingested.
So fentanyl was just the beginning. It’s gonna get a heck of a lot worse before it possibly gets better. No doubt about that.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/new-opioids-called-nitazenes-may-be-20-times-stronger-than-fentanylSpiking fentanyl with animal tranquilizer, called tranq. The zombie apocalypse.
Fentanyl is bad enough. It’s insanely cheap, powerful in tiny doses, and ramps up resistance until you get to the George Floyd point where the minimal effective dose is the minimal lethal dose. At that concentration, somebody who is not a user can OD by skin absorption. I suppose the closest 60s analogue would be LSD, but that was an erratic drug with unexpected results for users, although it was cheap. (and stuck in the fatty tissues enough an addict from decades ago could start having episodes again when going through weight loss)
Oh it WILL get better. Before too much longer all those susceptible to using this junk will have used it.. to excess, and end up assuming ambient temperature. Somewhere. A minor inconvenience for someone else to deal with.
“…due to the unintended consequences they are now experiencing.”
Unintended — but completely predictable.
Portland and San Francisco are both lost, and Seattle is headed that way ever since their “summer of love”. Junkies, tents, and poop on the streets, and rampant crime with cops arresting anyone who tries to protect themselves from crime.
Fentanyl isn’t the problem, it is the means. I am convinced the end-goal here is a police state, brought about by deliberately making things so bad people will welcome servitude. Step one, get the good police to retire. Step 2 bring in the new police as private contractors. Step 3, gradually shift them over to the dark side. Everywhere you go in Portland these days has a rent-a-cop in some form. I was chatting with the library security guy and according to him they are in the process of going armed, because the libraries are defacto homeless shelters these days. Trimet has merry bands of four transit security droids patrolling max stations and trains/buses. Of course they still let the ferals ride for free and 99% of the problems are caused by the ferals. So if they aren’t easily solving the problem, what is the end-game? Every single agency now has a homeless services division. And if you speak ill of the homeless, you are shut down immediately.
When this started to happen around the beginning of the WuFlu shutdown I opined that it was very possible that the US might devolve into a system similar to the Russian oligarchs with certain Billionaires developing and maintaining their private armies. I figured Bezos would be the first with armed security to protect Amazon properties and delivery trucks, and it would only be a matter of time before they were rented out to other companies as hired guns. I know that there are competing factions of rent-a-cops patrolling downtown these days, and if we start to see turf wars it would not surprise me. My local Freddies has an armed guard in LARPing gear at each door checking receipts. To be fair, once the ferals couldn’t get free food 24/7, they seem to have moved on from the neighborhood, so it is nicer. But at what price? When do we reach the point of sacrificing essential liberty for the illusion of temporary security?
Reality is what happens whether that’s what you wanted, or not.