Over the weekend I wrote about a NY Times story focused on homelessness in Portland. That article told a story of personal trauma which led to drug abuse and homelessness, a trap some people never escape.

Today the Times has a follow up which is again about drug abuse on the streets of Portland. It’s titled “Scenes From a City That Only Hands Out Tickets for Using Fentanyl.” In 2020, residents of Portland voted to legalize the possession of hard drugs like meth and fentanyl. The progressive idea behind this was that police should focus on dealers rather than wasting their time with the down-on-their-luck users. So the worst that users can face in Portland is a $100 ticket.

But as with most things Portland has done in the past several years, progressive ideas don’t always work out as planned. Instead of bringing crime, homelessness and overdose deaths down, all of these problems have gotten worse. Overdose deaths are up 50% this year and 2022 was already a record. It’s to the point now that regular people trying to work in the city are forced to walk through a cesspit of drug-addled people every day.

On her walk to work at Forte Portland, a coffee shop and wine bar that she operates with her brother in the sunken lobby of a commercial building, Jennifer Myrle sidesteps needles, shattered glass and human feces. Often, she says, someone is passed out in front of the lobby’s door, blocking her entrance. The other day, a man lurched in, lay down on a Forte couch, stripped off his shirt and shoes, and refused to leave.

“At four in the afternoon the streets can feel like dealer central,” Ms. Myrle said. “At least 20 to 30 people in ski masks, hoodies and backpacks, usually on bikes and scooters. There’s no point calling the cops.”

Despite the street turmoil, Ms. Myrle likes to go for strolls on her breaks. “But at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning, I walked to the block between Target and Nordstrom and in the middle of everything,” she said, she saw a woman performing an act of oral sex on a man.

She is keenly aware that she’s witnessing a confluence of longstanding societal problems, including mental health and housing crises. “But it’s so much the drugs,” she said.

A police officer who writes these $100 tickets says he mostly gets an angry response from addicts who are convinced it’s legal to smoke fentanyl on the street. He has to explain to them that’s, as with alcohol, it’s legal to possess but it’s not legal to use it on the street. So the addicts get a ticket and most of the time the officer catches the same people, sometimes just a few hours later, smoking fentanyl.

The Times doesn’t tell us how often any of the tickets get paid but my guess is not very often. The one thing the tickets do seem to accomplish is to keep the cops circulating among the users which means they often find people who’ve overdosed and administer Narcan to bring them back.

A homeless person who lives on Portland’s streets describes it as a very mixed bag.

“Portland is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

He ticked off the advantages: He can do drugs wherever he wants and the cops no longer harass him. There are more dealers, scouting for fresh customers moving to paradise. That means drugs are plentiful and cheap.

Downsides: Tent living is no paradise, he said, especially when folks in nearby tents, high on meth, hit him with baseball bats.

Noah started out in Detroit where he began smoking weed in 5th grade. He later became a heroin addict and was in and out of prison and rehab. Then he moved to Portland. The heroin market dried up so he switched to fentanyl. Even he can see that the life he calls paradise is a trap. “I mean, please, please God, tell me there’s a way to make it out of this,” he told the Times.

Will he make it out? Or will he wind up dead in a few months or years. I don’t wish that for him, I’d love to see him escape but if you’re using fentanyl every day you’re probably going to run out of luck eventually. One of these times he’ll take too much and the cops carrying Narcan won’t see him in time.

The truth is that Noah would only be marginally better off in a place where drugs were still illegal and people still went to jail for using. The critics of the old system aren’t wrong when they say it didn’t work very well. It would be more of a hassle for Noah if he faced arrest but he’d still do whatever was needed to get on with his habit. Addicts still died on the streets every year in places besides Portland.

But I think it’s becoming clearer that what Portland is doing now isn’t better. Things have gone from bad to worse but, unfortunately, many on the left are still too ideologically committed to admit it. They’re trapped too, in a bubble of their own making. The only bright spot I can see is that the NY Times is now writing stories that sound a lot like the ones I’ve been writing here at Hot Air for the past 4-5 years. Maybe something is starting to change as people confront the realities of the addict’s paradise they’ve created.